The Type of People You Need In Your Business to Flourish

Starting a business takes a lot of work. If you’re an entrepreneur, you’re probably already familiar with this fact. When your business is at ground zero, it’s all up to you or — if you’re lucky — a team of two or three individuals to put in the sweat equity required to get things off the ground.

Once you’re airborne, though, you can’t continue to exclusively lean on your own efforts. A failure to delegate responsibility has always been a classic downfall for small business owners. As your business grows, your staff must grow along with it. But you can’t start hiring people simply because they walked through your door or you like their vibe.

You’re going to want to look for several specific types of individuals to recruit to your team. Here are four different qualities a business owner should seek.

A Learning Mind

In the fast-paced, ever-evolving business world, it’s absolutely essential that you have someone on your team who is dedicated to always learning. It doesn’t matter if you’re building skyscrapers, designing software, or anything in between — if you aren’t looking for ways to continuously learn and adapt new technologies and methodologies into your business strategy, you’ll be left in the dust before long.

It’s possible to be the “learning agent” in your own business for a while. After all, you started the company and you have a vision for the future. However, as you grow and your operations become more complex, it’s important to look for ways to offload this need to be continually learning and teaching. Ideally, you should do this by hiring a Chief Learning Officer (CLO) to work within your company who is trained to keep everyone else uptrained and up to date on your industry’s best practices.

A Marketing Mind

No matter how excellent your products are, if people can’t see them, you’ll never be able to sell them. If you don’t have a marketing mind in your midst, it can be difficult to generate income, build your brand, and maintain positive PR.

If you’re a larger company, you can simply hire a Chief Marketing Officer (CMO) to oversee your marketing needs. Their focus should be on identifying consumer needs, behaviors, psychology, purchasing patterns, and so on. Even if you’re still too small for a CMO, it’s important to ensure that, as you scale your operations, at least some of the members of your team are oriented in an outward direction. Those maintaining this outward-oriented perspective should be focused on perpetually analyzing your customers and interpreting that information for the benefit of your business.

A Legal Mind

You may be aware of basic legal concerns like paying your taxes. However, it’s absolutely essential that you have someone on your staff who is completely aware of all of the legal concerns involved with conducting business. For instance, you want someone who can understand the difference between business law and corporate law. The former focuses on the formation of your company whereas the latter is more about the operation of your company, especially as regards to the sale and distribution of goods.

That’s only the tip of the iceberg, though. If you want to keep your business on the legally straight and narrow, make sure to invest in a Chief Compliance Officer or, at the least, find a very good lawyer you can trust and possibly even keep on retainer.

An Innovative Mind

Finally, you always want movers and shakers on your business team. On the one hand, a CLO is generally interested in reactively maintaining internal harmony and success. On the other hand, innovators are focused on proactively pushing into the future.

While innovation can be found in any C-suite position, it really should be cultivated on a company-wide level. Product developers should be looking ahead to evolving customer needs. HR representatives should consider how to integrate things like remote work into your staff’s operations, and your marketing personnel should be looking at things like big data and AI to find new ways to market your products. Innovation is critical because it keeps your company moving forward.

Cultivating Long-Term Success

While all of these qualities are critical to a thriving business, they don’t necessarily have to be exclusive to one another. You can have an innovative marketer or a sales-oriented learner.

The important thing is that you cultivate these qualities, regardless of where they specifically appear within the ranks of your employees. If you can develop things like marketing, innovation, and continual learning, you can guard yourself against fatal errors, maintain efficiency and productivity, and stay head and shoulders above the competition for the foreseeable future.