Over the last 15 years, I’ve been a founding team member at three different startups and the one thing I can tell you is nothing can kill a new business faster than “people problems”.
Even if you have an industry-disrupting product or service so attractive to customers it sells itself, if you don’t have the right people on your founding team, consider your startup dead and buried.
What Is A Founding Team?
Your founding team consists of your startup’s co-founders and early hires. This is a group of people who bring the following qualities to the table:
Complementary skill sets
Entrepreneurial spirit
Belief in your vision
Industry experience
Ability to wear multiple hats
The challenge is knowing who to hire and when to hire because as a resource-constrained startup, you don’t have the luxury to make a lot of mistakes. Hiring the wrong people won’t just cost you time and money, it could cost you your business.
With that said, here are three deadly hiring mistakes every startup should avoid:
1) Hiring People Too Early
Before you add anyone to your team, make sure you are absolutely clear on what the new team member will be doing.
Ask yourself: Will this person be joining a department that already exists with proven business processes in place or will they be starting from scratch and have to build out their position from the ground up?
You need to know which role this person will be playing because managing processes is different than creating them. If you put someone without entrepreneurial tendencies in a situation with zero groundwork, even if they are experienced managers, they won’t know where to start.
Once you’ve defined responsibilities and set expectations, there’s only one more question you need to ask yourself: Will hiring this person immediately make, raise, or save the business money?
For startups, that truly is the ultimate hiring question.
If the answer is yes, bring them on. If the answer is no, it’s too early.