The Hire That Was Supposed to Fix This
SparkToro’s 2025 State of Digital Agencies survey found 70% of agencies have no full-time salesperson, a statistic that describes exactly the gap a founder is trying to close the moment they finally make a BD hire. The assumption, reasonably, is that hiring someone for the role means the founder stops being the default answerer of every new-business call.
That assumption does not always hold. A founder can make the hire, on paper close the gap the 70% statistic describes, and still be the one picking up the phone six months later.
Why the Founder Still Picks Up the Phone Anyway
This is reasoning, not a cited statistic. The habit built over years of personally closing every deal does not disappear the day a new hire starts. A specific call still feels too important to hand off, a referral from a valued client, a prospect the founder already has a relationship with, and each individual exception feels reasonable in the moment, even as the pattern of exceptions quietly swallows the role the new hire was supposed to own.
The founder is rarely trying to undermine the new hire on purpose. It is closer to an old reflex that has not yet been retrained, running on autopilot exactly when a new system is supposed to be taking over.
What This Costs the New Hire
A BD rep who was hired to run new business, then watches the founder keep stepping in on the calls that matter most, is not getting the actual job they signed up for. Per Wikipedia’s summary of general HR literature, a November 2022 Gallup read found 49% of US employees were watching for or actively seeking a new job, a general labor-market backdrop that makes a rep in this exact situation, hired for a role they are not being allowed to do, a plausible flight risk well before any agency-specific data would be needed to explain why.
The hire does not need to be unhappy across the board. Watching the founder repeatedly take back the highest-value calls is, on its own, a reasonable enough reason to start looking elsewhere.
How to Tell the Difference Between Helping and Taking Over
Practitioner guidance: a founder joining a call the new hire is already running, to add credibility or answer a technical question, is help. A founder who takes the call instead of the new hire, on the referrals and warm prospects that would have been the easiest, most confidence-building wins of the new hire’s early months, is taking over, even when it is framed internally as “just helping out this one time.”
The pattern is usually visible in which calls the founder steps into. If it is consistently the best leads, not a random distribution, that is a signal worth naming directly rather than letting it continue unspoken.
What Has to Change
The fix is rarely a single conversation. It is a deliberate, repeated redirection: routing new inbound calls to the new hire by default, and treating a founder’s involvement as the exception that requires a reason, not the other way around. That reversal is uncomfortable precisely because the old habit was comfortable and, for years, worked.
A founder who cannot make that redirection stick on their own sometimes benefits from a structural forcing function, a system that routes and qualifies new leads before the founder ever sees them, rather than relying on willpower alone to break a years-old habit.
Sources
The external data in this article draws on the sources below. Figures described in the text as estimates or industry triangulations are directional and are not attributed to a single dataset.