Month nine judges the hire. Month one decided the verdict.

Somewhere around the ninth month with a new sales leader, most founders start drafting the exit conversation. The dashboard says what it said in January. The pipeline review has become a weekly argument about definitions. The board, or the operating partner, has started asking the question in the careful voice. And the founder opens a blank email with a subject line like "catch up Monday" and cannot write the first sentence, because every version starts with a feeling and none of them can find the fact.

Here is the fact that is missing.

You hired a builder. Judge the building.

You hired a builder, not an engine

A sales leader brought into a founder-led company at $2M, $5M, or $12M is not hired to run an engine. There usually isn't one. They are hired to build the thing the founder has been doing by instinct: a customer the whole team can describe, a process that does not require the founder on the call, a pipeline that forecasts something, a number that means the same thing in March as it did in January. That is construction work. And the only honest question at month nine is whether any of it got built.

The dashboard cannot answer that. It reports the number, and the number at month nine is mostly the setup at month one wearing a new name. It cannot separate the person from what the person was handed.

The pushback deserves a real answer

The careful operator pushes back here, and the pushback deserves a real answer.

I pay a senior sales leader precisely so they fix the setup themselves. If it had to be handed to them in writing, I hired wrong, and nine months is plenty of time to show it.

Yes. A good builder builds without a blueprint. That is the job. But you still cannot tell whether yours did unless you know what the site looked like when they arrived. If the hire inherited a guess at a customer and now the team can name one, something got built. If they inherited a founder-shaped process and the founder is still on every closing call, nothing did. Same dashboard either way. The counter-argument does not beat the thesis; it is the thesis. The builder's work is only visible against the before.

Three things you can check this week

So before the exit conversation, have a different one, with yourself, using evidence you can get this week.

First: the deals that moved without you. Pull every opportunity that advanced a stage in the last quarter and mark the ones where you were not on the call, the email, or the pricing decision. At month one that list was probably empty, because the founder was the process. If it is still empty, the engine did not get built, whoever's fault that is. If it is half the pipeline, you are looking at a building.

Second: the day-30 forecast against what closed. Ask for the forecast your sales leader gave you in their first month and lay it against the quarter that followed. Then do the same for the most recent one. A builder who is building gets closer over time, because the stages start to mean something. A forecast that is as wrong in month nine as it was in month one tells you the pipeline is still a spreadsheet of hope, and that is a system finding, not a character finding.

Third: what was handed over in writing. Find the document from month one that defined the customer, the process, the quota, and what "working" would look like at month twelve. If it exists, you can grade against it. If it does not, you have just found the real reason the exit conversation will not write itself: there was never a definition to fail.

The evidence tells you what got built

None of these three tells you whether to keep the hire. That is deliberate. Two of them can come back showing a leader who built real structure into a number that has not moved yet, because structure moves the number last. One of them can come back showing a leader who moved the number by doing what the founder used to do, personally, which is not a building, it is a tenant. The evidence tells you what got built. You decide what that is worth.

What the evidence always does is stop the next hire from inheriting the same setup. Write the definition now, dated, for this person: the customer, the process, the forecast standard, and what "working" means at month twelve. If you fire on a feeling, month nine comes around again with a new name on it. If you keep on a feeling, you will be back here at month eighteen, with the same email open.

You hired a builder. Judge the building. And if you are not sure what the building was supposed to look like, that is the first thing to fix, and it is not the sales leader's job.

Next step

Two minutes, eight questions, scored in your own answers: the scorecard will not tell you who to keep. It tells you where to look first. FixYourRevenueEngine.com/scorecard. And if you would rather have someone look under the hood with you, grab us a time at FixYourRevenueEngine.com/contact.

By Jason Rigolli, Founder of Revved for Growth
over two decades rebuilding revenue engines for founder-led or family-owned B2B firms. Two-time co-founder. Most recently, commercial lead for the PE practice of a leadership-advisory firm, on the leadership piece of sponsor due diligence.