SARAH LANDRUM
When your business is just getting off the ground, it’s often just you and your partners burning both the midnight oil and the candle at both ends. Once you’re going somewhere, it can be a great learning experience to handle all components of business operations — but eventually, you’re going to need help.
As your startup gets bigger and you start to bring on team members, it’s important to think about not only the kind of person you’re hiring, but also the role they’ll play in your growing business. You may think that with increasing interest in your product or service, you’ll need to hire more and more salespeople, but salespeople don’t grow businesses alone.
You’ll need a support system built on highly specialized expertise that you may only get through hiring outside professionals.
Related: 7 Ways to Keep Your Best Employees
Here are five people with the skills you need to help you grow your business:
1. PR/Marketing
The time comes when you can’t rely on word of mouth alone to market your business. You also can’t depend on the banner ads or email blasts you’ve been doing yourself, on top of everything else you have to do.
You’ll likely need marketing help, especially if you’re a consumer-facing company trying to grow your brand. A marketing professional will not only have the skills to carry out your marketing plan, but they will also have the know-how to develop a marketing strategy that looks at the long term.
Depending on what your business does, it may be helpful to hire a press or public relations professional. Companies looking to increase their standing in their industries or expose themselves to new potential partners and clients will likely want to get their name out to news outlets, trade publications and conferences — all of which are in a PR rep’s rolodex. Finding a marketing professional specific to your industry will increase your exposure immensely, and they’ll be able to find you opportunities in places you never thought to look.
2. Payroll/Human Resources
When it was just one or two of you, handling payroll and any other human resources tasks was likely no big deal. However, as your business grows, so will the responsibility when it comes to background checks, tax forms, payroll and benefits.
Take all of that off your plate, and avoid a mutiny over late paychecks, by hiring someone to do HR or payroll for you. These days, you can outsource human resources and payroll easily — saving you time and worry about employee procedures being done right, like employee onboarding, benefits, taxes and payroll.
3. Maintenance
Sure, you can break out the vacuum cleaner or the disinfecting spray every once in awhile, and you may even be pretty handy with a screwdriver. When it comes to the big aspects of your business, however, you probably shouldn’t be handling maintenance yourself.
Especially for retailers or other businesses with storefronts, maintaining them can be a big job. Hire an outside company to do any big work on the outside of your building. Things like brick cleaning, concrete restoration, and window repair should be left to the professionals.
4. IT/ Tech Professionals
Being computer literate these days is a necessity, and the majority of startups wouldn’t even exist without a bit of computer knowledge. However, your small business will inevitably reach the point where even a tech savvy entrepreneur can’t solve a tech issue.
That’s when you bring in the IT professionals. When your team starts to grow, it’s important to have someone there to install new computers, set up the team’s emails and manage the centralization of certain information and data. They’ll have the skills to keep your tech up and running — so you don’t have to waste time hitting CTRL + ALT + DEL and crossing your fingers that it works.
5. CPA/Financial Accountant
Sometimes hiring an accountant goes along with hiring a human resources professional, but it doesn’t always. Small businesses and solo entrepreneurs can usually get away with using simplified versions of the accounting process in certain software systems.
Once your business does start to increase in size, though, your billing gets more expansive, and the books aren’t so easy to do yourself. As the owner of your startup or small business, you need to hire an accountant you trust and who will make sure you need to be involved in as little of the day-to-day invoicing and bookkeeping as possible.
Good accountants don’t come cheap, but the time you’ll save yourself, along with their know-how, is worth it.
We all want to be a Jack-of-All-Trades, especially when it comes to a small business or startup that’s close to our hearts. Even the best of us, however, eventually reach the tipping point between ‘Jack-of-All-Trades’ and ‘Master-of-None.’ When we do, it’s time to call in these rock-star specialists to help.
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