When one person becomes many! Creating, managing and encouraging your staff

All businesses strive to be successful; success may come in many forms from a greater amount of sales to an expanded sales reach. As you sell more products or services and your customer base grows so too will the demands on your time. This is the perfect time then to consider expanding your team from a one-man show to a fully-fledged small business team.

Below is a checklist of all the considerations you may need to make before you hire new staff. The third in our series, this checklists aims to make the transition from just you to a full team seamless and easy to do.

Building a New Team

VITAL

• Determine the leadership structure (partnership, owners, CEO, etc)
• Clarify the pay structure for the leadership team
• Determine non leadership roles required for your team
• Advertise your roles on Seek and other job boards Career One, ExecutiveCareer.net.au, Adzuna
• Conduct job interviews
• Run a reference check and a background check on all potential staff

VERY HELPFUL

• View professional profiles of potential staff on sites such as Linkedin or Google+
• Conduct psychometric testing on every staff member to see if they will excel in their position. Try companies like Caliper to make sure staff fit your team
• If a full time person is not required for a task, why not try Upwork, Elance or Amazon Turk to get the job done
• If you aren’t confident hiring your own staff then hire a recruitment team to do the heavy lifting for you, but that can come at a cost. There are a number of recruiters available in every state, use the Seek recruiter search to find one near you.

Human Resources

VITAL

• Make sure your staff are properly classified (employee, independent contractor, part-time employee, intern etc)
• Create a job description, ensure your staff meet all or most of the requirements
• Create an employment agreement or employment contract
• Have your staff sign all appropriate employee forms, employment contracts, enterprise agreements and OHS forms
• Determine the wages for your staff by starting with the 'modern award', or minimum wages and conditions an employee is entitled to
• Create a discipline and termination policy
• Choose a payroll service such as Xero or MYOB

VERY HELPFUL

• Create an onboarding process or an employee handbook and provide to each new staff member
• Develop an Employee Assistance Program best suited to your business
• Identify whether 'Employee Benefits' are affordable to you and your company as they may help you to attract top talent

Sales

VITAL

• Determine a pricing system, look into the 4 P's of marketing to help
• Choose a Customer Relationship Management system such as Salesforce, GoldMine and Microsoft Dynamics CRM
• Track your sales pipeline and successes, and determine which products sell better and which ones require improvements or deletion all together

VERY HELPFUL

• Make a customer service plan for a standardised customer experience
• Determine a returns or complaints policy

Marketing

VITAL

• Determine what you are marketing
• Write your Marketing Plan
• Decide who is your target market and conduct market analysis or market research
• Develop SEO and social media strategies
• Research relevant trade shows and expos for your markets and products
• Print flyers, brochures and business cards via Vista Print, Officeworks or independent printers
• Create a customer database and leverage off these customers with repeat sales via email marketing programs using MailBANK, MailChimp or Vision 6

VERY HELPFUL

• Develop Key Performance Indicators (KPI’s) for your sales and marketing teams
• Decide how you would like marketing and sales to coincide with one another, working together these two teams should garner a huge amount of customer sales momentum
• Decide if a PR company would be the right fit for your company
• Is your business just you and you’ve decided you don’t need a full website for your business? Why not look at converting your LinkedIn profile to a website, for free