Importance of core team in start-up and where you get them

By SHAWY

The business world has seen a phenomenal change and everyone wants their business to grow more and more. What seems like a profitable field catches the eye of everyone. As a result, the field of startups has shown a spectacular rise in the past one decade which in turn resulted in the saturation of the field.

Wikipedia describes start up as an entrepreneurial venture which is a newly emerged business venture that aims to meet a marketplace need or problem by developing a viable business model around products, services, processes or platforms. A startup is a new business venture designed to effectively develop and validate a scalable business model. Startups usually need to form partnerships with other firms to enable their business model to operate. To become attractive to other businesses, startups need to align their internal features, such as management style and products with the market situation. In their 2013 study, Kask and Linton develop two ideal profiles, or also known as configurations or archetypes, for startups that are commercializing inventions.

A startup may look like a one person job but the fact is that it is actually the core team working behind the curtain. An entrepreneur might have high ambition and goals but at the end of the day it is the core team that with whose initiative and hard work cans the dreams and goals be achieved. A high market knowledge and financial support might be a lot helpful in a startup but the foundations of it are laid by the founding team. Having the right team determines the path and outcome of a new venture more than any decision in the lifecycle of a company.

The most difficult part to a startup is to find a core team. This includes to find the right candidates for a core team. Finding employees nowadays is easier with the vast amount of tools available, such as Linkedin and the hundreds of recruiting agencies, but don’t forget to be on the lookout for talent while networking at business functions and meetings too. Recruiting good employees can be a challenge but can be tackled with a strategic hiring process. This may include interviews, questionnaires, activities, observations etc. A carefully handled process will screen out the better candidates and it will be easier to recruit them. You need your team to share your passion for what you’re doing. They should see getting to change the world through your business as a valuable, if non-monetary, part of their compensation.  If they aren’t passionate and they don’t feel they’re changing the world with you, they’ll treat your passion like their job and you will hate that.

You have to make sure when you put together a core team that share the same dream and the same values. The group can be varied; but the core team cannot have a dissimilar vision or a different set of values, because they will probably be associates for many years. You unconditionally need to make sure that the aims of the core team is all aligned. Bach of the founder has to be very sensitive what each of the other members objectives are. You have to recognize these and try to incorporate them, because otherwise you will have people from day one heading in fundamentally different directions. Only if you get a team of really great people together, who share the same visualization, and work together well as a team, you will create a very sturdy groundwork for the company. Because everything in the firm invents from the core team and will grow out of that.

Oliver Samver in his book ‘America’s Most Successful startups’ states that the most important thing to make a company succeed is people. When you start out a company, you start out with nothing but people. One person alone cannot do it. Getting everything set up, getting things organized, getting a core team assembled and the systems in place takes a lot more than just one person. A group of people, a team has to come together. They have to believe in the idea and they have to execute it. These need to be people with mountains of energy, that are willing to go through anything that it takes to make the company successful. A team that will not take “No” for an answer. They have to believe in their passion to make something happen. And they have to be able to attract human and financial resources that allow them to execute in avery precise way against big odds. (Nimish Shah, Sentient Networks).

Every individual in the team has his own talents so it is important to treat every one according to the qualities they possess.To quote Albert Einstien “If you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that its stupid. Everyone has special qualities, and your goal is to find those special qualities and cultivate them. Don’t spend valuable time training on someone for something they are simply not capable of.

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