This Week@Work Pavlo had the honour of learning about some of the UK’s best Scale Up businesses as he is a judge for the Business Leader Scale UP awards.
It’s clear which businesses are getting it right and what they are doing right. Watch to see what makes a business genuinely scalable.
Unless you are psychic or have more time on your hands than any normal business owner would have, evaluating a potential employee with a CV in hand is a risky business.
Clouded by your unconscious biases, under pressure to get additional hands-on deck when under pressure and time scarcity make hiring the right person into your business hard to achieve.
The wrong candidate costs time, money, reputation, brand, revenue, profit, and culture.
As much as we’d want to blame a skills shortage, or maybe “millennials”, or social services, or the courts, or anything else, the reality is that we, as business owners, are to blame.
Getting the right team is essential if you want to build an Asset of Value Business. The idea that, “if you want something done properly, do it yourself” is a lazy, sloppy mindset that is destined to keep you in the engine room of your business day in and day out. It will never build your business into a growing, profitable business that can of a day be sold. Your business will remain an income generating job and for some, well, that’s okay.
But if you want an Asset of Value Business, getting your team right is vital and a critical skill. Listen to the podcast discussion of Pavlo Phitidis discussing how to do this on The Money Show or read on to get it right:
Why do you exist, as a business? Understand why you do what you do, in order for everything else in the business to align to this vision. Pavlo’s view is that you should always be building your business for the end of a successful exit – a sale.
Having the right team on board is essential to appeal to a buyer.
What makes your business special? The features of your product, the price and your service are all easily imitated. A business exists to solve a well defined problem for a well-defined group of people, with a specific, consistent experience.
This defines the purpose behind your business, and if you and your team can answer this crisply and clearly, you are positioned to build a business that can deliver this.
A system is s series of activities, performed in a sequence, that is measurable and teachable. So if you are able to teach the system, then you can recruit system operators, rather than individuals who may, or may not be able to perform these clearly defined activities.
It makes hiring easier as you can quickly assess whether someone has the aptitude and experience to perform those activities.
Meaning comes about when you have a good match between the actcitiy and yourself as it builds your confidence, and the more confident you become, the more pleasure you take in doing it, so you want to do it more, which makes you better, which builds your confidence more.
Understanding your role in contributing to the whole further builds purpose.
When you have a system of delivery, operated by a purposeful team, you as the business owner are released from the day-to-day activities of running the business. And for a buyer – the fact that business doesn’t need the owner in it to function, is the 3rd lever of valuation.