The Entrepreneur's Guide to Hiring and Building the Team

Book excerpt: There are few absolutes in business, but here is one: Thriving businesses employ a superior team. No matter how great the idea, how strong the entrepreneur's finances, how excellent the location, or how magnetic the advertising, the success or failure of the business rides on the quality of the workforce. And here's another absolute: Long-term financial success depends on keeping effective employees from jumping ship. In this book, business veteran Ken Tanner guides entrepreneurs through the three critical components of staffing a business—recruiting, teambuilding, and retention. As he shows time and again through advice, anecdote, and example, solving these challenges is like adding rocket fuel to the entrepreneurial business. Yet new business owners tend to take a lax view of personnel issues. They hire the first person who walks through the door or interview using a canned sheet of questions snagged from the Internet. Teambuilding consists of showing the new employee where to sit and who to go to for answers. And retention? What's that? The Entrepreneur's Guide to Hiring and Building the Team begins by helping entrepreneurs understand why staffing is so important. Then it guides them through the entire process of recruiting to attract top-notch talent to the budding organization. But that's only the start, Tanner maintains. It's critical to get these talented people to work together to drive the business, and it's equally critical to keep each employee challenged, motivated, and satisfied—the keys to retention.