As an entrepreneur, you start alone and you end alone.
Jeff Taylor believes that theory because it’s played out inhis own life. He founded Monster.com in 1993, then left to start new ventures in 2005, the year the “job board” Web site turned employment solutions company reached $987 million in revenue.
Now, Taylor keeps busy as founder and CEO of Eons Inc., a Boston-based holding company for four Web sites he started that cater to baby boomers: eons.com, eonsboommedia.com, tributes.com and meetcha.com.
From his experience at Monster, he’s taken lessons from recruiting employees and innovating in order to grow his new companies.
As an entrepreneur, Taylor says, “You also have the opportunity as your idea grows that you begin to give pieces of that idea away to other very capable people. In the end, if you give enough of the idea away, then the idea becomes an engine of its own with lots of talented people workingon it.”
Smart Business spoke withTaylor about how to find employees and innovation.
Find where you add value.The key to success as an entrepreneur is to be able to identify your strengths and weaknesses and to hire to your weaknesses. Too many times, as anentrepreneur, you think you can do all of it. You move into a mode in your life where you can’t be told that it can’t be done, so you think you can do everything, and you’re not going to listen to anyone else.
One of the things I found is that I have some clear strengths and some clear weaknesses. One of the things I developed was a sense of being able to identify people that were great contributors that had strengths where I didn’t have them.
Part of it is looking at what are your key messages. If someone were to ask you to describe yourself, do you describe yourself as a particularly organized person? Or are you a really good marketing person? People tend to be able to, with a little bit of poking and prodding, identify strengths that they have.
It’s a little bit harder to make a list of things that you’re not good at even though maybe in your heart of hearts you know that (it’s aweakness). For example, you really don’t want me to be in the accounting department of my organization. I tend to like more culture building, human resources, dealing with employees around the idea. But in terms of being operationally built, that’s not my classic skill set. So I look for people whoare more organized.
Identifying your strengths I think most people can do, it’s the weaknesses you need to spend a little more time on.
That was an important part of my hiring process. I also like to hire people with a lot of passion. I would look for people who were extremely interested in even if it was hobbies or passion that they had in their life outside of work, where I could see somebody go deep and long into asubject or topic or experience.
I love to hire that kind of person because as they caught fire to my idea, they would want to be part of it, and they would work hard to live that idea to its fullest. A big part of the recruiting process is identifying people who have a similar desire as you but maybe with a different skill set.
