Recruit leaders

Up to now, you have probably taken on some people to help you with the tasks leading up to having found some product market fit, designing and building your product and generating sales. For the most part, the primary needs of companies getting their footing requires generalists with some skills such as design and development, but everyone in a startup plays multiple roles.

The time has come to help the budding team with bringing in leaders who can dive deep into the different business units. Depending on the skills of the founder, hiring leaders would be to diversify the skills within leadership not duplicate them. So if the founder(s) has more engineering skills than sales, recruiting sales leadership or financial leadership (if the idea is to raise capital) makes more sense than hiring an engineering lead.

One of the traits you want in a leader at this stage is someone who comes from an environment where they were builders and had to wear multiple hats. You do want to avoid hiring ‘big company’ experienced leaders whose sole job it was to manage people. You still need player/coaches not pure coaches. You will also want to make sure that your leaders have mentorship skills and want to play a key role in developing the skills of their team through action.

Hiring great leaders will become one of the more difficult tasks for founders.