I have always struggled with this question: should we hire a junior for this role or pay more to hire a senior?

After several failures and some valuable lessons learned, I think I’ve found the answer.

If you’re a small company and your goal is profitability, you should always "hire people ahead of their own curve,” and these are juniors.

As these juniors grow into their roles quickly, the company grows with them too.

For example, if you hire a junior and they manage to grow conversion rates by 30%, this directly impacts your revenue and profit. Very simple.

This way, you pay less while still getting great results for the company, which helps with profitability. At the same time, the junior learns and grows while being paid fairly. It’s a win-win deal.

On top of that, if you manage to make a fat profit (I like this phrase... haha), you can create a profit-share deal with them, which makes it even more of a win-win, and everyone gets rich and happy.

But for this to work, you need three things:

  1. You need a proper operating system (KPIs and other tools) in place. As an entrepreneur, your job is to set the proper playground for these juniors to perform well. If you don’t have that, do yourself a favor and build it first. If you don’t know how to build an operating system, go learn how to do it. Because if you don’t have a great operating system, even the most hungry, humble, and smart juniors will just wander around and won’t get anything meaningful done (ask me how I learned this). You’ll only waste their time, and they’ll waste your money. They are juniors, but you are the coach, and you can’t be a junior. Think of it like a good football team: the players are young, junior, and hungry, but the coach is experienced, has played the game many times before, and knows how to set up the playground for the young, hungry players. And no, hiring someone as a project manager or operations lead won’t solve this (I’ve made this mistake not once but twice). You are the entrepreneur. You, and only you, are responsible for learning how to build an operating system and actually building it. No one else is going to do it for you, even if you pay them a very high salary.
  2. The junior should be hungry, humble, and smart. If they lack any of these, it simply won’t work. Don’t fool yourself.
  3. In the beginning, hire a great part-time senior advisor for that role. This person helps the junior learn the basics, develop the right way of thinking, and get up to speed. But this senior advisor can’t just be any senior person. It needs to be someone with a REAL track record of doing exactly what you want to accomplish. For example, if the junior you hired is responsible for increasing the conversion rate by 30% each quarter, you need to hire a senior who has done exactly that before. If you hire the wrong senior, it’s not going to work.

If you get all three of these right, you’ll be amazed at how hiring hungry, humble, and smart juniors can help you, and them, grow.

Now you might ask, what about senior people? Should we retire them all? :)) No, seniors can work well in larger companies with bigger budgets.

If you’re a senior in a small company, you’d better be one of the co-founders (setting the playground) or a very hungry and humble senior. Otherwise, you’re probably in the wrong seat.

So to recap, if you’re an entrepreneur and have a small company with fewer than 20 people, the path to growth is to set a good operating system in place, hire hungry, humble, and smart juniors, and pair them with a senior advisor at the beginning. If you get all three of these right, there’s a good chance the juniors you hire will grow fast, your business will grow fast, and those juniors will eventually become hungry seniors who help the next wave of juniors coming in. This creates a cycle that leads to even more growth and, eventually, a big company.

The wrong way to do this is to skip having a proper operating system, hire juniors (or worse, a senior), and end up wasting your money and their time.