Your success depends on your draft choices?

Far too many small business owners realize too late that their success is only as lasting as the team of people they build around themselves. Far too many look at their employees as expendable and replaceable. Those that take this outlook are usually out of business faster that they can blink. You can look at two rather identical companies and see that one is booming while the other is painfully fading away. Why is that? Is it all a matter of blind luck or have the successful drafted well?

• Too many business owners try and hire people that are like them or will fit it into the culture they are trying to establish. The smartest entrepreneurs understand their own shortcomings and try and offset that by hiring people that will address those shortcomings. The other major problem most entrepreneurs have is that they either think they can do it all or feel that they must do it all or the company will implode. Both mindsets spell disaster. You can’t do it all. You don’t know everything and you don’t have all of the skills you are going to need to stay healthy and successful for the long term. Also, the lack of trust in the people that do get drafted is just a waste of time and money. If you keep thinking you are a superhero, you will burn out and crash the company anyway.

• The successful know where they are weak and don’t hire people that have the same strengths as they do. They hire people that are strong in those areas where they are weak. A baseball team that needs pitching but goes out and drafts a second baseman is just shooting itself in the head and you will likely find them at the bottom of the standings. If you take on those who are strong where you are weak, you will have developed a team and a staff that has every eventuality covered.
• The other reason you need to constantly re-examine your draft choices is because your business will change over time. Perhaps you had the right managers in place to get you off the ground and competitive but are finding that they just don’t have the skills or the mindset to grow your business to the next level. You must re-examine your team for where you are right now and for where you want to be in five years. Do you have the right people in place or do you have to consider drafting those you are surely going to need?

-Written by Kevin Sawyer