Note: identifying details in this piece have been changed.
I joined a company that consisted of one man and an idea. That was late 2023. There was no team, no handbook, no software stack, no process for anything, and no clear description of what I had been hired to do beyond a general sense that the work would be finance-operations related, and that the work would be a lot.
For a while my job title could have accurately been written as everything my boss does not have time for. I set up the accounts. I chose the tools, or more honestly, I chose whatever tool I found on the second page of search results at eleven at night after writing a list of Pros and Cons in Notion. I built the initial folder structures that the company still uses. When a client came on, and boss gave me instruction on the deliverables, I worked out how we were going to serve them, and then I served them.
This is a familiar arrangement to anyone who has been early at a small company. What is less discussed is what happens two years later, when the company starts hiring people who are not you.
The years when you are the company
The first stretch is intoxicating, and I do not think anyone who has been through it would deny that, whatever they say afterwards.
Everything you touch becomes permanent. Rarely because your judgement is excellent, but mostly because you are the only one making decisions and nobody has the time to overrule you. You name a folder and that name outlives you. You pick a naming convention for client files at one in the morning and three years later a new hire in another city is following it, and neither he nor anybody else knows it was a coin flip.
You also get the education of your life. A company at that size cannot afford specialists, which means the first employee ends up doing accounting, technology, hiring, vendor management, client onboarding and whatever else appears. None of it is done particularly well, but you do all of it, and doing all of it badly teaches you more about how a business actually works than doing one thing very well.
And there is a version of closeness with the founder that does not survive growth. It is two people against a problem. Messages at odd hours, decisions made in four sentences, no meeting required. You are not consulted, exactly, you are simply present when the thinking happens, which is better than being consulted.
I want to name that plainly, because the rest of this is less warm and the warmth was real.
Then the hiring starts
Growth arrives as new names in the shared inbox.
An audit specialist comes in. Developers following him. Marketers, more accountants etc. People with actual titles describing an actual specialism, hired deliberately, interviewed properly, brought in to own a thing.
Nothing bad happened. There was no betrayal, no demotion, nobody took anything from me. The company simply became a place where more than one person makes decisions, and I discovered that I had quietly assumed I would always be one of the two people who did.
The changes are small and cumulative. Somebody alters a setting on a shared account and does not tell you, because from his point of view he is doing his job and you are not his manager. He is right about that. You still feel it, because you have spent two years being the person who knew what state every system was in, and the sensation of that map going out of date is unpleasant in a way that is difficult to describe without sounding possessive.
Or a decision gets made in a conversation you were not part of. Again, correct. There is no rule saying the operations person must be present when the product people discuss product. But for two years there had been no conversation you were not part of, because there was nobody else to have one with.
New people arrive into a finished world
Something else happens now when new hires join, and it took me a while to name it.
They arrive into a company that works. Accounts exist, files are where they should be, clients are being served, and the whole apparatus appears to have simply been there, the way a road appears to have simply been there. Nobody sees the version where none of it existed, because that version is not documented anywhere. It happened in a room, alone, at night, and left behind only in results.
So the natural thing for a competent new person to do is look at a system and say this could be better. And he is usually right. Most of what I built was built by someone with less experience than I have now, under time pressure, with a limited budget, to solve a problem that needed solving by a certain date. It is not good work by the standards of a company that can now afford good work.
That is the odd position the first employee ends up in. You defend decisions you no longer agree with, because you are the only person who remembers the constraints they were made under, and explaining the constraints sounds like making excuses. Or you agree that it is bad, which is honest, and slightly disorienting, because the thing being criticised is also the reason there is a company to criticise it in.
I have found no comfortable way through this. The best I manage is to say what the original constraint was, once, without arguing, and then let the improvement happen.
The salary you signed when there was no money
Here is a mechanical thing that nobody warns first employees about.
Your pay was agreed when the company had no revenue and no track record. It was a number that reflected risk on both sides eating into a bank balance that was the owner’s life savings. Every comparison from where you started vs where you are now gets calculated from that number, as a percentage of a figure set during the most vulnerable month in the company’s history. This is not a complaint because, fortunately, when I was hired, it was at more than 3x my previous pay but it remains a fact nonetheless.
Because new hires do not inherit that anchor. They are recruited into a company that now has clients and cash flow, they negotiate fresh, and their offer is built off the market. The market resets for every person who joins after you. It does not reset for you, because your number has the longest continuity.
None of this requires anyone to behave badly. It is just how the arithmetic runs when the starting point is history rather than value. The correction, if it comes, has to be deliberate. Somebody has to sit down and ask what this role would cost to fill today, and that question does not get asked by accident, and it is uncomfortable for the person it benefits to raise.
I have not been able to raise it properly. I am aware of the pattern and have still not done the thing the pattern requires. Partly because I already get paid more than my needs, and partly because my Dad, a strong influence in my life, always told me to focus on the work, not the money. To this day, he’s traveling 40kms daily to work in a shop in his village and despite my arithematic explanations of how it is not worth the cost of his energy and time, he keeps working because “the people of the village need me”.
