The Employee-centric vs. Client-centric Debate

The early days of any new business venture represent an enormous challenge and transitioning from business plan to profitability involves a number of important steps and a great deal of investment. Laying the proper foundation for your business is essential to securing the long-term future for your company so having an insight into where you are going to focus your early investment will help shape what eventually defines your business. There are two major schools of thought here: the employee-centric approach and the client-centric approach. Both have their merits and which works for your business will come down to an analysis of which approach is most likely to make your company stronger in the long run based on the resources and capital that you have available.

Employee-centric Approach

Greatest investment: Capital

Best Marketing Feature: Cutting Edge

Clientele: High End

The idea behind the employee-centric approach is to create an environment where the people you hire have the best tools at their disposal so that they enjoy coming to work. The concept is that if the employee is happy they will be better able to service clients who will be happy in turn. In order to provide your employees with such an environment usually requires investing a lot of capital up front. This is the one drawback to this approach as, by having a high startup cost, you have immediately positioned your company to operate at a certain price point depending on the market for your service or product. You have reduced your potential pool of clients down to those that can afford to pay for your service or product, and you are now trusting that you will be able to market your company in such a way that attracts a high end clientele.

You will benefit from being able to provide your clients with the very latest technology in whatever you are offering, and reminding them through advertising and marketing campaigns that your company is on the cutting edge of the industry is essential to making your company viable. Investing big in your company through an employee-centric approach means going big the whole way. The investment is bigger so operating costs will be higher and, in order to turn some kind of profit, you will likely be asking your clients to pay more for your product or service than some of your competitors. By making such a demand of your clients, it is imperative that you consistently deliver the goods because the moment a client realizes that they can get the same quality product or service for cheaper, it’s their right to jump ship.

Client-centric Approach

Greatest Investment: Time

Best Marketing Feature: Value

Clientele: Anyone

In contrast to the employee-centric approach there is the client-centric approach which places a greater emphasis on customer relations and attempting do a lot with very little. Ever heard of someone building their business from the ground up? Well, that’s the idea here. In the client-centric approach there is a minimal amount invested in capital and, instead, a great amount of time invested in an effort to provide the client with what they are looking for and keeping them happy. Every customer is precious as they represent the lifeblood of the company and one dissatisfied customer could be the ruin of your business. A poor night’s sleep is justifiable if it gets the project delivered on time and on budget.

Although expectations might have to be tempered with limited resources available, the advantage here is that because your costs are lower you are able to attract clients who might be looking for the best rate in the market. This, in turn, easily becomes the strategy behind how to market your company to prospective clients. By offering the most competitive rates you attract clients with smaller budgets, but you can in turn offer your service or product to a wealthier clientele by being able to offer them value, thereby effectively opening your business to a wider pool of prospective clients.

Got Tax and Financial Stress? Here's How to Avoid It

There is one time of year we all dread. No, it's not going over to the in-laws for Thanksgiving. It's tax day. Whether you pay your business taxes on the due date or in advance this can be a stressful time of the year.

Depending on the circumstances, you could find yourself writing out a huge check to the government that wipes out your cash reserves. It's no wonder your blood pressure spikes and the headaches come on.

The good news is that it doesn't have to be that way.

Yes, you'll still have to pay taxes but there is no reason why you should stress out about this part of your business. First thing to understand - everyone is in the same boat. Beyond that there are some tactics you can adopt to help manage your small business finances and avoid getting on the government's bad side.

Make a Plan

A business's success is built on the back of meeting deadlines. That comes with shipping products to customers and paying the bills. It's important to have a well thought out plan for your entire business. This is not something that should be "kept in your head."

You should be using a written calendar that covers all your responsibilities both to customers and to the government. If you know a payment is approaching you won't feel burdened or surprised when it comes time to write the check.

It comes down to a matter of making priorities. And yes, there is an app for that!

Don't Do it Alone

Feelings of stress go hand in hand with feelings of being overwhelmed. When was the last time you asked for help? As a small business owner there are a lot of new aspects of your business you thought you wouldn't have to contend with. Sure, you knew you'd be paying the bills but keeping up with your company's Facebook page and generating original content for your website? Did you budget time for that? More importantly, do you know what you're doing when it comes to optimizing search engines and social media?

