Hiring for your startup

I started KraftInn with very little capital and with help from family and friends. It has been an incredible journey and though I still dont have any fixed salary or income for myself, I have been able to hire six incredible people - five of them artisans and one of them a painter, a man of great jugaad and a great smile. Hiring is a great responsibility in itself especially when you are looking for people who have families to take care of, have a limited education and are not as spoilt for choices as graduates or engineers. Regardless of the struggles of the company and with a little help from family and friends, I tried my best and has been successful in paying for their salaries on time and provide for their accommodation - Some of them have never been out of their villages.

Now, we are at a phase, where I have started looking for talent of a different sort - creative people like designers, for accounting and customer service. We are based in a very small town, so it works both ways - its difficult to find talent and at the same time, there are people who find it difficult to find jobs.

I have come up with a few notes to figure out how to hire the right people. Some of them are :

1) Integrity : I would rather prefer an employee with limited talent and exceptional integrity rather than the other way round.

2) Relatives : I am a bit confused on this one. When you are very small as a company, it is incredibly difficult to attract talent so one way is to find people who are relatives and looking for work and work out a mutual benefit thing. I just think it may get a bit complicated so I have skipped on this one.

3) Friends : When you start up, you have a host of friends who encourage you and some of them may just be bored with their jobs and looking for that opportunity. Since you know them for long, you know traits about them and hidden talents which most other companies may not have found. Once I am ready to offer something substantial - a reasonable package or equity, this is definitely something that I look at.

4) Interviewing : I look out for resumes and interview people but this one is time taking and sometimes it takes a while to find the right candidate and that works out for everyone.

Let me know if you faced any of these. It will be cool to know what other startups, especially with low capital and a techno-functional businesses are doing this.

Five mistakes as an Entrepreneur

I have been an entrepreneur for the last three years. It has been a roller coaster ride and I have made some very common mistakes. I sometimes wish I didnt make them or somebody could have advised me. So just sharing if it is useful for you.

Mistake No 1: Getting into something I had no clue about

It is difficult to know about a business without doing it. However starting something without any groundwork without any expertise is a mistake. My first shot at entrepreneurship was a HR Consultancy. It is a business built on reputation and though I and my partners were able to arrange meetings with top HR managers, they didn't really trust us due to our lack of experience or the right qualifications for the business

Mistake No 2 : Not starting earlier

I had an inclination and opportunity to become an entrepreneur but I didn't start till I lost my job after the company I worked in closed down. I probably should have started 5-6 years earlier

Mistake No 3: Doing it for money

This is a bit counter intuitive but I believe one must be passionate about the business and when I tried my first business, I just wanted to make money and was not really passionate about the idea - that does not really work. It starts making sense when you really do what you like to do - there are low margin businesses and high margin businesses but what drives you day after day is the passion behind the idea

Mistake No 4: Thinking that marketing is free

For a long time, I believed that if I made something good, it will market itself for free. It does not work like that - no matter how small the budget, it is important to take your business to the right audience and that costs money

Mistake No 5 : Doing everything

No matter how smart you are, you will always need to pass some of the things to others. You cant do all by yourself. It is important to understand your core competence and let other people do things that they are good at - it may be a colleague or outsourced or maybe it can just wait.