What to look for in your first employee, according to successful small business owners

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What to look for in your first employee, according to successful small business owners

How small business owners know it’s time to hire—and who they bring on first

The trait small business owners say matters most when building a team

The first hire formula: How founders know it’s time—and who they bring on first

For Gaby Bayona, operating as a solopreneur was no longer cutting it, literally. At 18, Bayona began making dresses on her apartment floor, cutting and sewing her own designs with just one sewing machine and the skills she picked up from her seamstress mother.

“I was working super late nights, weekends, constantly. It was a really crazy schedule to the point where I simply could no longer do more,” Bayona says on Shopify Masters. Thirteen years after starting Truvelle, Bayona now leads a team of 40 full-time staffers and many contractors across multiple bridal brands and retail stores.

It can be difficult for entrepreneurs to relinquish some control and entrust others with their dreams. But if you’re a team of one, your growth skids to a stop once you’ve tapped out your finite personal time and energy. Hiring can be a major growth lever, freeing you up for higher-level tasks and allowing your business to soar.

For Bayona, hiring has allowed her to focus on the big picture and explore several additional ventures. “My role now is so much more forward-thinking than before,” she says. “I’m able to grow the company and launch all these new brands, and there’s no way I could have done that without a team."

How will you know when is the right time to hire for your business—and who you should hire? Shopify spoke with entrepreneurs to share their practical guidance and tips.

Recognize when you’ve maxed out your personal capacity

According to a 2025 survey of business owners and leaders conducted by The Harris Poll for Shopify, 39% of respondents said that setting sales or growth goals that stretch beyond personal capacity is a sign it’s time to hire.

Bayona’s tipping point came when a retailer in Ottawa asked if she could wholesale dresses. It was the start of Truvelle’s rapid scaling from side hustle to global brand—a journey that required a team.

“Starting with the first [hire], every time I’ve hired a new staff member, it’s because I, literally, physically could not do it anymore myself,” Bayona says.

This was also the case for Jono Pandolfi, who started Jono Pandolfi Designs in 2004 to make unique dinnerware for the hospitality industry. The New Jersey-based studio is now the go-to ceramist for the Four Seasons Hotel, numerous Michelin Star restaurants, and even the TV show The Bear. At the start, though, he worked with just one wheel and one kiln.

In 2017, the studio’s artistic pieces were in high demand, but it couldn’t produce enough supply to meet all that demand and grow further. Jono’s brother Nick Pandolfi left his job at Google to help solve this problem, joining as general manager and chief operating officer to scale the business.

“Our growth was always constrained by the sheer fact of how many ceramic pieces we could make,” Nick says. “We, of course, understood that if we hired more people, we could make and sell more stuff. But it was ambiguous how many people it would take to get us where we needed to be.” His early challenge was to remove that ambiguity.

Crunch the numbers

Ensuring your business’s finances can handle the added expense of an employee’s salary is crucial before making your first hire. Thirty-eight percent of Shopify survey respondents agreed that having sustainable cash flow that can cover payroll for at least three months is a milestone to meet before hiring, and another 38% look for consistently hitting revenue targets.

Nick spent much of his first year at Jono Pandolfi Designs analyzing the sales pipeline, deal close rates, revenue forecasts, production metrics, equipment capacity, and other data to understand how many people they could bring onto the team.

“Without any visibility into those factors, you have to take a much bigger leap of faith to grow your headcount,” Nick explains. “Compare that to being able to say, ‘OK, we have 30 deals in the pipeline and a 33% close rate, so we can pretty confidently say we’ll close 10 of these deals and need to make X amount.’ That kind of model gave us the confidence to open up headcount strategically.”

Nick was the fifth employee at Jono Pandolfi Designs; eight years later, the team has grown to 44 people and counting.

Start slow—and be intentional

Bayona approached Truvelle’s early hiring slowly and carefully. Her first hire was a seamstress whom she met through her mother, and the second was someone looking to shadow her. The first five to 10 hires started by working alongside her in her apartment, and many of them remain at the Vancouver-based company today.

And though those scrappy days and late nights on her own were challenging, Bayona wouldn’t change any of it. “I’m definitely a bootstrapper, and because I pushed to squeeze every ounce of efficiency from myself, I did every role,” she says. “That helped me understand what I needed from the people I would hire, and it gave me a foundation to show people how to do things efficiently, on a tight budget, and with a short timeline.”

