Too Much Work, Not Enough You
There's too much work and not enough you.
You have to hire your first person to help you with your (cautiously optimistic) growing business.
And you're terrified.
There are decisions you have to make that feel so significant, that need to be so perfect, so error-free, that you can no longer think clearly about your choices.
Instead you are thinking about:
who are you to have staff?
who are you to judge anybody's else's ability to do a job?
who are you to set a salary that someone is going to depend on?
who are you to say you will guarantee them a job?
Cue the extra cup of coffee, working until the early hours of the morning and telling yourself that you can cope on 2 hours of sleep.
But you can hire people to help you.
In fact, if you don't your business will no longer grow.
You need to be able to focus on business development, strategy and where the company is going.
And you need to believe that you are capable of doing all of those things, allowing others to carry on the work of delivering right now.
So how do you get over the imposter syndrome of growing your team?
Minimise the risks. Offer short term contracts rather than full time employment, run fixed term contracts that you can know for sure you can cover for that time period, use third party providers for certain services. Make decisions that you can demonstrably prove to be correct because you can see the money in the bank account right now.
Be transparent. Someone interviewing for a role in a startup should have already realised that the job comes with a slightly higher level of risk than in an established company. But many people love the idea of working in a new business and helping to build something brilliant and they can become the single greatest reason why your company suddenly takes off. Two heads can be better than one slightly caffeine frazzled one.
Your growth as a business owner has lots of scary moments, where you feel like there really should be an adult watching you do all of this stuff. But you ARE the business owner and you've got this.
You know your business better than anyone, and although past success doesn't guarantee future success - it does prove that you can get results.
If the thought of recruiting and managing people is scaring you from taking the next step, then get in touch and we can talk about the training that you need as a business owner and as a #manager to help those big decisions feel far more manageable.