Since you’re asking – advice on how to hire smart as you grow the business

cpjobs.com has partnered with code-R to bring you examples of challenges faced at work and practical advice to empower yourself and others.

Makeover Mike: A couple of years ago, I took over the family business after my father passed. It had always been a small enterprise, with no more than a dozen employees at any one time hired to work with my family. Even those employees were relatively new additions, as my great grandparents stubbornly resisted letting non-family members get involved.

But as times changed, my father became the last in his generation of the family who wanted anything to do with the business. So he decided to start expanding the company and its operations, which meant hiring employees. But he didn’t let the company grow too much because, in some way, he was still holding on to the family business culture that had lasted for three generations.

My father worked at the family business for his entire career but he and my mother encouraged me to get more varied work experience. After business school, I worked abroad in positions across several companies, including multinational corporations. And when my father’s health began to fail, I returned to Hong Kong to help with the business.

The business’ past will always be an important part of my family’s history and legacy, but it’s time to move on and modernise. I want to develop it into an innovative SME with a bigger and more diversified portfolio and workforce. I’m just nervous about the expansion. How can I create a successful business of the future without forgetting the past?

code-R: It is indeed important to be able to learn from the past, but also not be beholden to it. In many ways you are a start-up entrepreneur, as you’re trying to radically transform your business into something rather new and more fitting for the modern economy.

That presents you with unique benefits and challenges. You have a chance to reshape and fire up the culture of your business, but if you’re not careful you’ll just stain it with your own bad habits and behaviours. Don’t give me that look - we both know that no-one’s perfect. You are an important rock anchoring the company, but if you hold on too tight it will never thrive as a sustainable and successful long term business model for the modern age.

So, you need to nurture an autonomous corporate identity, one with a defined brand image and a solid corporate culture. And this identity needs to be bigger than you and able to carry on with or without you. You do this through the recruitment of your expanded workforce.

Every hire is a complex human being with their own values, habits and motivations. You’ll need talent to develop and manage the infrastructure of your business, and workers to power the engines. Every hire brings their own perspectives, and it is this complex ecosystem of interactions between personalities, behaviours and attitudes that will fertilise a strong corporate culture.

But before all that, you must set the core values of your company, and define its guiding vision. This will form the backbone of your corporate culture, and is a way you can pay homage to the past. By clearly defining the company’s stated sense of self, you make it easier to target and attract the type of employees who will share those values and vision, and build on those foundations to construct a new company with you.

Hiring the best fits right off the bat will give you confidence to trust them. And trust me, the fledgling culture of your born-again company will need your blessings to freely mature if it is to soar to distant horizons.

code-R

An independent non-profit project created to support the self-actualisation of those in their 20s and 30s, and even beyond.