You don't have to become an expert because there are plenty of experts out there in cyber land willing to lend a hand. Even your kids could probably be a big help posting notices or even cleaning up around the office. Start asking for help and watch the stress melt away.

Take Time for Yourself

All work and no play? We've heard it before and it has meaning for the small business owner. The first few weeks or months of your start up will be grueling. No doubt about that. However, that doesn't mean running yourself into the ground. You certainly can't pay your tax bills that way. Leave some relaxation time for yourself and/or with your family every week. Schedule it like a business meeting and hold it with the same level of importance. You'll find that approaching your business after taking a "time out" won't be a struggle. 

A Tale of Two Independents – What’s in a Name?

Jerry and Steve each operate their own web services company. Strictly speaking they are each a company of just one and the bulk of their work involves coding, formatting, updating and maintaining the functionality of various websites. They are about the same age, have a similar education and work experience, and provide essentially the same services regarding each of their clients as completely separate contracts. The only real difference is that Jerry calls himself a freelance web developer whereas Steve has given himself the title of “Consultant” for his firm Omni-Global Web.

Candice, Rachel, and Tamara are the support staff for a new surgical clinic operating in a ritzy part of town and, with a particular budget, they’ve been asked to set up the website that will represent the clinic on the web. Since none of them have the requisite skillset to do the job themselves, they sit down and hash out what they are looking for and promptly place an ad seeking a Webmaster which outlines what the job entails and what demonstrable skills the applicants should have. Both Jerry and Steve apply with a concise and well thought out email along with links to various samples of their work. Jerry applies as himself, but Steve applies as Omni-Global Web and offers his own personal information merely as a point of contact. Both quote the same price.

When reviewing the various applicants, Candice, Rachel and Tamara describe their feelings about Jerry and Steve:

Candice (about Jerry): “I like his work, I’m just concerned that as a freelancer he may not be able to give our project the time and care that it requires. These Guys that work as agents for hire, I just find they’re grabbing at every job out there and don’t put their full effort into their contracts the way real professionals do.”

Rachel and Tamara feel that Candice makes a very compelling argument.

Tamara (about Steve and Omni-Global Web): “I’m really impressed. There’s something neat and tidy about this company’s work. I think they should be our first call and hopefully they’ll be willing to take us on.”

Rachel nods her head in agreement, and Candice assumes control grabbing the phone.

“Omni-Global Web! Steve speaking.”

“Hello Steve, my name is Candice and your company got in touch with us recently about providing us with services for our website and we were wondering if Omni-Global Web might still be able to help us out?”

“I imagine that will be possible, how about we set up a time to talk about what you need?”

Steve eventually got the job without any referral or previous business with anyone involved with the clinic, and Jerry never received so much as a phone call back. Even Steve will tell you that it wasn’t his finest work, but the clients were happy and they paid well and on time.

The Moral of the Story

The reason why Steve got the job (and subsequently paid) and Jerry didn’t is pretty simple, but says a lot about the people that hire contract workers and how they think.

First, Candice had a negative impression about what it means to be a freelancer, and her bias, no matter how unfounded, still earned merit with her peers as being valid. Second, the fact that it was a company, and not just an individual, planted the expectation in Tamara’s mind that there was a larger degree of legitimacy to the work coming from Steve. It didn’t matter who’s work was actually better, as both were capable of doing the job that was asked, but Steve and his title of consultant created a more acceptable framework in the minds of Candice, Rachel and Tamara. Lastly, the way Candice, Rachel and Tamara viewed how both Jerry and Steve might accept being offered the work was completely different. Candice had an image of Jerry attempting to gather up any work he could get as though, working for himself, he was just happy to have something to work on to pay the next few bills. When she finally called and spoke to Steve it was almost as though she hoped Steve would accept them as clients. To Candice, Rachel, and Tamara it would have been a privilege for Jerry to work for them, but with the way they viewed Steve it was a privilege for them to have him work on their website.

If you are a small business owner and you work for yourself it’s important to make these nuanced considerations to have any chance of competing in a market place where contractors are consistently bringing more and more diversified skills to the table. Never forget that how to market and promote one’s self is itself a skill, and the difference between freelancer and consultant, however slight in practice, can be profound in light of the expectation it creates in the minds of potential clients.

