Building the Right Team for Your Small Business
A business, like any team, is only as good as the people making it up, and your small business will only succeed if you’ve got employees onboard who can facilitate success.
Here are a few tips on how to build the best team for your small business.
![Building an enthusiastic team is the best thing you can do for your small business! [Image courtesy of gcoldironjr2003 and used under a Creative Commons license] Building an enthusiastic team is the best thing you can do for your small business! [Image courtesy of gcoldironjr2003 and used under a Creative Commons license]](https://blog.clickandinc.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/01/businesswoman-corbis.jpg)
Hire people with the talents you don’t have.
Most small business owners, even those who want to keep their eyes on all of the moving pieces, know when it’s time to ask for help. If you can build a team with a wide array of talents, you’ll always have somebody nearby who can fill your experience gap and move things along.
If accounting isn’t your strong suit, hire an accountant. Or maybe you’re a number wiz, but social media leaves you baffled—hire a great employee who can help you where help is needed, and take care of the things that align with your own personal strong suits so that you can focus on running a successful business.
Embrace diversity.
If you’re running a small business, the last thing you want is a team made up of cookie-cutter versions of yourself.
Branch out in your hiring. A small business depends heavily on the innovation and ideas of its employees—your employee team, while small, should be dynamic, able to bring new and exciting ideas to the table. You can facilitate diversity by using out-of-the-box hiring techniques to build the strongest team possible.
A small business’s greatest strength is in its flexibility. If your customers are asking for something, you’re in a better position than some of your big-business competitors to neatly shift your business’s focus to where it needs to be in order to capitalize. And your employees should be the type of people who can pick up on their customer’s needs and bring these needs to your attention in creative ways.
Foster an enthusiastic business culture.
Like many of my peers, I spent my early days of employment in the food service industry—and I gained a valuable education in what not to do for a successful business.
Management continually belittled the clientele during staff meetings, which lead to a terrible attitude among the servers and kitchen staff—and, ultimately, the restaurant going out of business. No one wants their food served by servers whose facial expressions and attitude show in no uncertain terms that they’d rather be anywhere else but here delivering your food to you.
During your interviews, pay attention to your potential hires’ level of enthusiasm—for your company, for the industry itself, for an opportunity to shine, for a chance to be involved, or for anything else. If you can build an enthusiastic team and leverage that enthusiasm to help your business succeed, you’ll be in about the best position you can be.
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