Things to Consider while expanding your team
In our last post, we talked about how to go about building your team, the most important members of the team, and when to hire them. In this post, we will discuss the things that one should keep in mind while they are thinking about expanding their team. This goes for both the core team and beyond it.
Expanding your team is not an easy task at all. It is vital to have the best and the right people in your team for maximum efficiency and growth. A startup should be aware of the critical areas of its business. To maximize their growth, it is important to have an in-depth understanding of the strategy, product, research, operations, finances of the business.
We discussed the necessary head of departments you will need but you should keep in mind that you are not building a team for a startup that will get you through a couple of years. You should have the big picture in mind while expanding your team. Build your team with the entire organization’s structure in mind and consider the vision for your business.
There are four main departments that you absolutely need to have in your startup:
- Marketing and sales
- Product design and development
- Accounting and Finance
- Research and development
- IT and support
- Customer Service
These are the standard job functions across many industries so you do not need to think anything new. We aim to simply guide you through building the architecture of your business.
Also, keep in mind that you don’t need a team member to represent every possible function. We stand by the philosophy of ‘The Lean Startup’. Only you know the departments your startups would need with time. At different stages of your startup, you would require a different number of departments. In the beginning, you should have the departments which are required to build an MVP, a minimally viable product.
Is it best to hire or to outsource?
This is an important question the founders need to think about before hiring a new member of the team. At least during the early stages of your startup, it makes more sense to outsource since outsourcing means avoiding issues like sick pays, holidays, the stress of managing a team. But this is only for further expansion of your team and outsourcing the work of a core team is not recommended at all.
Venture Capital firms assess your team too
Even if the idea and execution are good so far, VC/PE firms want to know whether the team can handle the change with time. Thus, they seek out startups backed by teams that possess the potential to adapt to the changes. Another big red flag for an investment firm is whether there is a core team place or is there just a sole founder. This is mainly because one person cannot be the master of all trades and it is not humanly possible for them to build a whole company from the ground up, think of everything from finances, HR, product, marketing, etc alone. Another big possibility is burnout. This is another good reason to build a strong team.
