Fluid Resourcing for the Small Business

In principle, regardless of the size of your business, the jobs you create and maintain should add direct value to your business, otherwise they are a cost that you don’t want to maintain. It’s an even more important principle to abide to for SMEs because the strings attached to redundant, irrelevant jobs can be even more impactful. So can be the inability to hire and retain the right talent, in a timely manner. SMEs are even more impacted because of the financial implications that are borne out of poor human capital.

Large businesses have the resources to invest into curbing the effects of poor resourcing. Sometimes they are so well established that a couple of months of bad business does not impact them right away. However small businesses need to be more agile and really can’t afford the blow of poor resourcing.

Before I take it further with the more functional pieces, I want to expand on why you should care about resourcing your business. If you have a stable SME, whichever end of the small — medium spectrum you’re on, it’s likely that you have nailed it on what the market needs and is willing to pay for; you’ve also built a working model that is profitable. So why not take it further? You are likely going to be tied down in your small business if you don’t achieve getting the right people to support you to run your business as you work on growing it.

So how do we then create jobs that are relevant, that create real time value for our businesses?

First of all, allow me to clarify what value is. I refer to value alot in my writing. A job may create value through either one or two of the following attributes:

• Direct contribution to growing the revenue of the company: i.e. sales, marketing, new product development, and service delivery.
• Supporting the teams that are directly engaged in revenue creation by saving them time, creating an enabling environment: i.e. administration, finance and HR.

There are possibly more ways to expand on the ways jobs create value, but for the purpose of this conversation, I will stick to these two.

It’s very likely that as a company learns and pivots from one direction to the other, or simply as markets evolve, certain jobs cease to carry the value attributions they had to start with. It’s important, in this case, to be aware of this, and to take the required action to maintain relevance and value for the company.

A simple example that is relevant today is marketing. There was a time when marketing was all about ensuring product availability and visibility, simple product descriptions, and more. Today there is so much more to marketing. We have a generation of purchasers that is increasingly online, that buys into experiences, and the stories there off than the actual product.

Today even a small business needs to understand its users, where they are, what they are listening to, and watching, and what they will buy into before yielding into marketing. A simple way that a job may loose it’s value attribution would be in the event of failure to adapt to such changes and to continue to create monetary value for the company. Small businesses don’t have the time and resources to lose in this case.

How do you work around such a situation?

First of all you will need to be able to identify this need to shift. When you do, you will need to review the role of this position in the overall context of your business. In this process, you’ll want to be fluid in your thinking of how to fill the position(s): Is this something that one person can do, or should this be separated into more than one job? Is this something requiring a full-time placement, or will a part-time, flexible hire be more appropriate?

Following that you will hire for the position. The cost of hiring is growing: the time it takes to advertise, review, and interview applicants is considerable, and so are the costs associated. I don’t have a proposal for an improved process right now, but I do encourage spreading your wings when hiring, because it opens up to more talent and increases the likelihood of getting the right person.

Third, you should onboard and train. Most of us small businesses owners, do a poor job of onboarding and training staff. Onboarding and training get the new hire up to speed with your company operations, culture, vision and goals. If you are hiring junior talent, you should be intentional about training. Make sure you invest into in house training and extend other capacity building opportunities. Invite a friend who has expertise and know-how to spend a couple of hours training your staff on the most recent trends and technologies. Sign them up for professional training, and invite them to read about the subject matter they will be delivering on.

This all sounds like a ton of processes, time and work, and you are not mistaken, it is! So, as a business, you really need to gage whether you have the bandwidth to work through it.

As jobs become more and more specialised, your business also needs to recognise its capacity to manage functions. You can only manage what you understand. If you have little knowledge of accounting, for example, an alternative to managing the function internally is to outsource it to a company that offers there expertise. Accounting is one of the services that are increasingly made available as an outsourced function.

For the functions that you are not able to manage internally, outsourcing the service to a competent company or consultant is a worthwhile alternative. If your challenge is the financial capacity to hire a particular expertise, an alternative is to hire for the expertise part-time, where you manage internally but at a rate that you can afford.

The moral of this post is: it’s time we rethink work. The more we are able to adapt as businesses to incorporating talent, the more successful we can be. Human capital is essential to the growth and sustainability of a business. And there are a variety of recipes to consider when considering the management of talent. It’s important to focus on what you are good at as a team, build on that and source for what you are not good at, that is part and parcel of your business entity.

To the relief of some of my readers, HR is a service that you can now outsource. There are a couple of specialised service providers on the market already. Most of the processes mentioned above can be outsourced. I personally recommend Right Seat. If you have other service providers in mind to recommend to people in your geography do not hesitate to share here.

This article is part of series of articles that are meant to shift our thinking around jobs, and how they create value for businesses. The author hopes to expand on (1) opportunities that creating strong and effective teams can have on businesses, (2) ways that businesses that don’t have experience hiring and retaining talent can do so on a practical level, and (3) how to leverage the young and available talent.