PE will underwrite a deal down to the decimal and then hire a VP of Growth like it’s a pub bet.

The pattern is painfully consistent.

A charismatic interview.
A title that sounds impressive enough for LinkedIn.
A scorecard that reads like “drive growth” and “build a modern marketing engine”.

Then six months later everyone’s shocked that nothing moved, the CEO hates marketing, and the board deck has a new slide called “Brand Refresh”.

In portfolio companies it usually fails in the same way. The “growth leader” has opinions, frameworks and a nice vocabulary for attribution. They’ve never owned a number that mattered. They’ve never been the person explaining missed revenue to a CFO. So the work drifts into channel tinkering and agency management. Meanwhile the basics rot.

Home services is where this is most obvious. If you can’t walk into a branch and diagnose why booked rate is down, why speed to lead is lagging, why the call centre is leaking, why paid search is full of junk leads, then you’re not a growth operator. You’re a commentator with access to Google Ads.

And the market is telling you this role is hard. Marketing leaders don’t exactly have long life expectancy. Average CMO tenure in the S&P 500 is about 4.1 years. If you get it wrong at exec level, it’s not just awkward. HBR cites estimates that failed senior exec hires can cost up to 10x salary, and notes a roughly 50% chance an exec hire exits within 18 months.

The fix isn’t complicated, it’s just adult.

Define outcomes in numbers, not vibes. Revenue, contribution margin, CAC, lead to appointment, appointment to close, speed to lead, rehash performance, retention. Pick the few that actually drive value and make them non negotiable.

Test for operator muscle. Give them a real business problem with messy data and ask what they’d do in the first 30 days. Make them choose trade-offs. Make them explain what they’d stop doing.

Reference hard. Not “would you hire them again?” Ask what number they owned, what moved, what didn’t, and why. SHRM has data that a wrong hire can eat 26% of a manager’s time just to coach them back to baseline. That’s your EBITDA leaking out through a calendar invite.

And pay for talent properly. You can’t run a $50m revenue business with a “Head of Growth” comped like a mid level performance marketer, especially when marketing budgets are already under pressure in many companies.

You can’t spreadsheet your way out of mediocre hiring.