A Big Hello to all healthcare leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs. Today is another beautiful Thursday, and it is a great time to discuss entrepreneurship.
Though our entrepreneurship messages may be targeted at healthcare entrepreneurs, we believe entrepreneurs in general can also learn a lot from them.
Lately, we’ve been dedicating Thursdays to talking about entrepreneurship (and Mondays to leadership and Tuesdays to innovation).
Today, we discuss how healthcare entrepreneurs can build with small teams.
I will share my experience building and managing small teams across a few healthcare brands, plus vital information from research, and in the end, I have something exciting to share with you!
Stick around.
If you’re a healthcare entrepreneur or an aspiring one, Care City Media is the right place to get the information, insight, and inspiration you need, especially if you’re in Africa. We’re building more than just a community; we’re building a tribe and a family of healthcare leaders, innovators, and entrepreneurs passionate about transforming healthcare with innovative ideas. We do this by sharing ideas, igniting conversations, creating resources, and building communities.
To join our glorious adventure, subscribe to our Substack newsletter publication, and if you like WhatsApp, join our community here.
Now, back to today’s business — how can we build with small teams?
Your Ideas Are Valid
In entrepreneurship, money is a big indication of success. The big difference between an entrepreneurial and an innovative pursuit is that while the entrepreneur’s focus is on building an economically viable business, the innovator, on the other hand, is concerned about solving a problem or improving a solution without even considering, most times, the economic value.
Innovative ideas can metamorphose into entrepreneurial pursuits. It can happen that way, but not all innovative pursuits will eventually become money-making ventures.
It’s also important to note that all entrepreneurs are innovators because their primary focus is solving problems, but not all innovators will become entrepreneurs.
So, if you have an idea, the most important thing you can do is nurture it. In its early stage, approach it like a hobby. Understand, study, love, and be obsessed with it.
Ideas grow when nurtured and die when neglected. Starting entrepreneurs and innovators (those who’ve not started building yet. It’s all still in the head) struggle with how to nurture their ideas.
Nurturing ideas takes time. It’s like taking care of a child. You get pregnant, carry the idea for a while, give birth to it, and nurture it for a while until it matures. Plenty of work.
Your ideas are valid. It all depends on you.
You Can’t Build Alone
The digital age has made building and scaling businesses and ideas easy.
With the help of smart tools, automation, and AI-powered software, it has never been easy to build.
However, despite the abundance of tools and software, in entrepreneurship, you can’t build alone.
You need the input of others to add flavour to your idea, and I have lived by this philosophy for a very long time.
I strongly believe in the idea of building together.
You are not an island and will never know it all. You need the experience, expertise, and exposure of others to develop your ideas, and this is where building a team comes into the picture.
In building a team, there are many factors you need to consider.
The most important thing is ensuring that your team understands the mission and vision of whatever you’re building.
You don’t necessarily need a big team to make things happen. A few motivated and inspired people can get the job done.
I made this mistake when I started building teams. For a long time, I felt that having more people on the team would help until I discovered that after some years of having so many people on the team, there was no significant growth or output.
You need only the right people with the right skills. Finding the right people to build a team can be challenging. Nonetheless, if you keep at it and keep building and searching, you’ll find or attract them.
Here are some tips to guide healthcare entrepreneurs in building with small teams.
Start With You
If you’re just starting as an entrepreneur, you need to listen to this carefully.
Even if you’ve already started, listen.
Master yourself.
Know who and what you are.
Know the kind of person you are.
It all starts with you and continues with you.
In entrepreneurship, the success of any venture almost solely rests on the shoulders of the person who has the idea.
It’s not like the corporate world, where many people shoulder strategic responsibilities. In entrepreneurship, you’re usually the single person who makes most strategic decisions.
Have you discovered yourself?
The journey to self-discovery is often taken lightly in leadership. We forget that for leaders to attract people to follow them, the leaders themselves must know who they are and where they are going.
So, self-discovery is the first step in building any team as an entrepreneur. You must strongly believe in who you are and what you’re fighting for.
If you’ve discovered yourself, you don’t have any business trying to become an entrepreneur. Talk more to lead people.
It’s serious.
The next tip.
Understand And Love Your Journey And What You’re Building
Entrepreneurship is not a hobby.
It’s a serious business, and that’s why this message is directed at entrepreneurs who are already building something or those who are serious about building.
Your hobby is different from entrepreneurial pursuit, though most entrepreneurial ventures arise from hobbies.
You must know that when a hobby becomes an entrepreneurial journey, the entrepreneur adopts an entirely different mindset.
