Growing a business from scratch is difficult.
It’s challenging to get the right team from inception, and keeping them together for long is a concern too.
Some strategies have been proven to be effective in helping you overcome the challenge of building your team.
According to this report, you can do this by building your business with a clear mission and vision, hiring fans interested in what you do, and making your business a dream workplace for all.
Not only that, having freelancers on your team, networking and speaking at events, talking about your company online, and so on are sure-fire ways to acquire the best team to work for you.
On the other hand, you can leverage on the strength of your competitor’s team by poaching their best talents to work for you too.
While most HR personnel see this as a misnomer, you can still do it ethically as stated here.
One way to go about this is to ignore the non-compete clauses inserted in agreements signed by employees, and take the risk to bring them on board.
If this doesn’t work out fine, you can wait a few years when they are no longer relevant, or totally avoid them by asking for referrals.
If you do all these, building a great team won’t be a pain for your business anymore.
What to Do When Your Team Outgrows Your Business
After assembling the right team, another problem which arises later on is knowing what to do when the team grows faster than your business.
This’s a problem that most business owners face.
If not well managed, it could lead to incompetence, disorganization, and conflict among your team members, hence resulting to more difficulties for your business.
In this post, I’ll show you what to do as a business owner to avoid this anomaly.
With them, your business will flourish and stand the test of time even with more team members.
1. Paying above or at par with the market:
As a business owner, you need the support of your employees to keep your business thriving.
But when you have a great team that’s growing fast, there are chances that your competitors will likely want to poach them.
To avoid this, you need to pay your employees well.
When you do, they’ll become more loyal to you and also motivated to do more for your business.
While it’s difficult to ascertain what to pay your employees, your best bet is to evaluate industry and market standards before doing so.
In most cases, paying them above most employers in the industry, or at least ensure that your pay matches that of other businesses is the way to go.
2. Putting in place checks and balances:
When building a team from scratch, it’s easy to control your employees and assign duties and responsibilities to them.
But as soon as your business sprouts, and you have more team members from different companies with diverse practices, this becomes a huge task.
If not checked immediately, it could affect your company’s output, productivity, and ROI.
As a business owner, it’s easy to correct this.
One of the effective ways is by having in place checks and balances that’ll monitor and regulate the activities of your team members.
Through this, each team member will know their responsibilities.
This helps a lot because without proper checks and balances in your business, problems such as employee theft, inventory shrinkage, check tampering, and bookkeeping mismanagement can arise, and affect your business’s growth.
3. Motivating your team members:
Your employees are your business’s greatest assets. Without them, chances are that your business won’t survive.
When you have a large team, keeping them motivated is the foolproof way to making your business safe.
If you miss this step, you’ll have a set of passive employees who’ll not work with your company’s vision and mission, but rather stall your progress.
Creating an environment that spurs employees to work, having a functional reward programme, investment in training and retraining, and setting a great example that can be followed are some of the ways to motivate employees intrinsically.
When you have a motivated team, outgrowing your business will be an advantage, because everyone will co-operate to make it better. But if you don’t, it’ll pose a bigger challenge ahead for you.
4. Planning to become a firm:
In most cases, a business belongs to one person.
This’s risky especially when you have more team members.
To avoid this, it’s advisable that you expand your business to become a firm with two or more businesses.
This could prove difficult due to a lot of factors such as structuring of the firm, raising funds to get started, and making team members understand new business proceedings.
However, an undermined yet effective way to do this is to team up with other business owners to become a firm offering various services.
Collaborations such as this help your team and makes your business more organized, recognized, and able to solve problems.
Conclusion:
One of the biggest challenges you face as a business owner is to build a team that can support and contribute to your growth.
After crossing this hurdle and building the business to an extent, you’ll also find it difficult to manage your growing team members.
In this post, I’ve provided tips and strategies that can help your business boomerang despite these challenges.
If you put in place the necessary measures and engage in best practices proffered here, you’ll be able to grow your team from scratch and handle them professionally when they eventually outgrow your business.