It’s no secret that women in business typically come up against the most doubt when it comes to everything from personal capability to the viability of an idea. Still predominantly male-led business environments certainly have a way of continuing to cast women aside, even if those women are self-made entrepreneurs already seeing success.
This can quickly lead to the imposter syndrome that prevents as many as 60% of women from ever pursuing their business dreams and, even during the early stages of your journey, could see you questioning whether you can really do things alone. When doubt sets in, you may even find yourself considering employment well before you expected to.
Of course, a little bit of help never hurt anyone, but as well as seeing you handing over at least some of your business reins before you’re ready, jumping into employment when you don’t need or want to could end up having a detrimental impact. To help you avoid that regardless of how many people tell you otherwise, we’re going to consider a few warning signs that suggest you’re better off continuing on your own path after all.
# 1 - Yo-yo profits
Profits are perhaps the main thing you need to consider before jumping into employment off the back of someone else’s advice. You especially want to consider how steady profits are, and also how far that money could stretch in terms of a regular salary that also has to factor for things like overtime and holiday payments to attract the best. If profit margins show steady growth that keeps income consistently high each month, then by all means bring someone on board who can further enhance those profits.
However, if profits are still in the yo-yo stage of early business, a commitment like this could finish your efforts before they’re off the ground. In this instance, regardless of unwarranted advice, you should consider more viable options for expansion, including outsourcing of things like delivery/packing, etc. that you can cancel should you need to. Furthermore, you’ll want to take specific steps to get accounts in check before you do anything drastic, a goal best achieved at this stage with free options like the online accounting services for startups offered by Accounting Cloud. This way, you’ll have a far firmer handle on money overall, and a far clearer idea of when employment feels like the right move for you, never mind anyone else.
# 2 - Work you have to find
As well as leaving you at risk of inadvertently fuelling burnout, work that keeps on coming means that, if you keep on doing things alone, you’ll end up having to say no to clients. That’s bad for profits and reputation and is something that most definitely warrants a team to better help you manage the onslaught. However, as anyone new to the business world knows, these levels of popularity are something that you can only dream of in the early days and, when you’re having to painstakingly seek your clients, employment will see you wasting money on someone that won’t necessarily have work to do.
Despite well-meaning advice to the contrary, you should especially avoid employment if you’re still experiencing dry periods in your business calendar, or if you generally have just one job to deal with at a time. With the right marketing approach this can change, but not if you’re spending all of your expendable expendable on an unnecessary, and likely unfulfilled team.
# 3 - Still stuck in the creative stages
To a certain extent, business is a creative process regardless of where you are in your journey. During the tentative new stages of any company, however, success is especially dependent on your vision, and on your ability to see those ideas through to fruition. Just as novelists need rooms of their own to complete a great masterpiece, an entrepreneur stuck in these early creative stages generally needs to work alone, without the risk of having to pass work off to their team members. After all, at this stage, you aren’t entirely sure what your company is, let alone how to let someone else make that decision for you.
With this in mind, bringing someone on board too soon is guaranteed to lead to disjointed ideas and sometimes even self-conscious developments that are unlikely to sell. Instead, complete creative control is almost always the best idea, at least until your company is established enough to have a clear message, clear branding, and a determined way to get that out into the world.
# 4 - A lack of customer base
While this will end up tying in with the work you have coming your way, it’s also important to note that, when you don’t have an existing and strong customer base to fall back on, employment could quickly end up tripping you. This is especially the case during your smaller business days when platforms like social media and online chats rely on a regular, consistent brand voice that provides much-needed personal appeal. Achieving this by doing things yourself at this stage is going to provide a customer base with genuine lifetime value (LTV) that, with a little luck, sticks by you even as you grow.
If you bring people on board too soon, you risk confusing this voice and losing the personal touch that so often proves crucial for small-scale sales. This, in turn, can result in only one-off sales that do little to promote growth in the long term. Instead, make sure that those customers already love and repeat their purchases from you, then you’ll be better able to make sure that whoever you employ, they’re the right person to slot nicely into an ongoing and reliable existing sales model.
Knowing when to take the employment plunge is a cause for lost sleep for any entrepreneur, but as a woman in business who faces constant questions, you must stand your ground, and use your own initiative to understand these warning signs and what they mean.
