Reasons Startups Fail: Team Hiring

Reasons Startups Fail: Team Hiring

A startup has been launched and the entrepreneur is relieved at finally being able to launch. However, the work has just begun!

Since a startup business is a delicate seed, any wrong move can and might cause difficulties that could cripple the business. Although lots of books and posts about startups are filled with success stories of what became, very few talk about the little mistakes that killed what might have become.

The truth is, only a third of startups make it past five years with a fifth of them dying away in their first year. Why you may ask. Among the reasons for the failure is getting the right team.  

Femi Otedola recently posted “As an entrepreneur, my role is to ensure that I hire a competent team to run my business affairs without my physical presence and of course one that outlives me. Mine is to nurture the team to maximize shareholder value”.

As an entrepreneur, if you can get it right with your team hiring before you scale up, it would be a whole relief for you. But if you can get the team hiring right even at the seed stage, half your job is done. Your team includes your co-founders, partners, and even employees, and it is important to know that every kind of employee is a good match for the startup stage.

Working in a startup is not for the feebleminded. Establishing your place as a strong brand is a gritty and hard business and at that early stage, you need men and women that can push through. The sort of perseverance required for a startup is not present in every professional, and since you do not want to start with a high staff turnover, you have to choose right.

Some team members can be very excellent at what they do, but at the first sign that things could go south, they jump ship and start searching for another job, and you are left right where you started. Perseverance and strong will power is a key requirement for the startup team. You need team members that have a sense of ownership over the business and treat the business like it was theirs.

Another thing you want to do is to hire complementary team members with skills and attributes that can collaborate and complement one another, rather than compete. Each person can then focus on his area of competence and let the others do their bit.

Say, for instance, you are a tech or software developer, while you may want to hire one or 2 team members who have similar expertise, you cannot neglect marketing and customer relations as well as a legal expert.

At some point, you may have to sacrifice someone who is better at the job for someone who is a better team player. Why? Because at this point, you need people who can collaborate better than people who are just better at doing what they do. You may disagree with this point and it is fine. But I can tell you for free that you don’t need a one-man-army at the startup stage of your business no matter how good or reliable he/she is. Don’t wrap your entire business processes or productivity around a single individual. If you do, you will not like what happens when this person leaves your startup for a better offer.

Also, look out for team members that are good at achieving results; not just sprouting up ideas on the go, but people who actually put in the work to see the ideas come to fruition. It is easy to say ‘in our first quarter we should make 500 signups’. Now while that sort of team member is good for a startup, having one who is willing to put in the work and go through the grueling process of pushing the products to thousands so that the target of 500 signups is achieved; is better for the brand. Get people who get the job done!

It is possible that you could outsource your hiring process, but it is necessary that you also know what you are expecting in a team member so that you can recognize it when you see it. You could also include existing team members in the recruiting process to give you an added insight into your blind spots.

Whoever handles your team hiring, it still comes down to you to manage the team and you should be able to optimize the team’s output and push them to greater achievements.

Summary

A lot of business success depends on the quality of your team members, but how do you even know what qualities to look out for? As a startup entrepreneur, how do you recognize those team members that are ready to go all the way with you? Should professionalism be the first thing you look out for or are there other traits that are more important to you at this point? These are questions I try to answer in this article