Slow Hire, Quick Fire

Anyone in charge of his or her own business who is not familiar with the term ‘slow hire, quick fire’ needs to let it sink in right away. On the surface it seems rather self-explanatory and just good common sense, but internalizing the mechanisms behind why this practice is so fundamentally important can often be overlooked. Below are a few key points to focus on when you may be forced to pull the trigger on any major personnel decision as well as a brief examination behind the rationale for each practice.

The Slow Hire

Every hiring decision is an investment. The idea needs to be that the return from their productivity exceeds the outlay to keep them on board – there is no point hiring someone who doesn’t make your company more valuable than it already is. Like a poker player sitting at the table, there is the old adage that you cannot lose what you don’t put in the middle. Hiring someone should feel like putting chips in the middle knowing that you can take down the hand. If you’re bluffing and praying for your card to land on the river you’ll find yourself short-stacked in no time.

Here are some points to consider before hiring:

1) Don’t let yourself feel pressured by time – A savvy manager will see the need coming down the road long before there is any urgency to actually hire someone. If you’re hiring someone just because you need someone right away there’s a strong possibility you’re not hiring the right fit for the position, but someone who is comfortable being the company silver medal.

2) If it doesn’t feel right, it probably isn’t – It can sometimes feel like the only option available is hiring the least bad candidate. There is nothing wrong with holding out for something better. The right person is out there, and sometimes it’s just a matter of possessing enough resolve to wait it out until they come along.

3) Can someone become the right candidate? – Sometimes you might find yourself with candidates that don’t immediately possess the needed expertise or experience required to fill a position, but may possess certain intangibles, such as the right drive and motivation that can make them an asset to your company. Always keep in mind that it’s easier to train someone how to complete a particular task than it is to train him or her to care about what they’re doing.

The Quick Fire

If someone is dead weight, they’ve got to go. It’s fine to be patient with someone who is still developing the requisite competencies to do their job, but if someone doesn’t have the right attitude, or fails to demonstrate the proper level of motivation that you demand from your employees, don’t wait around hoping they will change. There are plenty of eager people who don’t need to constantly have carrots dangled in front of them who would probably do a great job if given the chance.

Here are some points to consider before firing:

1) Is it even a job that still needs doing? – It’s not uncommon for employees, brought on to complete a particular task, to hang around long after they’ve become redundant. It’s never easy, but explaining that their services are no longer required can sometimes make long-term sense and might be in the best interest of your company.

2) Are they spinning their wheels? – The guy who comes to work every day, does nothing, and collects his pay just the same as the guy who works his butt off, is an all too common occurrence in many work environments. It’s one thing to streamline one’s workflow to optimize productivity allowing for more free time, it’s another to create free time at the expense of productivity. And as great as it is to come to work feeling relaxed, it’s a wholly other thing to show up at work in order to relax.

3) Are they a vampire? – Sometimes what can hurt a company has little to do with the specific competencies of its respective employees and can come down to a single employee’s bad attitude. Nothing can be more damaging to team morale than one person putting his or herself ahead of everyone else. There is no place for someone who sucks the life out of your company.

Contemporary Fail-safe Solutions – An Ode to the Cloud

It’s late and you’ve just pulled a marathon 18-hour session putting together the finishing touches of a major project. It’s the eleventh hour and the deadline is looming, so it’s time to get those deliverables sent. You’ve poured your blood, sweat and tears into making this project the best that it can be, because you know that you operate in a results-based profession where the skills you possess on paper don’t amount to anything unless you can deliver the goods. Deep down you know that if this goes well you may look back and see this one project as the breakthrough that broke the doors on your career wide open. You’ve dotted every “i” and crossed every “t”. You’ve double-checked and you’ve triple-checked. It’s perfect. You stroll over to the kitchen and pour yourself a celebratory glass of wine. As you stride back to the computer for one last glance of satisfaction, a poorly positioned electrical cord brushes up against your ankle diverting your attention. Suddenly there’s a chain reaction stemming from a momentary loss of equilibrium – an unfortunate byproduct of your mismanagement of time and resulting in a lack of sleep. You go hurtling toward your workstation smashing into your desk and pouring wine all over your computer. The screen is frozen. Nothing moves. All is lost.

