FINANCE

FIRST GREAT QUIZ SHOW, The $ 64,000 Question, was named after its jackpot, a sum so large in 1955 that the first man to win it was a Marine captain who answered questions on French cooking. Adjust for inflation, and that prize now sits close to a million in today’ s money, which happens to be the going rate for the hardest question in business too. Paul Strouts, CEO of Acacium Group’ s life sciences division, has spent 21 years in specialist staffing, learning the invaluable question of when to hire. He prices a single wrong answer at £ 500,000( US $ 670,000), the full weight of a headcount decision once ramp time, management load and the revenue a bad recruit never books are counted. Founders, he has argued publicly, get it wrong in both directions, hiring too early and starving their cash flow or hiring too late and watching the market move on without them.“ For me, the key test is consistency of revenue combined with a deep understanding of the market you’ re operating in,” Paul tells Business Chief.“ If revenue has been consistently strong over a sustained period and the market fundamentals remain stable, it’ s usually the right time to invest in people.

If either of those conditions feels uncertain, you need to be far more cautious and deliberate in your decision-making.” That instinct – spend when the data says so and only then – now runs through every corner of the division he leads, a portfolio spanning Proclinical, R & D Partners and DRA across 12 countries. Paul is not the only one deciding when to press his winnings. Deloitte’ s latest CFO Signals survey of 200 North American finance chiefs found 59 % believe now is a good time to take greater risks, up from 36 % just one quarter earlier.“ Many CFOs are looking to advanced technologies to help their organisations respond more quickly to changing market and customer dynamics,” says Steve Gallucci, US Leader of the Deloitte CFO Program. Feeling brave in a survey is free. Signing off the hire and waiting to see whether the revenue comes in is where the £ 500,000 is decided.

Double or nothing, four times over The division Paul runs was assembled one escalating bet at a time. Hobson Prior, bought in 2012, got the group into life sciences. Proclinical, added in 2018, took the operation global.

86 October 2026