How To Hire Employees With No Money

The chicken or the egg causality dilemma

When you create a company, you are providing a service or creating a product. You may have found a market opportunity and want to make money out of it. There is nothing wrong with that. However, building a company isn’t an easy task.

Depending on the service or product that you choose, you will need multidisciplinary skills. For a person alone, it may be challenging to learn and be good at different functions. Also, there is no time in the clock to perform all the company’s necessary tasks by yourself. You need help from great professionals. You need to hire employees.

I didn’t have any money when I started my gaming company in 2012. However, that didn’t stop me to hire employees and build a profitable business.

We hear many stories about how companies can help a country (or even the world) by providing jobs. Not everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, and that is ok. However, when you start a company, you probably don’t have enough money to hire more employees.

With no employees, the company won’t be able to make more money. Without more money, the company won’t be able to hire employees.

How can one solve that problem?

Sell a dream

Professionals want more than a paycheck at the end of the day. They want to build something significant in their lives, and that makes them proud. That is one of the reasons great professionals leave companies. They don’t feel they can perform the best they can in those environments. Great professionals want to give their best to the companies they are working with and interact with other great professionals.

Selling a dream means that you should tell prospective employees how terrific your company will be and that will be a privilege for them to be part of. You must have clear for yourself what you seek for your company so you can sell it to employees. If you don’t know what you want, people won’t help you. Great professionals won’t lose time trying to understanding you if you’re not clear.

However, selling a dream is no guarantee that you will be able to get employees for free. I talked to a lot of people at the beginning of my entrepreneurial journey. Most of the people I spoke with didn’t want to work with me for free or making much less money than they were making. That didn’t stop me, though. I had a dream myself, and I needed people ready to help me.

Eventually, I started finding professionals willing to work for half of what they were making before. They believed in me and gave their best to my company. My dream became their dream.

Offer a bonus for results

Our whole system trains us to be wage earners. Nothing wrong with that, but that is not our only option to make money. People are usually afraid for their money to be influenced by results. They may make more money, but they may make less money as well. Human beings are more fearful of losing than not winning and, because of that, they prefer to have a guaranteed fixed paycheck.

However, great professionals usually want more than a fixed paycheck. They like how their work helps the company they are working with and like to be rewarded for that too. You should find those professionals. You, as an entrepreneur, are working for results. It may be difficult for you not to understand that people don’t want to make money influenced by that.

If you cannot pay employees enough today, you must show them how your company will reward them if they do good. I shared all of my company’s finances, so everybody in the team understood how the company was doing. We had financial goals that, if achieved, will give a bonus for every employee.

Also, we had financial goals to increase everybody’s salary. As the financial numbers were transparent, nobody asked for a raise if that wasn’t possible. Knowing the numbers also make everyone understand how their work was helping the company. All of them wanted to see the numbers going up the same way I did.

Offer company shares

The movie Social Network made popular the world of company shares by showing how Eduardo Saverin (one of the co-founders of Facebook) sued Mark Zuckerberg (co-founder and CEO) for losing almost all the shares he had. Shares may worth a lot of money in the future depending on the type of company you have and how it grows.

Offering shares may be an alternative for offering a bonus for results (or you can offer both). The difference here is that the employee will have a piece of your company. It must be clear what that means for the professional, and you might need help from a lawyer. Owning shares doesn’t necessarily mean that the professional will be able to influence decisions in a company as there are different types of shares. Some allow a person to make decisions (by voting) and others to receive profits.

Offering shares is like selling a dream. You are trying to convince people how terrific your company will be and make a lot of money in the future. Owning shares allow employees to receive a portion of your company’s profits.

If you plan to sell your business or make an IPO (Initial Public Offering) someday, that is also something you can say to your prospective employees. When you sell your company, employees will be able to get a proportional piece of that value. Employees may also sell their shares as their value usually increase after an IPO, making many people millionaires all of a sudden, which will definitely compensate all the time they were making less money.

Final thoughts

Hiring employees with no money isn’t an easy task. You should try all the options I shared and see what works best for your situation.

Here in Brazil, I learned that the offering-shares option was the one that less helped me. Professionals are not used to that, and they can’t see the future value of owning shares of a company. They usually prefer to have a dream to pursue and a bonus to receive. That was what I ended up focusing on in my company while I couldn’t pay higher salaries.

As my company grew, I increased everybody’s salaries. I had three employees that agreed to work with me making half of the money they were making before, and they didn’t regret it. I had as a personal goal to pay their highest salaries in their lives, and after a few years, I was able to do that. I am very proud of that. I couldn’t grow my company if I didn’t have help from them.

Having no money may be difficult, but it shouldn’t stop you. Life isn’t fair, and you should play with the cards you have. Don’t procrastinate thinking that you don’t have enough resources to start or grow a business with more people. Do what you can with what you have now.

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