A client of ours signed the biggest distribution deal in the company's history back in March. Six months on, the champagne has gone flat.

They'd partnered with a much bigger distributor to get their product onto shelves they could never have reached alone, and the plan worked exactly as sold. Revenue in the new territory was up in double digits within two quarters.

Then the finance director asked the question nobody had budgeted an answer for. Why isn't any of that showing up in profit?

It isn't an unusual story right now. And the clearest public version of it landed on 10 September, when Fever-Tree's half year results showed the same pattern playing out at scale.

UK revenue rose 3% to £49.5 million, and group adjusted profit climbed 9% to £20.1 million. But in the US, the company's biggest market and the one built on its distribution partnership with Molson Coors, revenue was up 11% at constant currency while segment profit fell 18% over the same period.

The margin on that part of the business narrowed from 8.1% to 6.2%.

None of that means the business is in trouble. Fever-Tree's chief executive, Tim Warrillow, described the first half as a period of strong progress, and on most measures it was. A profit guarantee from Molson Coors is cushioning the US business through this investment phase, while market share there keeps climbing.

But it's a useful, very public version of something that plays out quietly in plenty of boardrooms this time of year. Growth and profit stop moving in step, and somebody senior has to own the gap.

Why does hiring get harder once the growth actually arrives?

Because chasing a new channel and protecting the margin inside it are two different jobs. Most senior sales hires are built for one rather than both.

A hunter who is brilliant at opening a distribution partnership or landing a big account is not automatically the person who should be running the pricing, the trade terms and the account economics once that deal is live. And businesses tend to discover the gap about two quarters after the deal is signed, which is exactly when it is slowest and most expensive to fix.

By then the board has seen the revenue line. It is asking, politely at first, why the profit line has not followed it up the page.

What should a commercial director actually be able to do here?

Read a channel P&L, not just a pipeline. A strong candidate for this kind of role can explain, without notes, why a distributor deal that grows revenue can still shrink margin, and which specific levers move it back the other way.

Most businesses still run the same interview they always have, asking mainly about closing skills and target attainment. Ask a candidate instead to walk you through a deal where volume grew and margin did not, and watch how quickly the strong ones get specific.

Weak answers stay general, all confidence and no numbers. Strong ones will tell you the exact trade term they renegotiated, or the sku they pulled out of a promotion because the rebate made it unprofitable, usually within the first minute of being asked, and often before you have finished the question.

This is the split behind more commercial director recruitment UK briefs than almost anything else we have seen this year. A business lands the growth, then needs someone who can run it profitably rather than someone who can win it a second time.

Those are rarely the same person.

Get it wrong and the cost compounds fast. A hunter dropped into an operator's seat usually keeps doing what got them promoted, chasing the next deal instead of fixing the pricing on the one already won.

Margin keeps drifting for another quarter or two before anyone acts on it. By then you are hiring under pressure with the board watching, which is exactly the moment businesses settle for the confident interview over the specific answer.

Pay has moved with the job too. A current commercial director salary benchmark is worth checking before you write the offer, because a package built on what the role used to cost will lose you the candidate who actually understands channel economics to a competitor who priced the market properly.

Is this only a problem for companies expanding into new export markets?

No. We see the same pattern with a manufacturer near Sheffield that won a major new domestic account last year, and a healthcare supplier that opened its first NHS framework contract this spring. Neither business was exporting anything, and neither had touched a distributor.

But both discovered that landing bigger, more complex customers changes what "good" looks like in the person running that relationship. The seniority of the hire usually needs to go up at exactly the moment the business feels like it should be coasting on the win.

That is a hard case to make internally when everyone is still celebrating the deal.

Most of this you can spot before you write the job spec, if you are honest about which half of the problem you are actually hiring for. Growth and margin protection sound like the same skill from the outside. They rarely are, and getting that distinction wrong is an expensive way to find out.

If you are watching a revenue number climb faster than the profit line under it, that is usually the moment to look hard at who is running commercial delivery day to day.

Not just who closed the deal that got you here. A specialist sales recruitment partner who has placed people into this exact gap before can usually tell within one conversation whether you are hiring for the right half of the job.

Weighing up whether your next senior sales hire needs to be a hunter or an operator? Have a conversation with us, no obligation attached. And if you are the one considering a move into a commercial leadership role, our latest sales vacancies are worth a look too.