3 Types of People a Startup Needs to Hire

And the 1 to avoid with its six subtypes

Starting a new company has become a dream for many people. Some want to change the world for the better, and others want to get rich.

There are not really more motivations to start a company, in my opinion, and most of the time, the second one results from the first one.

Just think about Jeff Bezos, Amazon or Steve Jobs Apple, or have a look at the Forbes 100 Real-Time Billionaires list.

The first 10 places go to people who have built successful companies and shows names like

• Jeff Bezos
• Bernard Arnault,
• Elon Musk
• Warren Buffett or
• Bill Gates

All well-known entrepreneurs and investors.

It is no wonder that many young people want to do something similar and create their own company hoping to grow it to another Amazon and become one of the world's richest people.

Oh, you think it is not about the money? I talked with many founders, and 2 out of 3 talk about their glorious exit before its inception. Well, Jeff Bezos was another type.

But whatever the motivation, a company is always a team play, and exactly in this field, many start-ups fail before they even started.

Compared to multinational corporations, start-ups have additional huge problems.

Usually, the founders put their savings together and go all-in on one company. They do what no investment advisor would recommend — betting all their money on one company.

But, all entrepreneurs believe they have a better insight into a specific problem and get started on that as they assume they will turn their advantage into a profit.

And yet, money is scarce initially, but a team is needed to get the company growing.

What kind of people should entrepreneurs hire and what kind avoid?

The Builders

A company usually is building a product or service — or both of them. It needs the builders, the coders, the manufacturers — whatever the product or service is — it needs people that get into the office at 9 am and focus on execution until at least 5 pm.

Ideally, they are highly motivated, love their profession, and continue working late into the night.

As money is scarce, it's best to build companies in an environment with low labor costs and a general acceptance of stock options as compensation for a low salary.

When the builders execute well together, they can get wealthy. Just imagine getting 1,000 options in Amazon right before the IPO with the right to convert them at the IPO price anytime after.

Given Amazon's split history, those 1,000 potential shares would be 12,000 — and do the math yourself with the current stock price of about 3,300 dollars per share.

Yes, I dunno that there are many what-ifs, and this and that is not accurate may be a reaction in some readers while reading my Amazon example. It is just an example of how important it is to give the early employees rather stock options as compensation than high salaries.

When they share the founder's passion, they can easily turn a company into success, given that they are 200% focused on the execution rather than playing political games.

The Sellers

They are the second backbone of the first employees, even when the product or service is not ready for sale. Those people need to add value in the early days representing the buyer's perspective during the product development.

Ignoring the market is one of the number one mistakes companies make in the early days, and many start-ups fail because of building something not suitable for their respective markets.

The sellers need to love talking with potential clients and work their way through the many no’s without ever giving up. A happy, funny smiling face helps a lot to build those relationships that are critical for success.

Also, early on, money is scarce, so stock option plans might help make up for the gap and signal to the early employees — if you build well, you will benefit long term more than by cashing in a high paycheck.

The Motivators

Have you ever worked for a larger corporation with a CEO that had an assistant organizing his meeting schedule?

Or have you ever worked for a traditional company that still has a person at the entrance welcoming everyone who enters the building and directing them to the right floor and room in the house?

I have met both types of people and had some time to figure out the difference personalities make in such roles. Interestingly, personality is still often overlooked when staffing positions have a lot of contact with other people in and outside the organization.

Once I was working for a listed company running an agriculture business. It was a really old-style industry. The headquarter was located in Vienna as a tenant of an old bank.

And this old bank had a proper concierge service at the entrance. Every employee needed to check in with the concierge in a quick process. The concierge crew was about 5 people. Some of them happy faces and a few of the grumpy old men kind of personality.

Watching the employees of the bank walk by the concierge desk, I could see a different personality makes. The days when the grumpy older men were not welcoming or even insulting employees, many of them left with a disturbed or sad expression on their faces for the elevator.

I could imagine that this bad mood spread in the office like a viral infection intoxicating every single meeting of the day.

On the contrary, the happy crew welcomed people in the house with a smile, and the employees walked to the elevators in a happy mood.

Those happy personalities make a huge difference, even when they don’t contribute much to building the product or during the sales process.

Take care of your motivators, and they help to keep the spirit up during the bad days.

What about the leaders?

