10 Building a Team
You may well have a loyal and enthusiastic customer base and big ambitions for the future, but there's a limit to how much you can continue to do on your own. Before you start trying to take over the world, you're going to have to build a team around you and a solid company culture. You're going to have to be sure that you have a solid base that you can build on and be confident that you can continue to keep your existing customers happy, even when you start wooing new ones.
Up until now you've probably done everything yourself, including the tasks that you don't enjoy quite as much. You've done most of the jobs in the business, from developing the product in the first place to making the tea at meetings. So the chances are, you end up spending most of your time working on tasks that don't create much value.
As your business grows, the demands on your time will become greater, and the key to your success will lie in figuring out what it is that your role in the business really is. Perhaps there is one area of the business that you most enjoy, say meeting with potential customers and telling them all about your concept. Or maybe you are most passionate when you are actively going out and selling your product, coming up with new ideas, or motivating your team. So if you want your company to grow, you're going to have to figure out how you can spend as much of your time as possible on the jobs that you most enjoy and that create the most value in your business. When you spend time on the part of your business that you are most passionate about, you do a great job of it and hopefully bring a lot of money into the business. This is the work with which you add the most value.
The key is to cut everything else out of your day: all of the menial tasks like answering the phone, sending out invoices and chasing up late payers, and the jobs you're not so good at. You can do that by employing a great team that you can delegate all of that work to, or by finding an outside company to do these tasks for you.
You will no doubt have to consider taking on the first members of your team, or building on the one you already have. This presents a whole range of challenges and the moment you take on your first employee, you take on a special set of responsibilities that you haven't yet had. Now you aren't merely responsible for your own career, it is down to you to keep your employee in work. The decisions you take as you grow the company will put their employment at risk. They are relying on you for their livelihood, their ability to pay the rent and support their family. Suddenly, things become a lot more serious.
Although employing people comes with responsibilities, it feels pretty amazing to start creating a team of people who can begin growing the company. Everyone who joins the team will be bringing their own set of experiences and ideas, sometimes very different to your own. The people you bring into your team are likely to be the ones interacting with your customers, which means it is crucial that you attract the right people to work with you. Their ability and enthusiasm for the job will have a huge effect on your business.
Attracting the Right People
So there's a fair chance that you will need to take on someone with experience to help you develop the company. There's a lot of sense in discovering the areas of your business that you're not good at, maybe finance or product development, and taking on someone who is a lot better than you to do those jobs.
In a conventional company when you want to recruit someone, you usually put an advert about it in the local newspaper or perhaps online. You try to find the person who is best qualified to do the job.
Although it is obviously important to take on employees who are qualified to do the jobs you need to get done, I don't think that is the only aspect to consider. You have to find someone who is going to fit your company, someone who gets what you're all about and buys into the bigger picture of where you are trying to take the business.
The people you need to attract to your team will depend on your type of business, the work that you are hoping to delegate and how much you can afford to pay for the first members of your team.
You might well consider taking on someone part-time to help out with some of the tasks that are eating up so much of your own time, like admin and finance. Or, if you don't have a lot of money available to employ people, you could look into taking on an intern.
Internships are commonplace in the design, fashion and music industries. Youngsters who are just getting started in the industry can take up an internship as a kind of apprenticeship, giving them the opportunity to learn and develop their skills. Because they don't have a great deal of experience, they will usually start an internship unpaid, with only their expenses being covered by the company. As they progress, the aim is that the company will get to a position of being able to offer them a full-time paid position.
At SuperJam we often have recent graduates applying to come and work with us. Currently we have a couple of design interns and one who is working on sales and marketing. They were all attracted to work with us after reading a job description on the site Enternships.com, which is a great place to find enterprising young interns to join your company. The interns gain a great deal of experience and have the opportunity to work in an entrepreneurial and fun company. As their host, the company benefits from their enthusiasm, ideas and the work they produce.
When I have been recruiting people for our company, I look at all of the people who are most passionate about SuperJam. The people who write about us on their blogs, tell all their friends about us, send in suggestions of new stores that we should be selling the products to and volunteer to help set up tea parties in their communities.
I'd go as far as to say that they are the people who love the brand. Some of them love it almost as much as I do. They're exactly the kind of people who should be working with me. Who better to sell your product than someone who buys it themselves and really believes in it?
SuperJam's Recruits
By finding people who are super passionate about our brand, I've managed to build a team who are really motivated and who love the work SuperJam does. They're a group of people who love jam, really enjoy telling people about our brand and get a lot of satisfaction from coming along to the tea parties, feeling that they are part of a business that has meaning.
