For a startup under 50 people – if your newly hired VP says these things, it’s an immediate red flag:
“We need to hire this agency to do this market research”
“My good friend is running a marketing agency and we should commission them”
“We need budget to bring our entire team to this convention in Paris – you know, they’ve been busting their butts”
Some people (especially those who are from big companies) think companies are supposed to have enough money no matter what, no matter when. They don’t care if a goose can lay eggs or not, they only care how many eggs their team or department get.
Using external resources – sure, it might turn out to be a good decision or even necessary. But these cannot be your first go-to suggestion. That’s a lazy thinking. You and your team should try everything to do the sh*t yourselves until things are about to burst at the seams.
The famous Zappos story. They took the picture of the shoes in a nearby store (that’s not theirs), and when the orders came in, they went to the store and bought the shoes and shipped them, as if these shoes were already in their inventory. They didn’t complain about the lack of a state-of-art warehouse or Silicon Valley engineers.
As a startup founder, I’m sure you’re ready to do things in an unscalable way first. Question is, does everyone at your company know and operate on the same mantra?