10 Things to Get Right Before Your First Commercial Hire

Your first commercial hire is a strategy decision disguised as a staffing decision. Most CEOs I talk to feel caught between two fears: hire too early and burn runway investors are watching, or hire too late and hit a milestone unprepared. Both are real. Here’s what to figure out before the requisition goes out.

1. Name the decision in front of you.

The question isn’t “do we need commercial yet?” It’s “which commercial decision is actually on the table, and does it need an organization or an answer?”

2. Accept that the generic answer is usually wrong.

The right first hire depends entirely on the decision you’re trying to make. There’s no universal first commercial hire, and the one that seems obvious is usually an expensive miss.

3. Don’t hire the title you saw somewhere else.

Reaching for a CCO or a head of market access because that’s what another company did is how you end up with a senior leader in place for a problem you don’t have yet.

4. Understand what building too early actually costs.

It looks responsible. But if the asset can’t use the capability yet, you’ve turned scarce runway into overhead and asked senior people to wait for their own jobs to become real.

5. Understand what building too late actually costs.

It looks lean, right up until it doesn’t. You hit a milestone and find the commercial thinking that should have informed it was never done, and now you’re building under the worst possible time pressure.

6. Separate capability from organization.

You don’t always need a whole commercial department. You need the right commercial capability at the right moment, and those aren’t the same thing.

7. Sequence to the asset.

Commercial capability should be built to what this specific asset needs, and when it needs it.

8. Know when what you need is an answer, not an org.

Often, earlier on, the decision in front of you needs commercial expertise right-sized to give you a clear answer, not a headcount. A fractional commercial partner exists for exactly that gap, before a full-time hire makes sense.

9. Protect the runway that belongs to the science.

Every function you stand up too early is money you can’t spend on the data that determines whether any of the commercial work will even matter.

10. Put the decision before the department.

The first commercial hire should be the resolution of a specific strategic problem. Get the question right first, and the hire, or the realization that you don’t need one yet, usually becomes obvious.

Hiring a full-time CCO before the asset can use one is an expensive way to feel prepared. Start from what the asset needs instead.