Month: November 2023

Beginning a startup is always a risky and exciting business. Get it right, and you might just have a multi-million-dollar company in its infancy. Get it wrong, and you’ll waste your time and money, not to mention how much it can hurt your ego. It’s important to keep in mind that most startups end up failing. It’s equally important to recognize the characteristics of the most successful startups so that you can emulate them. One of the most important ones? Hiring the right kind of roles. If you’re ready to launch your startup, here are the roles that you should be looking to fill as soon as possible.

The Founder/CEO

The founder/CEO of the company is the visionary. They can see beyond tomorrow—they know what the overall goals are and how to get there. They’re also an incredible leader, able to lead a brand-new team to success, even through the more challenging moments. As the founder, it might be your job to be the CEO, which requires a lot of work. You’ll be the leader responsible for pushing the company forward and finding innovative ways to deliver excellence to customers and clients.

Remember that the company’s founder doesn’t necessarily have to be the CEO. In some cases, hiring a CEO works better. This is especially true if the founder has other businesses or responsibilities!

The IT Know-it-all

Technology is an integral part of any company, and as a startup, you must invest in good IT to stand any chance of beating the competition in this tech-focused world. Having an IT know-it-all on your side will help tremendously. Their responsibilities will include maintaining hardware and software, protecting against cyber-attacks, and creating new software systems/applications.

IT requires a person with a very particular skill set. Often, IT people come with a high price tag—their salary is much higher than other roles. If you don’t have the budget for an in-house IT department, there’s always the option of outsourcing it. In this case, it’s crucial to find a high-quality IT service provider with a lot of IT experience. Choosing the best Los Angeles managed service provider means identifying your specific tech needs, ensuring a good culture fit, and ensuring the provider offers a flexible, tailored plan for your startup.

The Marketing Executive

Many startups make the mistake of assuming that they can handle the marketing all by themselves—don’t be one of them. The marketing executive provides a crucial service to the effectiveness of the startup. In essence, they’re responsible for getting the product/service into the minds and hands of customers.

The marketing executive will be responsible for managing the marketing of the company (and the company’s products/services). They should have a lot of experience in doing this, understanding the different markets and how to work within a budget. They’ll also know how to conduct effective marketing research to boost the efforts of the marketing campaigns.

The Efficient Leader

While the CEO is the overall boss, they often won’t be on the ground floor. Instead, that should be left up to a good leader. Hiring an effective manager means ensuring that all areas of the business run efficiently. You’ll be able to rely on this person to help make sure that all business goals get met each day, whether that’s hiring the next best employee or handling daily production.

The Accountant

Does an early startup really need an accountant? Maybe not at first, but accountants provide essential accounting and auditing services that all businesses need. They’ll maintain financial records, ensure that the proper taxes are paid, organize payroll, and more. It’s not something that the CEO will want to be spending their time on! Outsourcing might be a good idea at first, but having an in-house accountant can make things run a lot smoother.

The Salesperson

You might think the marketing executive and the salesperson are almost the same person, but that’s where you’d be wrong. On the one hand, marketers focus on targeting specific customer bases, conducting general research, and building a brand. On the other, you have the salesperson, who deals directly with potential clients and customers.

Having a good salesperson on your startup team can make a world of difference to your success. Their charisma and confidence will mean closing on leads, ensuring continuous growth. Plus, a talented salesperson will even drive more customer and client loyalty, as, for many of them, they’ll be the face of the company.

The Product Developer

Who’s going to develop the products/services for the company? Even if you, as the founder, had an excellent idea initially, you still need to make sure your products keep coming and stay up to date with the needs of the market. For this, a talented product developer is necessary. Their skill set should include coding, creativity, and persistence, as they won’t only be responsible for creating the product but also testing it and ironing out any mistakes. The product developer is one of those hires that will cost you a little more, but their talents are more than worth it (and necessary).

Is Outsourcing Worth it?

In the early days of running a startup, you might not be able to hire a salesperson, product developer, or marketing executive. That’s okay—a lot of startups are in the same boat as you! In this case, you might consider outsourcing.

Outsourcing specific roles can be a great way to ensure that you get the benefit of having an expert without having to pay a full-time employee. Many businesses find excellence in outsourced services. You just need to make sure the provider you choose, whether it’s for IT, accounting, or marketing, aligns with your startup goals.

