Hiring for startups: Top tips to help you build out your dream team

Hiring for your startup is a tricky task, especially if you’re a bootstrapped founder like I was. When I started ROSEN out of my dorm room, I knew I couldn’t do it all, but I also knew I had much more time than I had money. This meant I had to be incredibly scrappy when it came to how I found support for my business on the days when I couldn’t do it all. 

First things first: When you’re thinking about hiring support for your brand, you need to have a clear understanding of your strengths and weaknesses – and know that there’s a difference between areas where you might have a weakness and areas that you find downright annoying.  

Take a moment to reflect on every task you do this week, even the ones that take just 30 minutes – think customer service, posting on social media, packing orders, making products and working the market. 

Next, think about the tasks that you might not currently be doing, but know that you know your business absolute needs. Critical things like bookkeeping or email marketing (not things like reaching out to celebrity influencers). Then, separate them into lists titled “I love to do,” “Don’t mind doing” and “Absolutely hate.” Now, categorize these three lists into “I’m good at / could figure it out” and “I’m not very good at have no idea what I’m doing.”  

At the end of this exercise, you should have a pretty clear indication of where early support needs to come in. You might not like what I have to say, but the first positions you should hire for are the “I’m not very good at have no idea what I’m doing” tasks and/or entry level tasks. Yes, that means you might still have a ton of “Absolutely hate” tasks on your plate, but that’s because you can figure it out yourself. 

If you’re anything like me, starting your business all on your own, you don’t have the luxury (read: money!) to hire for things you can figure out yourself. All too often, I see founders hiring out for the tasks they hate doing, while they’re left doing a bunch of things they don’t know how to do. This can lead to them running out of savings and running their business inefficiently. 

Now that we have the tasks you need to hire for, the next step is understanding where to go for support. Many founders I’ve spoken with want to begin with agencies or full-time hires, when in reality they don’t have the money for that.  They’re often on the train of thought that they need to raise money or get a business loan to hire a bunch of expensive people for tasks they can figure out themselves. Because that’s what all the other big brands are doing, right? 

That might be the case, but the difference is that those brands have proven their concept. They’ve generated enough sales or traction to sustain and justify an expert ad agency or head of finance. If you’re struggling to pay yourself consistently, let’s pump the breaks on the six-figure team budgets. 

My first hire at ROSEN was a contractor who answered customer service emails three to five hours a week. Then I hired another employee to pack orders for me 10 hours a month. Then, eventually we made enough money to where that hire could pack orders 16-20 hours a week. That role eventually grew to become a full-time operations staff focused on helping pack orders and products. The trick is to only hire for what you actually need and scale up slowly. My first full-time-out-the-gate hire at ROSEN wasn’t until the end of 2020. By this time, I had plenty of full-time employees and contractors, but they were all people who either started part-time or even on a project basis. 

Additionally, when you’re thinking about contractors or individuals to support your brand, think about the tasks that are easiest to train for. Hiring for marketing strategy to get your brand to seven figures right out of the gate is probably pretty ambitious, and expensive. Instead, hire a contractor to create and schedule your social media posts. Hire someone to pack your orders. Hire someone to email back and forth with influencers after you’ve already reached out to them. You should take on the actual building of the brand – after all, you are the expert. 

The entrepreneurship road is long and challenging, but don’t overwhelm yourself by trying to be everything right off the bat. The brands that have seemingly “made it,” either came from super stacked networks or started with a couple million in the bank. Instead, focus on your growth goals, and what you need to support that. You can do it – I know it and believe in you. 

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About the author

Jamika is a serial entrepreneur whose journey started with ROSEN Skincare, an acne care line with a purpose of making women of color feel confident in their own skin. After bootstrapping ROSEN straight out of college, Jamika scaled ROSEN to a 7-figure business, raised $2M in seed capital and secured retail partnerships with brands like Target and Ulta Beauty.

Since growing ROSEN, Jamika reinvests time and energy into emerging CPG founders, strategies and brand ideas. She's passionate about ways to make your brand stand out digitally and on shelf, while staying scrappy.