our CFO spent three hours yesterday reconciling expense reports. Your VP of Engineering is personally reviewing every pull request. Your CTO is troubleshooting a customer's API integration. Welcome to Series B, where your C-suite has become the world's most overqualified middle management team. I see this pattern constantly in growth-stage companies. The org chart looks impressive. Strong executives at the top. Talented individual contributors doing the work. But between them? A hollow layer where directors and senior managers should be. McKinsey research shows investors attribute 65 percent of portfolio company failures to people and organizational issues. The most common structural failure? The missing middle. McLaren F1 spent half a decade learning this lesson the expensive way before restructuring their technical leadership. Your Series B doesn't have that kind of time.

Most VP of Sales failures aren't talent failures — they're organizational failures wearing a human face. The founder succeeded despite the lack of systems. The VP Sales cannot succeed without them. Here are the four conditions that guarantee failure, and what to fix before your next hire.