How to put together a great team when you start out

Depending on what your business does, vastly different skill sets are required for success, but a couple of skills are always required to create a great outcome:

Sales: Unless you’re selling online only you need sales. And even if you’re an online business, who will look after joint ventures, partner relations, etc? That’s still a sales function.

Marketing: Marketing makes the world go around. Especially in the digital world we live in you need to have great marketing from day one. Ensure your marketing partner has broad experience. And make sure the experience covers conversion. Having a pretty web site will seldom generate sales; understanding what makes people buy makes a difference to your bottom line.

Systems: If you want to scale rapidly you need systems. You can’t do it without. Problem is – most people don’t think of this as a role, but it’s a crucial one—when you want to expand beyond the attic or garage. Think of invoicing. If you write an invoice every day and you need to do it manually – no big deal. When you suddenly grow fast and do 40 sales a day imagine if you still need to do each invoice manually. That’s why a lack of systems is the greatest inhibitor of growth.

Deep expertise: Whether you’re selling machinery to farms, track satellites over Siberia or do an iPhone app, you need to ‘know your stuff’. It’s absolutely essential that you have the core expertise of what you do in–house. If you don’t people will look right through it.

There are a number of other roles and skills you need on your team, like finance, administration and so, but these are secondary and rarely if ever have any impact on your success in the early stages.

Organising your roles

The best way to make sense of all this is to write down every role there possibly is in your business, and then looking at who will take care of each role. At the early sages of a business you should expect everybody to have multiple roles each. Here’s a reference list of all the roles you may need: http://www.businessconnector.com.au/resource/all-the-roles-in-a-business/

So technical skill aside what should you look for in a person you want to bring on board the team?

Here’s the four core elements you need to consider when you choose your future business partner:

• Passion
• Vision
• Personality Type/Profile
• Values

Passion

Is your potential co-founder(s) just as passionate about the business as you are? And are they passionate about the way our business is fulfilling a market need? You will often find you need to tweak the business plan to successfully bring on board additional partners.

Vision

What is the vision for the business? Go deep in a niche and stay in Australia, or spread across the globe? Work from home, or build a big team in an office? What type of alliances do you want to see? What do you want to be known for in 2, 5 and 10 years? Do you even have a plan?

Creating a clear business plan is essential as you start out. Without that, how will you get a common vision amongst the team?

At the same time you need to create clear forecasts – this year and next but also longer term. You need to discuss how much each co-founder or team member will get out of it; or you could easily end up with a dispute on your hands.

Personality Type / Personality Profile

You may never have thought about personality profiles before, but now is the time you must. Why? Because when you don’t look after getting a great mix of people on your team, things tend to not work out so well!

Ever been in a room full of creative people? Ideas are sprouting left right and center, but commonly they have few results to show for themselves. That requires a different personality who loves picking up somebody else’s idea and who won’t stop until it’s implemented and complete!

Have you worked with somebody who is brilliant at what they do but a complete introvert? You wouldn’t want them to be at the front of a room, presenting what the business does; that requires a different personality type.

In the corporate world Disc is a popular tool and for entrepreneurs the Wealth Dynamic Profile is very effective.

Values

Last but not least think of the values that you and other potential team members have. It’s what will capsize a business more than anything else. So what are values?

Think of values as our innermost beliefs. Take a business that also has a social aspect. To one team member the social aspect may be so important that she will forgo any income. To another team member the whole point of starting the business is to make money.

For some helping the poor means we must be poor, for others means we must be richer than most so we have more to give. These are just simple examples of how values influence our decisions.

Our values also drives our norms: To one team member being 2 hours in the surf is essential for the their life, and may indeed be where they get their best ideas. Another team member may be seen as an introvert workaholic spending 16 hours a day in front of the screen.

While a business can encompass people with different values it won’t work if the overall values of the business doesn’t appeal to their values, so you need to get clear on that early on.