The Bottom Line

While you might not have the funds to hire every single role on this list in the early days, you should keep in mind just how effective hiring these roles can be. Over time, you can build a team that delivers excellent results day in and day out. For that to work, you need a diverse group that includes people with specific strengths. The salesperson won’t have the same talents as the accountant, and that’s okay!

No matter how much you might love your business and how much you might want to do well with it and it in, the fact is, it’s going to cost money. Even the smallest of businesses will take some capital to get started, which can be hard to manage, especially if you’re not prepared for it.

 

Whether or not your business costs come as a surprise, it’s a good idea to minimize them as much as possible and ensure you’re only paying what you need. So, of course, you won’t want to do any outsourcing, will you? That just costs money, and that’s potentially money you don’t have (or that you feel could be put to better use elsewhere). That’s what a lot of business owners might think, but the reality is that outsourcing can be the best thing for even the most budget-conscious of business owners. Read on to find out just why successful businesses outsource some processes, and you might decide it’s the right thing for you too.

 

Cost-Saving

The first thing that most business owners will think about when they’re considering outsourcing is the cost – it’s not something you can do for free. They might assume that it would be too expensive, and they’ll try to do the work themselves, or they might think it would be better to hire someone to work for them to get the work done. In some cases, that will be the right thing to do, but in others, it’s actually a cost-saving measure to outsource.

 

If you were going to hire a chief marketing officer (CMO) for your business, how much would that cost you to have them around full-time? What about when there was no need for a new campaign? You’d still have to pay them even if there was no work for them to do. Fractional CMO services help build your brand in just the same way, but you only have to pay for the work that’s done, saving you money overall.

 

Outsourcing can also save you money if you were intending to do the work yourself; rather than having to take time away from the rest of your business to work on your marketing, you can stay focused on that (and bring in more money) while your marketing is dealt with by an expert.

 

Access To Expert Knowledge

Speaking of experts, that’s exactly what and who you’ll get when you outsource any tasks in business – as long as you shop around to find the ideal third parties to work with, of course. You might have some in-house staff who are great at their jobs, but that doesn’t mean they’re great at all the jobs that need doing in business (of which you’ll find there are many), and asking them to do things they’re not qualified to do or have much understanding of is a recipe for disaster, and on top of that, they’ll have a lot less job satisfaction as they’ll feel they’re never able to do what you want.

 

That’s yet another reason why outsourcing is a good idea. When you find the right people to work with, you’ll have access to exactly the specialist knowledge your business needs to move forward, whether that’s in marketing, IT, finance, or anything else. Plus, your team can get on with the work you hired them to do – the work they feel happy and confident to do – and you’ll find they’re a lot more productive and loyal as a result.

 

Focus On What Matters

Maybe you don’t have a team just yet because your business is young or small, or you just prefer to work alone. In that case, all the tasks in that business will fall to you, whether you have the skill to do them or not. That’s not the only issue; they’ll fall to you whether you have the time to do them or not as well.

 

That’s the real problem when you’re a small business with no one to turn to; all your time as a business owner will be taken up by doing the essential but time-consuming tasks that come with running a business (like marketing and accounts, for example), leaving you will little time left to actually do whatever it is you’re meant to do to make money. That will feel frustrating, but if you don’t do something about it, it’ll feel even worse; it might feel as though you’ve lost control and can’t run the business anymore.

 

When you outsource some or even all of these tasks, you’ll find you have a lot more time to focus on what matters and work on the core of your business. That means you’ll make more money and have happier customers, and the important but time-consuming things no longer have to be on your mind.

 

Access To New Technology

As we’ve said, there’s a lot that goes into running a business. There’s a lot you need to know about – the best and most successful business owners are those who are always up to date with new ideas and regulations linked to their industry, so it’s wise to keep your finger on the pulse of whatever you’re working on to ensure you’re doing things in the right way.

 

Of course, just learning about how to stay up to date won’t cost you any money (although it will still cost you time), but then you’ll have to do whatever it takes to ensure your business is working to those new standards. That will generally cost money, especially if you have to buy new equipment and install new technology to make it happen. So why not outsource instead? When you outsource to professionals, they’ll already have access to the latest tech and software, and they’ll know how to use it. That means you’ll save money because you won’t have to buy it, and you’ll save time because you won’t have to learn what it does – the cost of outsourcing will quickly pay for itself when you think about what you’ve saved.