If your business is going to succeed, you have to hire people you trust, delegate everything that isn't an essential part of your role as the CEO, and stay focused on growing your business.
What do most first-time entrepreneurs think is the key to success? A good idea.
In my opinion, less than 10 percent of a business's ultimate success comes from the idea—it's merely the starting point of the whole venture. The vast majority of success, the other 90 percent comes from great execution and usually a little luck too. Great execution certainly starts with the founder's hard work, but to really succeed a business requires a team of great people and a culture to support and retain them.
Hiring the right people is one of the hardest but most important parts of starting a business. When I first started out I realized I didn't know anything about hiring and managing people. I quickly found myself responsible for management, HR, sales, strategy, and customer service—all things that I hadn't thought much about when deciding to pursue my idea. It can be overwhelming to try to do it all, and it's also an unsustainable way to run a growing company. If your business is going to succeed, you have to hire people you trust, delegate everything that isn't an essential part of your role as the CEO, and stay focused on growing your business and leading the company.
There have been a million books written on how to make the best hires, but for a startup, the best advice I can give is to find people who have a strong work ethic and who are more interested in learning and contributing than they are in compensation and benefits. Employees who have that mindset are going to constantly strive to do better and to grow the company. And when you find people like that, your job is to do everything you can to reward them for that dedication.
It's not just about finding and hiring the right people; you have to keep them interested. When you're starting a company, often you only have five or six people, so why would you worry about culture? But, as your company grows, six can quickly become 60, and you find yourself running a real company with a culture that just happened organically. The best way to avoid that is investing in company culture from the outset, and I'm not the only one who thinks that.
Recently, a friend of mine attended a conference of CEOs. When asked what their biggest regret was for their company, three out of every four said it was their failure to invest more time and resources into their culture in the early days. That investment pays off in practical ways that go far beyond morale. my company, culture is one of the defining reasons for our success. When I survey current employees, they overwhelmingly say that our culture is their reason for staying. My employees are incredibly talented and could find higher paying jobs if they shopped around, but they aren't looking to leave. I've even had three employees come back to me after leaving for other companies. Why? They missed our company culture.
Many companies, especially in the tech space, throw free meals, sky-high salaries, and beautiful expansive campuses at their employees in an effort to keep them around, but loyalty can't be bought with perks. Thoughtful and conscious investments into the ways employees interact and the way workloads, stress, and requests are handled matter more than most entrepreneurs give credit, especially when they are starting out.
Some of this advice may seem like common sense, but first-time entrepreneurs frequently undervalue the importance of hiring and keeping the right personnel when they are starting their businesses. Our employees are the single largest determining factor of our success. Invest in them and your workplace early, and you will see those returns down the line.
Brett Derricott is CEO of Built for Teams, which provides HR solutions for small- to mid-sized businesses.
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