Industry Tips: The Challenge of Knowing When to Expand Your Team

In my years of coaching within the print industry, a challenge I see many business owners face, and in fact, I’ve helped many overcome, is knowing when the right time is to expand the team. The timing of this can play a huge role in ensuring sustainable growth, operational efficiency, and profitability of a business.

In this edition, I thought it might be useful for the readers of Print Monthly to understand what the key indicators are to recruit and offer some actionable insights to help you make informed decisions about your workforce.

The Benefits of Strategic Staffing

One thing you need to consider before taking someone on is how well that person’s skillset aligns with your company’s objectives. This is why one of the first things I do with any business is create or update its ‘mission statement’ as It’s crucial to all decisions made by the business owner. Once we have that in place, we can look at putting the right people in the right positions.

Building the right workforce directly influences you to meet deadlines, maintain quality control, manage relationships with your customers, and drive growth in your business.

Building a strategically staffed team ensures smoother operations. If you get this wrong, you compromise all of the above and create more problems for yourself.

So, when do you know it's time to grow your team?

This is the part most people struggle with but there are some key indicators that I suggest you keep an eye out for:

Increase In Number of Jobs – Whether you’re starting on your own or have an established team already, being aware of an overwhelmed workforce is often a clear sign of needing to make changes.

If you or your team are constantly working late or taking on more tasks than you can typically handle, pushing yourself or your team beyond personal limits will eventually lead to burnout, poor job satisfaction, and even result in high staff turnover.

Reduction In Quality of Work – We’ve all heard the saying “You’re only as good as your last job”, so maintaining the highest quality of work as standard is paramount. If you start to see a rise in quality concerns or missed deadlines, the chances are you're being spread too thin. As such, these could be a result of important tasks being rushed or inadequately trained staff needing extra resources to bring them up to speed.

Inability to Meet Customer Needs for New Products – Again, this is something I see often. Print companies know they have to increase their offering but usually struggle to do so due to the nature of time involved with adding new products to their website or other marketing materials. What I suggest is that you survey your customers to explore what products are in immediate demand.

What items do your current customers wish you offered but don’t? Once you know this you can also go for the quick wins.

If this is something you struggle with, it could be a sign that you need to expand your team. I’d recommend investing in new staff with experience in customer service strategies.

Increase in Customer Complaints and Churn Rates – This is normally one of the most obvious and reliable indicators of issues with operational efficiencies. An overstretched team will likely struggle to maintain a good level of customer service that both you and your clients have come to expect. If this is the case, hiring extra personnel in this department can help alleviate some of the pressure and bring your standards back up to where they should be. You want to ensure your clients feel valued and you maintain consistency with your communications.

Increased Downtime and Maintenance – Believe it or not, this can be one of the key things to look out for. If you’re working your teams and your kit too hard without allowing enough time for essential maintenance, machines are going to start breaking down at the worst possible times.

It’s important to make sure you’re building in capacity and have the staff bandwidth to keep on top of this, therefore, unexpected breakdowns are an indicator you need to expand the team in these areas.

So, what is the best way to grow your team?

Start by Looking at Your Current Staff – Are your current employees operating to their full capacity? Perhaps there are people you already have who can fill the appropriate gaps with some additional training? Make sure everyone is reaching their potential bandwidth before throwing more financial resource at the issue.

Future Proofing Your Business – Consider the direction the business is moving in and try to anticipate what future demands might be expected of your overall team. Consider which roles are likely to be more top-heavy and hire accordingly based on both the present and the future.

Ticking all the Boxes – It’s obviously important to hire the right people with the right skills but from experience, it also pays dividends to take things like soft skills into consideration. You want to not only make sure the individuals have the right technical skills, but you should be looking for people who possess good soft skills such as being good communicators, problem solvers, and are comfortable in a team environment.

I’ve seen firsthand how employees who are team players will cause fewer issues and are also better at adapting to change and in fact, support it.

Test the Waters With Outsourcing – We’re lucky to live in a time where there are lots of options in regards to freelancers. Websites like Fiverr, Upwork, and People Per Hour are great sources of talent and allow you to build a case for a particular role before you get to the stage of actually employing someone.

To Conclude – Managing staff is probably one of the most difficult parts of running a business, therefore, it is worth putting the legwork in up front to make sure you build the right team at the right time. For all the businesses I’ve coached in the industry over the past few years, this is still the most challenging area.

When you get it correct you set yourself up in a much stronger position to become a more predictable and profitable operation.