When you start out on your business journey, you tend to give it your all because you want this dream life of doing everything on your own terms and you work so hard for that.
But when you are fire fighting because what you have created is successful, you need to step it up a gear and ask for help.
This is where the fun of running your own venture can stop because all of a sudden you have stepped up a gear, hired staff in to help and you then find yourself in the strange position of being a manager of people.
I know that these words might not seem relevant during this pandemic, but all I can do is pass on my own words of wisdom to you, based on past experiences. Perhaps it is going to change in the future, but communication is going to get us through that.
Here are my top tips for scaling up when you need to employ your first staff members.
- Be really clear on what you want them to do. A job description will help here.
- Do the job you want someone else to do as if you were the person doing that. How many hours, what training do they need and what will be your expectations of that person and their role.
- Develop a ‘handbook’ which could just be one piece of A4 paper, covering everything they need to know and what you need to develop as a checklist.
- Put in place a method of monitoring performance and deal with any shortcomings early. Often these are because people don’t understand what you want them to do.
- Don’t employ your friends to come in and help, have the courage to bring in someone you don’t know so that you can focus on what needs to be done and not then wasting time on friendly conversations.
We all get lonely when starting our businesses and sometimes having a ‘mate’ in seems like the best idea possible, but in order to grow strategically, you need to be clear on what you need them to do, so that you can use the time to grow the business, not work in it as much.