Consultant vs first hire: Cracking the Australian market

You're an international healthtech company with real traction at home, and Australia is next. The default move is to post a job, find a business development manager, and pay them $100,000 to $150,000 to go and build the market. From zero. It feels like progress. Usually it's an expensive way to start slowly.

Here's the problem. A first sales hire with limited healthcare experience and no local network spends their first six to twelve months learning what you're paying them to already know. Australian healthcare is not one market. It's public and private, federal and state, clinical and commercial, with procurement cycles and gatekeepers that appear on no org chart. The real players, the people who actually sign off, are reached through relationships, not connection requests. A newcomer has to build all of that from zero, on your time and your money.

And the salary is the smallest part of the bill. Add 12% superannuation, annual and sick leave, payroll tax, and a recruiter's fee of 15 to 25% to land them in the first place. Then add the real risk: if the hire is wrong, and first hires in unfamiliar markets often are, you lose the better part of a year and start again. That isn't a $130k decision. When you bundle in software costs, basic office setup and other administration costs, It's closer to a $250k bet on someone still finding their feet.

There's a calmer way in

Engage an advisor on a retainer for a few thousand a month, less than you'd pay a recruiter just to find the hire. No super, no leave, no payroll tax, no recruitment fee, and none of the employment obligations a permanent hire brings. More to the point, no ramp. Someone who has spent 17 years in Australian healthcare makes connections and moves the work forward on day one. The map already exists. The warm relationships already exist. The target data is built, not guessed.

Over three to six months, that modest retainer does more than open doors. It builds the foundations of a sales machine: a mapped and prioritised target list, sharp local positioning, an outreach engine that gets replies, and warm introductions to the decision-makers who matter. You find out whether the market is real before you commit a headcount to it. You enter deliberately instead of hopefully.

Then, once the foundations are laid and early pipeline is proving out, you hire properly. The advisor who built the machine helps you recruit the first permanent salesperson and hands them a running start: a defined patch, live conversations, and a playbook that already works. Your new hire spends month one selling, not orienting.

The instinct to plant a flag with a full-time body is understandable. But in a market this relationship-driven, knowledge and network beat headcount every time, especially at the start. Buy the knowledge first. Build the foundations. Then hire to scale what's already moving.

That's the difference between spending a year learning the Australian market and spending a few months owning it.

Terry Cornick is a healthtech growth consultant and the founder of Clinical Advisors. Reach out here to discuss your Australian market entry.