Why You Need a Dream Team

Before you can build it, you have to believe that you need a dream team. As a small business owner, it’s easy to become complacent in our roles and just accept that we wear all the hats, but that’s probably a mistake if:

1. We hope to build thriving and sustainable businesses that don’t require our physical presence to keep them afloat,
2. We hope to eventually sell our businesses, retire, or at least have one or both options available to us, and
3. We want lives and some semblance of balance outside our businesses.

The bottom line is that we are not islands, and we don’t have to build our businesses by ourselves. With the right plan, a little patience, and some persistence, it’s possible to build a dream team, and possibly achieve more than you ever imagined for your business.

Who’s On Your Dream Team?

You’ve established that you need a dream team, but now who do you need on it? Each business will be slightly different in its needs, and every business owner will have his or her own preferences about who to include, but here are a few suggestions for who might make up your company’s dream team.

Your Marketing and Advertising Team

No matter what your business, one of your primary goals should be meeting new people in your target market and finding prospects who might become customers or clients, but as with many other responsibilities of a small business owner, it’s easy to get behind with marketing and lead generation, which makes this the perfect area to look for dream team members. Some of the possible roles and responsibilities to cover might include:

• Networking (in-person and online),
• Direct marketing (sales letters, email marketing, sales calls, etc.),
• Web marketing (managing your website, PPC advertising, search engine optimization, etc.),
• Event management (managing speaking engagements and events),
• Publicity and promotion (managing guest posts, media opportunities, etc.),
• Social media (managing Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, etc.), and
• Advertising (radio, television, magazine, Facebook, sponsorships, etc.).

Also, don’t forget that with lead generation comes leads, metrics, and a database to manage, so it might be helpful to have someone overseeing the admin side of your marketing and advertising efforts.

Your Operational Team

You’re in the business of selling some type of product or service, and while you might be the primary person delivering those goods or services, you should always be thinking of ways to leverage your efforts. This might include team members who oversee:

• Product and service development and/or delivery,
• Customer service and current customer accounts,
• Your editorial calendar and content generation efforts,
• Your financial picture, budget, and taxes,
• Your schedule and personal/in-house organization, and
• Human resources, training and education.

How to Build Your Dream Team

Once you know who you want on your dream team, the next and probably longest step is actually building it, and this is where you’ll need a big dose of patience, creativity and persistence. One approach I’ve been implementing more recently is the use of interns. Rather than trying to locate highly-targeted virtual assistants (which, for me, wasn’t proving to be a successful method), I’ve been able to find ambitious, creative college students who are studying to go into the different lines of work that fall under my business.

Not only does this approach help me find motivated, talented and specialized support for my business, it also helps me find prospective permanent hires who are being both trained and screened as we go.

Building a dream team for your small business is possible, if you know the goals you’re trying to achieve and then find creative ways to fill the gaps and find support. While I can say that building a team hasn’t been the easiest part of running my business, it’s certainly opened my mind to new possibilities for growth and improvement.

Looking for some tips on how to recruit your dream team? Check out this recent post from Huddle’s Andy McLoughlin on using the web to find a team of peers.

Who would be on your dream team, and what methods are you using for building it?

Photo by Flickr user woodleywonderworks, licensed under CC 2.0

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Small business owners who find creative ways to manage their current work while continuing to expand their businesses win out in the end; those who can’t eventually hit a plateau and are usually left feeling trapped by their businesses, and figuring out how to be more resourceful and innovative might be the only way to work through it.

Steering a 70-Ton Train

The first thing you generally have to accept when you find yourself at this point in your business is that it’s going to be hard to maintain complete control. Up to this point, it’s been only you, working at your own pace and your own way, so you’ve likely had a lot of control over your business and its growth. In fact, it’s likely that you’ve experienced many lulls throughout the life of your business. During those times, you had a lot more free time to plan, to market and promote your business, as well as organize your workload to suit your style and preferences.

As your business grows, however, things begin to change. It’s a quiet roar in the distance warning you that something is coming, and then all of a sudden, the 70-ton train is moving. All that marketing and promotion and hard work has started paying off, and you now have the momentum of that big lead generation train behind you. The only problem is that you haven’t built the tracks, and now it’s hard to steer.

You’ll have to get used to keeping things moving in the general direction you want them to go, without having absolute control over every detail. As you find help, you’re going to have to accept different working styles, get used to training and teaching others on your support team, and even adjust to the demands of your new role as manager (or engineer).

Learning to Take Baby Steps

Another thing you might want to prepare for is working in small increments to get things on track. Not everything is going to work immediately or as expected, so it’s going to take a lot more patience and persistence to see your business through the growing pains.

You may have to “try on” several solutions before finding the fit that’s just right for your situation and business, but you have to trust that a solution exists or risk relegating yourself to that plateau forever. Keep searching until you find the right match.

Also, prepare to make adjustments. As you put the support structure in place for your business, it’s unlikely that it will work seamlessly right out of the gate. You’ll need to modify the plan and your support team as you go, so set out to make gradual and steady changes over time so that you’re left with a strong and sturdy foundation to support you.

Being Resourceful and Innovative

The last part of the puzzle is adding support when you’re lacking the time and money necessary to build it. How do you hire help and train someone, for example, when you (a) don’t have the money to pay him or her and (b) don’t have the time to devote to training and figuring out what to delegate?

First (and again), you’ll need to be prepared to take baby steps, but second, you’ll have to figure out ways to be more resourceful and creative when finding support for your business. Some solutions might include:

• Bartering with other business owners who might be in a similar position,
• Starting an internship program or working with local college students, or
• Bootstrapping to incrementally build a budget for a virtual assistant.

