The last two posts on this blog was about hiring. And after a month, I am going to make yet another post on hiring. Why am I talking so much about hiring? In short because, it is probably the most tedious, time consuming and error prone thing a start-up entrepreneur will do.
Buying equipment is easy. You can read the reviews and if you buy from a reputed dealer it comes with a guarantee as well. So you don’t have to be scared of it breaking down. Besides, if you are not happy with the performance, you can sell or trade in your current equipment and buy new ones.
With employees you cannot do such thing. Of course, there is a probation period in which you can test out an employee. But I think it is often too late. A bad apple can spoil the whole team and even if you let go of a guy after the probation due to unsatisfactory performance, that is going to leave some negative sentiment among the remaining team. Even worse than that is the loss of time and money in dealing with it and finding replacements.
Therefore, we were careful in hiring. We wanted to be sure that we hired the right people. People who would thrive in a start-up environment. People who were not dependant on structure and GTD (get things done) people.
From the last post to today, I am again in the same scenario. Now I have a member in my team. Just signed up the second member and look forward to him joining us in about a months time. I am also hoping to finalize on the third member of my team this week itself.
There is no dearth of work, that’s the good news. And there is a steady flow of new projects coming in, which we are turning down at the moment, because we don’t have the people to deliver them. We are no longer interested in getting them done by out sourced teams. We want to take up work that can be handled in house and build a multi-skilled team.
If someone asks me what is the biggest challenge faced when starting a new business, the answer will no doubt be finding the right people.
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