For the sake of completeness — I am talking about early-stage start-ups without deep pockets.

The founder's team must lead the company with their visionary spirit and at the same time need to execute and sell.

They can’t sit down and relax like running a multi-national firm where representation is the only function they need to have on their daily agenda.

Start-Up is hard work and daily execution, and in my opinion, that is why people like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and Warren Buffett became so successful — every day was Day 1 for them.

Who are the ones to avoid?

Particularly one type of personality is the ones that every start-up entrepreneur must weed out quickly once they are spotted. Also, this type is logical when you think about it:

I am talking about all kinds of toxic people.

Of course, everybody has a bad day sometimes, and a great relationship must be able to digest a few bad rough moments — and of course, they do.

This is not what I am talking about. I am talking about the terrible personalities whose energy can mess up an entire organization.

Let me show you:

Liars: People exist who believe it is to lie to other people and deceive them. I had a fair share of those in my life, and a few decades ago, I tried to fix such relationships. But over the years, I learned it doesn’t work.

People are what they are, and sometimes it is best to keep them at a distance. Liars can not easily be spotted at first sight, but they reveal themselves after a couple of weeks. Nothing to keep in a company as they contribute to a toxic work environment.

Backstabbers: Do you know those colleagues or bosses who often want to speak “in private” with you to share the latest gossip about other colleagues and what people are telling about you behind your back.

Sometimes they tell the truth, but often they are also making things up, enjoying the mess they create. Some of them are fully aware of what they are doing and love playing such games, while others do it unconsciously.

Regardless of the motivation, such behavior destroys trust in a company quickly and, once spotted, should be addressed. If there is no change, such people won’t be missed in an organization.

Overpromisers: Those are usually highly motivated people who see the problems they want to deliver a solution to, yet they don’t understand what it takes to get a job done. The theme they end up with is constantly promising everything but not delivering close to what they promise.

Inexperienced people usually have the problem, and it is fine, as humans can learn. But when this character trait remains in people when they get older, it really gets messy. Experts usually are well paid, and their delivery on the point is the reason why they receive such high payments.

For such high-quality products or services at a high price, 100% timing accuracy must be expected. And yet, overpromisers fail to deliver and are unreliable in that respect.

Cut the ties immediately once spotted, and corrective measures don’t work out.

I-know-it-betters: Aka Complainers. The thing is, in a start-up — things are far from being perfect. Sometimes the execution team knows where to do better, and sometimes they have their blind spots. It is normal in Start-Ups.

And then there is this type of employee who is neither a builder nor a seller and doesn’t sit on the founder's board but always criticizes everything and everybody working hard to make the company a success.

In Start-Ups, we work on minimally viable products to push them quickly on the market and apply Kaizen Methods and similar ones to improve over time. It needs motivators to fuel the engine, not people who point fingers at what is already clear to everybody.

Please get rid of them.

Meeting Avoiders: I call them the little princes and princesses who believe the world revolves around them, and I think everybody knows the professional psychological term.

Have you ever had such colleagues who demand an appointment with you, and 5 minutes after they should show up, they call it off with a lame excuse?

Or people who run into your office without even asking if you are up for a meeting and believe that they deserve your immediate undivided attention whenever they feel like it?

Or those people who ring you up 5 minutes before a meeting and tell you they won’t make it in time and the meeting starts 30 minutes later?

Do yourself and your team a favor — address it and weed such behavior out.

These are the three successful employee types and the six killer behaviors I observed during my 30 years in business. Every organization that wants to be successful needs to work on weeding out the toxic ones.

It is either by change personalities which are tricky as those behaviors are rooted in the past and usually connected to core values. Such a change process takes years or decades, and I don’t think it is the job of a business to fix people.

Like Jack Welch said in his 20/70/10 rule:

Take care of the 20% top-performers pay and train them well.

Develop 70% of the mediocre performers. Not everybody is on the top of their game every day, and people churn in and out of the top-performing group.

The number one salesperson might have a divorce and stumble in the middle group of the company for one or two years before she raises again. Builders have the same problem — we all experience life's challenges.

The lowest 10% are not defined by performance, in my opinion, but by behavior.

Toxic behavior is the only reason to fire people. The others create products that deliver sufficient revenues to pay the bills and satisfy the shareholders with increasing company values.

But get rid quickly of the toxic ones.