Starting out with the end in mind is always the best way to make sure you take the right road to get to the places you want to go. The same can be true when you think about your company and the team you want to build to achieve your biggest goals. When you are drowning in work your immediate thought it probably something like “I need some help like yesterday” and you may end up making a hire out of desperation or hire someone that is only taking things off your to-do list. But what if I asked you to start thinking about how you want your business to look in the future before you start or make that next hire?
Envisioning how you see your team and how you want your business to look will allow you to see more clearly the departments you want to create and the roles you may need to fill within them. This doesn’t mean you to need to fill all of those roles immediately or even at all to start but taking some time in advance to really think through this will ensure you end up hiring for the right positions and finding the best people the first time around.
In today’s post we are going to take some steps to get you thinking through your company of the future and of the team you will need to start building to get there.
To get the dream casting rolling I first want you to picture your company 3-5 years down the road. Really cast that vision and think about things like:
– What does your company look like?
– What goals have you achieved?
– What role do you now play in your company?
Based on what that vision looks like this is where I want you to think through the different departments or teams you would need to have within your company to achieve everything you just dreamed up.
If you need some help being able to see the vision, Josh Kaufman explained it well is his book The Personal MBA which may help you when determining your core departments within your business. He explains that there are 5 Parts of Every Business:
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Value Creation ( Discovering what people want and then creating it through things like product development, freebies and services etc.)
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Marketing (Building hype around the product or service you just created)
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Sales (Turning those loyal followers into paying customers)
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Value Delivery (Giving your customers what you promised them and ensuring they are happy)
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Finance ( Bringing in enough money to keep things going)
If you take this model to build out your core teams you may want to start looking at having for example, a leadership team, an operations & finance team, a growth team that focuses on product development and a customer service department that would work on the value delivery portion. Your business may need a dedicated sales team but that depends on the type of business you are running.
Once you establish your teams or departments you can then build out from there and start thinking through the roles or seats you would need to fill within each of those teams to ensure your company is running optimally.
I want you to think through the jobs you would want to create and not just the tasks that need to get done. Let’s start shifting our thinking that hiring isn’t solely about delegation and not letting that never ending to-do list determine how and who you hire. It’s not about transferring your to-do’s onto someone else. You want to create a role that can allow someone to take ownership over their position versus just saying I need someone to do this task and that task.
I encourage you to take some time and really work through this exercise and truly map out how you see the structure of your business coming together. You may realize that you are the sole person on each of these teams for awhile but at least you have a direction and a plan to use and to stick too. My hope is that you have a clearer picture of who that first hire may need to be and then your second and your third because the plan is ready and waiting when the time is right!
If you are on a roll and want some more tips on what you need to do prior to hiring your first team member, make sure to grab my FREE Pre-hiring Checklist!
