The commercial operations problem: why most early-stage growth efforts fail

Most founders I talk to think they have a growth problem.

They've raised a round, hired a marketer, launched some campaigns, and the numbers aren't moving the way they hoped. So they do what founders do — they try harder. More channels. More spend. Another agency. A new positioning workshop. The problem, they assume, is that they haven't found the right tactic yet.

After ten years of building and scaling companies across the DACH region and East Asia — including co-founding Yuno, Switzerland's first consumer electronics rental platform, and evaluating over 200 business models at a corporate venture studio — I've come to believe something uncomfortable: most early-stage startups don't have a growth problem. They have a commercial operations problem. And the distinction matters more than most founders realize.

What a commercial operations problem actually looks like

A commercial operations problem is easy to miss because it hides behind activity. From the outside, everything looks like it's moving. Ads are running. Content is being published. Someone is updating the CRM. The team is busy. But the machine isn't compounding.

In practice, it usually looks like one or more of these:

• The strategy lives in the founder's head, not in a system the team can actually execute against

• Growth spend is going out the door without a clear hypothesis about what it's supposed to prove

• Nobody owns the commercial function end-to-end — marketing, sales, pricing, and retention are being managed as separate things by separate people who don't talk to each other

• There's no operating cadence: no weekly growth review, no shared dashboard, no clear definition of what's working

• Pricing was set once and has never been revisited

• Unit economics are either wrong or unknown

None of these are growth problems in the traditional sense. You can't fix any of them by running better Google Ads or hiring a content marketer. They're structural.

Why this happens to almost every early-stage startup

Early-stage founders are good at one thing by definition: making something out of nothing. That's the job. You find a market, build a product, get the first customers, raise some money. It works because you hold everything in your head and move fast.

But the thing that got you to your first million in revenue is the thing that prevents you from getting to your next ten million. The founder-in-your-head model doesn't scale, and it doesn't transfer. When you hire your first marketer, they don't have the context you have. They don't know which channels you tried and abandoned, which customers churned and why, how you think about pricing, or what the real goal of next quarter actually is. So they default to what any reasonable new hire would do: they run tactics.

Now you have someone running Google Ads and posting on LinkedIn, but no one is actually leading the commercial function. The tactics happen. The system doesn't exist.

Why fixing it is harder than it looks

The obvious answer is to hire someone senior. A VP of Marketing, a Head of Growth, a Chief Commercial Officer. The problem is that a full-time senior commercial hire costs €120,000 to €180,000 a year plus equity, plus a three-month hiring process, plus the risk that the person you hire isn't actually the right fit for your stage.

Most early-stage startups aren't ready for that commitment. They know they need senior commercial leadership, but they also know they can't justify the overhead. So they kick the can down the road and hire another marketing coordinator instead. Six months later, nothing has changed. The commercial operations problem compounds.

What actually works

The way out of a commercial operations problem isn't more tactics or a bigger team. It's building the operating system first, and then hiring and spending against it.

In practice, that means getting clarity on four things before anything else:

The commercial strategy. Who are you selling to, what are you selling them, why do they buy, and what's the repeatable motion that gets more of them through the door? This needs to be written down, not held in the founder's head.

The unit economics. What does it cost you to acquire a customer, how long do they stay, how much do they pay, and what's the margin profile over their lifetime? If you can't answer these in one page, you can't make intelligent growth decisions.

The operating cadence. A weekly rhythm where the commercial function reviews what's working, what isn't, and what to do next. Dashboards that everyone on the team can read. A shared definition of success.

The structure. Who owns what, how decisions get made, and what roles need to be filled in what order. Most early-stage startups skip this and end up with a team where everyone does a bit of everything and nothing compounds.

Once these four are in place, growth tactics start to actually work — because they're running inside a system that can learn from them and adjust. Without them, every tactic is a standalone experiment that teaches you nothing.

The fractional alternative

This is the gap that fractional commercial leadership is designed to fill. Instead of hiring a €150k full-time executive or continuing to hack around the problem, founders bring in someone senior on a part-time basis to build the commercial operating system from the inside — strategy, unit economics, operating cadence, team structure — and then either stay on to run it or hand it off cleanly to a full-time hire when the company is ready.

Done well, it's faster than hiring full-time, cheaper than working with an agency, and produces something that scales beyond the engagement. Done badly, it's just another consultant with a slide deck. The difference is whether the fractional leader actually builds the system inside the team or delivers recommendations from the outside.

The test

If you're reading this and wondering whether your own company has a growth problem or a commercial operations problem, ask yourself one question: if I took a two-week holiday tomorrow, would the commercial function keep moving forward, or would it stall?

If the answer is "stall," you don't have a growth problem. You have an operating system problem. And no amount of paid traffic is going to fix it.

About the author: Fabian Herrmann is a fractional commercial executive based in Berlin. He co-founded Switzerland's first consumer electronics rental platform, and scaled it to 12,000 contracts and 22 employees as Chief Commercial Officer. He now works with seed to Series A startups building their commercial operating systems from scratch.