Secrets of building a great small business team

Helen Sheplyakova
HireRush
Published in
5 min readJul 8, 2017

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An effective team that rarely experienced coordination and communication difficulties is one of the keys to company’s success. However, finding a perfect segment for a well-functioning chain is a challenge for each business owner or recruiter.

A large segment of success regarding this topic depends not just on the payment you offer and the amount of work you demand to get done in return. The atmosphere of the company, its general ethics, a positive and encouraging atmosphere in the office and the feeling of being valued are the things that attract great professionals to businesses and make them strive, which benefits the company in general, the individuals working for it and its owner. Your ability to consider the personalities of different staff members, understand them and recruit people that aren’t just experts in their field, but who’re also capable of functioning successfully in that given team, matters a lot as well.

If you manage to build a great team for your business and sustain its productivity, you will make your company prone to success. Thus, let’s discover what may help you achieve the goal of gathering a dream squad for your small business.

Tips to build a great small business team

1. Look for great experts

Apart from sharing the goals and values of your company, people need to be qualified to perform the required tasks to be able to join your business team. The kinds of experts you’ll look for will obviously depend on your field of specialization.

However, there’s a high chance that you’ll need a good mix of everything: main staff performing the tasks the company was created for (for instance, hairdressers and makeup artists for a beauty salon or programmers for an online-based start-up development), marketers to promote your business, expose it to the target audience and gain customers, staff managers, administrative personnel and lawyers to ensure legal support. It may happen that some individuals will combine a couple of roles or that you will reach out to freelancers as certain issues emerge (like accountants, tax preparers or office cleaning companies).

The key to finding workers for a great small business team is to look for professionals who’re more skilled than you are and letting the first few workers — the main members of the staff — help you with the admission of other experts for the team. That’s how you can achieve mutual understanding and coherence within the team at an early stage of company’s existence. In order to cope with the finances, start-up owners may have to look for versatile professionals who hold expertise in different areas, related to the company’s operation.

2. Hire passionate individuals, but don’t get discouraged by weaknesses

Only people, who love their job and share the core values of your business, will help you make your business operate at its best and reach success. Make sure that your workers are all passionate about the common task and will make every effort to achieve the set goals. They should care, but not just come to work to last through the working hours and receive the salary.

Furthermore, as a boss, you need to acknowledge the fact that there is no such thing as a perfect worker or business team. Each staff member has his own strengths, which are accompanied by certain flaws and weaknesses. Being aware of that, you need to hire different people, who can balance out each other’s weaknesses, fill in each other’s skill gaps and create a hard-working passionate small business team.

3. Don’t hire unless you have a reason

Some businessmen feel the need to expand at the expense of additional workers once their company starts gaining momentum and bringing substantial profit. It’s a tempting thing to do, as the more workers a business has, the more reputable it appears and the more orders (as it might seem) it will undertake.

However, hiring an extra employee or two has to have a greater purpose that that. As a smart business owner willing to build and sustain a great, hardworking team you should only hire when the amount of work your company has to do surpasses the amount of work your current team is able to perform. Or, if your company lacks a narrowly expertized professional and that negatively reflects on the quality of products/services you produce.

You need to make sure that you have enough work for a new professional and that the money you’ll spend on his salary will be replenished by the profit increase, caused by the effort of that newly hired individual. Otherwise, there’s no point in introducing an extra player into a business team.

4. ‘Shop’ for professionals you can afford

As a business owner, you will want to hire the best people for your team. At the same time, you won’t be able to afford the top pros right away. Thus, don’t even try to allure the candidates who’re used to higher salaries by future benefits and salary raises: if the person isn’t satisfied with his role in a company or the pay, he won’t do his best for your business.

Most likely, he will continue looking for a better position and leave you quite soon. So, hire professionals you may afford and encourage them to improve for their own sake and the future of the company.

5. Create a friendly environment

In order to become a great business team, you workers need to feel comfortable when working with each other and communicating with a boss.

Surely, it’s not as easy to do if you’re running a firm of cvil rights lawyers or similar office professionals. But, if the kind and the structure of your business allows, aim for personal interactions and friendship building, as mutual encouragement and friendly atmosphere without the boundaries made of formalities are the factors that stimulate the performance of every small business team and turn it into a unified, coordinated organism.

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Helen Sheplyakova
HireRush

Blogger, independent writer, home improvement, fashion and beauty, small business development, energy efficiency and money saving enthusiast.