Think about everything you have to offer, and find ways to make those resources work to your advantage. Chances are, something you have at your disposal is exactly what someone else needs, and that kind of exchange can get you on your way without taking much in the way of time and money.

Seeing a business through stages of growth and change can be challenging, especially for small and solo business owners who are strapped for resources, but with a little creativity, there might just be a way to push through the plateau and take your business to the next level.

How have you used creativity and resourcefulness to grow your business when limited on time and money?

Photo by Flickr user Chris Denbow, licensed under CC 2.0

There comes a time in your business where you experience growth or change. You think you have everything running along smoothly, and then the real work begins when everything is turned upside down. You want to take advantage of new opportunities, but in order to do that, you have to adjust your systems, support and tools to accommodate that growth and expansion.

Old Pain: Incomplete and Outdated Systems

You know you need to do it. You hear it all the time, “You have to put systems in place to support your business and streamline your work so that you’re more productive, and so that you can outsource and delegate lower level tasks.” It makes sense in your mind, but it just doesn’t seem to be a top priority in the early stages of your business. Instead, you concentrate your efforts on figuring out how to navigate the often confusing path of the small business owner, while spending the rest of your time trying to find new customers and clients.

Before you know it, though, your business starts to take off, and then the pressure really starts setting in. You’re still figuring your way around, you’re trying to maintain your current lead generation efforts, but now you have the added workload to boot. There’s just no time left to worry about creating systems now, except that the further things go, the more desperate you become, and you start feeling like you’re digging your way out of quicksand.

Old Pain: Little or No Support

Most small businesses have to keep things very lean during the beginning, but it doesn’t take long to get used to managing things solo, leaving you strapped for time and thinking you’re the only one who can get the job done.

Then, of course, because you never had time to create systems around your business, everything is a jumbled mess. How will you ever figure out what best to delegate? Even if you wanted to outsource some of your work, where would you start? Without clearly delineated roles, hiring help would seem like a waste of time and money. You’d only end up doing the work yourself or not having anything for the new assistant to do.

The only problem is, there’s only so much you can do on your own, and at some point, you’ll come to the end of the line of your availability, which will mean the end of the line for your company’s growth as well.

Old Pain: Few Tools in Place

There are so many tools available to make the life of a business owner easier, but in the beginning, several things can get in the way of you taking advantage of them. Money is tight, and with such a small workload, it just seems to make more sense to do it yourself, rather than paying for something that you’ll barely use.

As your business grows, you start thinking you might want to get a few tools in place to cut down on your administrative time, but by then, you think that you’ll get things done faster if you just just keep doing them as you’ve always done. By the time you realize you really need them, you’re worried that implementing new tools could cause you to lose valuable information or time, should there be glitches in setting them up.

They don’t call them growing pains for nothing, but as hard as it is to interfere with the delicate arrangement of your business in order to put new systems, support, and tools in place, it’s important to have the faith and, as organizational and productivity guru Julie Morgenstern would say: let go so that you can grab hold. By letting go of things temporarily, you’ll be able to get a better handle on them for the future so that your business can handle the growth that’s coming your way.

What “old pains” are holding back your growth potential, and how are you overcoming them?

Photo by Flickr user doug88888, licensed under CC BY 2.0.

Who Do You Consider a Colleague?

Especially for freelance web workers, defining a “colleague” can be a complicated matter. Is your stakeholder a colleague? How about the project sponsor for the contract you’re working on? More likely, you consider people doing similar work in similar fields to you colleagues, over and above people that you work with directly, who are responsible for entirely different aspects of a given project.

Expanding your definition of who you count as a colleague is not just a petty semantics game. It will help shape the way you interact with people, and could lead to more meaningful relationships where none would otherwise exist. Treating a PR contact as a colleague, instead of passively receiving information from them, for instance, could get you priority access to advance information down the road.

You might also consider people who perform the same function as you in different industries colleagues if you don’t already, and try to reach out and connect with them. A business writer has a lot to learn from a technical writer, for instance, and vice-versa. Having colleagues in other industry spaces also has the advantage of giving you lots of “bench depth” in terms of recommending other contractors to clients with needs beyond your skill set.

Have Conversations Beyond Your Purview

Being the expert on something feels good. So good, in fact, that many will opt to maintain that feeling as long as possible rather than risk wading into unfamiliar territory, and possibly looking like a bit of a fool. But by sticking to familiar ground you’re only doing yourself a disservice in the end.

Take every advantage you can at trade conventions and other events (including purely social occasions like birthday parties) to pick the brain of professionals in various fields other than your own. As freelancers, we often focus so much on personal branding that we miss out on chances to pick up a little more knowledge of things beyond our walled garden.

Try Out Unusual Partnerships

If you happen to be successful at learning about things beyond your usual sphere, you may start to get ideas for strange and unusual projects that bridge disciplines or industries.

Resist the urge to dismiss these fantasies as unrealistic or unfeasible. In fact, try some of the more unrealistic ones out. It’s hard to embark on a project that doesn’t have a clearly defined value proposition, especially if you’re at a point at which you basically need to convert all of your working time into money. But as the old saying goes, nothing ventured, nothing gained. Accepting a little risk in exchange for the possibility of finding a partnership that could lead to new and exciting work is sometimes the only way to escape a work funk or a revenue plateau.

Pop the Bubble

At this point, with the technology available to us, there’s no excuse for having tunnel vision as a freelancer. Get out there, meet new people, and reevaluate your professional assumptions on a regular basis, and your business will reflect the positive change.

What steps have you taken to cultivate interdisciplinary relationships?

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