So, you’ve decided to start your own business. That’s great! But you need more than an innovative idea for your business to get off the ground, you need to make sure you execute your idea in a way that puts you, and your company, on the road to success. This is a given, but you need to create a business plan, and in doing so you need to accurately and unflinchingly look at the problems your business may encounter. Then you can begin to devise preemptive solutions to these problems.
Does all of this seem overwhelming? It is, and it will continue to be. Entrepreneurship isn’t for the faint of heart and will take a lot of hard work. But after you get going, you won’t be going it alone. You’ll need to add other people to your team to succeed and grow, and each person you hire should add something crucial to your team. The first five hires you bring on can truly make or break your company. In the very beginnings of any business, startup or no, one wrong hire can derail the entire company and be a drain on your resources. That why these first hires are so pivotal. As an entrepreneur, it is important for you to have a little bit (or a lot) of each of the strengths of these personalities, but it is important to know your own personal limits and bring these other people in. Running yourself ragged trying to catch your weaknesses up to your strengths is, in the end, a liability for both you and your company.
Don’t know what to look for in the first people you hire? Here are five types of people that are crucial to getting a successful startup off the ground.
1) A Creative Person
If you are the one who thought of the core business idea, chances are the creative person is you. If this is not you, this should be one of the first people you bring on. This will be the person that helps you with the inception of the product or service. They will need to be someone with an element of creativity, who is flexible, and good at inventing unique solutions. This person will have a hunch or a vision of a product that can be built, and ideally not just be a problem solver and a nimble thinker, but can also help you develop a brand identity and give your company it’s personality as well.
2) A Detail-Oriented Person
The creative person may have a lot of great ideas, but while he or she will be capable of developing a concrete plan, one person does not usually excel at both of these things simultaneously. It requires different mindsets to be reactive and think outside the box than it does to be proactive and organized. This is where a detail-oriented person will be needed. Your detail-oriented person will be responsible for building the product or service itself, and he or she will do the research to find the information necessary to put the creative person’s idea into action. This person helps you determine your strengths and weaknesses, develops actionable plans, and doesn’t get lost looking at fine print. In the beginning stages it can be hectic and stressful, and it is easy for things like filing permits or registering copyrights to slip through the cracks, but this detail-oriented person won’t let that happen.
3) A Builder
Before you have a product or service to sell, you have to make that product or service viable. You need someone who has the technical skills to actually build the product. If your startup is in the technology world, this builder will most likely be an engineer or a developer. But there are many other experts needed for just about any kind of business. If your business is a law consultancy you need a lawyer with experience, a bakery will need a skilled baker, and a vineyard will need an expert in viniculture and viticulture. Because this is your business, at the beginning this builder is probably you. Once the company begins to grow, you will need to make sure that there is an employee or partner with the same technical expertise and skill that you have, otherwise you will not be able to run a burgeoning business and continue to produce services or products at the same time.
4) A Process-Oriented Person
Now that the detail-oriented person has created a set of specifications, you will need to add someone who is process-oriented. This person will ensure that a system is in place in order to put the concept into action. This person should also make sure that each person on the team knows his or her role so that everything is running smoothly. A person with great follow-through, diplomacy, and a good head about how micro actions affect macro situations is needed here. This person should help you develop training procedure for staff, know safety protocols and institute them, and understand how to drive with enthusiasm without being overbearing. Everything from ordering to payroll to website development should have a process.
Now that you have an idea, have researched information to back the idea up, the shell of the product, a system in place to get the product built, and technical skills to build it. There is only one last key person in bringing your business to fruition and who will be the icing on this cake:
5) A Highly Deadline-Oriented Person
The fifth person you will need to add to your team is someone who is fast-paced and highly focused on deadlines. While this may seem counter intuitive, this person will actually need to be a little impatient. This person will hold everyone else accountable. This person may not be the most popular person on the team, but he or she will be crucial to the team meeting its needs. This is your enforcer, your key player to keep responsibilites in check and people on task. They’ll need to be okay playing the bad cop and the good cop together.
Once you have these five people picked out, it is a good idea to think about how these people will interact within the company. Perhaps one particular person needs some extra pushing, and will therefore need to interact with the deadline-oriented person. Perhaps there are two people who should not interface with each other directly, and another person can be used as a buffer. Offsetting skills and personalities amongst your group is very important, especially in the beginning.
It is important to remember not to focus on finding the perfect employee but rather the perfect combination of employees. Everyone has different strengths and no person is without weaknesses. Rather than minimizing weaknesses and setting the bar too high when interviewing candidates, focus on the incredible strengths your candidate may possess and how that can fill the holes in the weaknesses of your other staff. If you seek perfection in one person for too long, the hiring for each candidate could stall indefinitely and your business could become stagnant. All five of these people will work together to create the quintessential formula for a successful team.
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