Best Practices for Building an Early-Stage Team
When you’re running an early-stage company, the worst thing you can do is hire the wrong person. It’s a waste of time and money, which are an entrepreneur’s two most valuable and most limited assets. Conversely, a good hire can help hit major milestones, create new market opportunities, and reach inflection points that make or break a business. In other words, the quality of talent on your team is instrumental to a company’s success.
To learn more about how to bring top caliber talent onto a team, we spoke with Michelle Joseph, Founder and CEO of the award-winning talent consultancy PeopleFoundry, on how founders should think about building teams and finding talent. Michelle has dedicated her business to growing technology companies like Geofeedia and Food Genius from the ground up by thinking beyond filling individual roles and considering how to create customized, scalable solutions that result in sustainable, motivated teams.
From the get-go, we learned that “the founders that ask for best practices from other organizations that [experienced] similar growth challenges they are facing. Those are the ones that end up being successful – the ones that say ‘we don’t know everything, and we need help.’"
As simple as that sounds, it’s this part of the recruiting and team-building process that presents the most challenges. For one, first-time founders are often used to wearing every hat and confronting every obstacle themselves, which means they “can’t get their head around the fact that they can’t have all the answers and perform every role.” However, to truly scale a business, you need people with different complementary skills and experiences that will fill in gaps in the existing team.
Founders shouldn’t be asking how can I hit all of these milestones myself to achieve my vision, but what am I best equipped to do, and who do I need to bring on to achieve the company goals? First-time founders who understand that they cannot realize their vision alone and can clearly identify that they need operational expertise, product development experience, or a host of other key skill sets to add to their business are much more likely to recruit the right talent. And finding the right talent is instrumental. So here are a few basic rules:
1) “Make sure [you are] setting time aside to meet people in order to join the team.”
This can be a real dilemma for founders who need to hire, but struggle to find the time to do it. Whether it’s enlisting outside help or designating clear roles and responsibilities around hiring, you need to be actively dedicating resources to building out your team. Otherwise, you won’t hire anyone, or you’ll bring on the wrong person.
2) Clearly define what success looks like for a given role.
For one, this means understanding an articulating the role that you need filled. From there, you need to develop key performance indicators for success that you can measure over time. Whether this is a sales role, a development role, or something else, you have to know what marks your new hire will need to hit to meet your organizational goals. During the interview process, you can begin to ascertain whether candidates are a match for your goals and the role’s KPI’s by considering:
· What are the drivers behind their current successes?
· What have they done in their previous roles that demonstrate they can be responsible for this specific role?
· What motivates them in work? What about in life?
· How do they face failure?
· How do they articulate successes versus failures?
· Do they have management skills?
· How do they react to change?
3) Understand the role you’re hiring for and set expectations appropriately.
“The worst thing to do as an early-stage founder is to paint a picture that isn’t true.” There’s a big difference between working at an early-stage startup and a big company, and that’s difference you need to be conscious of when you’re hiring. When you define a role and position your organization to candidates, you have to be as clear as you can about what the job will look like and the company’s trajectory.
If you set the wrong expectations — whether they’re about compensation, hours, responsibilities, career path, or something else — you’re going to have a very unhappy employee on your hands, which is bad for culture and bad for work product. Along those lines, “making sure the early team is flexible and can handle change is going to be important.” Flexibility and adaptability are characteristics you need to look for across candidates and positions to ensure you’re building the optimal team.
4) “Great people don’t work for free.”
Expectations are a two-way street: it’s important that your candidate truly understands what the organization is doing and how they will fit in, but it’s equally important that you understand you will always have the most skin in the game of anyone at your company. It’s one thing for you to make enormous sacrifices like reneging a salary and spending every waking moment working, but it’s another for an employee to do the same.
That’s not to say that you should expect less from your hires; it’s simply that you can’t expect them to work themselves to death for no compensation. At the end of the day, no matter how much ownership they take, you need to be aware of how much it will cost to get incredible talent willing to sacrifice their time and stable lifestyle to grow your business.
5) Never settle.
“You never want to lower the bar. You never want to settle. That doesn’t necessarily mean that [your new hires] need more experience, but it’s about being on a team that motivates you.” In other words, no matter how badly you need to fill a role, you should always be looking for a new team member who gets you excited to go to work and build out your organization. “Fine” is not good enough — you have to be aggressive in finding the right person to blow you away.
Moreover, you should like who you hire. As Michelle puts it, “whenever I have hired for an organization, I have asked myself, ‘could I sit in a car with this person for this for five hours and have a good experience?’ If the answer is no, then they’re probably not the best fit. I have to actually like them as a person.”
6) Walk the walk.
“All the top talent are currently employed, so being able to showcase your organization, your internal brand, and what you’re achieving to the correct audience, and getting the messing right is so important.” You can’t attract the best talent without giving them something to believe in. However, “you can’t dictate culture, you have to drive it.”
To truly live the culture, you have to know what your core values are as a person, communicate them to your team, and get everyone on board with you. You can only promote certain types of behavior. From there, people will be more likely to adopt those behaviors, and in turn, self-select for the atmosphere and environment you’ve created.
About Michelle Joseph
Michelle Joseph is the Founder and CEO of PeopleFoundry Inc. Michelle’s main responsibilities as CEO include the strategic development of PeopleFoundry, operational planning, and continuously adapting to a national landscape of talent. Michelle holds a BA in Political Science with a minor in Psychology from the University of Dayton and received her Masters in Human Resources Management in 2008 from Cornell University. She is a mentor at 1871, the HR mentor at MATTER, a board member at Designation Labs, a contributor to the Taproot Foundation, and a member of the Young Executives Club of Chicago and the Economic Club of Chicago.
About Hyde Park Angels
Hyde Park Angels is transforming early-stage investing by taking a people first approach. The organization is the largest and most active angel group in the Midwest. With a membership of over 100 successful entrepreneurs, executives, and venture capitalists, the group provides critical strategic expertise to entrepreneurs and the entrepreneurial community. Nearly 40% of our members have founded a company, 88% are CEO’s, top executives or corporate board members, and 100% invest in startups. By leveraging the members’ deep and broad knowledge of multiple industries and financial capital, Hyde Park Angels has driven multiple exits and invested millions of dollars in over 40 portfolio companies that have created over hundreds of jobs in the Midwest since 2006.
About the Author
Alida Miranda-Wolff
Alida Miranda-Wolff is Associate Manager at Hyde Park Angels. Her role includes creating and executing marketing and communications strategies, planning and managing events, fostering and maintaining community and industry partnerships, and managing membership. Prior to joining Hyde Park Angels, Alida served as a manager, data analyst, and publication specialist at a multibillion dollar industrial supply corporation. She has led one of the most successful Kickstarter campaigns in Chicago history and worked with half a dozen startups in various marketing, content creation, and project management roles. Alida believes in creating valuable, spreadable multimedia content, and has done so as a freelance writer for several print and online publications.
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