Your team is everything
If you want to create a very profitable business you need profitable employees.
The easiest way to get this is to hire motivated employees that can manage themselves to achieve results. This has been my most important fundamental focus the second time around. Developing a process for this and knowing who you want to hire have been two of my best upgrades to my second business.
Here are three key suggestions:
Don’t hire average staff, or you will end up with an average company. Wait and slow down before hiring. It’s better to just wait that much longer rather than hiring the wrong person. You don’t actually need to hire a person if you are smart and just optimise the systems you are using at present.
Ask more questions, not less. The impact of who you hire impacts your other top performers in your company. Hire poor quality people and you say something to them. Hire high quality people and you breed greatness into your organisation.
You can’t motivate people – you can only hire motivated people. Don’t bother with motivational programs, just hire a motivated person. Do some personality profiling to figure out if a person is motivated or not and you will save yourself a lot of time from creating motivational programs and talking to staff members to motivate them.
If someone slips through your process, talk through it – perhaps they aren’t suited to your company and would be better working in a big organisation where they want slow moving and predictable employees. Stop trying to motivate the average staff member in your company and just replace them instead.
Posted on July 22, 2010
A side note on that, from personal experience – if you're running a smallish company (we're at 12 staff currently), then how people fit in the office socially is a lot more important than you may give credit for. A team that gets along well with each other is much more effective than a team that bickers.
That tends to come out of hiring motivated people anyway, but it's worth bearing in mind when hiring – a super coder who can't relate to the rest of the team is no better than hiring an unskilled person and having to drag them along.