Setting your VP of CS up for success
The Problem: Buying a Ferrari With No Engine
For Series A–C companies, hiring your first VP of Customer Success feels like a milestone. You’re writing a big check expecting a growth engine.
But here’s what usually happens: that VP spends their first year putting out fires, backfilling roles, fixing tech debt, and writing board decks. By year two, churn has already torched millions in ARR — and the “engine” you thought you bought still hasn’t turned over.
The problem isn’t leadership. It’s the missing system.
In sales, you’d never expect your VP to build CRM, lead funnel, and enablement while also hitting revenue. You pair them with RevOps and maybe sales enablement. Yet in CS, we do exactly that. We drop an executive into chaos and ask them to build and run at the same time.
The Executive Objection
“If I’m paying $250K+, shouldn’t my VP be building this?”
Yes — but not while 70% of their time is consumed by firefighting. At $250K/year, that’s $175,000 spent on reaction and only $75,000 on construction.
No executive can deliver scale when their first year looks like a triage ward.
The Framework:
Design → Build → Run → Scale
Think of your retention engine like infrastructure:
Define the desired outcomes and the structure
needed to achieve them.
Lay the foundation (customer journey,
onboarding, retention signals).
Operate with discipline (playbooks, health
scoring, automation).
Expand leadership impact (VP focuses on
strategy, growth, expansion).
Retention Architect framework
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Most companies hire a VP and drop them straight into Run + Scale without a Build phase. That’s like asking a CFO to deliver GAAP audits without an ERP in place.
This is where the Architect comes in.
The Architect Advantage
An Architect isn’t a replacement for your VP. They’re the one who installs the operating system your VP can scale. In six months, they deliver:
Foundation
A customer journey and onboarding model
that becomes the blueprint for growth.
Strategy
Clear retention pathways and executive-level
metrics that tie customer outcomes directly to
revenue.
Systems
Scalable playbooks, health frameworks, and
governance that transform retention from ad-
hoc to predictable.
Execution
Get it done 3X faster.
The difference?
The One Takeaway
Architect = Design → Build → Run → Scale
Not: Hire → Scale → Hire → Scale.
Pairing your VP with an Architect means they don’t waste their prime years patching leaks — they drive growth on day one.
The real question for every CEO isn’t if you need an Architect.
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