The Serial Entrepreneurs present — 8 Proven Guidelines to Co-Found Your Team

More than 16 serial entrepreneurs shared with us how they build successful teams

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The Serial Entrepreneurs

6 min readDec 2, 2015

Amazing businesses are rarely build by just one person. Starting a company requires a lot of work to be done in a short-time frame because of the competitive landscape. This means that when you’re starting out you need to have a team around you to build your business with. In this article we discuss 8 proven guidelines of how to co-found your team based on interviews with more than 16 successful serial entrepreneurs — all of which have founded and sold multiple multi-million businesses.

We’ve sat down with 16+ serial entrepreneurs and asked them questions about different aspects of their business. What we’ve learned is something epic; that everyone has a different story to tell about how they became successful and each had their own unique journey, yet we started to see that there were key elements that they all had in common. In this article we’ll discuss the common patterns on how to co-found your team. We’ve learned that there are three reasons for building a team.

The first reason is that building a team allows you to refine your pitch and you can bounce off ideas with them. Having intelligent people around gives you a way to validate your thoughts and through this method you will gain a deeper understanding. The second reason is that if you cannot sell your ideas to potential co-founders or early team members, you can not sell these ideas to investors or customers either. Lastly, having support and having a feeling of “not being in this alone” is commonly mentioned. Starting a venture comes with hard and stressful times. Having support during these teams is key according to the serial entrepreneurs that we’ve interviewed.

Proven Steps To Building A Team

The steps to building a team seem relatively straightforward, but are powerful.

Step 1. Understand your own strengths and weaknesses
Step 2. Find people to balance your skillset with and who enjoy working with

Serial entrepreneurs first make sure that they understand their own strengths and weaknesses. After knowing what they are good at and what skills are needed in the team — they go and look for these skills based on the 8 guidelines presented below.

Guideline 1. ONLY work with people who you have worked with before and get on with — or with people from your existing venture networks. NO new people!

Many of the serial entrepreneurs we’ve interviewed commented on the importance of first finding out how it is to work with this particular person. But what if you’ve never worked with a particular person that you’d like to start a business with? Some serial entrepreneurs have a great solution for this. They try and do a few mini-projects together first to see how well they get on, before making a big commitment.

Guideline 2. Find people that balance your skillset but have SIMILAR values

The serial entrepreneurs we interviewed commented on the importance of finding people that balance your skillset with similar values.

“You should ideally look for people who have complementary expertise, but share similar values”
- Ashley Friedlein, founder of Econsultancy founder and successful author

Finding people that can potentially balance your skillset is not the full challenge. The key here is to make sure you find people that can balance your skillset but at the same time share your values. Sharing values is absolute key.

Guy Westlake (Co-founder & CEO at Lavanda) mentioned to us that “the initial team will set the tone for the company culture that is to follow, and that will help recruit and retain talent further down the line.” Therefore, finding people who share similar values is absolutely key.

Guideline 3. Keep eye open on talent from the beginning

Serial entrepreneurs stress the importance of always looking for great colleagues. It seems that this notion of always looking for talent is part of their view of the world. Particularly the ones who share similar values but have complementary expertise (as discussed in Guideline 2).

Guideline 4. NEVER start a business with friends

This guideline is pretty clear. Serial entrepreneurs strongly emphasized the importance of never starting a business with friends. No exceptions to this rule.

Guideline 5. If you don’t have a required skill, don’t be the bottleneck: Hire that skill

Don’t let yourself (as a founder) be the bottleneck to growth. Make sure you are working around your own weaknesses. For example, if you’re not a developer and you need development resources it requires you to hire those first. Only hire those skills that are essential. It’s important to manage cash burn and motivate with equity/options.

Guideline 6. When scalable, repeatable growth is there: HIRE

The serial entrepreneurs we interviewed shared that when scalable, repeatable growth or revenue starts to show it’s important to hire. According to Andy McCloughlin (Co-founder Huddle and angel investor) the issue is that the longer you wait with hiring the more restricted your business will become. As a result hiring should be done as soon as the hiring decision makes sense for the business.

When we interviewed Matt Wheeler (CEO of Driftrock and founder of Omio) he mentioned that one of his big regrets was not hiring commercial talent quick enough for one of his ventures. He told us that he opted for a freelancers rather than a hiring a full-time commercial rockstar. He mentioned that this particular business had scalable, repeatable growth and having an excellent full-time employer would have given the business a great kickstart. He emphasized to us that as soon as you have anything resembling a scalable, repeatable growth engine, you should double down on hires in order to scale fast.

Guideline 7. Outsource administrative work

It’s important to hire people to manage administrative, accountancy and law work as quickly as possible and at all stages. Therefore, work with virtual PA’s, accountants and accounts lawyers that are willing to work on thin budgets.

“Once the admin starts piling up, hire an office manager/finance manager you trust. These hires are crucial for removing tasks that don’t add value to the growth of the business, but just need doing.”
- Matt Wheeler, founder of Omio, Forward Labs, and founder/CEO of Driftrock

Guideline 8. ALWAYS have a shareholder agreement in place from the beginning

This one sounds basic, but is actually something quite a lot of entrepreneurs forget. It’s important to always have a shareholder agreement in place. Even if some specifics are not worked out in full detail, it’s important to get the big picture items in writing.

“Always ensure you have a well-thought out shareholders agreement in place from day 1, so everyone knows where they stand, especially if a member of the team decides to exit one day.”
- Philip Wilkinson, co-founder Shopgenie, Genieventures, Keynoir, and Kopi

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Our mission is to bring ‘actionable advice’ from stories, decision patterns, and golden nuggets in expertise from serial entrepreneurs to aspiring entrepreneurs.

Who Are ‘The Serial Entrepreneurs’?

The Serial Entrepreneurs are a group of individuals that we work with. Each of them has built and sold at least one multi-million pound business and now onto their second, or third.