John Babcock, a partner of Rustic Canyon (http://www.rusticcanyon.com/), gives three strategies to build a perfect business team. Recruiting is one of the most important and time-consuming aspects of a successful company.
- Focus a large portion of your energy on this task
- Bring your current team into the recruiting process
- Clear out any problem employees
After we fund entrepreneurs and they’ve got the capital to really go out and feel their team, I think startup CEOs are really surprised by how time-consuming that process is. And so I guess, these are the three things I’d tell entrepreneurs to do.
The first one is just to expect to work it hard. If your company is growing quickly and your team is growing, this could be 25% of your week, weekend and week out for months, for a year. And so, just expect recruiting to be a really important part of your day and it’s certainly going to be.
The second is to really involve your team in recruiting and that means both rewarding them for bringing people in, as well as, giving them the ability essentially to veto somebody and keep them out.
And the third part of building your team I’d say is to not hesitate to remove an employee who's a problem. It is a -- just a little -- just one bad person in a big group can really spoil the culture in a room and we’ve all been around it. And there’s always this fear of everybody is doing something important and, you know, if she leaves, we’ll have an empty seat and we won’t be able to do that.
I’ll tell you, empty seats aren’t as difficult as seats that are filled with a jerk. I’d really just encourage you to expect that recruiting and building a team is one of the really important jobs of a CEO. It takes real time. But it yields great dividends.