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How This Company Bounced Back After a Toxic Hire It takes time, but it's possible.

By Kate Rockwood •

This story appears in the November 2016 issue of Entrepreneur. Subscribe »

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"Culture fit" is the Holy Grail of hiring, but when Tracy Lawrence launched the catering startup Chewse, in 2011, she gave experience an inflated importance.

Related: How One Entrepreneur Survived Five Years of Errors

"We're really into transparency and talking truth to power, but we didn't always have a way to vet it," she says. That led to a toxic hire: someone with crazy-impressive skills and market chops but a passive-aggressive streak. Fast-forward six months and the Chewse culture was marked by whispered unease and gossip.

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