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I talk to a lot of founders.

I’m one myself, plus an active Hampton member, and a full-time CEO coach and advisor.

But since I joined SRCH Partners a few months ago, I’m having more of these conversations than ever. In the last two weeks alone, I’ve had 20+ detailed, very specific calls with founders about their pain points and who they need to hire.

Almost all of them are hiring senior leaders (that’s our focus area).

Ops, product, marketing, sales — everything from CFOs to CEOs.

And almost every founder I’ve spoken to asks for the same thing: a player-coach.

Quite literally, I can’t remember the last time I have heard so many people use that phrase…

I’m generalizing a bit, but here’s what that typically means:

They already have a team. They have had some period of explosive growth or success, and have either plateaued or are looking ahead to the next stage.

They want someone experienced, who has the playbook they need, and who can build a team out, level up the company, and still roll up their sleeves and do the actual work.

This, of course, is a completely reasonable ask.

But the compensation budget is where things sometimes can get shaky.

Case in point: a founder told me a few weeks back they need a senior-level hire to take all the ops off their plate, which would allow them to focus exclusively on sales, the function they did best.

And the comp range — $150K.

That ain’t gonna do it. And the sooner you tell yourself that, the better.

To be fair, you can absolutely hire for less than that.

There are three ways to do it:

All three can work. But none of them builds a team, hires and develops people, or levels up a company. And that’s the job these founders keep describing to me.

The in-between hire doesn’t get you there either.

$150K can buy a strong, hands-on product manager. But it typically doesn’t buy a leader.

We’ve seen it in our own searches: the one head-of-product role we filled anywhere close to that number was a hands-on job with no team to build. Contrarily, a CPO placement this year who had to build a team — as a player-coach — came in ~$260K base and $350K+ OTE.

Here’s what we’ve actually seen at SRCH for senior leaders across functions. Base is the salary. OTE (on-target earnings) is base plus the target bonus.

For an outside check, marketing roles have some really solid data.

Emily Kramer at MKT1 just pulled salary data from 1,100+ B2B startup marketing job posts. Her medians, base salary only:

Interesting to consider the “jumps”. Pay barely moves from mid-level to senior. Then it jumps at Director, and again at VP.

That jump is the price of leading. These hires should be able to:

For one last relevant data point, Pavilion — the professional GTM community — puts the median B2B CMO at $275K base and $327.5K OTE.

These are all critical data points for you to consider as a founder.

The player-coach is not going to be a bargain hire.

Don’t think you’re heading to the discount rack or the flea market. You are looking for the most expensive profile on the board, because you’re paying the leader price for someone who can also still do the work.

Here’s the part that matters most if you run a founder-owned company in the $5–50M range:

Many senior offers lean hard on the bonus.

In the marketing searches we’ve placed recently, three of the four put more than 20% of OTE in the bonus, and one went as high as 36%.

Equity, meanwhile, is a bit more rare. Only two of the seven marketing offers we’ve made included equity, and just one of our four U.S. ops offers did (and that was phantom equity). Compare that to MKT1’s data, where about two-thirds of startup job posts mention equity.

The difference is who’s hiring. MKT1’s data is mostly venture-backed startups, where equity is the currency. Many of the founders I work with are bootstrapped or close to it, and they own the whole thing. They’re not handing out stock options readily, and that’s fine.

Then the bonus is the biggest lever you’ve got — so use it.

Here’s my very strong opinion: when you’re hiring a marketing, growth, or sales leader, you’re hiring a revenue-generating person. Their whole job is to make the company more money. So go big on the OTE and weight the comp heavily toward the bonus.

Go to the top of the base range you can afford. Then build the bonus around one question I’ve always asked:

What number would have to move that, if they hit it, you’d be ecstatic to pay them?

Not “fine with”. Not “I guess”. Ecstatic.

Then make it big. What would have to happen for you to happily cut a $200K bonus check? A $300K one? Write that down, and steer the bonus in that direction.

I see too many founders play small ball here. They treat the bonus like it’s them vs. the hire, like every dollar paid out is a dollar lost. Eff that. If you picked the right number, a giant bonus means the company won big too. Make it a win-win, not an us vs. them.

Two guardrails so it actually works:

And if you want to add equity on top, great. Just don’t use it as a substitute for a bonus that actually moves people. At your size, the bonus is the lever you control.

If that’s you, here’s how I’d put it together:

The founders I talk to aren’t wrong to want a player-coach. A great one can change the whole company. Just budget for one like it’s the most important hire you’ll make this year, because it probably is.

Next week, I’m taking this one level up: how founders are paying their replacement CEO without giving away equity.

And if you’re staring down a senior hire right now, hit reply. That’s literally what we do at SRCH.

Berkshire has now put about $930M into Bending Spoons, the Milan company that buys aging software like Evernote, Vimeo, and WeTransfer, cuts hard, raises prices, and runs it for cash. On the surface it’s about as un-Buffett as it gets, which is exactly why it’s worth a look. If you’re building boring software with loyal customers, this is a real exit path.

Olivia Moore at a16z just dropped the seventh edition of her Top 100 Consumer AI Apps list, and it’s packed. My favorite stat: only 4.5% of U.S. consumers pay for ChatGPT, Gemini, or Claude, but the top 1% of payers average about $903 a month. That’s a wild spread, and a good reminder that your best customers are rarely your typical ones.

I just found this 2021 essay from Paul Graham and shared it with my 11-year-old son the same night. His idea is that working on your own project feels like skating instead of walking, and that school and work slowly train it out of us. It’s great for anyone, but especially young people.

Hiring a senior leader right now?

Hit reply and tell me the role and your budget. I’ll tell you honestly if it’s realistic or way off.

Hope everyone has a great weekend.

And until next time, thanks for reading.

Jordan