A $30M revenue company that just took its first institutional capital is one of the hardest environments to build a leadership team for, and one of the most consequential. It is too large to run on instinct, but it is still missing many of the processes required for scale and cannot afford the fully built-out executive suite of a $100M competitor. Every hire has to do more than the title suggests. Every miss carries outsized cost because there is no bench to absorb it.
Having worked with and built leadership teams at this stage, and watched many more take shape from the outside, a few patterns hold up consistently. What follows is not a fixed org chart or a list of standard hires for small, founder-led businesses new to private equity. It is a way of thinking about sequence, scope, and fit that tends to hold across most businesses of this size.
Start with the thesis, not the org chart
The most common mistake is building the team a $30M company “should” have, working from a checklist of standard functional VPs. The better approach is to understand the team this specific business needs to execute its specific value creation plan.
A business whose thesis is a buy-and-build needs corporate development and integration capability early, well before it needs a polished head of marketing. A business whose thesis is margin expansion needs operational and finance firepower first. A business whose thesis is organic commercial growth needs a go-to-market leader immediately. The thesis dictates the sequence. Start there, and let the org chart follow, rather than the other way around.
Assess the team you already have
Before deciding who to hire, understand who is already there. The strongest team-building processes start with a genuine assessment of the existing leadership, ideally begun during diligence while the company is still running its sale process, and continued through close and into the early hold. This is not a formality. It is how you learn which parts of the plan the current team can carry and which parts they cannot.
The goal is a clear-eyed read on strengths and gaps. Some of the people who built the business to this point are better than they look under the noise of a transaction; they might be capable of taking on more. Others are excellent in their current lane and will not stretch to what the thesis now demands. Both are useful things to know early.
This assessment also changes the hiring math. Not every gap has to be closed with an external hire. A capable existing leader can sometimes absorb an adjacent priority, at least for a phase, which buys time and preserves capital for the hires that truly cannot be solved from within. That in-house solution is only available if you have actually assessed the team, rather than assuming the org chart in front of you is static. That question is really where role design begins.
Scope roles wider than the title
Roles at a $30M company have to be scoped wider than they would be at a larger organization, and that changes who you are actually looking for. Narrow specialists rarely fit, because the business cannot yet support them. A CFO here is frequently also running strategy, leading corporate development, and maybe acting as the de facto COO, sometimes all at once. The commercial leader who owns sales owns marketing too, because there is no separate marketing organization to hand it to.
This is why importing a leader straight from a much larger organization often disappoints. Someone who ran a deep, well-resourced function inside a $1B business may never have operated without the specialists, systems, and team beneath them that made them effective. Strip those away and the same person can struggle badly. The leader who thrives at $30M is comfortable as player and coach, doing the work and building the function at the same time, and that profile does not correlate with the size of the logos on a resume.
Wide does not mean impossible. The point is not to collapse three full-time roles into one seat. It is to define the few cross-functional priorities this stage actually requires and hire for range against those priorities.
Sequence over completeness
At this size you cannot hire everyone at once, and you should not try. Capital is finite. So is the CEO’s bandwidth to onboard new executives. The organization can absorb only so much leadership change before it destabilizes, returns diminish, and the changes themselves start creating new problems.
The discipline is to identify the one or two hires that unlock the most value right now, make those hires carefully, let them settle, and then sequence the next wave. A team assembled deliberately over four to six quarters almost always outperforms one assembled all at once, because each hire has time to prove out and to shape the hires that follow. The goal is momentum against the thesis, not racing toward a finished team.
Handle the founder transition, not just the founder relationship
In many businesses at this stage, the founder is either beginning a transition or becoming the central transition question. In some founder-led businesses, the sale is also a generational transition: the next generation does not want to run the company, and the transaction is as emotional as it is financial. Building the leadership team around that reality is one of the most underweighted parts of the work.
The obvious version of this is making sure new hires can work with a founder who is still present: earn their trust, and manage the handoff of responsibilities the founder has held for years. That matters, and it is not easy. But the larger picture is understanding what leaves when the founder does.
Founders carry things that were never formalized, and maybe never discussed. Commercial relationships that quietly drive a meaningful share of revenue. Professional relationships and informal authority that hold parts of the organization together. Knowledge of the business that lives nowhere but in their head. Some of what a founder carries is pure strength. Their passion and relationships are often why the business exists at all. Some of it is a constraint on scaling, bias and habit that made sense at $10M and will not at $60M. The trick is to identify these aspects effectively and plan for the transition: which relationships are at risk when the founder steps back, and how do we protect them? Which gaps will open that the founder never flagged? Which of the founder’s instincts should the business keep versus outgrow? This is arguably much harder than working with the sitting founder, but navigating the transition well minimizes risk and unlocks value.
Hire for the next 18 months, not the exit
It is tempting to hire the executive who can eventually run the business at three times its current size, the leader you will want at exit. Sometimes that person can also do the job the business needs today. Often they cannot, or will not stay engaged doing work that feels beneath the role they were sold.
At $30M, hire for the phase the business is actually in and the one it is about to enter, not the company you hope it becomes. The leader who takes it from $30M to $60M is not always the one who takes it from $60M to $150M. Building as though they must be the same person can produce a mismatch today and disappointment tomorrow. Scope for the journey you can actually see ahead, and revisit the team as the business earns its way into the next phase.
This does not mean planning for executive churn. If someone can scale beyond the next phase, great. But the first test is whether they can do the work the business needs now.
Building a leadership team at this size is not a scaled-down version of building one at a larger company. It is its own discipline: thesis first, honest about the team already there, scoped wide, built around the founder transition, and matched to the phase the business is actually in. Get that right, and the team becomes the engine of the value creation plan. Get it wrong, and it becomes the reason the plan stalls.