Hire for YOUR weaknesses and the things YOU hate to do. No matter how skilled you are at business, you cannot be excellent at everything, and even if you are, you won’t have time for it all. So, first of all, hire for the things you are not good at doing.
Most business owners get into business because they are passionate about it or because they have experience/skills at something. Many find that the many accompanying tasks and requirements of entrepreneurship are outside their skillset. That is completely normal and to be expected. There is a learning curve to business ownership no matter how good you are in your industry and no matter how strong your business education is.
However, some areas are not worth the time and energy for the owner to learn to do well. And these are going to vary from person to person. A fairly common one is bookkeeping. There is so much more to accurate and effective bookkeeping than simply keeping business receipts in an envelope for your CPA at the end of the year. Do you really want to learn t-accounts, debits & credits, depreciation, journal entries, and nuances like PO Box Rental is usually categorized as Office Supplies, not Rent? If you started hyperventilating just reading that, then you need to hire a bookkeeper.
There are also tasks within every entrepreneur’s wheelhouse that are better handled by someone else. Either you HATE doing them (so they get done late or never), or there are simply better uses of your talents/skills. For example, if the owner of a restaurant is a master chef, should she spend her time designing fliers on a computer? Wouldn’t her time be better spent trying new recipes, training the kitchen staff, or greeting guests? She should hire a graphic designer.
I’m not advocating that you go out and hire 53 employees to handle cleaning, maintenance, procurement, HR, bookkeeping, accounting, legal matters, marketing, sales, finance, strategy, staff/operational management, tax mitigation, insurance, IT, website, training, customer service, R&D, and the other several dozen aspects of your business that I didn’t mention. Obviously, budgets have a limit. What I am suggesting is that you either hire employees who can fill in the gaps (your weaknesses and despised jobs) AND/OR you hire companies/consultants/contractors/freelancers to do them. While some tasks (depending on the business) require a traditional employee (servers in a restaurant for example), many others can be outsourced. There are providers who are capable of handling every single one of those business areas mentioned above, at a fraction of the cost of an employee, and usually at a much higher skill level than you.
Hire the experts; do what you love.
