Big Story: Hiring Your First General Manager
Key Takeaways
Most owners hire a GM too late, waiting until they are already at capacity, which makes the transition harder.
The most common GM hiring failure is selecting for technical skill rather than management capability.
Setting a new GM up to succeed requires deliberate structure, documented decision rights, a defined 90-day onboarding plan, and clear accountability.
The best first GM is often already in the business, unrecognized and underdeveloped because no one has invested in them.
Most owner-operators know they need a general manager long before they actually hire one. They feel it in the decisions they still make personally at 10 pm. They see it in the employees who wait for direction before moving forward. They sense it when their own activity has become the company's ceiling.
The right time to hire a GM is not when you are overwhelmed. At that point, the hire is reactive, made under pressure, with limited judgment and limited capacity to onboard the person properly. The right time is when the business has sufficient systems, revenue clarity, and role definition to support the hire. If the company has consistent revenue, defined roles across core functions, and an owner who regularly makes decisions that someone else could make with the right authority and information, the conditions are already in place.
Many owners assume the solution to growth is better time management, improved productivity, or another operational system. Often the issue is simpler. The business has reached a point where leadership capacity has become the constraint. The owner remains the primary decision-maker, problem-solver, and point of escalation. At that point, growth is about building enough leadership inside the company so the business can keep moving without everything coming back to one person.
The mistake that usually breaks the first GM hire is choosing the person who is best at the work rather than the person who can manage it. The strongest technician, most loyal employee, or top salesperson may have earned trust, but the GM job asks for a different muscle. A manager has to set direction without taking over, hold people accountable without rescuing them, and let someone solve a problem imperfectly rather than stepping in too soon. Those habits can be learned, but they rarely appear just because someone was excellent in their previous role.
Owners who can articulate clearly what the GM owns, what decisions they make without escalation, and what success looks like at 30, 60, and 90 days are hiring a leader. Owners who say "help me with everything" are creating a senior operator who will eventually stall or leave.
A second failure point appears after the hire. Owners bring in a GM and then continue approving every meaningful decision. Employees quickly learn that authority still sits with the owner, and the GM becomes a messenger rather than a leader. Delegation is not just adding another person to the team. It means handing over decision-making power. Without that, the business gets a new role, but there’s no increment in leadership capacity.
The best GM candidate is often already inside the business. It is usually the person who thinks beyond their own tasks, asks the right questions before acting, and points out operational gaps instead of working around them. They may not have the title yet, but they are already carrying more responsibility than the role officially gives them. Before starting an external search, it is worth taking a serious internal look. Most businesses have at least one person who could grow into the role with clear expectations, coaching, and a deliberate transition plan.
Hiring a GM gives the owner room to lead again. Not just extra hours in the week, but the mental space that comes from knowing that execution is not entirely dependent on them. That trust does not appear on day one. It has to be built through clarity, repeated handoffs, and decision-making authority. The earlier the owner defines the role and starts developing the right person, the less likely the hire is to be a desperate move made under pressure.
The goal is not to disappear from the business. It is to stop being the thing that limits how far the business can go. A well-defined GM helps create that shift. The strongest companies are not built around one owner who can handle everything but around leadership that can carry the business even when the owner is no longer in every decision.
The I In Team
There is a trade most owners make without noticing. Over time, the person and the role merge. You stop being someone who runs the business and start being the business. It feels like commitment. It looks like dedication. But somewhere in that merge, the individual who had good instincts, who could read a room, who knew when to walk away from a bad deal, gets buried under the title.
The (I)individual frame starts here. You are one person, but you are not only the role you play. You are the sum of the people who shaped you, the standards you set before the company existed, and the judgment you carried before the business taught you to defend it. The capital I Individual is larger than the founder, the CEO, the owner. When the role swallows the individual, the business loses the very judgment on which it was built.
This matters in two directions for owners.
First, notice where the role makes decisions that the individual would not. The owner protects a failing product because walking away feels like admitting fault. The founder keeps a loyal but wrong hire because the role rewards loyalty over honesty. The title has opinions, and they are not always yours.
Second, recognize that your team is watching the individual, not the role. They know the difference between the values on the wall and the person who shows up under pressure. When the role and the individual say different things, the team believes the individual.
The work is not to abandon the role. The role carries responsibility, and pretending otherwise is a failure in itself. The work is to keep the individual present inside it, so the business keeps access to the judgment that made it worth building.
This week, try this: Think of one decision you have been avoiding. Write down three things. What the role wants to do. What you privately believe is right. And what is making the two diverge. The gap is usually where the business has begun to drift away from the judgment that built it.
→ Go deeper: Individual Influence: Find the "I" in Team, the first book in the trilogy from Brian Smith, Ph.D., and Mary Griffin, on how to keep the individual present inside the leader.
SMB Signals
Simply Business's 2026 Small Business Growth Gap Report found that 80% of small business owners regularly handle non-revenue-generating tasks such as administration, finance, and scheduling. More than half (54%) identified additional time as the single most valuable resource for growth, while 35% chose to remain solopreneurs specifically to avoid the complexity of managing additional employees.