About half a dozen people who work at SuperJam travel around supermarket stores, music festivals, food fairs and other big events, handing out samples and telling people about the products. They all do an amazing job of it. Not because they've had any experience of this kind of work before, but because they really care about SuperJam. In their spare time they help out at the tea parties and they are always on the look-out for more little shops that we should be selling to.
Everyone who works at SuperJam is encouraged to post their ideas or news onto the Facebook page, Twitter and blog to share with everyone else. They might talk about about how much fun they're having serving scones at a music festival or about a celebrity who has stopped by the camper van to say hi.
I'm sure you can imagine the value in fostering a sense of community and a sense that everyone in the company is connected. When everyone is connected in a company and knows where the business is trying to go, it becomes really easy to manage them. In fact, because everyone at SuperJam is so motivated about the work they're doing and understands what the brand is all about, it is really easy to let them more or less manage their own work.
Flexible Working
Some of the SuperJam team are musicians, some are artists and quite a few of them are students. They have lots of other exciting things going on in their lives aside from working with me and I have to embrace that. I want SuperJam to be a super flexible place to work, where people are not being micro-managed, somewhere without heaps of bureaucracy or procedures. I just want the customer to be happy and I figure that if the job in hand gets done, everyone is happy.
So how do I manage everyone? Well, in a lot of ways I'd say that everyone manages themselves. I don't dictate what work anyone does, what hours they work, how they do it. I want them to be independent, to come up with their own ideas and search out opportunities for themselves and the company.
We have a big Google calendar that everyone has access to, where they can pick what work to do and tell everyone what they're up to. Super simple. Obviously, if I were employing more people we'd use something more sophisticated. But it does the trick: I can post what stores we need to visit or where samples need to be handed out. One of the team might hear about a food fair that they think we should go to and can post it up there. They then collaborate with a couple of the other people to figure out what days they're going to work, how they're going to get there, how they're going to set everything up. If, for instance, someone can't work a particular day, they can communicate with some of the other team members and get one of them to visit the store in their place.
It probably sounds like chaos if you're used to working in a company where it is someone's job to manage a rota. But I think this is what my generation want their workplace to look like: they want to be able to manage their own time, spending time outside of work on the things that are important to them as well as working for the company they love when they wish to.
Although I'm sure you'll be able to find a great team of passionate people who love your products and do a great job of keeping your customers happy, there might be some jobs that you can't hire someone to do. Perhaps there are aspects of your business that aren't really core to what you do and you should think about finding a reliable external company to take care of them for you.
Outsourcing
Outsourcing can be something of a dirty word. It probably conjures up images of vast call centres in India filled with enthusiastic young operatives cold calling British house-wives, interrupting Eastenders to try to sell them mobile phone contracts.
However, in reality outsourcing doesn't usually mean sending work overseas. Most of the time it is about companies finding someone else to do all of the tasks that aren't central to their business.
You would be amazed at what you can outsource to companies that can probably do a better, cheaper and more efficient job than you could do yourself. As you would imagine, there are companies that will answer your phone calls; so long as the person they have picking up the phone knows all about your brand, this can work really well. They'll be able to answer questions from your customers, respond to complaints and turn down pesky sales calls.
Usually it makes a lot of sense to outsource your accounting and bookkeeping. If you find a good company to work with, they'll be able to send out invoices to your customers, keep track of all of your expenses and maybe even chase up the customers who haven't paid on time. They will also, of course, deal with all of your tax and prepare your accounts at the end of the year.
In the US, there is a company called Earth Class Mail that offers small businesses a secure service of having all of their mail opened, scanned and emailed to them as an a attachment. There's no need even to have a physical mailing address, as all of your mail is redirected to Earth Class Mail. This kind of service is ideal for entrepreneurs who travel a lot and also means that everything mailed to the company can be easily stored and accessed online. Although there isn't a similar service in the UK just yet, I've heard it won't be long before there is.
Of course, you might decide to outsource the manufacturing of your product or the delivery of your service, if this isn't a strong point of yours. You might feel that building a brand is where your passion lies, or in sales and marketing.
A massive range of businesses, from food brands like Innocent to technology companies like Apple and maybe even your local plumber, outsource their production or the delivery of their services. That's because they've decided that the job they're good at is developing products, finding customers and promoting their brand. It makes a lot of sense for them to find someone else to do the production, who will no doubt do a better or cheaper job than they could.
