Who Do You Hire First? A CPG Operator's Guide to Building Your Ops Team the Right Way
Many founders figure out they need operational help the hard way. Things start going sideways, the fires pop up faster than they can put them out, and somewhere between a missed PO deadline and a co-man quality issue, they realize: they can't keep doing this alone.
That realization is actually a good sign. It means the brand is growing. But the question that follows is usually the tricky one: okay, so who do I hire first?
Get the sequencing right and you build a team that scales with you. Get it wrong and you're either bleeding cash on overhead you can't support yet, or you're patching holes with the wrong people and wondering why things keep breaking. Neither is fun. Both are avoidable.
Here's how to think about it.
Start With What the Founder Can't Cover
The first hire isn't a formula. It depends almost entirely on the founder's background and what gaps actually exist in the business right now.
If you're a founder who came up through sales or marketing and you've got a solid advisory network or board pointing you in the right direction strategically, your first operations hire can probably be a solid ops manager. Someone who's comfortable owning end-to-end supply chain execution, flexible enough to move up and down the org as needed, and capable of running with clear direction. You don't need a VP right out of the gate if the strategy is already sound.
But if you're a founder who's genuinely operating in the dark, meaning no strong advisors, no clear operational roadmap, and you're not sure what you don't know, then the first hire probably needs to be more senior. A director-level operator who can get in the weeds, set up processes, and bring some strategic structure to the chaos.
Either way, the range you're hiring for in that first dedicated ops role is typically somewhere between an ops manager and a director depending on what the business actually needs. Don't over-hire out of anxiety. Don't under-hire to save money. Hire to close the specific gap in front of you.
The Second and Third Hires: Build the Execution Layer
Once you have that first ops leader in place, the next few hires are almost always tactical. Associates, coordinators, or people with two to three years of experience who can own and execute documented processes. The ops manager or director defines the work, hands it off, and the team executes.
This model can carry a brand pretty far, honestly. You can run a lean, effective operation with a small team if the people are good and the processes are clear. The key is making sure the work is actually being documented and handed off, not just managed by tribal knowledge in the ops leader's head.
From there, you grow the team as complexity demands it, not just because revenue is going up. More SKUs, more channels, more co-mans, more 3PLs, that's when you add headcount. Revenue growth alone doesn't automatically mean you need more people.
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When Does a Brand Actually Need Senior Ops Leadership?
This is the question that trips up a lot of founders. They hire a coordinator when they needed a director, or they hire a VP when they really just needed someone to execute.
The honest answer is likely somewhere between two and five million in revenue, most brands need at least one person with the strategic experience to guide the operation forward. Someone who has seen a brand go from $5M to $15M and knows the difference between a problem you solve once and a problem you build a system around.
By the time you're pushing toward $15M to $20M, the founder needs a real right hand on the operational side. A COO or VP of Ops who can own the day-to-day so the CEO can stay focused on vision, investors, and growth. That transition, where the founder stops running ops and hands it to someone experienced enough to handle it without constant oversight, is one of the most important organizational moves a scaling brand makes.
The Signals That Tell You It's Time to Make a Move
Sometimes founders wait too long, and it can cost them. Here's what to watch for:
The most obvious one is constant fires. If you're spending your days reacting to problems rather than building toward something, that's not a founder problem. That's an ops resourcing problem. You need someone whose job it is to prevent those fires, not just help you put them out.
The second signal is bandwidth. When the founder is so buried in operational details that they can't focus on growth, investors, or product, the business is at risk. Operations shouldn't be the thing that caps the ceiling on how fast you can grow.
And then there's the forward-looking version: big launches, new retailer, new product lines. The best founders are thinking about ops hires before they need them, not after. If you know you're launching in a major retailer in six months, now is the time to get the right person in place, not three weeks before the PO hits.
Very few brands going from zero to five million have a proper capacity plan, but having any kind of forecast tied to your ops headcount needs puts you ahead of most. It doesn't have to be fancy. It just has to exist.
One Rule of Thumb Worth Keeping
When you're evaluating ops candidates, use their resume to filter for the basic experience fit, and then mostly put the resume down. What you're really hiring for is culture fit and the right kind of experience for your specific stage.
If you're a brand going from $5M to $15M, you want to talk to people who've actually lived that journey. Someone who's worked with your ERP, understands your channel mix, and has navigated the kind of complexity you're heading into. That's the experience filter. After that, you're hiring a person, not a resume.
Hiring on culture is the best way to build a team that stays, performs under pressure, and actually moves the business forward. Plenty of technically qualified operators are terrible fits. The right person for the stage and the culture is worth more than the most impressive CV in the pile.
The Bottom Line
Sequenced hiring in CPG operations isn't complicated in theory, but it's easy to get wrong in practice. Hire too early and you're burning cash. Hire too late and you're paying for it in time, team morale, and missed opportunities. Hire the wrong level and you're setting someone up to fail.
The brands that get this right are the ones that treat ops hiring as a strategic decision tied to where the business is going, not just a reaction to where it's been.
About Bravo CPG
Bravo CPG is an embedded operations team for growth-stage food, beverage, beauty, and wellness brands. We combine hands-on execution with senior-level ownership, taking full responsibility for production, co-man and 3PL management, demand planning, wholesale orders, freight, and more. Our goal is simple: help brands scale profitably without the operational chaos that slows most of them down. If any of this sounds familiar, feel free to reach out to us!