There is almost no more important task in modern business than protecting the integrity of your work, and in this day and age there are a myriad of solutions at your fingertips to ensure that all is never lost.

Storage Solutions

Short term: Backing up relevant work to multiple locations should be standard practice for everyone as digital mass storage devices have become plentiful and cheap. Saving to a flash, or USB connectable external disc drive, is always recommended. Any piece of hardware, however, can become lost or damaged, so the degree of importance you place on a project determines the number of devices you use.

Long term: Ah, the cloud! Mystical bands of binary information that float unblemished amidst the digital ether seems the stuff of science fiction, but it’s quickly becoming an essential business reality. The cloud is literally information stored on huge servers that remains at all times part of the expanding universe that is the internet. For pennies a day you can upload and download information like it was your own hard drive. The difference is if you’re computer breaks down, all you need is another computer and it’ll be right where you left it. 

Although there are many cloud storage options out on the market, Amazon Glacier is a cost-effective cloud storage solution worth investigating.

Sharing

Keeping important files and work documents in multiple locations is essential to being able to fail-safe, so file sharing is a great way to spread the safety around and there are several ways to do it. When files are contained on a hard drive they are rooted to that location, but with file sharing it’s easy to pass along important documents that others can get to if they need to.

Free File Transfer Sites: Depending on the size of the files you are dealing with, there are number of great file transfer options through the cloud. With free file transfer sites, unlike cloud storage where you essentially pay for space, there are limitations like a cap on file sizes, or how long files that are uploaded are available to download. There are number of options available to users for easy transfer of files including: WeTransfer, HighTail, and TransferBigFiles.

Dropbox: Unlike with file transfer sites, Dropbox is actually a program on your computer that sets up a folder designed to be shared by your computer and any other computer that you invite to share with it. It’s just like any other folder on your computer and files stay exactly where they are, but as soon as anything is placed in your Dropbox, it’s essentially saved on any of the computers that also share that folder, so you can be sure that even if you lose it, someone else will still have it.

Modern technology has provided so many tools to make sure we can stay on top of our projects and mitigate potential disasters. Hundreds of people have learned the hard way that can go wrong and they have designed so many solutions that there quite literally is an app for that. It’s not enough to just save your work anymore. Nothing should be left to chance, so make sure you’re using all the resources you have available, including the cloud, to your advantage and rest easy knowing that your work will be preserved the way it should be and will be ready for delivery.

It’s a Marathon, Not a Sprint – But You Gotta Go Really Fast!

When deciding to start a business it is always important to keep the long play in mind. It’s okay to make sacrifices in the early going with the expectation that it will pay off in the long run. It’s fine to keep business at a slow, steady, and manageable pace in order to achieve a level of comfort and sustainability. And, there’s nothing wrong with finding your stride and establishing a work flow that’s right for you. However, it’s never time to allow complacency to settle in because allowing yourself to fall behind means you will inevitably get left behind. Below are few key ideas to keep in mind order for your business to keep pace and make the right strides from start to finish.

Innovate.

No matter how cutting edge you think you are, the next big thing is right around the corner – it’s just a simple fact with the current state of technology. The moment a new technology is released, companies are on the move making refinements and developing their own patents in order to stay in the race and get a piece of the pie. It’s not always necessary to be at the vanguard of innovation, but it’s essential that you keep a pulse on whatever the latest upgrades are and keep your own systems up to date. Always make a point to reevaluate the state of your company’s level of innovation every quarter – yes, things change just that quickly.

Ask for feedback, and respond to criticism.

No matter what service, or product, your company provides, the needs of your clients will change from one day to the next and it’s essential that you stay on top of what those needs are. At the end of the day it is your job to provide them with what they are looking for, not what you think they should want. Being sensitive to customer needs is the cornerstone to profitability because it is customer needs that, in fact, drive innovation. Also, it’s essential that you never become bitter towards negative criticisms to your product or service. As great as it feels to receive a pat on the back once in a while, that’s not necessarily how we grow. Every negative criticism represents an insight into the potential flaws with your service or product and what may need tweaking or overhauling. Criticism isn’t so much an indictment of your abilities as it is an opportunity to step up and prove what you’re capable of.

