Hi, I'm Dani Tan, and if you are here, you are in the right place. Today we're going to talk about different phases of business and building teams. So whenever I go to a conference or I speak at an organization, someone will come up to me. It could be a co founder, a CEO, a leader of a team. And they will say to me, you know, I'm having an issue with hiring or I'm having an issue with this person on my team or. Or I'm not sure if I hired the right person. And the question that I usually will start to ask them is to understand before I even, like, dive into the person and you know, what their issues might be with them is understanding where their organization is currently at. So I think something that gets skipped is what phase is your business or organization in?

What phase is your department or team in currently? And do you have the right members or hires for where your business is currently? So I'm going to walk through a couple different phases that your business may be in and what is the team needed in order to help support that? And that will kind of help ground us in understanding. Okay, where do we need to support that team member a little bit more or less, or where do we need to, like, realign what it is that we need from the people on our team? So the first part is the startup phase. So if you are in the startup phase, your focus is, I'm just trying to build a core team. I need to have a couple people doing some things. And what I mean by that is that your team is going to be pretty lean, right?

It's going to be a lean team. Folks are going to be coming in, you're at early stages, and everyone's going to be diving in, working on everything. So you're not necessarily looking for, like, super specialized folks. You're looking for somebody who can wear multiple hats, who can jump into operations, can jump into marketing, can jump into different categories and just really help. Yes, you will start to delineate what the roles and responsibilities are, but there will still be overlap. Now, the bonus is that you get folks coming in who are just excited to learn, who are hungry, who want to jump into different things and explore. That's really great. You typically have a true vision, North Star, of what it is that you want to do do, and everyone's excited about that vision, and you're starting to define the roles, but maybe there's just more flexibility still because everybody's still jumping in and your training is going to be more like, hey, hit the Ground running.

This is what I need you to do. Like I'm going to show you once and you go and you hit it. And the culture is going to be focused on just like everyone heads down trying to hit that, that overall, that overall goal, the overall vision that's happening. So that's your startup phase. I would say the difference in your team and your startup phase is that it's leaner, everyone's wearing a lot of hats and everyone's jumping in and getting things done. Now when you are more so in your growth phase and you are starting to scale your team, the things that will start to change is that you're going to be able to, okay, now you're growing your business, you're able to start to recruit more people. And so versus before maybe there was more overlap in people's roles and responsibilities and everyone was just jumping in.

Now you're looking for folks who are going to really start to have more structure. So there's going to be structure in your recruitment process. Structure in the kind of people that you're hiring, hiring. You're going to start to formalize your onboarding process, formalize how people are reviewed on their performance, their training, being able to make sure people actually have a little bit more specific training to their role, to their expertise and to their skills. Versus before everyone was kind of like jumping in and figuring out that's where you start to see, okay, now I'm able to start to create that. And then versus before where maybe you're able to just kind of like look up and see what everyone was doing.

You have to have more formalized check ins with people and accountability with that too. Now like if you're in this more mature phase and you're like okay, we are like high performing, things are going well and we want to start to expand. You're going to really start getting in there. So before you were just running, running towards making things happen. Now you're really looking at performance. You're going to start to measure yourself against your metrics as individuals on teams. Who is truly performing, what is working, what's not working, what are the strategies behind that? How can we really optimize to make things better? What can we leave behind that's not working? So you're going to be much more performance focused.

Key performance indicators, having some kind of metrics for success, not just for your business, but also for your, your team, the people on your team, definitely more strategy and strategic planning. So versus before maybe you were just like putting out fires and doing the Day to day you're going to have more long range plans of like, what are you looking to do for the next month, quarter a year and not just not coming from the top, but also coming from those who are the leaders within your team. So a lot of leadership development here too. So maybe before you had one person each department, now you have a leader for each department and they also have their own team. So being able to really roll up what everyone's roles and responsibilities, responsibilities are, but also could becoming more specialized where before everyone was, you know, overlapping.

There's less overlap. People are starting to really narrow in on their lane and become more of an expert within that space. I think that part's really important. So the examples that I'll get is, you know, when we first had this person come in, they were amazing, they were great, they were doing everything. But now as the team has grown, their attitude has changed. Maybe they're not as excited. And so a lot of the questions that I ask is, you know, what was their intention when they were coming into this organization to begin with, when it was a startup? Were they excited about the opportunity for growth? Were they excited about the ability to learn across different departments? Do they feel like they're more hindered now now that they're more focused in one section as the team has started to scale?

Those are the kinds of questions to ask to understand those pieces before we kind of just assume that maybe they're not having it anymore. It's good to understand like what their vision for themselves are within it too. Or let's say you're hiring somebody who you want to be a specialist or an expert in their space. But maybe they're more of a generalist and they've always just been somebody who's jumped across different categories and they haven't really honed in on one section that you've actually hired them for. So trying to figure out, okay, where do they need more support, training and support with their skills when it comes to getting them to where you want them to be. Or maybe they're not the right fit for.

