Growing your small business when you’ve got limited funds to work with can often be a challenge. You want to invest in the talented personnel you need to hit your newest targets, as well as bring on the innovators necessary to disrupt the industry you’re operating in. However, talent can be expensive, and finding the right people for your team can be a difficult and costly undertaking.
No need to stress. There are concrete steps you can start taking today to find the right people for your team, even if you only have limited funds to work with.
Prioritize quality over quantity
Many startup and small business owners are tempted to bring on a huge group of employees all in one go, covering every department and growing their team hastily. While this may work if you’ve landed a large investor or low interest small business loan, hiring on tons of new professionals at once is typically not the optimal strategy for every business.
Instead, if you’re limited on funds, prioritize quality over quantity. This is important for a number of reasons:
- When you hire on high-quality talent, you need to pay them competitively. Innovators with desirable skills, impressive resumes, and the growth mindset necessary to succeed in your company naturally have tons of options. In order to make such a catch, they will need to be fairly compensated.
- Even if you do pay one high-quality hire a competitive salary, that’s likely still less money than the total amount you’d be paying a larger number of more inexperienced hires.
- Lastly, one ingenious innovator might be able to create more wealth for your company than 10 or more unenthusiastic employees. Hiring the right high-quality employee could be a break-out moment for your small company.
If you’re worried about tricksters and fraudsters, you can verify your new hire’s employment history with a free online background check.
Hiring one or two high-value employees might work for some, but if you need a wide variety of departments quickly staffed in order to keep your operations running smoothly, you may need to look to other options.
Start with contractors and freelancers
Having full-time, in-house staff for your organization is almost always the best option to ensure you’re producing the highest quality work you can. However, with a limited budget, that’s not always an option. If you’re struggling to find talent and don’t have tons to spend on payroll, it might be worth looking into freelance and contract workers.
With a growing worldwide network of freelancers, it won’t be difficult to find the talent you need to hit your targets and steadily grow your business.
Freelance workers save you money in these critical ways:
- They only do part-time or temporary work, basically working on an as-needed basis
- Hourly rates for some freelancers, especially those not located in the US, can often be lower than in-house employees
- You are not responsible for covering their benefits or retirement accounts
Freelancers are an excellent option to help you get off the ground and start growing your business, even when your cashflow is a little lighter than you’d ideally like. Once you do start seeing your projects completed, however, you can start thinking ahead to the long-term.
Grow slowly and steadily
As mentioned before, one common mistake made by many startups and small businesses is hiring on too many at once. This can leave you scrambling to get everyone trained up and productive enough to actually bring value to your company, and may put you in debt while you wait to see returns on your investments in hiring.
A strong and long-lasting company is built on growing slowly and steadily, and allocating only the funds you actually have toward projects that you know will give you return on your investment in time. Sure, it might not seem as glamorous as having the perfect startup that’s ready to go public just a couple years after your first investment, but that’s also a rare and lucky outcome that’s not realistic for most startups.
Starting small and growing only when you comfortably can is the bedrock of a promising long-term business plan. Making the right hires to help you innovate along the way will help your business grow strong in the years to come.