What are the key ingredients of getting the right team together?

Grant Leboff: One of the things that are very important when you get to that stage in a business, is putting that senior team, that management team, together. What for you, are the key ingredients? What's the composition of trying to get that right team, that right balance?

Guy Rigby: I think the business has to lead, by defining where management is required. Different businesses require different levels of expertise, in different areas. But once you decide on that, often businesses aren't yet financially strong enough to go out and do it all at once. So there is probably an order, during which it will go and do things, and the founder will probably be still be a hero for quite a long time doing a lot of jobs that he might end up not doing, because he's got other management members doing it.

So I think the typical areas in a business that will need looking after are finance; don't run out of cash. Sales; generate demand. Supply chain; supply chain might be product, might be a service, it might be the people in the business. As in my business, I'm an accountant. We employ people who deliver our services, so for me the supply chain is my people. So that will be an HR Director, for example, in my business. So we just need to figure out what roles and slots need to be filled. Then you need to have some understanding of what is a main board role and what is a management role. Some of these guys, typically the finance guy, the MD will be on your main board, perhaps alongside your non-execs, if you if you have any, and some of them; the head of sales, the head of marketing, whatever it may, be may actually be in a kind of management team below. Each business will change.

Guy Rigby: There has been a sort of tendency to make everybody a director in small businesses and I don't think that's terribly helpful. I think you're better off figuring out what that end structure should look like, so begin at the end, is something I always talk about. What does it look like in five years time and then figuring out who are the best people for those roles or and then how you recruit them and retain them. Often that will involve some sort of incentive arrangement, some sort of share ownership or whatever.

Grant Leboff: Where do you start looking for these people? I know there is probably no exact but do you go straight to other companies and try and pluck your management from there? Are you looking for people who want to take a step to the next level, but then you've got people that, perhaps, are inexperienced in those roles because you're looking at the raw talent they have, rather than necessarily the experience. Where's the balance for that, for an entrepreneur?

Guy Rigby: I think all of the above. I think if you've got a very big role, a really really important role, I'd probably still think that going through a formal process, which is expensive, of some sort of headhunt is still a good way of doing it. It might be very expensive but at least you'll see quite a lot of very capable candidates. And at the other end of the scale, of course, we live in the world of social networks and our own connections can can be very, very forthcoming in terms of delivering candidates for these roles.

Grant Leboff: And in your experience, if you're a fairly young business, with some degree of success but if it's an immature business it's just starting to put the management structure together, the degree of success will be relative. How do you attract people, the right people, to that business. What are the mechanisms that an owner has??

Guy Rigby: The most fashionable way of doing it these days, is to offer them some sort of stake in the business with the prospect of an exit. Listen, I'm building this business, five to seven years out we're going to sell it and I'm going to give you a percentage of the business through an enterprise management incentive scheme, or whatever it may be, which is which is tax effective and that will retain you. Effectively, from my point of view that will lock you, in because you never leave with the prospect of that huge sum of money, in relative terms, coming up in five to seven years time.

Grant Leboff: And for you that would be the optimum way or are there others?

Guy Rigby: I think it works. Now at the end of the day, you've got to find people who are genuinely passionate alongside you. There's a hell of a lot of instinct involved in this. Do I like this guy? Can I work with this guy? Does he actually know what he's talking about? What he's telling me about what he did was his previous business, was that really what he did or is that what with the team he was involved in did and he played a small part in it? So you got to ask all those questions and figure out whether or not the guy, or the girl, is the right person for the job. But ultimately in order to retain them, these days it tends to be linked to some sort of financial opportunity at the end of the day.

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