Launching your business

Every business is primarily about people – as customers and as employees. This chapter is about both finding and attracting people to work with as partners or staff and customers. Many start-ups do not employ anybody to start with, but the only way you will grow is by recruiting appropriate staff, including managers, to deliver your product/service to more and more customers. Selecting, developing and managing staff will become a key activity – something many entrepreneurs have a problem with. When there is more than one founder, the issue of working with the other partners so as to become an effective management team can be just as challenging. And as a business grows it will face challenges and problems that mean the founder needs to adapt and change the way they manage the business. There are a number of ‘stage models of growth’ that seek to describe the challenges that they face as the business grows. These are covered in Chapter 12. The more rapid the growth, the more difficult this will be. And all of these changes need to be properly managed alongside the day-to-day delivery of customer service. It is little wonder that so few firms grow to any size. Some entrepreneurs even decide not to grow their business because they realize they cannot manage these changes or because they prefer to move on to another start-up.