At our upcoming Founder Forge workshop, I’ll discuss a concept I call “organizational breakpoints“. I borrow the term from programming, where breakpoints are like stop signs a programmer inserts into code to pause a program from executing at a certain place. Once paused, the programmer can step line by line through code to troubleshoot things like data values and conditional statements. When they’re done, the programmer can either remove the breakpoint and let the program continue executing at its regular speed or stop the execution entirely and make a fix.
Well, organizational breakpoints aren’t that different. They’re milestones in a company’s timeline where it becomes necessary to slow down and inspect a company’s values and needs line by line before stepping back into the full pace of day-to-day business. →
This founder story is from a young legend here in the Chicago area. FEW Spirits makes whiskeys and gins that win awards around the world. They grace the shelves of thousands of bars with their beautiful bottles and even more beautiful contents. They have seven employees and a small production facility in Evanston, IL to do it all in. →
There are two ways to onboard a new hire. The first is the bad way: on their first day, get started. The second, higher road, is to get things in order in advance of day one so the new team member can sit down and get busy from the get go.
Doing a good job with onboarding can make a huge difference in the perceptions the entire team has of the company, let alone the new hire, and it saves tons of time by helping everyone be less involved in showing greenhorn the ropes.
So, what’s the typical process for onboarding at a small company like ours? I split it into two realms: logistics and getting to know the company. →
This is the final installment of Supporting the Team that Builds Your Dream. I dig into our own experience building an operations team last year, the ever so important soft-skills of operations team members, and the ins and outs of outsourcing. →
This is the second installment of Supporting the Team that Builds Your Dream. In this post, I discuss creating, documenting, and sharing a vision of your company’s operations team and taking the first steps towards building it. →
