Making your first hire, recruiting your first team member. When do you start the on-boarding process?
I think it’s a really good question because I think a lot of people race into it.
When people go into business, they take so many different routes.
There is no defined path for everybody. Some people work in a company and do their thing in their spare time, others might quit their job and dive straight in.
Diving Straight In
But what I find people generally dive straight into is hiring their first employee.
People see it as a sign of prestige. A right of passage; to have somebody working for them.
Bet my advice is to hold off from it.
And this might seem counter-intuitive at first When you’re setting off in business, you wanna get moving and you want to move fast.
And one of the things that’s really easy to do is to spend money fast.
Watch out for this one.
It’s a common mistake.
The Increase in Value
I have the outlook that €100 at the start of the business is worth €1,000 a year later.
5 years later it might be €10,000 €20,000 €100,000.
The value of money at the start of the business is incredible, relative to money later on in the journey.
So hold on to that as much as possible.
Focus
And what you should hold onto all the more,
is your focus.
What a lot of people don’t think about
Think when they hire somebody that it will speed things along having someone to help them. They don’t think about how distracting it is;
It Can Get Messy
Looking for candidates is time-consuming.
Interviewing, narrowing finals and then picking, negotiating, training, outsourcing training, and affording mistakes for an employee.
In what I’ve seen in my experience, this process has actually served as a huge distraction and slowed things down.
It’s a lot of work.
The University of Life
I spent a year interviewing countless entrepreneurs, asking all about their journeys; what made them succeed, what did they learn from their mistakes. And I really delved into the last one – there’s huge value in making mistakes.
And I noticed a trend amongst a lot of them – the businesses that held off; that hired at the last possible opportunity, seemed to have the fasted journey.
The ones that raced into employment got clogged up and a bit messy and delayed, as I mentioned. A lot of distraction and wasted money.
So what I would say to anybody who’s thinking of hiring their first employee;
hold off until the last moment until you hire someone.
Slow down.
How do you hold off?
Double up your own work
The fact of the matter is when you’re stuck into the business at the start, you need to give it your all, so I would encourage you to give it all.
Look for third party suppliers. Freelancers.
In the early stages, you’re looking for really good support. And frustratingly at those early stages you’re not able to afford that. So you end up getting somebody who’s willing to learn, but they’re learning at your expense, and I’d encourage you not to do that.
Your First Employee
So when it comes to on-boarding;
Hold off as long as you can and bring on freelancers hiring them as you need them. Increase their workload as the demands increase. And then look to them to be your first employee when the opportunity presents itself.
Hopefully by buying time and pushing off hiring someone, you’ve a better budget to bring in that better talent for your organisation.
It will save you having to invest time into their on-boarding, their experience, their training, budget for them making mistakes and you can by-pass all that.
Any questions? Reach out.
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