You’re Flooring It.
You’re Saving
Almost No Time.
Why the smartest thing a startup founder can do for HR is do it earlier than feels necessary — and what Rory Sutherland’s paceometer has to do with it.
“Going from 20mph to 30mph saves you vastly more time than going from 70mph to 80mph. You’re burning more fuel, taking more risk — and getting almost nothing back.”The Paceometer Principle — Rory Sutherland
The instrument most founders
have never heard of
Rory Sutherland talks about a little instrument called the paceometer. Unlike your speedometer — which tells you how fast you’re going — the paceometer tells you how much time you’re actually saving. And the curve it draws is brutal.
Most speedometers show miles per hour: distance covered in a unit of time. The paceometer flips it — it shows the minutes taken to cover a fixed distance. When you look at it this way, the returns collapse at higher speeds. Going from 20mph to 30mph? Enormous time saving. Going from 70mph to 80mph? Marginal. You’re burning more fuel, taking more risk, and the return has nearly disappeared.
Startups are making the exact same mistake with HR. And it’s costing them dearly.
It takes a disproportionate amount of fuel to get a rocket off the launchpad. Get the foundations right at low altitude and the rest of the journey becomes dramatically more efficient. Ignore them, and you’re burning fuel you don’t have.
Where most founders are
when they call us
By the time most startup founders reach out for HR help, they’re already going 80mph. The business has grown fast, the team has tripled, and something has gone wrong. Usually several things.
At this speed, fixing things is hard, slow, and expensive. You’re at the flat end of the paceometer curve. You pour in enormous effort and the needle barely moves.
The Wrong Senior Hire
Someone in a critical seat who isn’t the right culture fit — and everyone knows it except the founder. Tolerated too long. Now expensive to undo.
The Drifted Culture
The team has grown from 8 to 40 in 18 months. Nobody really knows what the company stands for anymore — because nobody ever wrote it down when it would have been easy.
The Compensation Crisis
Pay conversations that have become awkward, inconsistent, and quietly toxic. Equity conversations that should have happened 18 months ago. Retention starting to wobble.
The Non-Process
A hiring process that produces different results every time — because it was never really a process. Every hire is a fresh improvisation. Outcomes are inconsistent at best.
The Promoted Manager
Your best individual contributor is now managing four people and failing at it. Nobody built their capability before handing them a team. Now the problem is compounding daily.
The Gravity Problem
Scaling feels like fighting gravity the whole way up. What worked at 15 people visibly doesn’t work at 50. The founders who invested earlier are already in orbit.
What low speed,
high return HR looks like
The paceometer tells us something that feels deeply uncomfortable to a startup founder: slow down to go faster.
Investing in HR infrastructure before you feel the pain isn’t a luxury or an overhead cost. It’s the highest-leverage move available to you at that stage — the moment in the curve where every unit of input returns maximum output.
The founders who ignore this — who say “we’ll sort HR when we’re bigger” — are the ones who eventually arrive at 80mph and discover they’re spending £200k solving a problem that would have cost £20k to build properly in the first place.
- Hiring frameworks built before the panic hire, not during it — consistent, repeatable, improving with every person you bring in
- Culture and values defined when the team is 8, not reverse-engineered from a culture deck when you’re 80
- Compensation philosophy agreed before it becomes a retention crisis or an equity argument
- Onboarding that compounds — every new hire benefits from the work done for the last one
- Manager capability built before management failure is embedded and expensive to undo
- The confidence to act before the pain arrives — because that’s where the return is
Still on the
launchpad?
If you’re building something and want to get the people foundations right before you need them — or you’re already at altitude and need help — talk to the team at Meliorem. We work with founders at every point on the curve. But we’ll always tell you: the earlier you call, the better the return.
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