How To Avoid Hiring People In Your First Year
Hiring people in your first year is a big risk, and most companies only do it if they’ve got a lot of venture capital money and think their idea is really going to work. But, of course, doing everything yourself is notoriously challenging.
In this post, let's look at some of the ways you can reduce the likelihood you’ll need to hire someone in your first year and keep risks low.
Table of Contents
Be Honest About What You Suck At
The first step is to be really honest about what you suck at. Most founders wind up hiring a lot of people for jobs they could do better themselves, which is something you’ll want to avoid if you’re still trying to get something off the ground.
Think about whether you could learn something in less than three months and then, if you can, study it to replace that role in your firm. That way, you have more mastery and options, and your business isn’t dependent on bringing someone else in from outside.
For example, suppose you think you’re bad at accounting. Is it true you couldn’t just learn how to do it all through Quickbooks in a couple of weeks? You don’t need to know everything about accounting principles and practices. All you need to do is understand how to remain compliant in your business as a whole.
Outsource Before Hiring
Another strategy is to outsource before hiring, which is a great option if you’re protective of your time. Getting people outside of the firm to perform specific tasks you need to get done is often highly time efficient.
For example, you could use software for bookkeeping. A lot of the major vendors will literally connect you with professionals who can do a couple of hours of work to get everything set up and connected how you want.
The same goes for marketing. Do you really need to bring an expensive marketing professional in-house? These are not available on a fractional basis and they can manage teams of freelancers for you, eliminating that overhead.
Even admin and legal clerks are now something you can outsource. A fractional CFO or COO can do most of this work for you, taking it off your hands.
Automate The Boring 80% Of Your Business
Avoiding hiring in the first year also means automating the vast majority of your business. The more you can hand over to machines, the better off you’ll be.
For example, you could use smart AI agents to provide customer service to people visiting your website. These are now extremely sophisticated and can respond like a person would to natural language queries. They can also flag conversations for escalation, just in case someone needs to talk to you.
Notion and Zapier are also great automation tools. For example, with the latter, you can connect all the apps in your business together at the backend. Zapier can get your CRM talking to your accounting software and social media automation tools. This means you have a more comprehensive business digital presence that doesn’t require constant monitoring or interference.
Make The User Do The Work
In some industries, it’s also possible to save on hiring by making the user do the work. These days, there are all sorts of tools for this. A lot of companies use Airtable for things like ops or Carrd where users design their own sites and software.
Charge More And Sell To Fewer Customers
Another approach is to literally change your business angle so you don’t need as many people. A lot of companies think that hiring enormous teams is always the way to go. But you can sometimes get benefits from selling to a smaller number of people and charging a higher price. This approach massively reduces your requirement for a lot of people, giving you more leverage over your time.
Run On No-Code
If hiring developers is a bottleneck, see if you can run on no-code for a while. Use tools like Webflow and Bubble to drive you through a period where you just don’t have a lot of labour.
Cap Your Salary
Finally, cap your salary at a low level. Limiting yourself to a regular wage gives you more runway to avoid hiring. While it might eventually be necessary, you have time to avoid the “we need to hire or I’ll burn out” stage, something you don’t want to get into.
When you cap your salary and expenses, you cap the pressure. You’re able to basically move forward how you want.
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