Grow Your Own
Lack of available talent to hire is a common refrain of business owners in our field. Give up on looking and complaining! To create a sustainable business you need to be able to grow your own.
Growing your own means hiring smart, motivated people with all the right soft skills and investing in them for the long haul. In return for helping give them a career, expect that they'll reward you with loyalty, will care about helping to teach your newer staff, and will work together with a cohesive vision (having all been trained the same way).
Do you sell code or do you sell expertise? (Hint the code is GPL.) If you sell expertise you recognize that the true value of your business is the people on your team. Sure your contracts and brand could keep you going for a little while, maybe you could even sell them, but it's the people who have the true value. So invest in them to invest in your business.
Sure sure, agreed agreed, people, yes, empathy, values etc etc yes yes. But how do you actually train up a team of expert consultants? How long is this going to take? How are you possibly supposed to afford it? If you're bringing in these green developers, won't they break your clients' sites and destroy your reputation? Jody, doesn't it seem totally contradictory that you're obsessed with quality AND saying it's cool to bring these amateurs into the team? Wow, guess we should expect to be getting some rescue projects sliding off of Zivtech's roster soon! And won't these people you're training just quit and come work for us once they're skilled and we offer them more money? And wait do you seriously pay people to get training?
Great questions! ;) I've been growing my own for a long time and harvesting the many rewards. I'll answer all these questions, new ones that I think up, and then follow it all up by letting you ask your own which I will then also answer.
This session is intended for business owners, leaders and managers as well as those getting ready to make the leap. You'll leave this session thinking differently about your opportunities and (hopefully) inspired to grow your own team instead of trying to buy one on the market.