The Secret to Building Your Team
When you first start your company, it’s very easy to want to grow operations very quickly, because that growth is easy for other people to understand as a sign of success. As an entrepreneur, you’re going to take on risk every day and fail every day, and it’s understandable that you’d want a hit of validation telling you that you're on the right path. That can come in the way of an investor, or a big client signing a contract, or a benchmark like the number of employees you have. You’re going to want to give people the headline to show your growth, and it’s easy for them to understand the scope of what you’re doing when you tell them you manage a team of 12 people.
Let me tell you this from experience, however: Do not grow your company more quickly than you need to. Grow your team carefully and slowly, and make sure you find the right fit of people who are in the endeavor with you for the long haul.
I say this as someone who never built their team quite right. Part of that was a simple matter of economics: I raised money from friends and family and put in some money myself, but I also thought we were going to raise a lot of money from investors which didn’t end up happening. As a result, I had to let people go — The Hub has gone from three people in its inception, to 15, back down to four people over the course of four or five years. COVID certainly didn’t help things, either, and while it was painful to let employees go, it was a necessary step for the lifeline of the company.
We're profitable now, and the people that I have around the table now are deeply loyal and it's a really good crew, but I never had a big team that was really tightly bought into a single vision and working perfectly. I certainly hired too quickly and had too many people working on the same project without a clear delineation of who was in charge of what. This creates its own issues: If you have multiple people touching a problem within your company, then if that problem doesn't get fixed, it's unclear why. But if everyone has ownership of something, not only is it more likely to get done because they feel that ownership, but you know who to talk to and how you can work together if it doesn't.
By hiring slowly and carefully, and putting thought into the quality of employee you hire, you’re able to give ownership of certain tasks on a pretty one-to-one basis. You know that the buck stops with someone so that when you have a question about why something's not working, you have someone with whom to brainstorm and collaborate.
In the early days of The Hub, I all of a sudden was in charge of 15 people that were burning a lot of money by virtue of their salaries or hourly rates. (As I’ve said before, it’s not building an app that costs money — it’s hiring the developers and coders to keep the app running for the next year that will suck you dry.) I’m proud of that team and the work we did, but some of the things people were doing at the time were less important than others, or not yet necessary given where the company was in that moment.
When you've gone from five to 15 employees, almost overnight, keeping track of that magnitude of people and managing, loving, and caring for the work they’re doing is very hard. It's like if you had to grill 20 burgers for a barbecue, you can put all 20 on at once, or you could do four at a time. If you put all 20 on at once you run the risk of forgetting to flip one, or you might burn a patty; conversely, if you only cook four at a time, you can take your time and you know exactly where you are and what you have done.
Building a company at a much slower pace takes restraint — especially if you have money in the bank — and it’s something I had to learn the hard way. Now, I know to prioritize the anatomy of a team, and to make sure that the people I bring in are as fully bought into the process as they can be.
A good question that one of my mentors would ask me about various issues I was dealing with was, “Is this the difference between success and failure?” I think that's a good benchmark for anything, from whether you should be prioritizing a task, or if you should be working over the weekend on something. It also lends itself well to deciding if you need to hire somebody for a project. There are some tasks you will have to hire someone — knew nothing about internet photographer culture when I started the Hub so my first few hires were people who lived in that world and spoke that language — but if you can survive without locking someone’s salary in just yet, it’s worth considering if you can coast for the time being, and revisit the idea of hiring someone later down the road.
In 2021, the question for the Hub is going to be how we spend our money, and how aggressively we try to move. There are certain things we could spend money on, such as Facebook ads or discount codes for new customers, that I can immediately siphon off if I need to. Conversely, If I hire a lot of people and suddenly realize we’re spending too much money, it’s much harder to make any meaningful shift because that human being left a job to come and work for me.
Sometimes you can't help it and you need to make personnel cuts, but if you're more careful about hiring only when you really need to, you will be less likely to find yourself in a situation where you have to lay someone off. In the beginning of a company, you often tell yourself, “If it's not working out, I’ll just fire them,” but things are rarely that simple. I fortunately have remained very close to a couple of the people I've had to lay off, but it's a pretty awful thing to do to someone.
If and when I start hiring again, I will prioritize the people that are in it for the right reasons, and who really want to be in the room. At the Hub, that could be a passion for the way we’re democratizing creativity and helping brands and agencies get really good work for a reasonable price, or because they love the idea of bringing work to people that don't have it, or because they want a really complex problem and to throw themselves into putting the puzzle pieces together. It doesn't really matter exactly what it is, but I believe in the act of being curious and always getting better. That takes time to discern, and while some people will inevitably skate through the cracks and wind up not being a culture fit, the percentage of those people will almost always be less than the ones with a true passion for what you’re doing.
Take your time putting your team together, and try your hardest to vet the ones you let into the door. Offer them equity instead of paying them market rate if you need to, but make sure they’re bought all the way in. If not, or if you don’t absolutely need to hire someone in that moment, try the task yourself for a few days or weeks. You might find that you learn a new skill — or at the very least, why you absolutely do need to hire someone for the job when the time comes.
Don’t hire for the sake of the headline. Almost always, you’ll hurt your bottom line, as well as the other person and yourself when things come crumbling down.