Now, failure becomes real. Success is the goal, and competition is around the corner.
These are the compulsory mindset shifts that occur when converting a hobby into an entrepreneurial venture.
You must have a deep and intimate understanding of your product or service, love it, and feel connected to it. How does this relate to team building?
It’s straightforward.
When people begin to join you, they see only your passion for the vision, your discipline, and how you handle failure, success, and competition—that’s what they see at first.
If you don’t understand your journey, service, or product, I advise that you leave it a while in the hobby realm to really understand it before attempting to convert it into an entrepreneurial venture.
You’ll need to do it daily, enjoy it, research, and build the necessary technical and soft skills.
When you’ve reached a point of palpable discipline, you can begin to consider migrating into entrepreneurship.
The third tip.
STILL ABOUT YOU!
Build The Right Skills
As a starting entrepreneur, you must develop soft and technical skills.
You definitely do not want to rely entirely on your team members.
I will tell you why.
You may not have the money to bring in full-time team members or pay freelancers.
Most of your early team members may be happy volunteers who are usually in school, young and easily distracted, or more experienced entrepreneurs or professionals like yourself who have tens of commitments, like work, business, family, and pets, or maybe even partners who, obviously, are also busy.
So, relying 100% on your team’s skills can kill productivity, believe me.
In my experience, I have encountered entrepreneurs who had to halt building their ideas because a social media manager had to resume school or just stop being active.
Or the web developer just suddenly becomes extra busy and doesn’t have time to attend to their websites. Or the graphic designer no longer has the spirit to continue with them.
The only thing they had was an idea. Because they lacked the essential creative and technical skills, their ideas died. Sad, right?
When I started developing my ideas, I knew the skills I had to learn, and I quickly started learning them even before any team member joined.
So, I wasn’t left hanging when they joined and wanted to go later. I knew what they were doing and quickly filled in before someone else came along.
As a starting entrepreneur, you’ll wear many, many hats.
You’ll wear them for a very long time until you can grow to the extent that you can hire a few full-time or part-time team members or freelancers (which is what I prefer to do).
Now, on to the fourth tip.
Let’s talk about the people you’ll be bringing on board.
Looking For The Right People
You need the right people on your team, and you don’t want a football team.
Two to five people are going to do the job.
You Can Start With A Handful of Volunteers
Volunteers are a good resource during the early building phase. Once you’ve understood your product, idea, or service, volunteers can help you in the formative stages.
Use them to handle tasks like social media management, content writing, graphics design, etc.
Sometimes, volunteers may not provide the quality you need. Only on rare occasions do you get an outstanding, experienced volunteer. Most of the time, they understand the vision, are willing to stay, and can even become core team members and, on rare occasions, partners (I have seen it many times).
One piece of advice on handling volunteers is that they might become tired of volunteering.
Yes, it happens.
In this situation, I recommend you start giving them a form of thank you stipend, and for those who have the skills, you can start paying them something for their service.
It may not be very big, but just do it to show them you appreciate them and that when growth begins to start, you’ll do more.
It gives them a sense of belonging.
They Must Understand Your Vision
Whether volunteers, part-time, full-time or freelancers, ensure they understand the vision.
You must do the extra work to educate, motivate and inspire them—this here is the reason why entrepreneurs must know what they are doing.
When you know who you are and where you’re going, you can educate, motivate and inspire the people on your team.
Since your team is small, anyone who joins must understand what they are getting themselves into.
Let them know it’s a small team and that you’re bootstrapping (most entrepreneurs will bootstrap heavily from the beginning). Let them know so that their expectations will be tailored rightly—be open about finances; it helps build trust in a small team.
They Must Have The Right Skills
It’s a small team. Everyone on the team must bring something on board. If your idea needs more of designs to function, bring more designers onboard.
If it needs healthcare professionals with certain professional skills, look for them. If it needs writers, project managers, software developers, marketers, sales—bring them. Don’t waste your time bringing more designers when you need writers.
Learn to strike a balance across talents.
If you’re building an NGO, look for the right skills. Most NGOs need a mix of marketing, content, and liaison. Look for these people. Don’t start bringing designers into an NGO. You need them, but not four of them—that’s a waste of resources.
If you’re building an agency, look for the right skills needed to make an agency function.
Agencies are highly creative communities, so you should look for people who have the skills to develop the services you want your agency to offer.
I made this mistake when I started building Care City (now Care City Media).
I was building a publication. What I needed were writers and editors, not even designers or web developers. But I was busy hiring people who were not writers. At the end of the day, we were not producing much writing.
