Josh Delaney, Husband, Father of 2, marketing online since 2004, eCommerce Expert, Brand Builder, Inc 5000 Award Winner, Sold 5 Companies in 10 years to both private and public companies, “Milwaukee’s Most Notable Marketing Executive.”
Starting an online company requires a blend of strategic, creative, and technical skills. Identifying and filling key roles early on can set the foundation for success. Here are essential positions to consider when starting a company brand new. Josh Delaney built and sold multiple companies for multiple 8-figures in just the last few years with only a core team of 3-4 on the payroll. It’s only getting easier to do this.
Assuming entrepreneurs have a product and brand and are ready to start selling here is what Delaney did and does regularly when it comes to hiring first key roles (italics are the jobs he would outsource):
- Designer: “If you can design things, you can get off the ground fast as a start-up. Design email content, website content, product graphics, infographics, print material, ad content, labels, packaging, social content etc. With one single designer, you can look like a million-dollar company every single day. I got lucky when one of my best friends from high school turned out to be the sickest designer I know and he said yes to working for me. I had gone through so many designers before that.”
1b. Developer: Outsource a third-party individual.
- Customer Service / Social Media Manager: “Whatever you are selling is going to require customer service and community engagement. You should do this to start, but quickly train someone else to answer things the way you want to be answered and engage with your community and customers daily. Don’t drop that ball, it’s the most important one. All of the great stuff your designer is making, this person should be helping you deploy across all customers and social channels.”
Delaney goes on to describe how to ensure high-quality customer service as your online business scales:
”You must have a customer service team that is 100% bought into the mission and values and brand voice from day one. Customers have to feel the brand personality through your service agents. Keep the team small, one person until they are so busy they literally can’t take one more call or email in their 40-50 hours a week. Recently I built a $30,000,000+ e-commerce store with just 2 customer service agents. 1,000+ orders a day at times with just two people. They worked hard, they made good money and they were dedicated to upholding our brand integrity and they knew that we valued their job so much. They are not just “customer service reps” we don’t care about. They are at the heart of our business, they are boots on the ground, and they matter. We made sure to treat them as such.”
2b. Digital Marketer / Ad Agency / Media Buyer—outsource individual or agency if you can’t do it yourself.
- Content Creator/Manager: “Photo/Video/User Generated Content gatherer or organizer. This role works on real-life content through photos, videos, or gathering photos or videos through users and customers or influencers every single day to pair with your graphics and other creative and marketing efforts. Between this and your designer, you should have creative and content to deploy every single day. This allows you to market on all channels in all formats exactly how they need it. You then give this to your developer to build out your landing pages and offer pages and then your media buyer to set up your ads on every channel using this content.
So you have creative going, a website developed, customer service is a system, content is being gathered daily and media buyer is setting up ad channels, you now have a system with legs that you can pump an ad budget into and really start to grow your business with only two key roles in house and two roles outsourced. Lean and mean.”
3b. Email Marketer: Outsource. “This person will set up all your automated flows and teach you the best ways to communicate with your list. Retain them or pay them as a consultant to set everything up right ASAP. If you can’t afford to keep paying them, at least your entire email list is being hammered properly on its one for the few couple months of them engaging with your brand. All on autopilot.”
- Operations Director: “At some point, you’re going to run out of time between coming up with marketing ideas, sales channels, new products, managing those few people networking to build various parts of your supply chain, etc. Having said that, you’ll need someone to take over your day-to-day inventory management, email management, logistics, people management, etc. This person is your right hand, their job is not to let things slip through the cracks while you’re running around growing the business through sales and marketing and building new products. This position will come as soon as you can afford it. I grew from a customer service rep and social media manager into what is now my Director of Operations and has helped me build multiple seven-figure companies and has been through two exits and tens of millions in revenue. I really love that and think that the best way to hire is to promote from within if you can.”
With these people, just a handful, you can build an empire.
Describing the qualities to look for in an operations manager to ensure they can lead product development and day-to-day effectively, Delaney explains:
“They have to be task oriented. Opposite of a creative. They have to be ok with working for someone else in a fast-paced setting and have a high capacity for retaining lots of new information all the time. They have to be good with the management of deadlines and multiple vendors and processes with each of them. Their brain has to work in an itemized fashion. Whereas creatives, nothing is itemized and nothing is in a straight line. You can help figure this out with personality tests like Meyers Briggs which I absolutely believe in and think every business big or small should have people go through. You’ll learn so much about how people work together and what types don’t work well together, etc.”
Members of the Newport Beach Magazine were not involved in the creation of this content.
