The first question most buyers ask after closing is: what do we need to fix? It is the wrong question.
The right question is: what is currently blocking everything else? Because in most SMEs I look at, the problems are not distributed evenly. There is usually one structural gap — one missing role — that sits at the intersection of three or four things that are not working. Fix that gap, and a significant part of the operational picture improves on its own. Try to fix each symptom separately, and you spend twelve months hiring, onboarding, and managing people who each solve ten percent of the problem.
This is how I think about the first hire after a buyout. Not as filling a vacancy. As unblocking a system.
When I am evaluating a business pre-LOI, I am not just asking who is in the team. I am asking what happens to the business if the seller stops showing up tomorrow. Which decisions stall? Which clients start calling a mobile number that no longer gets answered? Which internal processes grind to a halt because no one else knows the sequence?
The answers to those questions define the hire.
In most small businesses I have looked at in Poland and across the EU, the bottleneck resolves to a version of the same thing: there is no one who holds the operational picture end-to-end. Not the finances and the clients and the team simultaneously. The owner does — and only the owner. Everyone else holds a piece.
That is not a people problem. It is an architectural problem. And the first hire should address the architecture, not the headcount.
What does this person actually do?
In practical terms, I am looking for someone who can operate at the intersection of three functions: client relationships, internal coordination, and financial awareness. Not a specialist in any one of them — a generalist who is fluent in all three at the level the business requires.
They know which clients matter and why. Not from a CRM report — from actual conversations. They know the history, the sensitivity, the renewal cycle. When something goes wrong with a key account, they are the person who makes the call. The client knows them.
They hold the operational rhythm. They know what needs to happen each week for the business to deliver. They are the person the team asks when they are unsure. Not because they have been given authority on paper — because they actually know.
They can read the numbers. Not at CFO level. But they can tell you whether last month was a good month or a bad one, why, and what it means for next month. They are not surprised by a margin report. They are not waiting for the owner to interpret the data before deciding how to act.
This combination is not rare. But it is specific. And most businesses that have been owner-run for fifteen or twenty years have never had to find it, because the owner was the one doing all three.
The most common hiring error I see in post-acquisition situations — and in businesses preparing for a sale — is hiring on the immediate pressure rather than the underlying gap.
The business is overwhelmed with client requests, so the owner hires another account manager. Coordination is breaking down, so they add a project manager. The numbers are always late, so they bring in a bookkeeper. Each hire solves a specific complaint. None of them solve the fact that there is no one who can hold the whole picture.
The Risk: Three hires, three salary lines, and the business is still fundamentally dependent on the owner — or, after a transaction, on the buyer — to make sense of what is happening. The structural gap remains. It is just less visible because it is surrounded by more activity.
A single well-chosen hire in the right role addresses the cause. The symptom hires address the noise.
If you are running an SME and thinking about what makes your business transferable — to a buyer, to a successor, to a management team — this is the lens that matters.
Do you have someone in your organisation right now who knows the top three clients well enough to manage those relationships independently? Who understands the operational sequence well enough to run a normal week without asking you? Who can look at a P&L and tell you if something is off?
If the answer is yes — that person is already a material asset. They probably do not appear on any valuation model, but they are directly reducing the transition risk that a buyer or a bank will price in.
If the answer is no — that is not a crisis, but it is visible. Every serious buyer will find it during due diligence. It will show up in the structure of the offer, the length of the requested transition period, or the earnout conditions. Not because buyers are adversarial. Because the risk is real, and it needs to land somewhere in the deal.
The earlier that role exists in the business — before a sale process starts, not after — the cleaner the transaction becomes. And the more options the owner has on timing and terms.
When I look at a business post-closing, my first hire decision follows the same diagnostic logic I applied pre-LOI. I am not looking to replace what the seller was doing. I am looking to replace the function — the role in the system — that the seller occupied.
Sometimes that function already exists in the team and just needs to be formalised and supported. Sometimes it needs to be brought in from outside. In either case, the decision is not about finding a good person in the abstract. It is about identifying the specific structural gap and finding someone who closes it.
A buyer — and their bank — will also look at how quickly the management structure can be strengthened without disrupting revenue. That is not a theoretical question. It is a practical constraint that affects deal timing, financing terms, and the credibility of the transition plan.
Getting the first hire right does not make everything else easy. But getting it wrong makes everything else harder.
If you find this kind of operational thinking useful — whether you are an investor following SME deal logic or an owner thinking about what makes a business more transferable — the best next step is the weekly field notes. One idea from the buy-side each week, practical and without noise.
On the site you will also find a confidential seller form for owners and an investor waitlist for those exploring co-investment in structured buyouts.
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