The founder owns the relationships
There is a structural feature of my situation that sharpens all of this. I do not speak to clients. That is a deliberate arrangement, and a reasonable one. One voice faces the client, and it belongs to the founder, so the service stays consistent and nobody receives three different answers to the same question.
The consequence is that the value I produce reaches the outside world with somebody else’s name on it. The client experiences a firm that is reliable. He does not experience me being reliable, because he does not know I am there.
Relationships are the durable asset in a service business. Systems can be rebuilt, staff can be replaced, but the client who trusts a particular person is the thing with real weight. When you do the work and somebody else holds the relationship, your position inside the company is entirely dependent on that person’s continued good opinion. There is no external constituency that would notice your absence.
I do not think this arrangement was designed as leverage. It was designed for consistency, and it delivers consistency. But it produces leverage regardless of intent, and it would be naive to pretend otherwise.
Responsibility accumulates, authority does not
Now some stuff I would want another first employee to know.
Early responsibility attaches to you automatically. Nobody grants it. You are the only one there, so every unowned thing drifts into your hands, and after a while the list of things you are responsible for is genuinely long.
Authority does not work that way. Authority has to be given, in words, by the person who has it. And because the early period is informal, nobody ever gets around to saying the words. There is no moment where the founder says, this area is yours and decisions inside it are final. There is no need for such a moment when there are two of you and you are already deciding stuff together.
So you arrive at year three holding a long list of things you will be blamed for and a short list of things you can decide alone. New hires, joining a structured company, are told what they own on their first day. They receive clarity that the founding employee never got, because clarity is something a company learns to give and you predate the learning.
I do not think anyone did this to me. It is the natural shape of the situation. But informal arrangements do not become formal on their own. Somebody has to raise it, the somebody is me, and I have been slower about it than I should have been.
You become the documentation
The other trap is subtler and takes the form of a virtue.
Because you hold everything in your head, onboarding runs through you. New people ask you how things work. You explain, they get productive, everyone benefits. It feels good, and it is genuinely useful, and it is also the mechanism by which you turn into a permanent internal help desk instead of a person with a job.
The correct response is to write it all down. Documented processes, written procedures, systems that do not need you standing beside them. I have done a fair amount of this and I believe in it completely.
It is also worth being clear eyed about what you are doing. Every process you document reduces your indispensability. That is the right outcome for the company and, in the long run, for you, because being indispensable is not power, it is a cage. You cannot be promoted out of a role only you can perform. You cannot take three weeks off. You cannot leave cleanly, because leaving would require a handover project that nobody has time to run, and so the answer to any conversation about your future is always, quietly, not yet.
Writing it down is how you get out. It just does not feel like advancement while you are doing it. It feels like carefully making yourself optional.
The loyalty asymmetry
There is a story early employees tell themselves, and I told it too. It goes: I was here when it was nothing, and that will count for something.
It does count for something. It counts as trust, as tolerance, as the benefit of the doubt during a bad six months when you had a stupid breakup. Those are not small and I have received all of them.
What it does not automatically count as is ownership, title, or a seat where the significant decisions get made. Those come from negotiation or from paperwork, and being present at the beginning produces neither. The founder took a risk that has a legal name and an instrument attached to it. I took a risk too, of a different kind, in years and in roads not travelled, but my risk exists as sentiment. Sentiment is real but not enforceable.
That is not an accusation, I want to repeat. It is arithmetic, and I would say the same to a friend in the same position: your loyalty is an argument you are making, so make it out loud, in a conversation with a date on it, rather than hoping somebody notices.
The generalist problem
One more, and it is about what happens outside the company rather than inside it.
Two or three years of doing everything makes you unusually useful and unusually hard to describe. Specialists have a market. There is a going rate for a payroll person, a known ladder for a developer, a phrase a recruiter can search. The person who has done accounting and systems and onboarding and vendor management and a little bit of hiring and exit interviews has real capability and no category.
That capability is worth a great deal inside the company that watched you build it, and much less outside, where nobody watched. It cannot be verified quickly. It does not fit a job title. This is why so many long-serving first employees find that leaving means a step down on paper even when it would be a step up in skill.
I do not have a fix. The partial answer is to make sure at least one of your many competencies is deep enough to name, and to build something visible that belongs to you, because a portfolio of things nobody can see is not a portfolio.
Where that leaves me
I still hold more of this company in my head than anyone except the founder. I still know why half of it is built the way it is. Some of it was built badly, by a version of me who knew much less, and I am usually the only person who can see that.
The honest state of things is that I am somewhere between the person the company was built around and being just a cog in the whole machinery of the company, and I do not yet know which of those I am going to be. That will be settled partly by the founder and partly by my fate.
What I would tell someone taking a first employee job tomorrow is not to avoid it. It has been the most educational thing I have ever done and I would take it again. Just understand that the informality that makes those first years wonderful is the same informality that leaves you undefined later, and that the moment to fix it is while everyone still remembers what you did.