People Management for Entrepreneurs

Recruitment, Retention and Reward: An Instant Guide

Guy Rigby

• Publisher: Harriman House
• Year: 2011
• eBook ISBN: 9780857191847
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Entrepreneurship
• Index: Business

This eBook is about people management for entrepreneurs.The author of this instant guide from Harriman House, Guy Rigby, has also written From Vision to Exit, which is a complete entrepreneurs' guide to setting up, running and passing on or selling a business.

Part One – Talent Recruitment

“A business is absolutely nothing without its people! Success is a team effort.”

— Peter Jones, investor and entrepreneur

It’s all about the people

You’ve heard all the clichés – ‘people are the lifeblood of the business’, ‘the business is all about the people’, ‘people buy from people’. They are all, as clichés tend to be, true.

This means there is no single more critical asset in a business than its people. Without good people, an entrepreneur can have the best idea in the world and yet be unable to execute it. An idea is simply an idea, a business in waiting, until it is implemented by a team of talented people with a common vision and complementary skills.

Successful business leaders understand this. “You can come up with loads of ideas but if you haven’t got the people in place to make them happen there will be a logjam,” says Nick Jenkins of Moonpig.com.

“My ex-bosses, Sir Richard Branson and Alan Bond, provided insight into the business and the spark to get it going. Then they’d hire fantastic people around them to make it happen,” comments Brad Rosser, ex-right hand man to both business leaders.

It’s people that make things happen. They bring their knowledge and expertise and they deliver capability. They create a culture, building your brand and your corporate values in the process. Some products and services may ‘sell themselves’ but, ultimately, it is people who conceive, create and market those offerings.

Having the right team will enable growth and reduce owner dependency, a repetitive curse. As David Molian of Cranfield points out, “Unless you can recruit, retain and motivate talented people, you will never buy yourself the time to free yourself from doing the operational stuff. That has to come first. Successful recruitment will allow the owner-manager to spend a significant amount of time in creating and fashioning the business of tomorrow.”

There can only be one conclusion. Sourcing the best talent you can find and then cultivating, motivating and harnessing its potential is the most vital ingredient of business success. And because recruiting and training talent is such a costly and time-consuming exercise, it’s important to get it right first time.

The trials of hiring

It sounds simple, but recruitment comes with its own set of challenges. For starters, according to a Chartered Institute of Educational Assessors (CIEA) survey, one in three job seekers lies on their CV. In addition, as the world of business has shifted from a focus on processes to people and the working landscape has moved from ‘jobs for life’ to more flexible ‘serial career’ working practices, talent has become less loyal, more demanding, and invariably more difficult to secure and hold on to. The very nature of work has evolved and become more fluid and individualistic.

The reality is that businesses no longer have the luxury of relying on training and longevity to manage the gaps in their talent pool. They can’t afford to carry excess resources, nor do they have the luxury of time when trained executives leave or are lured away.

These shifting trends mean that companies will often need to recruit the best and most suitable ready-made talent – people who are already equipped with adequate competencies – to help them lead their businesses. In order to do this they will need to stand out from the crowd. This may be because of a reputation for excellence or an outstanding remuneration package, or perhaps because of a deep commitment to diversity or work-life balance. In practice, a host of factors will be taken into account.

An essential part of the process is to create a stable environment to enable individuals to shine, nurturing and prioritising their development, keeping them informed and aware about how they can contribute and enabling them to work harmoniously together.

Happy people are secure people, and happiness takes many forms. To build and retain a dream team, today’s employers need to pull out all the stops.

Talent is king

In order to succeed and grow, a business must:

• recruit the right people to deploy in the right roles – and at the right time
• develop reliable and cost-effective recruitment policies and processes
• create an open, inclusive and stimulating environment that fosters team spirit and celebrates success
• unlock and develop individual potential, whilst offering attractive rewards.

The first two points come into the ‘recruitment’ bracket so we’ll cover them in Part One. We’ll examine the latter two points in Part Two on talent retention and reward.

Recruit the right people

Building a dream team is not simply about recruiting the right people in the right roles. Successful growth also comes down to hiring those people at the right time.

According to entrepreneurial expert and writer, Mike Southon, making the transition from ‘sapling’ (up to 25 people) to ‘mighty oak’ (over 50 people) requires businesses to hire ‘grown ups’. These are people with real and proven business experience of managing projects, teams and even whole companies.

If you can’t change the people, change the people

It’s unfortunate, but there’s almost no doubt that changes to your management team will be required as your business transitions through growth.

A key challenge that CEOs face is managing the replacement of people who are unable to take the business to the next level. Hard decisions will have to be made. Loyalties forged from long involvement can make changes problematic. And yet, as Sir Eric Peacock says, “having the right people on the bus is mission critical.”

“All too frequently a business has grown faster than the people within it,” adds Sir Eric.

Julie Meyer’s comments mirror this experience. “One of the biggest things I see is companies that start with a team that can’t get it to the next level.”

Bill Morrow, founder of Angels Den and previously an accountant at Virgin concurs. “For me the biggest lesson I’ve learned on the growth side is the understanding that your staff are going to have to change. So, just because Betty was with you when you started, the skills that Betty has as you grow might not necessarily serve you all the way.”

Your instinct will tell you when you need to take action to change or upgrade your management capability. When it does, consider the following approach:

• Be objective about having the right people in the business. You need a balanced team that covers all the key disciplines and competencies for the current growth phase. And, if possible, beyond. It may be helpful to seek advice from a mentor or external advisors.
• Review your team to identify the weak links and any skills gaps that will need to be filled. Consider how you might help the existing team to step up to the plate. Perhaps training and mentoring, or support from external advisors or sub-contractors, may be the answer.
• Be honest and up front with people about your expectations, about the natural evolution of the team and how, realistically, roles will have to evolve or disappear once the business reaches a certain stage.

“Some people are good at getting companies going and other people can help them scale and get them across the finish line. It’s important to recognise that not everybody can be there on the finish line,” explains Julie Meyer. “The more you can be up front with potential employees and the more you can articulate the milestones that they have to achieve to get to the next level, the less ambiguity there will be.”

It may be that certain individuals are capable of being on the bus but don’t want to sign up to the journey. Julie Meyer continues: “To succeed in a growth business, everybody needs to be on the same bus. If the bus is going 70 hours a week, you can’t have people getting off at 45. Everybody’s got to be working at the same pace to avoid resentment. So you have to be really up front about what the journey is. If the journey is that you’re going to work hard for five years and aim to make a load of money, or at the very least make some money, learn a lot and become more valuable as individuals, some people will want to sign up for that journey. Not everybody will.”

Embrace diversity

“It were not best that we should all think alike; it is difference of opinion that makes horse races.”

— Mark Twain

Optimising your team to take a company through each level of growth boils down to assessing exactly what skills are required at any given time.

New competencies should be complementary to existing ones, but different. A common mistake can be to hire people in your own or a stereotypical image, duplicating skills, limiting diversity and innovation and, ultimately, growth. While you want to hire people that you and your team will like – people who fit in to your culture – this does not mean you should seek out ‘more of the same’.

It’s not just skill sets that should be diverse. The ideal team should be a mixture of personalities, backgrounds, genders and cultures. Today’s global marketplace is increasingly diverse and competitive, so our workplaces should reflect this.

Creating and maintaining a cultur...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Publishing details
• Praise for From Vision to Exit
• About the Author
• Preface
• Part One – Talent Recruitment
• Part Two – Talent Retention and Reward
• From Vision to Exit
• Other Business eBooks From Harriman House