Congratulations! You’ve turned your idea into a reality and have a new business. Obviously, there isn’t much time to celebrate as there are so many things you have to do and think about. From the marketing and cashflow to contracts and accounting, the early days are when you as a founder must fulfil multiple roles to keep costs down. However, there is one role that we do recommend you find an expert to fill as quickly as you can – HR.
But with no employees why do you need HR? Here is why.
HR for Values
Many businesses when they start hire the services of a marketing agency to create their branding and messaging. Part of this is to define the company’s values – the guiding principles that the employees of a business follow to drive their company forward. In other words, the values set out what your business stands for to help you differentiate your company from the competition.
An HR expert can be incredibly valuable in this process, ensuring that those values work for the company and preparing the individual behaviours that align to these for all new employees to follow. Also (with respect to marketers) an HR expert can bring a different perspective to make them pragmatic and useable in an everyday environment.
This will ensure that as your business grows, the attributes that your customers have fallen in love with will remain consistent and you’ll create brand loyalty.
HR for Attracting Talent
Every entrepreneur starts a business with a bold vision. They have aspirational targets they wish to meet and in order to achieve them, they need to attract talent to their team.
The right HR support on board will work with you to define exactly which roles you need in the short and long term, and define clear job descriptions for each. Not only that but they’ll also make the recruitment process simple, ensuring your precious time isn’t wasted on interviewing ill-suited candidates.
HR for Retaining Talent
Any individual joining a new business is taking a risk in terms of job security so it’s important that you have measures in place to ensure that you keep hold of your talent. In the early days of a business, every team member is crucial to its success and having HR support in place to keep an eye on employee satisfaction (and therefore retention) when you cannot is invaluable. Not everyone can be offered equity or a potential big payout, so you need to be able to offer something different to your new brave employees.
HR for You
Starting a business can be incredibly pressured and at times lonely. Having a sounding board for ideas or struggles is important.
Some HR professionals are trained in coaching as well as counselling so can keep an eye on your mental health as well as keep you focussed on how to achieve your goals. In the early days of your business, you’ll experience extreme highs and lows and to have someone on hand who can give professional advice and help will enable you to bounce back more quickly than you could on your own.
There you have it. Hopefully we have convinced you of the need for HR support in your brand new business so why not give us a call and we’ll get started.
