Our hiring strategy
Happy Sunday!
The first few weeks of this year have been dedicated to two things:
Training our new salesperson, and
Trying new things with lead gen and marketing
This week’s edition is about our hiring strategy. I’ll walk through each of our hires, in order, and share why it made sense for the business.
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When should you make your first hire?
When starting a business, you’re a team of one. Sales, marketing, product, etc - it’s all on you.
Then … you find a little jingle in your pocket, and you’re faced with the question, should I hire?
At Bullpen, I decided to look for our first hire when we were making between $8k and $10k per month. I forewent a salary and had to hire fractionally at first, but the need for help was clear …
Our first hire - sales
Play to your strengths, and hire for your weaknesses.
For Bullpen, this meant hiring in our sales function.
Note, this is counter to what most startup founders will do. Most founders are great at sales and will first hire for technical skills or operations help.
In my case, my long-time stutter made it very difficult to do sales effectively. Inbound selling was doable, but outbound selling would require a ton of work. It made the most sense to hire for my weakness and find a talented salesperson.
The great part about sales is that it’s mostly a commission role. As such, you can keep your fixed costs relatively low and pay on performance.
Additionally, I hired fractionally at first, then grew our first sales position into a full-time team member over a few months.
Who would take a job at a company making no money with a barely viable product??
One of our users!
Sometimes your company’s customers are the best first employees.
We gave our first salesperson a sweetheart commission in return for a below-market base. This worked great for both the business and our first team member.
Our 2nd hire - sales … I mean, talent
Our second hire was initially a second salesperson, but that changed in their first 30 days.
Initially, our sales function managed the employer relationship AND handpicked freelance talent for their roles.
This made the sales function very emotionally difficult. Similar to how a home buyer and seller have different real estate agents, an advisor recommended that we split the sales and talent functions in our business.
Fortunately, our second sales hire had a ton of real estate experience and very nicely fit into our newly formed talent role.
After making this organizational change, we started to see REAL traction. The business’s major functions were covered, and with a few product tweaks, we started to grow revenue very quickly (early 2022 - 500% YoY).
With help in sales and product, my time shifted to growth and maintaining back-office functions.
Our 3rd hire - fractional accounting/back office support
With our newfound growth, we engaged a finance and accounting firm to run our back office … accounting, AP/AR, and payroll. They’ve staffed (fractionally) a handful of folks to our account.
Why? I didn’t have a good grasp on the financials, and it was starting to become difficult to make big decisions.
This solved our problem.
Our 4th hire - marketing (fractional - but growing)
For quite a while, I was a one-man marketing operation - running our website and content efforts solo.
Remember the advice above … play to your strengths, hire for your weaknesses.
I’m good at marketing and lead generation, so I kept it on my plate as I hired in our other major functions.
However, the workload became too much, and the quality of my content was starting to suffer.
I hired a commercial real estate journalist (fractionally) to run the content creation for our business. At the same time, I outsourced our front-end website support to an agency.
Pro Tip: A journalist with experience in your industry can be a great content hire.
Marketing support has been game-changing, and the role has grown from a few hours per week to nearly full-time.
Our 5th hire - sales
With all of our major functions covered, we’re growing our sales team first. Our second sales hire started a couple of weeks ago, and I’m spending most of my time coaching.
Coaching has become a bigger and bigger part of my job as our team has grown.
In summary, our hiring has looked like this:
Sales
Talent
Back Office (accounting, AR/AP, payroll) - fractional
Marketing (content/front-end web dev) - fractional
Sales
That’s all for this week! Let me know if this provides helpful context for your business. If you’re further along, reply in the comments with your list of first hires.
✌️📤
Tyler
Founder @ Bullpen