Startup Employee “Pit Crew”

If you follow auto racing, imagine a pit crew coming out and quickly
enabling the driver to have fresh tires, gas, and quick maintenance to
get back into the race.  That is how you should approach getting new
employees contributing in your company.

When you are in startup mode (which is seemingly never-ending), you will want to indoctrinate processes in your company to quickly get new employees effective once they are hired.  Many larger companies have developed very sound processes around new employee orientation and management  practices around on-boarding employees.  When you are under 50 people, my guess is that you haven’t spent a whole lot of time thinking about this.  Imagine each new employee as helping give you fast mover advantage for your business. 

Each position will have a different approach.  A coder is of course different than a salesperson.  But,
each new employee should be supplied some core information from the manager.  This includes an overall roles and responsibilities document and a weekly MBO (management-by-objective) document,

I have previously posted about MBOs.  You can read that post here.

I’ll spend a little time on the Roles and Responsibilities document.  It can be as simple as a 1-2 page document.  It should including the following information:

• Role: Overall description of the employee’s role in the company
• Responsibilities:  A list of 3-4 job responsibilities for the employee.  Example:  Responsible for all revenue display deals for WidgetBucks, this includes:  ad networks deals, direct ad deals, and agency relationships.  (Note: this is important especially when companies are growing quickly.  Typically you get into trouble as you grow when you are not clear on job responsibilities.  When you move from everyone wearing different hats to more definitive roles, you can get confusion across the company if  you are not clear about each employee’s responsibilities.  )
• 6-month MBO’s:  You can do 1-month, but, I find for a new employee, in a startup, you are going to be more fluid that annual goals.  The MBOs will include a list of 3-4 strategic asks to the companies objectives (as part of the agreed upon role) that are tracked every week.  I did an earlier post on the role of MBOs.  Each roles and responsibility document should include the 6-month metrics that you want that employee to hit.  They should be specific and measurable. Example MBO Metrics:

• Individual quota 8/15 – 12/31 = $X,XXXX
• Overall Sales Target = $X,XXXX
• Ship new front-end release by end of Q3 (contributes n% increase in revenue)

You should also articulate how to integrate the employee in the DNA of the company.  This includes key employees that will be important to get to know quickly, key meetings to attend, etc.  If you are a little larger, either have a mentor and/or the manager to help the employee get up-to-speed on the infrastructure (bug tracking systems, development platforms, CRM systems, etc).

In addition, you should plan on providing supplementary information on a network share and/or email that will help the employee get up-to-speed more quickly.  Some examples:

• Sample sales agreement and IOs
• Sales pipelines
• Prior Strategic planning documents and/or Board slides
• Latest specs on pertinent code bases
• Sales forecast information
• Marketing materials

Your goal is to get any employee up-and-running effectively within a month.  You want them to have everything the need to contribute and pumped full of enthusiasm about your company.