Your first employees

Building your team-first hires

Who do you need on your team to help your business grow? It’s not as simple a question as we are led to believe. Often, business workshops will tell you to create an org chart. Once you create the chart, what do you do? It is rare that sufficient funds will magically appear to enable you to hire everyone on your dream team, so how do you know who to hire, when to hire and how to finance those hires when excess capital may be lean?

It all starts with what matters most to your business. Often, we will seek to hire an administrative professional. While definitely an important hire, it is not your most important hire. Office staff or back office support, are cost centers. That means they do not directly generate revenue for your business. Yes, their efforts should make your business run more efficiently and enable everyone else to perform their functions with greater effectiveness, but those are all indirect benefits. A full back office staff will cost you, and they do not directly result in one of the key needs for business longevity. You need customers and clients who pay in a timely fashion. Without paying customers, your business will shut down. Your first hires should be team members who support these efforts through sales and business development. In the early stages when a business may not be flush with cash, consider a commission based arrangement that could enable the professional to earn more over time, but also be paid in direct proportion to how much new business they bring in.