So, the last time I talked about football, you all quite liked it and I got a great response.
And, it’s very like thinking about building out a football team and all of the different roles and skills you need within a football team.
Now, – I’m not the biggest football fan in the world but I know enough to understand that every team is made up of different roles. You’ve got your strikers out front, you’ve got your defenders, your midfielders and you’ve got the goalie at the back. You need a mix of people because if you had a team that was full of fantastic strikers but your defence is rubbish, you’re never going to succeed.
And I think it’s the same within business. You need lots of different skills and then you need them working together. Then most importantly, you need really strong leadership to make sure that it’s going to succeed.
Now, if I take you back to the early days of me when I first started out in business, I’m very much a striker type of person. I’m the one that’s upfront, I’m out there, I’m looking for new deals, I’m the sales, the marketing, the product development woman. I’m the one out there and I had hired other people like me in the business and I probably had a good kind of midfield behind me.
Very early on in my business, a couple of years in, my husband Simon decided he would join the business as well and it was a fantastic set up. So a few people said to me, ‘oh my word, you work with your husband, how does that work out?’.
But for us it works really, really well. And Simon has a completely different skill set to me. Simon’s very much like the goalkeeper at the back. I’m seeking all these opportunities while he’s the one that’s at the back, protecting and managing the business.
He’s the one who’s organizing the defence, making sure that we don’t concede any goals. And having those two roles really in the business is just absolutely a winning formula.
Another way that people tend to term it is if you think about a farmer. Simon was like a farmer because he was the one tending to the crop sorting everything out okay. I’m the hunter, I’m the one going out there kind of finding the food and when you work those two roles together in a business it really is building that business for success.
You know I see a lot of the same things with businesses that come into the Den and businesses that I’ve invested in. They’ll either be a fantastic hunter or a brilliant farmer and if I’m being really honest, I tend to gravitate to people who are more like me kind of connecting with businesses where you’ve got the person out front who’s like me who’s the one great at going out and doing the hunting and a lot of problems I see in a lot of businesses is they don’t have a Simon.
I hope that kind of resonates with a lot of people but what I would say is what I personally really struggled with is that my business was my baby, especially in those early days when we were a couple of million turnover and a really high growth business. I knew it would never ever mean as much to anyone else as it did to me so how could I ever trust anybody else with running the business?
I couldn’t because they weren’t me, they wouldn’t care as much as I would and for me, having Simon come in was the next best thing because he cared about me and therefore by comparison, he cared about the business.
The business became something that we did as a family and we made it successful as a family, for our future family.
A lot of entrepreneurs really struggle with that, you know they are still the one trying to do everything and being a jack-of-all-trades is brilliant and it’s absolutely necessary when there’s just you in the business. For a couple of years it was just me and a few admin staff within the business so I had to be a jack-of-all-trades. But then the problem is, I knew I was a master of a few, but not master of the others.
This is when the football team analogy comes in. Yes, I could play reasonably well in each position on the field, enough to maybe be a third division team. But I wasn’t a good enough striker that I could have played in the Premier League.
I couldn’t have played those other roles in the Premier League for another team. So those are the roles that I had to fill.
Having me and Simon working together in two strong roles meant we were then able to fill up the rest of the team where we saw we had gaps in those skills
So, anyone who is building a business, I urge you to really double down and ask yourself ‘what type of role am I in and where do I really succeed and therefore how can I put some other strong people in the business as we build up?’.
I know early days, a lot of businesses don’t have that but as we build up how do I fill those other roles with other people that are just as strong. You’ll have seen me talk about this in another episode about what happens when you play to your strengths. That is how you really build a world-class team that is going to go out and succeed.
So just to remember some big take-homes from this one – know your strengths, know your role and work out how you are playing to it.
Make sure you’ve got the whole football team covered. And it’s not just about sales and marketing. It’s really different buckets that you’ve got within the business and making sure you’ve got all of those major buckets covered.