We’ve spent the last 15 years creating a great business team, who are all focused on 1 simple thing, helping our customers…
- helping them save money
- helping them become more profitable
- helping them to flat-line their cash-flow
- helping them to find the right solution
- helping them to solve a problem
- helping them to trust us, so they can focus on their core business
- helping them to find other trusted people and organisations
It may sound simple, but we can assure you it’s not been easy. We’ve had our fair share of bad eggs, along with making many of our own monumental mistakes along the way.
And after reading many business books and taking counsel from several revered business experts and leaders, I’m confident we have amassed a fantastic team of skilled individuals, who are solely focused on helping our customers. Which by default, will help our organisation grow and provide the team with excellent career opportunities.
Whilst building our business team, we’d like to think we’ve picked up quite a bit of knowledge on what makes a great business team. This knowledge isn’t something from the business school curriculum, it comes from the experience of actually doing it, recruiting a team and growing a business, which is in constant change mode.
So, based on our experience to date, here’s our top 5 favorite secrets of creating a great business team…
- Integrity. You must be able and need to trust the people you work with implicitly. Trust is a big 1. You have to let go of the reigns and trust your team to run the operation and look after the customers in the right way. This is the only way the business will grow.
- Diversity. Teams of different kinds of people, such as gender, background, ethnicity and age, bring different skills, different views and generally provide a better combined overall vision and a more rounded viewpoint.
- Different skills. There’s no point in having all technical people or all sales people, it’s important to have a mix of skills to provide your customers with the best overall experience. As an example, in our business we have technical, customer support, sales, finance and warehouse skilled people, and we even have a couple of semi-retired people who carry out our own local deliveries.
- Experience. In our view, you need a mix of experience and youth. We currently have 2 apprentices who provide us with different view points and sometimes come up with better ways of doing things, but this is balanced with experienced people who have been with our organisation for years, and help our younger team members to understand our culture and values.
- Culture & shared values. We put a massive amount of emphasis on this. And it’s important that the team fully understand and buy into the culture of the organisation you are trying to build. One way of doing this, is making them responsible for choosing the values that each team member is expected to be held responsible against. Some call it behaviors or rules of the game of business.
These are just a selection of our favorite secrets in creating a great business team, and of course, there are many more important areas in creating a great team. And we are sure you will have your own favorites and would love you to share them with us and our readers.