Embrace change.

Once upon a time people graduated from college, got a job, and stayed right there until they retired. It’s well understood that nowadays college graduates should prepare to have several careers before they decide to call in their pensions. In the previous paradigm a layoff would have been calamitous, but today it’s almost so common that the phrase “I’m between jobs right now” has almost become cliché. Keeping everything in a constant state of flux should be the only permanent aspect of your life and business. It prepares you for every eventuality because if you’ve been keeping up you likely saw the changes coming a long time ago.

Have no fear.

 Anyone unfamiliar with the term “self-sabotage” needs to go look it up, because all too often we are the biggest obstacle we need to overcome. Whether it’s fear or apathy, very often we become limited by what we feel we deserve and no one is going to just pay us because we think we’re cool. It’s fine to speak soft, but paramount to be assertive enough to do what needs to be done. It’s not enough to just put one foot in front of the other. In order to make real strides you have to pound the pavement and you need to have a talk with yourself and not let yourself get in the way of you achieving your dreams. 

How to Conduct a Meeting

Meetings, when properly directed, are a great way to get everyone on the same page, strategize, and brainstorm with the aim of moving the company in the right direction. If a meeting lacks the necessary focus, however, it can represent a colossal time-suck and a waste of everybody’s resources. It’s essential to have a clear picture of why a meeting is necessary and what needs to be accomplished. Below are a few “don’ts” and “dos” when it comes to taking the lead and conducting a great meeting.

DON’T conduct meetings every week for the sake of conducting a meeting – it can lead to so many annoying little problems like the anticipation of the dreaded weekly meeting, the didn’t-we-just-discuss-this-last-week feeling, or the incessant mulling over minutia. Not every decision in a company should be left to a democracy and it’s really only beneficial to call a meeting when one is deemed truly necessary.

DO include everyone - if you’ve decided that now is the time to have a meeting it should be because some kind of shift in direction is necessary. Sea changes can implicate the whole company and you might be surprised by who has big ideas. If wholesale changes are necessary, and you limit your company’s rebranding to the marketing team because you see it exclusively as a marketing issue, you’re effectively limiting your options moving forward.

DON’T make your meetings about one-on-ones – a meeting where everyone is gathered waiting for their turn to speak and explain what they do is likely to cause attendees to zone out. The key to a great meeting, and getting great ideas out, is to keep everyone engaged. Set aside time to have one-on-ones so that everyone can communicate what’s relevant about their particular position and then connect them with whoever they might need in other departments. Remember, meetings are about the big picture, not the details.

DO have a clear idea of what needs to be accomplished – a meeting’s focus can be lost so easily by getting bogged down in details. It’s imperative that, when leading a team meeting, you know exactly where your team is at and where they should be by the end. It’s possible to know the answers without having the means to articulate it, so clueing in to what’s being shared in a meeting should be what allows you to formulate an expression of what you know is already there.

DON’T get sidetracked by things that are irrelevant – although it’s important to keep things lighthearted and fun, maintaining control over the direction of the meeting is essential to make progress. Meetings can suffer from too many questions or too much fine-tuning. Ideas discussed at meetings should be global, not particular. It’s important not to just gloss over the details, but keep in mind that the grandeur of an issue should reflect the size and duration of a meeting.

DO allow everyone a chance to shine  - although you’re in control and you make the decisions, a meeting can never be about you. You can communicate company values in an email, but you get feedback in a meeting. Having an open mind, ceding the floor and jumping in only to direct traffic, should be the leader’s role in any meeting.

Summary

Meetings aren’t the kind of thing you want built into the framework of your company but it’s important to have systems in place that keep you in contact with the various branches of your business. A constant stream of meetings can devalue their importance and, as a team leader, it’s important to distinguish between when everyone needs to be brought together and when it’s time to meet one-on-one. Meetings represent an opportunity to shake things up, keep everyone on their toes, and pull them out of the doldrums of the regular routine. Suddenly throwing everyone into a collaborative environment of equals often has an effect of stimulating out-of-the-box thinking and it can be surprising where the next great idea can come from.

