Start-up hiring — back to a pet topic I love.
As a Start-up, it’s easy to get excited, fall in love with your product.
Human nature is to do the stuff you love, despite your aptitude. (I thought I was done with the confessions). If you are lucky, you are extremely capable in this space, for everyone else, give it up and get the right people around you to do this essential function.
Is hiring the right people the number one thing a business needs to do? Only if you want a high growth and sustainable business.
In what order should you hire, and how do you get started?
Assuming you are at the idea stage, it’s just you, perhaps a colleague (your future co-founder). You are doing everything yourself. This is important. Go deep, understand the problem, map it out.
Once you know what’s next, and why the role and rituals are mission critical, look widely for the right person. There are no static roles in a disruptive high-quality business. Learning, adapting and sharing insights is the norm. The right person, aligned to your goals, will get it done.
Recognising what the company needs at each stage, understanding more than just growth, which does not always reflect value, is the domain of a great founder. Some founders are great at starting, but then can’t deliver during growth stages. Perhaps it doesn’t interest them; regardless, you need someone who can audit the team and reshape as required. Are they the right people for the next 18 months?
If the value to a customer grows, the stickiness (or my word, loyalty) sustains growth and real value. Traction follows, and chasing satisfaction, not only percentage growth, requires more than just a sales team. Find the Gems. But why do these Gems wish to join your team?
Great start ups scale, usually in clusters of functions. It’s hard to manage a flat structure, and a CEO or COO must be able to keep everyone focused on “the one thing”, repeatedly getting the message out there.
I have helped hundreds of founders with share plans, and I sometimes see a founder ask me for a “me too” share plan. This simply won’t cut it in terms of incentives.
What is your internal and external message to…
a) the team and
b) the customers and
c) the suppliers?
Constructing a share plan that traverses the stages of start-up, scaling up, series A and perhaps B, needs some creative thought. The right message has to accompany the documents. In fact, the message and the option dealing strategy/cap table management is far more important than the documents. This is probably one of the top 3 reasons founders fail to persevere and fail to rally a team.
I’ve listened to Tony Robbins, spoken several times with him too. He is no doubt the most inspirational public speaker I have ever met. In fact, I have heard one of my friends who is a talented disruptive founder say, “Tony Robbins changed my life, perhaps its why I left my job and kicked off my start-up”.
In my view, diving in once a year with even a Tony Robbins quality motivational speech, will not be as good for a team as the founder having presence. In the trenches, sweating it out and being there with the team to encourage, share successes and failures and learn from them. Clearly, this gets harder once your company is much bigger. However, building a team of managers across the functions of a business, who possess this quality, will be special. Each person needs a voice. I have worked in teams, and even on advisory boards where some have felt reluctant to speak up. Regardless, if a person simply agrees, ask them for their thoughts, you might learn something, or at least get their buy in.
A friend of mine said “Failure is not trying for fear of failing” and “If you do make a mistake, hate the mistake, but don’t let it stop you”. Go back and work out how to make sure it doesn’t happen again. This encourages people to innovate and builds camaraderie, and sets an accountability, rather than blame platform. Wise words, mate. If you are a manager, build this into your playbook.
In short, the best “tech companies” actually have the best people. If you don’t want to get better at hiring and developing talent, you have two choices; either find someone who can deliver in this regard and hire them yesterday, or forget starting a company.
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