Building a Company: the Importance of a Good Team

We see a lot of great ideas submitted via our easy-to-use template.  We see polished business plans with great forecasts and strategic insights explaining why the concept will succeed, but one point is consistently overlooked: people.  The reality is, it doesn’t matter how good your idea is, or how good you as an individual are, without a great group of core people to help you build it you’re unlikely to succeed.  Even some of the most successful entrepreneurs were known to be notoriously anti-social but realised they had to invite others into their inner sanctum in order to make their dream a reality.

To successfully grow a company and realise the potential of an idea, we encourage all of our entrepreneurs to give serious thought to their human resources requirements.  Every business will have different needs, but at a minimum we believe that most CrowdBnk companies need senior leaders with strong experience in finance, marketing, business development and operations.  Other companies may need a lead engineer (e.g. software companies) or social media (e.g. us!).
Once you have determined the skills you will need to grow your business, start recruiting.  Beware, however, that it won’t necessarily be a quick process and you will likely have to build your dream team over an extended period of time.  You will likely need to be flexible and willing to consider alternative employment arrangements to secure the help you need (e.g. part-time, remote working).  We’ll cover incentives for early hires in a separate blog post, but cash-poor entrepreneurs should also be ready to give up some equity in order to attract high quality candidates.   

Once you have put together your team, leave them to do what they do best.  Everyone will realise that the company is still your baby, but if your instincts were right and you hired good people then trust them to deliver on its potential.  Micro-managing senior talent is a sure-fire way to alienate them and prompt them to explore opportunities elsewhere.