We’ll never get bored of saying this: there are seven critical success pillars to your business and if you manage them proactively you’re assured of having the success you want within your business: 

• Finance
• Marketing
• Sales
• Operating procedures
• Team
• Products/Services
• You (the entrepreneur)

One of the greatest challenges we face as entrepreneurs is how we can attract the kind of person that wants to come to work with us and for us.

The steps to overcome acquisition shortage are:

• Define that person ahead of time
• Create an avatar of your ideal employees for each position
• Be creative – List your creative solutions
• Refine your culture

Bonus tip:

• You are uniquely qualified as a small business owner, to be able to pivot, come up with creative solutions. All of the perks that employees are accustomed to now and demand would actually get you some very qualified people that would love to work for you and believe in your culture.

Hi, this is AJ Mirabedini. Founder and CEO of Entrepreneurs RX. We’re a organization that’s formed by business experts, consultant operators and academia that have done a lot of research and work on understanding exactly why entrepreneurship, small, medium businesses struggle, and what are the keys to their success.

Our approach to you and to the marketplace is the fact that there are no one episodic, siloed solutions that can help you grow your business. It is based on seven intertwined success pillars that you need to manage in order to be able to grow your company, scale it and make it really what you want it to be. 

To define success as you define it, not as somebody else to find it. 

I’m here to answer questions that you ask and provide some guidance on some of the challenges that a lot of our clients and friends are having in the small to medium business world. One of the key issues that I hear, one of the questions that keeps coming up to me repeatedly in this post pandemic era, we’re having a hard time hiring people.

There’s a shortage of qualified staff that then gets us in a position of having to do more with less and to create a business model that is only counter to our own needs of being able to find a balanced approach to our life. So how do we address this? 

This is a really interesting moment for small to medium business owners.

This is a time where we need to go outside the box and get creative on how we can attract the kind of person that wants to come to work with us and for us. So defining that person ahead of time is really, really important. We talk a lot about in the marketing space to define an avatar of your customers.

We also need to create an avatar of your ideal employees for each position that you think you’re going to need help for. You need to really predefined them. And then you need to get creative. You know, in this day and age, people want to work remotely. They’ve worked remotely. You might incorporate that into your HR policies.

My advocation to a lot of our clients has been to consider a hybrid approach where assuming you can return back in office, once pandemic has passed, then whatever your company positions are about vaccinations and mask at that point in time, create a hybrid environment where just like you provide your employees PTL personal time off. 

You provide them personal work from home times. So, everyone has the ability to work within the comfort zone of their own home while they’re also required to function internally in your organization, whenever the time needs to be. 

A four day week is another interesting idea to be able to get more done in a fewer days so people can have a long weekend on a regular basis. 

You are uniquely qualified as a small business owner, to be able to pivot, to be able to come up with creative solutions. List your creative solutions. Shorter workweeks, remote work, access to benefits, travel. All of the perks that employees are accustomed to now and demand would actually get you some very qualified people that would love to work for you and believe in your culture.

That’s another key thing is we don’t talk about our culture enough. We think this is a transaction. We think we’re going to pay someone X amount of dollars and get the results we want from them. That doesn’t happen until they’re aligned with you. So refine your culture. Put that up front and don’t make the benefit of working for you purely money. 

Out of all of the other reasons why working with you, for you, alongside you, will get them to what they want. 

The intimate with their needs as employees.

And if you help them achieve their needs, they will help you achieve your needs. Thank you.