You need somebody who's more of an expert in that space and that's okay too. So the last piece that I would say is then it's going to be like more of expansion. So if you're trying to jump into new markets, right, so maybe you have only been, you know, in the Americas, maybe you're trying to expand to, you know, different, different places. Okay, so who's going to be the right person for me there right in A couple of sense. So like, let's say you're trying to expand to Europe, you're trying to expand to Asia. Who on the ground there will understand the nuances of that market? In addition to being able to bring somebody in who will know the best practices of what you've built already and being able to make sure you're creating that bridge in that gap.

So being able to do the research in those new areas is super critical, important. Having your teams be able to adapt, right? So if you're bridging the gap between the team that you built and the new team on the ground that you're developing, how can you bridge that gap together is very, very important. And then to create that integration, because you don't want to have two different places focusing and working on in two different ways. You want to figure out where is there the gap where you can make sure those systems and processes are talking to each other and that one person is not just doing one thing because that's how they do it, and the other one just doing other things, that's just how they do it.

So that's also important, but also not to just stick to how you've always done it, to really have an open ear and communicate and be open to innovation of how to do new things, because they are in a new market, they might have new ideas and that's part of the reason why you do it. So I think it's something that's really, really important to consider. And so just to recap, if you're in the startup phase, you are more so on the emphasis of flexibility, wearing many hats, exploration, everyone's just like hitting the ground running. You're just really there to have those strong relationships to make it happen. Because your team is super lean. If you're in the growth phase, you are trying to develop what those processes look like.

Whether it's just having a formalized recruitment process, whether it's having performance reviews, onboarding, all of that good stuff. And then you want to make sure that you're giving the opportunity for skill development for your team. Once you're in that more mature phase, you're trying to optimize your systems, your metrics, understanding what's working, what's not, you know, and having to make sure that your team, your leaders on your team have the leadership skills in order to help their teams be empowered to do what is they need to do. Because you're becoming more specialized now. So you want to make sure you're not just in the weeds with everybody else. But you've actually given everyone autonomy on their teams in order to run what they need to run and make happen.

And then if you're in the expansion phase, just being cognizant, if you're going into new markets, like, who do you have there? How do you bridge the gap between the two? And just making sure that, you know, depending on what phase you're in and what is the priority for you, do you have the team in place to help support you? If you don't, can you help support them to get there? And if not, who do you need to hire in order to make it happen? They think those are the places to start before jumping to the person. I always say, let's start from the top and then work our way down. Amazing. So if you are somebody who's like, okay, I don't know where I am in these phases. I don't know where my team is, I don't know where I am.

I don't know what to do next with my hiring. I typically have organizations come to me because they're looking for help, either with a leader on their team or with their hiring. And they're like, hey, can you just come in and take a look at what is working and what's not? And so I've had an example of a client who basically came in and acquired this team that she did not hire. And so she didn't know what to do in order to get them to be performing. One was good, one person on the team was good, but, you know, maybe didn't have the best attitude. Another person was not getting anything done. So we had to figure out, like, what was the structure and the vision for the organization at that time, what was needed, and then depend based off of that, what were the rules in order to help support that, to make that happen.

And then the current individuals that were there, who was actually making it, making it move the needle and had the skills to make it happen and who didn't and to reassess and have those direct conversations to figure out how to right size the ship at the end of our time together, end of three months of. In the course of three months, we were able to right size the ship and get everything moving more, more smoothly. Do we have to let go of something? She has to let go of someone? Yes, yes. People had to get let go. Some people got hired, people got to stay. But it's all about being able to be able to assess that and to make it happen. And so those are the hard conversations that you have to have, but you have to be able to have.

Be able to do this exercise and reflect on it. I had another leader who again, adopted an entire team and it just wasn't panning out. And she actually was, you know, there to train and develop them, was holding lunch and learns, was trying to really, like, upskill them to get some more. They needed to be. And they actually, a chunk of them had ended up exiting because they didn't want to hit those requirements. And she ended up hiring a portion of her team brand new. But when she hired in that portion of her team brand new, we identified what she really needed and what was missing. They actually invigorated the rest of the team. That was still there and that remained. And now her team is back to performing.

So if you want to work with me on any of these things or you just have questions about it in general, I always recommend that you join the sessions, listen to the podcast. So listen to the Pivot and promotion podcast, join the email list and get to know me. And if you're like, hey, this may be a good fit on the support that I need, then I say book a call. So when you book a call with me, we hop on the call, I listen to what support you need, who it is you know, that you're looking for, and then I give you a plan. I give you a plan of how it would be to work together. And that's what we do. We take it from there. So to find any information on me, go to-a n I t a n dot com, that's dannytan dot com and you can find all that good stuff there.

But you know where to find me. And thank you for joining today's session.