The Most Underrated Marketing Tool in Your Arsenal

If the barometer of success for any marketing strategy boils down to ROI, it’s time to consider the PDF file as one of the most overlooked ways to get the word out about your product or your service. If you consider the myriad of ways to draw potential clients to your business, few are as easy to put together, as cheap, or as effective.

Simple Tools That Are All in the Box

Imagine you’re unveiling a new product line at your store. One of the most conventional ways to draw attention, and promote your new product, has been the leaflet. In the digital age the leaflet has to now be regarded as one of the more ineffective ways of driving business. Consider all the steps involved and who needs to be employed:

• A graphic designer needs to be employed to handle the layout.
• A completely separate company needs to be hired just to handle the printing.
• Finished leaflets then need to be distributed.

Now consider how those steps can be refined and made more cost effective with a PDF file.

• Virtually any word processor or design tool can be converted into a PDF file.
• No printing necessary.
• A final PDF can be distributed with a single click of a button in an email blast, or via per click advertising on almost any social networking site.

With a PDF no materials are wasted and no leaflets get unceremoniously tossed in the garbage. Save a tree.

So Many Options

PDFs can assume a variety of forms that may be useful in driving people to your business. Here are a few ideas:

Catalogues – PDFs are specifically designed to integrate images with text. They are quite literally the digital gold standard for delivering professional looking, unalterable, designs modeled after traditional print publications for the digital age.

Informational Material – For service companies, educating your client base on what you provide can help establish trust and offer them a reminder that they may be in need of your service. A well-targeted PDF tutorial, offering something as simple as a quick tip, can often spark in the minds of your clients a number of ways that they can use your service.

Promotional Video – With easy-to-use screencasting software such as Camtasia and Screenflow, it’s simple to turn a PDF file into a promotional video that can be quickly embedded onto your website or on various social networking sites.

The total cost for all of these methods are a fraction of the costs associated with conventional print materials, billboards, radio, and television advertising, and by using social media, the reach is even greater.

Other Benefits of PDFs

By now it should be clear that the PDF is able to profit from the fact that it can travel digitally and has a demonstrable versatility. But there are still a few more points that make PDFs so handy.

They’re Unalterable – No matter what design tool you’re using whether it’s Microsoft Word, Adobe InDesign, Photoshop, it doesn’t matter, converting to PDF places the final stamp on a design and makes it final. When it goes to the world it can not be imported and have it’s design components altered, leaving copyright and design control in the hands of you and your company.

They’re Universal – Unless you’re dusting off your old Amiga, chances are your PDF will be read by any device from a PC to an iPad. It will always look just the way it was intended and never suffer from corruption by crossing platforms.

They’re Light Weight and Cheap – No heavy boxes to move around and, in fact, PDFs require minimal amounts of space on your hard drive. Just about every software tool under the sun has a “save as PDF” option. Total cost: $0.

Etiquette in the Virtual Office Environment

The office is a constantly evolving environment. In fact, the tech boom has given rise to a brand new work environment unlike the world has ever seen. Globalization and the internet have transformed the way we do business, altering the landscape and changing the way workers, united under the banner of a common vocational purpose, interact and see a project to completion.

Online office environments, like oDesk and Elance, have become an increasingly common way to infuse expertise into small businesses by outsourcing skills and aspects of a project that may not fall within the core competencies of its key constituents. In fact, it is now possible to see a project from acorn to oak by building a workforce of contractors from around the world operating in a virtual office environment which tracks their time and progress.

Operating through the soft barrier and anonymity that is the internet, it’s easier than ever to be detached from some of the more mundane aspects of the job. In their infancy, virtual office environments were a breeding ground for employers looking to get something for nothing by offering the promise of work to desperate contractors. Thankfully, the market has found a way to regulate itself and, though the problem does still persist, it is no longer the norm. Employers will be keen to protect themselves from contractors looking to make a quick buck and leaving them in the lurch with poorly executed, or incomplete, work. On the other hand, most contractors will be inclined to protect themselves, and usually only want to be compensated fairly for their time and their expertise. It’s important to remember that there is an element of give and take that is essential to making the relationship function optimally.  

