Building an Effective Executive Team for Your Early-Stage Startup

Our theme for the October 9 meeting was Building an Effective Executive Team and our guest facilitators were Linda Usoz, Partner in Corporate and Employment Law at Kirkpatrick & Lockhart http://www.klng.com and Kurt Amundson, a consultant who has served as COO and CFO for a series of high tech firms across the Silicon Valley. Linda and Kurt and the entrepreneurs in attendance offer the following suggestions on Building an Effective Executive Team for Early Stage Companies.It's

About the People

• Do the research to ensure that people are who they seem to be/say they are
• Work with a successful team with positive history working together is a good indicator for success and will more likely get the funding and support sought

Create clear milestones, roles and objectives with related consequences/options

• A detailed job description may help you with your negotiations and communications and help you before more flexible in signing on and growing your executive team
• Invest the time to create the right executive team member for your start-up
• It's about competence, passion, culture and fit
• It's about having the right people on your team at the right time, preferably people who can scale with your organization as it grows
• Communicate your expectations on roles, milestones, rewards, responsibilities clearly and in writing and up front
• Every start-up needs business expertise as well as technical expertise
• If someone objectives to the thorough due diligence in investigating a fit in the organization, perhaps he/she is not the right person for your organization

Strategies for hiring the right person at the right time

• One way to plan for the growth of the organization is to not give inflated titles to people who sign on early. This way you have the option of promoting them or hiring someone over them as you grow the company
• Hire an interim executive to cover immediate needs while also investigating executives' long-term fit in the organization
• When you're faced with founders who need to be re-assigned within the organization, it's best to be clear up front about milestones, roles, objectives while communicating clearly the needs of the organization. Get board involvement. Get everyone invested in the long-term success of the business, de-emphasizing the inevitable ego-struggle it would take a founder to step down from senior executive positions.

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