When you start your first business, you end up wearing multiple hats out of necessity. Lacking the financial resources to hire help, you are forced to embrace this reality, but after attaining a certain level of success, not only will you be able to bring people aboard, it will be necessary in order to scale it beyond a certain point.
When you begin searching for employees, here’s what you should be looking for in three core areas.
Sales
While you will have to acquire your first accounts on your own, driving future growth will require someone else to be doing the prospecting while you focus on the strategic functions of the business.
Start by going to your competition, or other businesses that aren’t that far removed from what you do, and begin to analyze the ability of their sales people.
This will help you to understand what to look for in a great salesperson, and it will also tip you off to talent that is not satisfied where they are currently working.
Whether you hire them or someone identical, this strategy will allow you to hire a great first sales employee for your business. If you cannot hire through quick contacts, you have to set up a recruitment strategy that brings in the best possible talent. In order to do this you have to be sure you create job descriptions that are as accurate as possible based on what you will need in the company.
Marketing
While sales employees help to close deals with potential clients, you’ll need to find a way to get clients to walk through your front door once you have qualified that your product or service has a viable customer base.
When you want to scale up your business, it is advisable to hire a marketing expert to help you to achieve your goals.
They should be able to the track the metrics that determine whether a marketing campaign is a success, they should possess sufficient creativity to craft campaigns on their own, and they should be able to think their way through problems as they encounter them.
The problem is that most people say they know marketing these days. It is not that difficult to come up with a great looking CV when you are looking for a marketing job. Because of this, you have to use some sort of test system. You want to test the skills of the marketing staff you consider. It is the only way to be sure that the people you hire will have the necessary marketing skills to bring in really good results for your company.
Human resources
Once you have increased your head count significantly, managing needs related to labor issues will become a distraction that will eventually make it necessary to bring a human resources person on board.
This vital member of your staff does more than simply create a pay stub for all your employees every two weeks, as they serve as the primary point of contact for all employee disputes with management. Whenever a dispute happens and there is no trained HR department handling it there is a pretty good possibility that the result will be disastrous.
In order to focus on making high-level decisions that will drive your business to new heights, you need an effective HR employee that will handle everyday labor concerns on your behalf.
This way, you won’t have to deal with employees disrupting you constantly about low-level issues that have nothing to do with what you are trying to accomplish.
Keep in mind that most companies out there make huge mistakes when it comes to human resources. This can cause many fines and in some situations we even see companies that go bankrupt because of really simple errors that were made with the paperwork.