Building your team is not a sexy topic, but it is crazy important!
Ideally you will assemble a team of people who support your vision, cover the areas of business where you might not be the strongest and help you achieve your dreams. They will get along with each other, they will grow and they will get you.
Sounds super easy, right? It can be! All it takes is a little planning before you start hiring.
Transcript
How To Build A Team That Doesn't Make You Lose Sleep
Today, I’m going to talk about the different ways that you can build your team so that you have your dream team and the different ways you can stack up and structure your business so that you’re supported in the way that works best for you.
There is almost an infinite number of ways that you could build your dream team, but I’m going to focus on the ones that I’ve seen be the most successful and the most commonly used. But know that if none of these resonate for you, feel free to strike out and make your own. The most important player on your team is you – the entrepreneur – so do what’s right for you.
W-2 Employees
The first way you can build your team is the really traditional way, with W-2 employees. There are full time, part time, interns. All of that type of employment starts as a W-2, at least in the United States. I have no idea what it’s called in Canada or Australia or England.
Basically, that is where you’re the employer of record and you’re responsible for payroll, taxes, all sorts of things like that, and you have some responsibility to the employee. That is probably the number one way that businesses build their teams.
W-2 Employees + Vendors/Partners/Freelancers
The number two way is kind of a hybrid of employees and then also vendors or partners. They might have a bookkeeping firm, or they might have a marketing firm, but they have a core team of employees doing their work. That’s also really, really common.
The next one that’s less common is a small team of employees and then like an army, so to say, of project managers or freelancers – people who work on a project basis for different things – and that’s generally used more in businesses that are straddling between e-commerce and brick and mortar type businesses.
Vendors
The last one is when you’re purely entrepreneur, independent contractor, freelancer, and you don’t have any employees. You have no payroll, you’re the only employee of your business, but you do have a lot of vendor costs.
Those are the most common ways that you can build your business, and they all work great if they’re the right one for you, but you need to be realistic about what you’re like as a leader, right?
Because I hate managing people. I built the team of 15 W-2 employees, and I hated it!
It was no fun at all.
For me, a team of about six entrepreneurial partners or freelancers is where I like to run. That feels really good to me, and as my business grows, I’m sure it will grow, too. But right now, that feels like a really good team, where I pull people in when I need them, I let them go when I don’t, but I have them in my back pocket for when I have that need.
I want you to think about how you work best.
Do you work best with vendors and partners and freelancers, or do you work best with somebody you can see at your office every day, day in and day out, who is an employee who is exclusively devoted to you? Maybe they have a part-time job, but for the most part, you’re their main gig.
Whichever one works for you, that’s the best one for you, and that is how to build a team that doesn't make you lose sleep.
I hope this helps!
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