As mentioned in my blog post end of the trip I will post some details the next few days about some conclusions I had during this business trip.

I suppose once I have everything set up, this business blogging will more or less stop, but now that I am actively building the company, it’s interesting to write as a form of thinking. I also get lots of reactions about these posts, incentivizing me to write more.

This post is about hiring and the decisions around that topic.

As posted on LinkedIn, I decided to remove the payroll role. I couldn’t find the right person when it came to skills vs their pay expectations. I got lots of applications from people with too little experience. I got some OK applications from designers with the right experience, but then they had way too high expectations regarding salary.

The mix between high salary costs in Belgium and general averageness of the payroll applications creates a problem for employers. I don’t know if the Belgian government really realizes they are scaring entrepeneurs away, and they are not exactly creating an attractive investment climate.

The mix between high payroll costs, high administrative burdens, and lack of flexibility made me decide to try and find the right combo in freelancers – including Mexican freelancers.

Within this decision, I found a few great designers already, on the Belgian side, who will be the first people helping out Obra ship great design projects for our clients.

Next to the team I already have on call, I need more people with the right skills who can hit the ground running. So if you are a freelancer and have solid UI and/or front-end skills, check out our updated jobs page.

I am looking for people who want to do more than just do the work project-based and can help to build the company; and this both in Belgium and in Mexico city.

As for the business partner, I removed this role from the website. This is an extremely difficult role to hire for. And some signals are telling me it’s not the right choice to put this role with one person. In a small company context, everyone has to help grow the company.

For now, I split up the “business partner” role from the “design lead” role. It was worth a try to try and find a person who could do both, but I think it’s not realistic in the short term. Rather than have a ghost job posting, I would rather have none and work on this problem in the background.

One reasoning I had for the business partner was to run and grow the Belgian part of the company, at all kinds of levels: sales, marketing business development, but then also design leadership in the projects. When I challenged myself on that reasoning, I didn’t really see a reason why there couldn’t be a split between day-to-day work and real-life tasks and the actual growing of the company and business development.

In talks with people I gave the specific examples of answering a Belgian client at 9AM, when I am sleeping in Mexico; and being able to go to physically to a client for workshops and usability testing. I put these tasks with the business partner, but since every individual designer at Obra also talks directly to the clients, why split that up? If anything, I trust the freelancer team I built so far way more to do this than the payrollers I was interviewing. So this can be covered.

Then the business development side, this is actually a separate task, that I am fully commited to. I’ve decided to not actually design too much this year: I am working on the business part of Obra. Every moment should be spent selling, hiring, coaching, mentoring… not designing myself. Except for maybe some AI front-end projects where I can really learn something new and make an epic deliverable for the client.

One danger in hiring is trying to find a copy of yourself: that just doesn’t work. When I do business development and overall project vision, and the designers and front-enders can design and prototype great work, we are essentially complementary. When I try to find a business developer in a designer, I am essentially looking to reflect myself on the Belgium side, which then just leads to a 1 +1 = 2 situation, not 1 + 1 = 3. In times of abundance, maybe it helps to just scale up and make money because the economy is with you, but in times of scarcity, it’s better to deeply think about who you partner up with.

Those are a lot of words and reasonings to find out why you will now find the freelance design lead as a separate job posting.

I have to flesh out the logic behind this job but it would be a contract with a base wage and a specific perf-based aspect. I’d like to thank a specific freelancer (you know who you are) — and my dad — to help bring me to this line of reasoning through our talks.