3 Specialists You’ll Need To Hire In Your Small Business
Small business owners tend to have their greatest success as a result of their flexibility they can react to changes and mold themselves to fit niches in a way more established, conventional businesses will often struggle to do. They can do this because they have fewer moving parts to arrange – so a solopreneur can temporarily reinvent themselves as something different for the benefit of a more lucrative contract. This, of course, is a silver lining that must have a cloud attached to it – and in this case, it’s that the versatility they prize so highly comes with a lack of depth in areas where more conventional businesses are hitting it out of the park.
If you want your small business to retain the lean shape that allows you to outmaneuver larger businesses, there is going to have to be some element of trade-off. If you try to do everything yourself, it’s inevitable that you are going to have problems at some point. So you’ll be best served by hiring a small, but capable team of people who are experts in essential areas of the business. Below we count off the most important areas for this recruitment drive.
Accounts
A true solopreneur will do everything, from running the business’s social media accounts to delivering finished products to customers. Inevitably, though, this means they can only handle so much business, and the moment they get past a critical mass, they lose control. Part of the reason for this is that any business needs to keep a calm, sober eye on incoming and outgoing funds. That’s not something you can do if you’re driving around suppliers for essential materials and waiting up until 4 am to speak to a customer in Johannesburg.
Hiring a specialist to stay on top of the accounts is something that you can, at least, do on a somewhat ad hoc basis initially – they can run through your monthly payments and invoice generation. Once you reach a certain level of growth, however, it will help to have a permanent professional keeping their eye on the figures.
Digital media
If you’ve ever tried to deal with an HTML glitch on a website, you’ll know it can take a large swathe of time, and many attempts, to fix the problem. It can be infuriating, and the actual source of the problem can seem to be utterly invisible. If you’re a solopreneur trying to get this sorted out, you can end up losing hours in which you could be chasing up leads or perfecting a new product. Having an expert in digital media – whose job it is to trace problems and destroy them – is worth the salary and attendant costs.
You can still have input on the digital side, writing content and figuring out how to import photos from iPhone to Mac. However, the bulk work in this area is really best left to someone who doesn’t have the distraction of trying to run the rest of the business at the same time – it’s an initial cost, but will pay for itself.
Personal assistant
It may seem like an indulgence and even an extravagance to hire a PA for a small business, but in so many ways they can be the most important hire you ever make. The first and foremost reason they are so important is their ability to manage your schedule. If you’re trying to do everything on your own, your mind will be in so many different places at once that you will, inevitably, find yourself (at least) double-booked. In terms of reputation, you absolutely cannot afford to become known as someone unreliable – so a personal assistant who can plan your schedule and alert you to potential conflicts is worth their weight in gold.
Personal assistants can be some of the most put-upon hires in any business – there are horror stories of the lists of duties that some PAs have been assigned over the years. Your personal assistant isn’t there to manage your life but to ensure the business runs smoothly. That means they can be asked to manage your diary, greet your guests and arrange business trips. At times, they can carry out interviews for potential new hires, too. When envisaging how a PA fits into your business, ask yourself in what areas your business needs greater efficiency. From there it should be easy to draw up a person specification.