Is your business at the point where you’re spending hours on repetitive and scheduled daily tasks to keep the company running?
Build a Core Team Around your Founders
If so, it’s time to start hiring a core team of support players around your founding team. The goal of the founding team should continue to be progressive growth for the company’s clients, revenue, and profitability. When daily tasks derail the founding team from focusing on what they do best, I recommend looking to create support roles and hiring online workers to fill those tasks.
You don’t have to move directly into hiring people full time because it most likely won’t be affordable yet, but you must surround yourself with a strong support team to run the operations of the business.
My Experience with eCommetize
One month ago, we were about 6 months into building eCommetize and I realized we were starting to get stuck up in the daily cogs of the operations machine. We were sacrificing quality hours for tasks that others could easily perform instead of focusing on the growth initiatives of the company. Personally, it was driving me crazy.
It was at this time that my co-founder, Zack Schwartz, and I decided to write down the areas that we were spending too much time and start recruiting for the best workers. Because of our background hiring and training online workers at our first eCommerce business, Portlight, we were able to find intelligent and reliable online workers pretty quickly.
Learn to Hire Remote Workers
If you’re new to hiring remote workers, you can read my eBook on The 10 Most Common Mistakes of Outsourcing…and How You Can Avoid Them. The eBook was written for my company, FreeeUp, that specializes in the remote hiring industry. It walks you through how to recruit, interview, hire, train, and manage remote workers so that you aren’t stuck working in your business.
Find the Most Reliable
We identified the most time consuming roles and hired there first. We chose the most communicative and experienced workers to join our team and trained them on their given role. We provided them with clear expectations of how we wanted them to communicate and we established organized schedules so that we could always communicate with them.
We are nearing the end of a first batch of training on order fulfillment, product listing, inventory management, social media management, and lead generation research. If we didn’t make the choice to bring these core people onto our team, we would be drowning in the amount of work that our stores require and we wouldn’t be positioning ourselves for real growth once the eCommetize software has been finalized.
The Outcome
With this group of core operational team members, we are able to focus our energy on landing new customers, adding new suppliers, developing software, and building positive awareness about the brand and our services.
My Experience with FreeeUp
The same experience rings true for FreeeUp. FreeeUp is the hands on solutions to hiring remote workers online in the eCommerce industry. As a reflection of the service that we provide to our vast client network, we too employ an incredible team of remote workers that highly complement the core business model.
There is someone for almost everything and the team only continues to grow each day…
- Accounting and bookkeeping
- Lead generation
- Email marketing
- SEO
- Recruitment and interviewing
- Back link generation
- The list goes on and on…
I can’t imagine what the company would be without this core group of workers. They allow me and my co-founder, Nathan Hirsch, to stay hyper focused on the growth of the business. Nate focuses on new client acquisition, relationship building within the industry, and overall company structure while I focus on content, branding, website development, and digital marketing.
Surround Yourself with a Core Support Team
I can’t stress the importance of surrounding yourself with individuals who are more intelligent than you in specific areas of your business. If provide the right motivation, they will push your company forward while you lead the way. If you try to do everything by yourself, you will eventually burn out and find yourself as a doer…not an entrepreneur.
For more advice on the key steps to building your startup, join the ConnorGillivan.com community and receive weekly updates on my life as an entrepreneur and my philosophies on startups.