NFIB's May 2026 Jobs Report found that 14% of small business owners cited labor costs as their single most important business problem, the highest reading in the survey's history. At the same time, job openings fell to their lowest level since May 2020, and hiring plans declined to a six-year low.
SHRM's 2026 Talent Trends Report found that 68% of organizations continue to face challenges in recruiting full-time employees. The most difficult capabilities to find are judgment, decision-making, and complex problem-solving, which 80% of HR professionals cite as especially difficult to source externally. Organizations are investing in developing those capabilities internally before beginning external searches.
The skilled trades gap is widening for the businesses that depend most on field labor. JLL's 2026 skilled trades talent research estimates that by 2030, about 2.1 million skilled trades positions for electricians, HVAC technicians, plumbers, pipefitters, and related trades could go unfilled. Last year, nearly 600,000 jobs were posted for major skilled trades positions, while only about 150,000 new workers entered through apprenticeship programs, and for every five workers who retire, only two replacements enter the workforce. Electrician positions are projected to grow by 9.5% through 2034, which is triple the 3.1% average for all occupations.
Many businesses invest in marketing without a clear view of what is working, what is not, or how those efforts connect to their growth goals. A structured digital marketing platform addresses that gap by bringing marketing activity, performance data, and customer engagement into one place. When owners can see which efforts drive results, marketing decisions become more deliberate and easier to align with broader business priorities. It tends to make customer follow-up more consistent and growth easier to measure over time.
Resources & Events
📅 ServiceTitan Pantheon 2026 (Orlando, FL - October 5-7, 2026)
ServiceTitan Pantheon is one of the largest business conferences for the trades, built for HVAC, plumbing, electrical, and other home service owners and their leadership teams. It is held at the Walt Disney World Swan and Dolphin Resort in Orlando. The program centers on practical growth for field service businesses, including operations, marketing, leadership, and technology use to scale profitably. Details →
📅 World Business Forum NYC (New York, NY - November 4-5, 2026)
The World Business Forum is a two-day leadership and strategy event that brings together senior executives from across the globe to learn from influential business thinkers. Sessions span leadership, growth strategy, business transformation, talent, and leading change. Speakers include Jim Collins, Malcolm Gladwell, and Indra Nooyi. Details →
📊 Report Spotlight: Vistage Q1 2026 CEO Confidence Index (Vistage)
Vistage’s Q1 2026 CEO Confidence Index shows business leaders moving back into a more cautious mode. The index fell to 87.2, down 1.7 points from Q4 2025, ending a three-quarter climb while still staying above its three-year average. CEOs are dealing with geopolitical uncertainty, tariff complexity, margin pressure, hiring caution, and rising costs that are hard to fully pass on to customers. Revenue expectations remain relatively steady. 65% expect higher sales over the next year, but only 51% expect profitability to improve. Read →
Frameworks + Tools Spotlight
Whether you run an HVAC company, a professional services firm, a B2B operation, or a general contracting business, the same question applies:
Could your business continue performing if you stepped away for 90 days?
Use the framework below to assess five areas that determine whether a business is truly independent of its owner. Score each dimension from 1 to 3. Your lowest score is your most important 90-day priority.
Most owners can tell you their total revenue without thinking. Far fewer can tell you how much of it would walk out the door if one customer left, and whether that relationship lives with the business or only with them. This exercise, the Revenue Concentration Map, takes about 30 minutes and answers both.
Step 1: Pull your revenue from the last 12 months and list your customers or accounts from largest to smallest. You only need the top ten. (8 minutes)
Step 2: Add up what share of total revenue comes from your top one, your top three, and your top five accounts. If your top three account for more than half of your revenue, you are running a concentrated book. (5 minutes)
Step 3: Next to each of the top five, write two things. Who owns the relationship, meaning whose phone rings when something goes wrong, and how hard it would be for that customer to leave, on a simple scale of easy, moderate, or hard. (7 minutes)
Step 4: Find the single account that would hurt the most to lose. Ask one honest question about it. If that customer called tomorrow to end the relationship, would anyone other than you have seen it coming? If the answer is no, the risk is that the relationship has no owner besides you. (5 minutes)
Step 5: Choose one move and put a date on it. Either reduce the concentration by naming a target for new accounts this quarter, or reduce the dependency by bringing a second person into your most important relationship within 30 days. Block the same 30 minutes 90 days from now and run the map again. (5 minutes)
→ Want this mapped against your whole operation, not just revenue? Start with the S.M.A.R.T. BizVision™ diagnostic, a 360° look at your business that surfaces the dependencies a single exercise will not.
For the Commute
The Hidden Operational Cost of Speed (Daily Influence)
This episode looks at the costs leaders create when they push organizations to move faster without checking how that speed affects coordination, quality, and decision-making. The takeaway is that speed is not always the same as progress. When teams are forced to rush every decision, they often create rework, confusion, and operational drag that shows up later as missed details, weaker execution, or burnout.
