Team Management

Questions some people ask themselves when deciding on who should be involved if anyone in the setup and startup of their business:

• So, why does anyone need a team?
• Isn’t it much cheaper and thus more cost effective to start a business alone?
• If I hire someone I will have to pay for them and I don’t have much money as it is?
• If I don’t involve anyone else in my business is it more likely to succeed?
• Can my business be taken away from me if I allow others in at the beginning?
• I’m a perfectionist, nobody can do what I do as well as I can do it, so why hire someone and be let down?
• I’ve never managed anyone before, how will I manage to start a business and manage people at the same time?
• I know one of my weaknesses is trusting people, can I really trust someone I don’t know to do right by my business?

The list goes on and on, there are many reasons why a business will not hire someone to work in their business. This is one of the reasons why many startups fail at the beginning of there journey. Some businesses need teams to develop and provide the kind of customer service required in order to compete and keep customers coming back for more. It can be very easy to become overwhelmed and thus appear unprofessional or unable to cope with the demands being set by returning customers.

We all have our fears and insecurities and like becoming a parent or embarking on a new relationship, those fears and insecurities will come to the surface. When they do, we need to be ready to face our demons because if the business doesn’t expose or test our weaknesses, our customers will! The demand for what we do will be there, the question is can we meet it consistently and alone without the support additional staff members?!

A great acid test would be to create an imaginary scenario where we are 5 years down the line and the business is thriving. If we are the only person how would we cope?! If that seems to far ahead and we have made an agreement with ourselves that we would have hired several staff members, we can alter the time line to six months but keep the customer count the same. How would we cope in that situation?!

These are common risk scenarios we explore when devising an optimum team for our business. Similar to the Cashflow forecast which attempts to produce a timeline of our income and expenditure over a period of a year or 3-5 years. Customer and Sales management poses similar questions as to how we will cope, not only if we have an overwhelming amount of customers but also if we don’t have many at all. Hiring staff when you don’t have the work can be equally as crippling. However, you can hire staff on a temporary seasonal basis as well as on a zero hours contract.

There are different ways to manage work within an organisation. Having a source of constant supply of Agency or Temporary staff to help will benefit you with a buffer of manpower if and when you need it.

The management of your team is also an important aspect of keeping the face of your business looking pristine. If your staff (temporary included) are customer facing, then some degree of training will need to take place in order for you to keep your customer coming back or at least recommending you to other potential customers.

With the advent of new technology becoming smaller and smaller, you can now manage your business and employee needs right from the palm of your hand while busy being on the move. There is a new matrix style organisation, which has arisen, giving us the ability to communicate using various user friendly smart mobile phone apps and computer software which talk to each other seamlessly; meetings can be held on the fly from anywhere you can get a mobile signal and thus an internet connection. The future is mobile.

If you’d like to find out more about how to make your business and team more mobile then contact us now!