Who are the most important hires to make when you are starting a business?
The startup businesses that win and dominate their markets are the ones who hire the best talent. However, before you even get into how to hire them and select the best fitting team, the bigger question is who do you hire?
What are the essential hires all startups should make? Which comes first?
Table of Contents
Get An Assistant
There is an enormous amount to do when starting a business. Very little of it directly relates to making real money. There is a lot of busy work. It needs to get done. It’s just going to make things a lot slower and lead to a very low ROI on your time, if you are the one doing it all.
This can include everything from registering your business to searching for office space, ordering equipment, travel plans, scheduling meetings, paying the bills, dealing with junk phone calls and emails, and even searching for the best places to recruit the other team members on this list and shortlisting them. A good assistant can do all of this and a lot more. It will make everything go faster.
Customer Happiness
Every connection matters when starting a business. Every lead, prospective investor, and customer. If you burn those early connections you may not only never get the chance to serve them again, but you’ll miss out on all of their referrals too. Every dollar counts, and every contact can be a move in the wrong direction or waste. You may have the best product and model in the world. It won’t matter if you can’t deliver an amazing service.
That means instant responses to emails, calls, texts, and social media. It means friendly and not rushed service. It means someone who thrives on engaging with others and pleasing them, not just going through the motions of a customer service rep. You aren’t the best person to do this. Even if this is your jam, you don’t have enough time to dedicate to it in order to do it right all the time. This could be the most important hire you make.
Executives
One of the biggest regrets of many entrepreneurs is that they didn’t hire a professional executive team earlier. Many brand new entrepreneurs think they can’t afford it, when the opposite is often true. Hiring experienced executives can help accelerate your venture, while enabling you to avoid common pitfalls, and have powerful players handling the intricacies of different departments so you can get on with the high-level items.
This means hiring a CMO, CFO, and CTO. It may also include a COO and CEO. Once you have these roles filled they can help with filling their hiring needs for their parts of the business.
Remember that in fundraising, the team is everything and for those investors capturing this in a pitch deck of 15 to 20 slides length, it will be critical. A good idea here is to get started with a great pitch deck template.
Lawyers
The role everyone loves to hate. Not many people seem to like lawyers, except those very few occasions when they really save you and your money. This is one of those situations in which you really need a lawyer. Maybe a whole legal team, department, or at least a law firm on call. Find the best you can and keep them on retainer.
They’ll come in handy for a wide variety of items, including:
- Incorporating and structuring your company
- Cofounder and share agreements
- Evaluating term sheets
- Dealing with employment issues
- Filing patents and protecting intellectual property
- Defending against
- Frivolous and malicious lawsuits
- Tax issues
- Bankruptcy
- Real estate issues
Accountants
As a business owner, you can no longer simply rely on the local strip mall tax preparation chain or online do-it-yourself tax software. You need a real CPA and accounting firm. They may work with your own bookkeeper, but you need real professionals for the level you want to get to.
They’ll help with tax strategy, budgeting, tax filing, audits, preparing financial statements, payroll, and more.
Advisors & Coaches
Advisors are critical at all stages of business, but even more so in the early days. They can add a lot of credibility to your company. Which can help with fundraising, recruiting, and PR. They can also put you on the fast track to success by helping you leap the typical pitfalls entrepreneurs fall into, and speed up growth.
As a leader, you have to grow faster than your business. If you want your startup to be exponentially growing 100% per year, then you have to be growing personally and professionally even faster than that to stay ahead. A coach can help you with this. Someone who has been there before, has an eagle-eyed view of the marketplace, and can not just be a sounding board, but hold you accountable to achieving your goals.
Marketing Experts
It doesn’t matter how perfect your product is, ingenious your business idea, and functional your model, if you don’t have sales. Poor marketing will derail everything else. At a minimum, it will rob you of profits, cash flow, and value. It could well put you out of business before you even get started. In the reverse, great marketing could take a mediocre product and create incredible value and financial results.
The best marketers can help you presell and make sure you are walking into a profitable business opportunity. They can help with fundraising efforts even before you launch. They will ensure you get the chance to show the world how great your solution is.
