- Review org chart and determine what needs to be for each role
- Consider alternatives for areas where you may be weak
- Review option for a business partner
Review Roles and Determine Weak Areas
|
|
Even though you will start your team small (may even be just you in the beginning), you still have a wide variety of work that needs to be done. It is helpful to review your org chart and see which roles you feel comfortable handling and which ones you don't.
You can also go through the org chart and determine for each role when you feel you will need someone to step in and help you handle the work assigned to that role. Some roles may not be needed to a large degree until later stages of your business development.
You have several choices for roles that you must handle but you're not ready to hire for at this stage of your growth. You could try to get up to speed on the area by taking classes or other learning opportunities. This may work for roles which you are primarily comfortable in terms of temperament, however, you simply lack some of the specific knowledge.
For other roles you may not want to tackle them at all. For example, you may know that sales is a critical role for the growth of your company, but that you shy away from this type of activity. In this case, you may want to find a business partner.
A partner can be a 50% co-owner working with you to start and grow the company, or you could bring on a minority partner who focuses on a smaller part of the business and does not share in the upside to the same degree.
I highly recommend considering a full time business partner. In my case, my partner had a background in professional sales and was comfortable developing the client base. If I had gone out on my own without this effort, the business would never have gotten to the same point.
He feels the same way since he could focus nearly 100% on sales development while I worried about operations and fulfilling new orders. This is the ideal arrangement - each partner brings a complementary set of skills and together the effort will be stronger than if either of you operated alone. The hope is that together you will produce enough profits that you can split them and still be ahead.
Plus, you gain a lot in terms of support and brainstorming by having two minds focused on the business. While employees can help you in a similar way, I feel that only a partner can give this higher level of support. At the same time, we did want to get similar insights from a key employee so we offered him profit sharing so he could be part of the upside of the business.
©2002 Track Marketing Group, Inc. - All Rights Reserved.