#Growing Your Team
Growing a team comes with a huge set of challenges. From making sure you maintain the right kind of culture to not losing control over what’s happening in your company, there’s a lot to get right. Those challenges also vary a lot from case to case. This lesson looks at four entrepeneurs, how they faced their own challenges and how they managed to build the team they needed.
##Understanding the Importance of Roles
“We only hire people we like. Personality supercedes skill sets.”
-Philip Walton, Co-founder of BRCK
For Philip Walton’s company BRCK, the most important aspect of growing their team was getting just the right people to fit the roles they envisioned for their company. This meant seeking out entrepreneurs to function as managers within the company. Walton knew that traditional managers would have a difficult time understanding the logic behind the company’s strategy and that this would introduce potential conflict.
Walsh knew that while management style could be taught, it was much more difficult to teach personality and ways of thinking. So, he focused on hiring the right personalities and mindsets instead of a standard manager’s skill set.
Kahitouo Hien, the Founder and CEO of FasoPro, faced a similar problem of how to keep the core of his team together while expanding. His company grows, harvests, and sells caterpillars in Burkina Faso, so his initial thought was to hire caterpillar harvesters to work for him. But that backfired because and managing rural caterpillar harvesters required deep knowledge of their culture and time with them to build a strong relationship.
“In Africa it’s always the same - when you deal with rural people and you are from the town, they always expect to give them something back. If you don’t have someone who is well integrated in these rural communities, it will be difficult for you to succeed because every person will be looking for you to pay for everything.”
-Kahitouo Hien, Founder and CEO of FasoPro, Africa Prize shortlist
So simply growing and hiring new people wasn’t the answer. Instead, Hien hired the president of the local co-op and made her responsible for sub-contracting the harvesters solved those problems. The harvesters already had a good relationship with the local president, so they were better able to manage all of the harvesters. Additionally, it kept Hien’s core team small and easily manageable. So it wasn’t just about hiring, it was about understanding people’s roles and how to hire for those roles.
The lessons taken here touch on what other entrepreneurs have learned: that growing in the simple sense isn’t always the answer. There’s more than one way to grow.
##There’s More than One Way to Grow
“[if you can’t grow the team] you get into outsourcing. Get another service provider, vet them, or get someone’s friend to bring them to Nairobi, tell them what you need, get them to do it as a 3rd party but report every 3 weeks, we will pay you.”
-Brain Bett, Co-founder of Illuminum Greenhouses
When expanding his greenhouse business, Bett found that using freelancers instead of hiring allowed him to be flexible in his growth. That’s because he could quickly bring them on to confirm that there was enough of a market in a given area. Then, once he’s certain there’s enough demand there he hires his full time staff to take over. The freelancers may seem expensive based on their rates, but working with them allows Brian to take revenue in new markets without up-front costs. He only grows full time staff only when the revenue streams to support them are established. This way, Illuminum Greenhouses supports the fastest growing business units with the biggest teams.
The idea here is that there’s more than one way to grow. You can grow in terms of revenue, units produced or sold, you can grow geographically, or you can expand your product lines. Growing your team can focus on any of these places.
Bett knew that growing geographically required growing his team in a geographical way.
Naresh Mehta, CEO of Powertechnics, figured out that to grow in production volume and quality, simply hiring more people wasn’t the answer.
“You’ll find a lot of answers inside yourself when you do your time and motion studies for the product.”
-Naresh Mehta, CEO of Powertechnics
Mehta instead focused on working with his lower level production staff to empower them to help improve their own processes. He implemented time and motion studies to better understand how things function and to empower his staff to improve their own processes. This often eliminated the need to hire more people. In addition, when the benefits of these improvement trickled down to those same staff members, it increased loyalty, work satisfaction, and team coherence.
“Get the people involved in developing the process for the department, at the end of the day volume and revenue increases, there’s a benefit to the staff, when the revenue trickles down it’s a closed loop.”
-Naresh Mehta, CEO of Powertechnics
##Growing Case by Case
Each of these examples shows how growing depends enormously on how you want to grow and why. Before beginning to hire, these entrepreneurs found that asking themselves what the end goal was helped guide their actions to find the best way to grow in the way they really needed to.
Can you relate to the stories we told here? How is your experience different? We’d love to hear from you. Your questions and comments are what will help us make better lessons in the future.