As tempting as it might be for an employer to contract the data entry services of someone working for $1 per hour in a distant country, there’s no guarantee that what is needed will be communicated effectively or that the work will be done correctly. One might even be persuaded to convince several prospective contractors to complete samples in order to prove that they are capable of completing the work and then running off with the aggregate without compensating a single contractor for their work.

When dealing with any contractor in an online environment the key is to first give them the benefit of the doubt. Knowing that they are capable of what they say they are is important and most will be able to provide a track record of successfully completed work. Inherent in the system of most E-offices is a feedback system and, although abuses are not unheard of, there is also some legitimacy to them and should be another factor to consider before making a hire. Lastly, reach out – a virtual office relationship is still a relationship and a quick Skype call can go a long way to establishing trust between contractor and employer. Employers demonstrate that they are the real deal, with honest money to pay for an honest service, and this informal interview process is usually enough to unveil the wizard behind the curtain.

No matter who you hire for what service, keeping the lines of communication open is essential and a “set it and forget it” mentality is never a recommended approach. As your business grows, so will your relationships and it’s important to nurture them and keep in mind that sacrificing some early returns can, with the right amount of patience, generate greater stability over the long haul. 

How to Hire Employees

Being exhausted from working around the clock driving your business forward can actually be a good thing. Despite the bags under your eyes, the gravelly voice, and potential spontaneous hair loss, all that stress can serve as a signal that your business has advanced to the point where it’s time to hire some help. As tempting as it can be to continue to assume all the responsibility for your company and reap all the financial benefits as well, it may actually be more profitable in the long term to surrender some of the immediate dividends and take back some of your days.

There are two basic paths to take when hiring someone:

The first, and most obvious is to hire an assistant. Any business has mundane components, or a series of tedious small jobs, that are seemingly unrelated to the main focus of the company. They include everything from answering telephones, sending out emails, filing, billing, laundry, getting coffee, etc. When hiring someone to handle all the jobs you don’t want to do, the goal is often to find someone who’s driven, pays attention to detail, doesn’t sleep, and is willing to work for less than they’re worth.

This method of hiring, especially at such an early stage in the growth of your company, is akin to exploitation and will further limit the growth of your company. The types of people who will end up working for you are those that simply need a job. The kind of employee you should be looking for is one who wants to work for you, not one who is putting themselves in a position of indentured servitude. The reason for the drawbacks with this method of hiring is due to the fact that it means that all the jobs in the company are accounted for. It might be effective to get by on a day-to-day basis, but a ceiling is reached the minute your employee becomes truly effective at their job. The net result will be a former employee who uses their experience at your company as a means to get a job that’s more meaningful to them.

The second method to hiring is to find a partner. Anyone who has seen Derek Sivers’ riveting TED talk from 2010 about how to start a movement knows that as the leader you’ll get all the credit, but the true catalyst to starting a movement is the involvement and commitment of your first followers. As Sivers points out, it’s important to embrace your first few followers, or employees in this case, as equals. When things began, you may have been the very embodiment of the company, but by embracing your first employees as equals, the focus now becomes the company and not the individual roles that are being filled within it. Suddenly, instead of all the jobs in the company being accounted for by you and your various assistants, new jobs are being born through the cooperation and vision of your close circle of followers.

So what is the key to finding a great partner?

The real trick to finding a great partner is to position oneself within reach of people that are like you, but with complimentary skills. For example, an audio professional might want to align themselves with an expert in film and video where suddenly you have a production company capable of offering an array of services instead of focusing on just one. It’s also important that they be at the same relative stage in their career so that you can both grow together without one feeling like they are dragging the other. And finally, your partners should hold the same core values when it comes to what they feel is important for the company to thrive – citing artistic differences as the cause of the destruction of a promising union has almost become cliché.

The very last thing to consider is how you attract the right people to your business. It’s important, regardless of the channels you use to draw attention to your company, that in the job description it clearly indicates that candidates will be immediately positioned at the same level, and be performing the same duties, as the founder of the company. Be forthright about your own abilities, your goals, and your expectations and make it clear to the people you decide to interview that their involvement in the company represents an opportunity to be a part of something that has the potential for real growth.

The net effect of this second strategy is not only having a willing partner who will help lighten the load in the short term, but also a friend who will take ownership of their role and nurture the company with the same care as you in the long term.