It took me years to realise and change strategy.
Now, we have more writers on the team, and we’re doing what we are supposed to do—writing.
And finally, the fifth tip.
Communicate Openly And Empower Team Members
Communication is one of the most effective leadership skills. I wrote about it on Monday. You must learn to listen to your team members, even if there are just two of them.
Always communicate team visions, goals and strategic plans.
The beauty of small teams is that it’s easier to communicate and get feedback easily compared to big teams.
Always communicate if you want your small team to remain healthy and productive. This leadership habit has helped us as a team.
We communicate regularly. I try to have a close relationship with everyone on the team. It requires some hard work, but I have discovered that it brings the people closer to the team’s vision.
Try to know more about your team members than just company or business issues.
Let them know that you care about them and are making an effort to get to know them beyond work or business.
Communicate regularly using your team channels—WhatsApp, email, Slack, Notion, etc.
Celebrate team members’ achievements and special days—birthdays, wedding ceremonies, anniversaries, promotions, certifications, etc.
It’s through effective communication that we build a healthy team culture.
Empowering Your Team
Allow team members to grow. It’s super easy because it’s a small team—purchase team courses.
If you have a social media manager who is performing below expectations, buy them a course and follow up with them.
When building with small teams, most of the time, you may not be able to get the best, so what you do is get those with potential and grow them.
One business culture I am learning from the Japanese is the importance of investing in your team members. I
It’s vital to the success of any business. The customer might be very important, but the team is the reason why the customer can be satisfied and why the products and services even exist in the first place.
So, invest in them. Empower them, and in return, they will contribute greatly to the growth and success of your brand and organisation.
Other things to consider include:
- Define Very Clear Goals, Roles And Responsibilities: Let everybody know what they are here to do. It’s easier for people to function when they know what they are expected to do. Don’t make roles or responsibilities look ambiguous and indescribable. Make it direct.
- Focus on team building: Let team meetings be sessions of team building. Organise events with your team members. Invite leaders and experts to train your team. This practice is a wise investment.
- Avoid micromanaging: I used to be a dangerous micro-manager. I liked to be involved in every detail. It was wasting my time and not allowing team members to function effectively. So, I repented and stopped micro-managing. If team members make mistakes in a project or task, I correct them and try to teach and mentor them. Mistakes are the foundations of great things.
Embracing Technology And Artificial Intelligence
Finally, embrace technology and artificial intelligence.
Small teams are only effective because of technology. Without technology, it would be impossible to achieve great things with small teams.
Recently, Sam Altam commented that small teams could have as much as 10 billion dollar valuations in the future because of AI—the one-person unicorn dream.
Yes, it’s possible. Small one and two-person teams are already doing amazing things because of automation and AI.
The advent of AI agents is also transforming the landscape of small teams and entrepreneurship.
Entrepreneurs are already exploring the possibilities of AI to do the jobs of 10, 20, and even 100 people!
We’re happy about AI; nonetheless, no matter how advanced AI becomes, we must preserve the human touch. I strongly believe in preserving the human touch in the workplace.
Our team has recently started expanding into AI and automation. It’s a gradual process, and we’re excited about the possibilities.
However, we will ensure that the human touch is maintained and that we do not replace everything we do with AI.
There’s so much we can do with AI and technology as entrepreneurs.
This is one topic we are excited to explore in our May Healthcare Leadership & Innovation Webinar.
We’re changing the method of our webinar delivery now to pre-recorded sessions attended only by registered and verified participants. The recordings will now be edited and shared.
Subscribe to our Subsatck newsletter to be the first to hear about our plans and future events, offers, products, and services.
An Opportunity To Build With Us
Are you a healthcare professional thinking of starting your entrepreneurial journey or a healthcare entrepreneur who has already started but needs assistance restructuring your team or building a new one?
We are revisiting an old idea. Some years back, we started a small agency that helped healthcare entrepreneurs, brands, and businesses with marketing, branding, and team management. We worked with a few entrepreneurs but couldn’t keep up because of too many engagements and had to suspend the programme for some time.
Now, we’re ready and better equipped to resume. We’re already getting entrepreneurs to join us and are excited to invite you if you’ve got an idea you’re working on.
We don’t have a website yet. It’s just me and a couple of other creators—brand strategists, web developers, product designers, writers, etc.
Send me a message here: workwithbigdan@gmail.com introducing yourself, and we will schedule a meeting.
Only serious entrepreneurs ready to start building and have the resources to pull things together.
