People are the core of any business venture – be it a large business conglomerate or a startup venture. That said, startups when they initially start have a lack of funds and are not able to involve many people in the business venture. In most of the cases in a startup ecosystem, the co-founders are technical and/ or marketing specialists who have the knowledge of developing the product/ service and make it available to the audience via the use of technology and eventually help it sell amongst the audience. At the initial stages of a startup, the founders are self sufficient to take care of programming/ developing/ marketing, as well as low-level operations.
As the business picks up, the founders look at hiring sector specialists to scale up further. However, there are certain employees that every startup must have, mainly because of the skill sets they possess and the value they add to the business. Moreover, smart entrepreneurs are good at introspection and understand what their strengths are and what they lack, so they can hire people who complement each other and have greater synergies to offer as a team.
Here are five types of employees every startup must have:
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1. Project manager
As and when a business venture grows, the entire processing system gets complex, mainly due to more orders and integration of CRM’s in the system. Initially the co-founders are the ones responsible for day-to-day operations of the company. However, when orders multiply, a designated person is required to ensure that the operations go on seamlessly.
The Project Manager hired should be a person in a leadership position who can effectively identify and communicate the problems in the system to the founders and implement changes as and when required to get the optimum output. This will help minimize the founder’s worries on account of day-to-day operations and allow them to concentrate on scaling up the business instead.
2. Tech Expert
Most new age startups are tech enabled, so they can speed up the pace of operations, achieve better levels of accuracy and scale up faster. Technology has, therefore, come to assume a critical role for startups. Right from launching a website with an effective web design and ensuring that is user friendly, to thinking of a suitable mobile strategy to keep up or stay ahead of competitors, startups need a person who has the right experience and expertise in technology to propel the company forward.
It is important that the person is able to strike the right balance between user experience and features from the customers’ perspective while simultaneously making the backend system robust, foolproof and easy to update/maintain. Moreover, with new technologies being developed faster than ever before, the tech expert would also need to keep up with the latest technologies in the market, so the company is able to retain its tech advantage in the market.
2. Campaign Strategist
Once the product or service is in the market, it is imperative for a startup to reach out to its target audience in the most effective manner. This is where hiring a campaign strategist becomes important, since he/he can design a suitable marketing campaign that can yield the best returns for the company.
The campaign strategist will not only look into cost effectiveness, but also analyse the impact a campaign has on creating top-of-the-mind brand recall and analyze what other companies in the space are doing which their company isn’t.
3. Marketing/Social Media Manager
To ensure that the campaigns shortlisted are undertaken in an effective manner, the startup definitely needs a marketing representative who could also double as a social media manager, since the lines between traditional and digital marketing have started to blur faster than ever now. These are the go-to-people who execute all the strategy related to attracting more prospects for the business, thus facilitating in revenue generation.
5. Data Analysts
While the extensive marketing team will strategize and execute plans to reach out to the right audience for the business, there is someone required to analyse the large volumes of data in order to understand the impact of all the efforts and identify areas of improvement, so the existing business strategy can be tweaked to yield radically better results. This is where the role of a data scientist comes in to effect.
The measurement, analysis and interpretation of the data generated would help to create a system of continuous testing and optimization, which would facilitate the startup in realizing its goals faster and in a more effective manner.
Conclusion
Resources are usually scarce in a startup, so it’s important that every penny is spent wisely. Hiring the right people is amongst the most crucial decisions for a startup, since it is these people on whom the startup rests and who determine the fate of the business.
So, rather than spending too much money hiring different people, start by hiring people with the above skill sets to get things rolling, and as things start falling into place, you can go on to expand your team and add people with other diverse skills.
About the Author: Mahesh Nair is co-founder of PicsDream, a platform for photographers and videographers to share, showcase and monetise their art
