So you’ve got your business idea. You’ve tested it and retested it, inspected it from all angles, and calibrated it based on your finding. You’ve written up your plan and see a path to 20x. What comes next?
From the idea generation and problem identification stage (see previous post) , it’s time to start building the business. From my perspective, you start with people. The core of your team is enormously critical because if you can start with great people, great people are going to beget great people.
It’s imperative to understand the full value of hiring slow and firing fast. I use the analogy if you build that core team with stallions and we make a mistake and hire a donkey, the stallions will kick the donkey right out of the mix. It’s so critical to hire the right team and make sure you correct any hiring mistakes quickly before they create any significant damage.
I really like young, smart, humble people on a mission to go and do something. Truly do something. Not just blindly chase a dollar. Curiosity and flexibility are the two big things that bring results every single time.
New hires should also bring the right kind of confidence. It’s not being a know-it-all. Instead, it comes from humility, research, and just feeling good and prepared about something. This is the separation between arrogance and earnest confidence.
It’s critical to get people into the right seat within the organization. That means matching their skillset with the job that truly fits. Making that happen is easier at the beginning because you can create a seat around somebody’s skillset at the very earliest stages of the business.
As a business scales and grows, it becomes more difficult to follow this approach. At the next stage, businesses always shift to this is the job description, let’s find somebody to fill it.
In the beginning, though, it’s more about finding a fantastic team and then dividing and conquering the challenges that arise.
It’s also essential that everyone on that initial team truly knows everyone else’s responsibilities and accountabilities. That’s a big part of creating an amazing working environment. Hiring great people and creating an amazing environment makes things really tick within the overall organization. To bring it back to that first key hire: I prefer working with first-time CEOs. They’re not stuck in their ways and are generally more curious and open to learning. When intelligence meets agility, that’s a winning combination. No one is ever going to be an expert in everything. If the operational leadership, vision, and willingness to learn are there, there’s always a deep network of specialists that you can tap into and leverage those skillsets to accomplish whatever challenge is at hand.