Most senior commercial hires are briefed on the pain, not the job. By the time you know what the role needs, you've already filled it.
Why the brief is usually written too early.
How it usually starts
The business has grown. The founder is still signing off the range, the buy, the price and the big accounts. Every important call still lands on one or two desks.
So the answer seems obvious. Hire a Commercial Director. Or a Head of Merchandising. Someone senior enough to take it off the founder's plate.
A job description gets written. It lists what's hurting right now. Margin. Stock. A wholesale book that's gone quiet. A team that needs leading.
The search takes months. The right person arrives. And then the real work starts.
What they walk into
The new hire finds an open-to-buy built on last year plus a percentage. Decision rights nobody wrote down. A founder who says "it's yours" and still reviews every buy.
The problem they were hired to fix turns out to sit somewhere else. In the range. In the terms. In how planning and buying talk to each other, or don't.
They're good. They spend the first six months working out what the job actually is. Some of them make it. Some leave, and the business is back where it started, with a year gone and a harder story to tell the next candidate.
Nobody hired the wrong person. They hired the right person into a role nobody had defined.
The other way round
Run the role before you hire for it.
One senior operator steps in part-time, with real decision rights. Not a monthly call. Not a report. They set the plan, make the calls and run the cadence the function is missing: range reviews, OTB, account reviews.
Three things happen.
The function starts working. The metrics it owns start moving while you would otherwise still be recruiting.
The decisions move. What the founder decides, what the role decides and what the team decides get written down, and tested against real weeks.
And you find out what the job actually is. Not what it looked like from the founder's desk. What it needs to be once the business is running properly.
What you hire at the end
Sometimes the answer is a permanent hire, and now the brief is built from evidence. You know the scope, the decision rights, the team they'll lead and the numbers they'll own. The person you recruit walks into a function that already works.
Sometimes the answer is a smaller role than you thought. Sometimes it's a bigger one. Sometimes the team you have can carry it, once the decisions are clear.
All three are cheaper to find out before the hire than after it.
When it isn't the answer
If the problem is one thing, a range that needs cutting or an OTB that needs rebuilding, you don't need a leader for six months. You need it fixed.
If the business isn't willing to hand over real decisions, it won't work. Part-time leadership with no authority is just advice with a longer invoice.
And if what you need is a full-time executive at part-time cost, it isn't that either.
The question to ask first
Before you write the job description, ask what the role would decide on its first Monday that nobody decides today.
If you can answer that in a sentence, you may be ready to hire.
If you can't, that's the role you're not ready to hire for yet.
If this looks like your business, the first step is forty-five minutes with both of us.