This is part one of a three-part series on building the other side of your business, your workplace.
In the beginning, every founder should forget the details of building a workplace. You focus on your product or your service. You get your legs under you and push a product out the door, then you begin to hire. You hire a developer, a designer, maybe a business-centric counterpart. All along, without much attention, your two to three-person shop becomes a workplace: a little community where people come, provide a service, and get paid in return. The duties to service this workplace, like paying salaries or fixing computers, are tasks you as founder inherit and take care of. Maybe they’re the red-headed stepchild tasks of running your own business. Maybe you like the diversion.
You do a good enough job. It’s a few transactions every month. A phone call here, a contract there. Provided your business continues to thrive, though, those few and far between transactions become more frequent. As a founder who “can’t just let go”, you fit it all into your day (and night). You delegate a bit of it to a cofounder maybe. Over time, the quality of your work starts suffering. Not just on the workplace side of things, but on the passion-fueled side as well: your product.
The small community you’ve built deserves better. It’s time to start building the workplace-side of your business. The result of not doing so is turnover from a staff that doesn’t feel the social contract between employer and employee is being upheld. The quality of their work begins to deteriorate, just like yours.
Building an efficient workplace is key to building a good product and becoming a self-sustaining company. It increases morale and trust so that the team building your business focuses on design and implementation, rather than everything that’s not working at work. For you, you can pay more attention to the vision and mission of your company, spending time where only you, the founder, can truly add value.
In next week’s post, I’ll dig into creating a vision for your workplace and a roadmap for how to get you and your team there.
{Craig Bryant is founder and product manager of Kin, and cofounder of We Are Mammoth, a web consulting firm in Chicago.}