Similarly, for Jono Pandolfi Designs, Nick is deliberate about each of the company’s hires. “Ours is a very labor-intensive business and our products require true craftspeople to make them,” Nick says. “So we spend a lot of time thinking about what types of folks we want to hire, and how we can attract and retain them. It’s a very big part of what I think about at work, and the bigger we get, the more attention and time is spent on hiring.”

Seek values alignment

Five key values at Jono Pandolfi Designs guide hiring decisions, Nick says. The acronym BRICK reflects the company’s core philosophy: Built from scratch, Resourceful, Improving constantly, Collaboration, and Keeping it positive.

"We’re looking for people with a great attitude who can add to our collaborative environment," Nick says. “As my brother says, ‘There are no dinnerware emergencies.’ We want to be a positive place to work.” They look for candidates who embody these traits and will strengthen that culture—and if they don’t, even the most talented, trained ceramicist simply wouldn’t be a fit for the studio.

For Marina and Ricardo Larroudé, cofounders of footwear brand Larroudé, values are central to hiring. “I think that ethics are a very important thing,” Ricardo says of his criteria for selecting new employees. “If I start to see that they’re bendable about what’s right and what’s wrong, that usually doesn’t work for us.” The brand began with just the husband-and-wife team; they’ve since scaled up to 550 employees.

Identify what you can and can’t train

At Truvelle and her other brands, Bayona considers interviews in part to be a “vibe check.” That is: She’s looking for people who are kind and hardworking, and she says she tends to overindex on those traits rather than worry heavily about direct experiences.

“I’ve always believed that you can train people to do things, but you can’t train work ethic and personality,” says Bayona. “Even though we’ve grown, my business is still quite personal. I try to be a kind and accepting person who people will enjoy working with, and I look for people to reflect that when they represent my brand.”

For Ricardo, overconfidence is a red flag; instead, he looks for candidates who are not embarrassed by what they don’t know. When an employee can admit they don’t have the answer to a question, it’s a good sign. “Someone that says, ‘You know what? I’ll ask somebody. I have no clue.’ That’s a good person,” he says.

While Jono Pandolfi Designs does look for related experience, it’s not necessarily in ceramics, Nick says. Rather, the company wants to see that candidates are accustomed to performing physical work.

“You’re using your body to make stuff, so we’re looking for relevant experience that demonstrates you can handle the very physical nature of the job,” he says. “Often our staff has no ceramics experience whatsoever, but they might have worked as a line cook or waitstaff, so they have that sense of urgency and experience being on their feet all day. Other folks who do well are people who worked in fabrication, metal work, carpentry, and construction. It’s a path into our industry from places that you might not expect.”

Match your must-haves to your business stage

The “right” person for your business can evolve as your business grows. The best candidate to help build the company from the zero-to-one stage may not be the same type of person you’d seek when you’re established and looking to scale. So some of the traits you seek may evolve over time.

Adaptability, for example, is generally a positive at any stage, as the unexpected can happen to any business. But this trait is particularly crucial in the early days of a startup.

“When we were getting started, I needed people to jump in and do whatever random tasks were required—and to see that as a positive growth experience,” Bayona says.

Now that her brands have grown and become steady, however, Bayona says they attract people who value consistency. And for some roles, she now seeks people who are excited to grow at the company in the future.

Don’t underestimate a growth mindset

Hiring growth-minded staffers can bring unexpected skills and insights that benefit the entire company, as Jono Pandolfi Designs found.

“We hired a production assistant who had previously worked as a baker in a doughnut shop, and he ended up having incredible insight about how to manage our production process in a very thoughtful and empathetic way,” Nick says. “Now he oversees all of our production and has been a tremendous asset in helping the studio grow.”

This growth mindset can also apply beyond an individual’s career path. When selecting leaders, Ricardo also considers their ability to bring in additional talent who are aligned with the company’s culture and needs. “I sit down and say, ‘Listen, I love you, you’re great, but … you gotta find five people like you,’” he says. “That’s the thing that we do to grow.”

This story was produced by Shopify and reviewed and distributed by Stacker.