When you start a business, one of the best things that you can do, we are told, is to “get your hands dirty.” The idea being that there’s no one else better to make your dreams come true than you so get in there and do it yourself! However, as you start seeing success, you and your partners can’t possibly do it all and you need to accept that you need to get your hands a lot less dirty.
But how do you know when and where do you start? I suggest looking at three areas:
1. What are you not good at? – If there are things that you are doing and you aren’t good at them, those should go to someone else.
2. How will your business scale? – Just about any business needs customers to scale so no matter how well you sell, you likely will increase your revenue with another salesperson.
3. Who’s taking care of your customers? – When you have your early customers, they love calling the owner to resolve issues, but that can’t scale so you need people to manage your customers.
When we reached five customers, I could no longer be responsive to them along with acquiring new ones so I found someone that I could train to handle the day-to-day issues and I would be the escalation point. Although it took about six months of training, I was much more available when that was complete.
When we had 10 people, we needed to keep our funnel full so we trained from inside the company and hired someone from outside the company to take over those responsibilities. I spent many months, more likely years, sitting on conference calls training the salesperson on what to say, how to say it and where to do the sales dance, but this was a vital investment in our future.
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When we reached 15 people, I realized that accounting was not my strength and that it was time to find a controller to handle our expenses, revenue and sales tax obligations. It wasn’t cheap to bring in an experienced person, but I was not able to teach this person what they needed to know, they had to come in with knowledge and experience so this was a different kind of hire.
So although I spent a lot of time hands on doing hiring and training, at the end of each phase of the process, I was getting my hands less dirty as the employee count increased. I had to teach myself not to instinctually answer questions that I knew or solve problems that we faced because I had to let others do their jobs in order for us to grow. Not every entrepreneur is capable of this, but I believe you have to try.
