Getting your brand or business to the point where you need to start growing your team is an exciting, yet slightly overwhelming time. But in saying that, it can be difficult to identify when exactly this should start to occur. Many people hold off for so long and continue to pile themselves with tasks and stress to the point where it's simply impossible to continue. Others potentially jump the gun a little too early and prematurely hire employees who then don’t really have enough work to fill a full-time role.
Both of these scenarios are not ideal. So we’re here to help you identify the key indicators you should be trying to identify, in order to see if you think you’re ready to start expanding your team.
1. Understand the goals of your business.
You need to align your team growth with where you actually see your business going. If you’re a brand that has a business goal of getting into thousands and thousands of retail stores, then you’re not going to hire a social media manager as your first hire. If you want to be an influential and fast-growing e-commerce company, then you need to map out what areas you want to capitalize on, and then prioritize your hires from there. Unless you’re one of the few, most companies can’t afford to hire 3-4 roles at a time. So be strategic with what roles you want to hire for based on your needs, and what they can contribute to the business and go from there.
2. Look at your tasks at hand.
One of the biggest indications of what you should hire for lies within your own tasks at hand. The reality is, you can’t do everything yourself, no matter how much you want to. Research shows that multitasking reduces your productivity by 40%. So you need to figure out the priorities of your own tasks. And this can be done by breaking them down into four main categories:
- Urgent - Important
- Not Urgent - Important
- Not Important - Urgent
- Not Urgent - Not Important
The key when it comes to team growth, is how big your lists are for the middle two categories: [ Not Urgent - Important ] and [ Not Important - Urgent.] If something is not urgent and not important, then =in reality, it can be put to the back. If something is important and urgent, then it’s usually something that will need to stay in your court. If something is not important but highly urgent, this is when you need to start delegating. You need to ensure that you are free enough to focus on the high level, bigger picture projects. So if you’re getting ot the stage where you are getting caught up in tasks that aren’t hugely important, but very urgent, or ones that are not quite as urgent but still important, and therefore have time to be perfected by someone else - then it’s time to hire, train and delegate.
3. Make sure you’re ready for it.
Once someone accepts that job offer from your company, you need to be prepared. Having a new employee means you need to be ready to accommodate, train, and facilitate them through their career. If you haven't had the time to develop training processes of how you want people to operate within your business, then you need to do that. The one thing you don’t want to do, is rush team growth. Your first hire is critical in setting the tone, culture, and mood that will filter throughout the organization as you grow. No employee wants to walk into a new job on their first day and feel like their managers are completely unprepared for them. You want to give clear direction on what your business is about, what you represent, what your goals are, where you see this new employee fitting in, and essentially an overall vision for the employee and the company. So before you go out and hire the perfect person, make sure you and your business is ready to accommodate them.
4. Look into outsourcing.
This isn’t necessarily a pitch for our own agency, but one thing to think about when you think of team growth, is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be an immediate hire in your own team. Outsourcing certain services to agencies is the perfect pain reliever to an immediate stress that you’re feeling within your business. You might need the help, but you could be unsure of exactly who or what you need to hire for, or you may be questioning the workload whether it’s enough to go hire someone full time. If you’re not ready to expand on an internal team just yet, or you want to try a service out before you introduce a full time person into that roll - then this solution is can be very beneficial for your business.
To conclude, there are several key factors you have to consider before you want to expand your team. It’s a fine line between hiring people too early, and hiring people too late. Be smart about your hires, but also be critical and really take time to evaluate your current situation before you take the leap. These tips will help guide you as a reference to analyze where your business is at currently, in order to determine if you’re ready to take that next step.