SuperJam's Manufacturing Partners
When you're looking for a manufacturing or service partner, there are all kinds of factors to consider. This isn't a relationship that you want to rush into; it could well be one of the most important decisions of your business career. If the partner turns out to not be as great as you had hoped, maybe delivering late or at a substandard quality, it could destroy your brand in no time.
You're going to need to see samples of other products it has produced and also have the company produce a test batch of your own product. If you're having another company deliver your service, perhaps consider giving it a trial run with a few of your customers and asking them for feedback.
In the case of working with a factory, you will want to visit it for yourself. Until you actually stand in the factory and see the machines and employees with your own eyes, you have no idea what the standards are, regardless of what the sales team tells you. For all you know, that sales team might turn out to be an intermediary as well.
Chinese Production
The pitfalls of setting up a relationship with a partner can be a particular problem when you are dealing with potential manufacturers in China or other low-cost countries. There will no doubt be concerns in your mind over the safety and conditions of the factory workers and the quality and integrity of the goods they produce.
Although all of the production of SuperJam takes place in the UK, we have relationships with great partners in other countries for the production of our branded aprons and homewares. I am sure that we would all love for everything we sell to be produced on our own shores, but the reality is that for some types of products it isn't easy to find a way of making that competitive.
You may well find yourself producing a product that is struggling to compete at its current price and you could be finding it difficult to make any decent margins. Locating a production partner overseas could reduce costs to a point where you're in a better position to offer a more competitive price, grow your business and end up creating a lot of well-paid jobs in product development and marketing in your community.
The internet has made the world a much smaller place and finding an overseas partner can be fairly straightforward and a lot less daunting than you might imagine. Sites like Alibaba.com list the thousands of manufacturers that are out there for every conceivable kind of product, from MP3 players to Halloween costumes and industrial freezers to syringes.
You can contact manufacturers of similar products to yours and send them some details about what you are looking for right away. From my experience, the companies in China are hungry for success and efficient beyond our usual expectations, sometimes responding to your enquiries within hours.
When you are dealing with overseas manufacturers there can be language and cultural barriers to overcome and both sides will have reservations about putting too much trust in someone from the other side of the world. I would suggest that you should do everything you can to make your requirements extremely clear. Always send a sample or prototype of what you are looking for them to produce and ask them to replicate it and send their version back to you.
Whether your manufacturing partner is in the UK or elsewhere, over time you will build a relationship with them. You'll become more and more trusting of one another and hopefully will be able to work closely together to develop new products and improve what you are offering to your customers.
Crowdsourcing
Some times there are jobs that are being done in your company that could be done by your customers or by the public. It probably sounds a bit strange, but what is sometimes called ‘crowdsourcing’ is really transforming whole industries. If you think about the music industry, it is traditionally someone's job to find new talent and pick which acts should get signed to a record label. But now people like Simon Cowell, with shows such as the The X Factor, have turned that on its head. The public finds the new acts by voting for the ones they think should make it. Of course, some times the acts they pick don't set the world on fire, but on the whole the public chooses the act that is most likely to have commercial success.
I love the idea that we can let the people who buy our products, the public, to get involved in the company and collaborate with one another to help SuperJam grow. We can ask them for ideas for new products or suggestions of new stores that we could be supplying to.
An idea that I am really excited about is letting consumers organize tea parties completely independently of SuperJam. We can let them collaborate with one another on Facebook, Twitter and our website and once they have found a venue, elderly people from their local community and a few people to help out at the party, we will give them a grant, something like £100, to host the party. They'll be encouraged to upload videos of the event onto the web, take lots of pictures and promote it on our Facebook page.
You can probably imagine how many tea parties we could run if we make it really easy for the people who love SuperJam and who are passionate about the tea parties idea to host their own parties in their own communities. We have had about 50 events like this so far and once we figure out exactly how to put it all together, we could have hundreds, probably thousands of events happening all over the country, with tens of thousands of elderly people coming along and having a fun time.
I think that is pretty amazing. By getting the people who love SuperJam to help us out with information about stores we should be supplying, ideas for new products or even giving their time in helping to organize tea parties, we actually get a lot of work done that otherwise we'd need to employ someone to do.
Whether you bring enthusiastic new talent into your business, find outside companies to take over some of your workload or encourage your customers to help you grow your business, you'll find that having a strong team around you puts you in a great position to start developing your business and taking advantage of all of the new ideas that present themselves.