Are
Competitors Poaching Your Key People? Here’s How to Keep Them
Use these arguments to prevent your
top talent from jumping ship.
EXPERT OPINION BY HOWARD TULLMAN, GENERAL MANAGING PARTNER, G2T3V AND CHICAGO HIGH TECH INVESTORS @HOWARDTULLMAN1
Aug 5, 2025
We’re entering a very
peculiar and precarious period for smaller venture-backed companies that have
survived the pandemic and are now finally back on their feet. Just when they
thought there was light at the end of the tunnel, they’re discovering that plenty
of people are trying every day to poach their best employees. Talk to any CEO
who’s been around for a while, and they’ll describe the long line of visitors
outside their office and the regular conversations they’re having with their
managers about leaving. They’ve survived and dodged several bullets, held on to
most of their important customers, kept their teams largely together, and might
even be looking at operating profitably in the near future. But not if they
lose some of their best players.
Unlike some of their
most recent investors who are yelling
“giddy up” at the top of their lungs—most of the smart entrepreneurs right now
are happy to take a breath, hunker down, conserve their cash, and build the
next tranche of their businesses upon a rock-solid foundation, streamlined operations,
good and growing margins, and a base of loyal, long-term customers. It’s a
strategy that’s all about better and deeper customer connections and
commitments and not necessarily about going bigger and broader for the
moment.
These businesses are
planning to grow, but not too aggressively and not by quickly hiring tons of
new people. The growth that these companies expect to see over the next
two-to-three years will not be at levels likely to impress either the VC guys
already on their boards who paid premium prices in their last several
investment rounds (which were priced and closed before Covid) or the
A.I.-dazzled investors now rushing around and looking for the next rocket ship.
Even more importantly, slow and steady performance improvements, safe, clean
and efficient operations, and modest bumps in total revenue are also not going
to materially move any of these companies’ valuations or stock prices. But they
will make for much better businesses in the long run. It’s a game of time,
patience and perseverance.
Still, the slow and
steady growth story is a hard one to sell to experienced old timers and
especially to anxious newbies in a hurry. It also isn’t the most compelling
story to tell your key team members who’ve been toiling in the trenches for
years, drinking the Kool-Aid of a bundle of bucks at the end of the rainbow,
and burning through the best and likely highest-earning years of their career.
The difference between time and money is that you always know how much money
you have, but you never know how much time you have left. 01:49
Your top talent is being
asked to sign up and re-up for another several years, but they’re smart enough
to see that the going forward plan isn’t likely to move the company’s valuation
needle much at all or to increase the value of their own holdings. So, in some
ways, the offers coming over the transom to some of your most important players
of (a) signing bonuses, (b) new equity in more exciting businesses, and (c)
advancement opportunities which may well represent their last chances to move
up in an organization are all quite seductive and compelling.
It’s your job to
convince these folks to stick around and stay the course. While each person’s
situation is different, and every company’s position—competitively,
strategically and financially—will also be somewhat unique, there are some
common arguments for not taking the bait and bailing out. Here are four that
I’ve used more than a few times with considerable success.
You left where you were
for good reasons—they haven’t changed.
The most prevalent
poachers today are the biggest firms and they’re not interested in lateral
hires from the other big guys because they’ve concluded that those folks know
just as little about what’s happening as their own people do. They’re trying to
steal the smarts from startups and early-stage growth companies because that’s
where tomorrow’s talent is concentrated and that’s where the future is being
designed and built. Nothing’s new or different in the big gray corporate world,
where change is still a nasty word. Going back there for the bucks is a bad
bet. The money you may make isn’t worth the price you pay.
You didn’t join our team
or our journey for the money.
If your happiness and
job satisfaction depend on money, you’re never going to be happy with yourself.
Money is what people without talent use to keep score. You joined our company
because you were interested in making something new that you could be proud of,
doing work that was important and that mattered, and because you wanted to join
a group of excited and talented people who had found a place where the work
filled their souls and not simply their time. Doing work that you don’t believe
in takes away from your soul.
You think you know what
you’ll be leaving behind, but you have no idea of what you’re signing up
for.
There are no guarantees
in any life or business, but it’s a lot smarter to stick with the business and
the people you know than to make a life-changing move at a time when the entire
world is in flux and even the most substantial and secure businesses are making
radical shifts in their business strategies, their workforces, and their
commitments to their people and their customers. Future employment promises are
only as good as the people who make them, and those folks could be out the door
themselves before you even get on board.
You’ll never replicate
the connections you’ve built through years of shared struggles where you
learned to trust and acknowledge how much you needed each other.
Teams, along with their
individual members, grow over time and the ineffable bonds, warm memories,
apocryphal war stories, and emotions that bind them together can’t be replaced,
replicated or rebuilt. The days behind us determine the days ahead and, whether
we believe it or not, the most critical decisions we make are those made with
our hearts and not our heads. We choose a path with our hearts and then we use
numbers to try to justify and convince ourselves that the course chosen is the
best one. You can never really appreciate what you’re leaving behind until long
after you’ve left.
The bottom line is, when
the dust finally settles, when you look deeply inside, and you give voice to
your decision, make sure that the words come from your heart rather than your
head. Your heart has reasons that your head doesn’t know.
