My Ten Top Tips to Build a Great Team

Despite the emergence of AI and all the benefits it brings, if you want to grow your web design agency, then you’ll almost certainly need to employ people.

But building a truly great team is about a lot more than just recruiting. Get it right, and it can take your agency to the next level. But get it wrong and it could cost you. In this article, I share my ten top tips to build a great team.

01. Be Highly Selective

This one should be obvious, but when you’re recruiting, you should be highly selective about who you bring in. That might not be easy if you’re busy and you just need ‘bums on seats’, but employing people should never be about the short term.

When you employ someone, they could be with you for a long time, potentially many years. While you do have things like probationary periods, where both you and your new employee can decide if you’re the right fit for each other, letting someone go in their probation is never a nice thing to do, and should be avoided where possible. It’s far better to take your time, be choosy about who you bring in, and get it right first time.

Advertise your role in many places, and don’t just offer the role to the first person you interview. Aim to see as many people as you can. When I employed people, even when I thought I’d met the perfect candidate on the first interview, I still made sure I interviewed as many other people as I could, as this usually led to a much better hire in the end.

Remember, you’ll need to work with these people day in, day out, and they will also represent your business to the outside world. Take your time, because there really is no reason to rush a big decision like this.

02. Follow the ‘50/50’ Rule

Whenever I recruited anyone, I always followed what I called the ‘50/50’ rule. This meant that when I was assessing potential employees, half of what I looked at was their skills, experience and expertise, and the other half was their personality – their attitude and their approach to work.

Many people neglect that second part and just focus on finding someone with the right technical experience, but if you want to build a truly great team, then there’s more to it than that.

You’ll need to find people who are a good fit for your team and who buy into your company culture. You’ll all need to work together, so that means you need to find team players who have a positive, supportive and proactive attitude.

You can teach people technical skills, but you can’t always teach them interpersonal skills. Bringing in someone who’s technically fine but creates a toxic atmosphere can end up doing your business more harm than good.

03. Say ‘Thank You’ as Often as Possible

This is a small gesture, but it can go a long way, and it was something that I learnt quite early in my career.

I was fortunate to work for a boss who was a really good guy in general, but I always remember that he was also great at saying thank you. It wasn’t disingenuous, and it wasn’t over the top. It was just a little thing that he did naturally.

If I did a good piece of design, he would say well done and thank me for it. When I was leaving to go home, he would always thank me for my work that day.

It was just a small gesture, but as an employee – and I was quite junior back then – it did a lot to make me feel valued and appreciated, and it made me feel loyal to him and the company.

You don’t have to do this all the time, and in fact, if you do, it probably won’t have the same impact, but if you can make the time just to thank your employees when it matters, it can go a long way to building a strong and loyal team.

04. Set Out Your Vision

Building a truly great team is more than just putting bums on seats. If you want your team to commit to your agency and be with you for the long term, then you’ll need to set out your vision to them – a vision they will need to buy into.

This isn’t about trying to take over the world, but you do need to think about why you started your web design agency in the first place, and what you’re looking to achieve.

Perhaps you want to work with charities and good causes, or to have a positive impact on society. Perhaps you want to be the market leader in a specific type of website or technology. Or perhaps you just want to consistently do work that you’re all really proud of, so that you can all go home every day feeling content in what you’ve produced.

Your vision doesn’t need to be so big and grand that it’s practically unachievable, far from it. It could be quite humble, and plenty of people just want to work for a good quality, local agency where they can do work that they enjoy.

But it does need to be a bit deeper than just wanting to make money.

05. Lead By Example

As the business owner, you’ll need to be the living embodiment of your vision, but you’ll also need to act in a way that communicates your values and what you expect from your people.

This means it’s not just about telling your team what you expect them to do – you’ll need to show them that you’re prepared to do it too, without any double standards. If you aren’t prepared to role up your sleeves and do the hard work, then this can be one of the quickest ways to create an ‘us and them’ mentality, which can lead to resentment.

You may not always have the technical skills to do the same type of work as your team, but if you expect people to work hard and dedicate long hours when you’re not prepared to do the same, or if your team start to feel like you’re just offloading while keeping the good stuff for yourself, then don’t be surprised if people don’t stick around too long.

06. Make Time for Team Building

There’s more to life than just work, so if you want your team to truly commit to your agency and enjoy working there, then you’ll need to make time for team building and social events.

It’s very easy to get lost in the day-to-day and to forget about this, but try not to. When I ran my agency, I probably wasn’t the best at this, and this was always something that I struggled with.

But it’s called ‘team building’ for a reason. Social events are one of the best ways for your team to not only unwind and let of steam, but to also get to know each other and share positive experiences in a way that you don’t always get to do in the office.

Plus, who doesn’t like a treat that’s paid for by the boss? It might cost money, but think of it as an investment that will more than pay for itself in the long run. Even if it’s just something simple like a team lunch once a month, you’ll be surprised at just how far that goes.

07. Pay as Much as You Can Afford

The jobs market can be highly competitive and expensive. Finding the best talent is neither easy or cheap, and if you want to compete with bigger agencies, you’ll need to accept that you’ll need to pay at least the going rate.

Even then, there will be a limit, but it’s not always about paying the highest salaries – it’s about paying as much as you can reasonably afford.

If you’re a small agency, then you probably won’t be able to pay as much as the bigger ones, but that’s okay. Pay is important, but it isn’t always the most important thing for many employees. Plenty of people specifically seek out smaller agencies, despite the lower pay, because of other aspects, like culture and work ethos.

But you will need to stay on top of this. Don’t neglect your employees pay, as not all employees are comfortable asking for more, and the last thing you’d probably want is a good employee suddenly leaving just because they wanted more money but were afraid to ask.

08. Focus on Extra Benefits

Even if you’re not able to pay your employees the highest salaries, there are other ways that you can make up for it and create an attractive offering for your employees. You could offer them things like:

• A generous company pension scheme.
• Employee discount schemes, so they can save money when they shop.
• Greater holiday allowance, so they can have more time off.
• Free food and drink in the office.
• Free parking.
• Other nice touches, like letting them have the day off for their birthday.

Even just the potential to work with higher profile clients or on more creative or exciting projects can be a big draw, especially if it’s not available anywhere else.

Remember, not all employees are motivated by the biggest salary. Many will look at the overall package, so if you can be creative and find ways to offer that little bit extra, it could both save you money and give you a greater return in the long run.

09. Trust and Empower

If you’ve run your agency for a while, and especially if you’ve run it on your own and you’re used to doing everything yourself, then it can be hard to hand things over to others, especially when you first start to employ people.

But that’s exactly what you’ll need to do if you ever want to build a truly great team. The trick is to create an environment where it’s okay to fail, within reason.

It’s true that you’ll be running a business where you’ll need to deliver work that is done to the required standards, so there will always be a limit to this, but you’ll also need to give your team enough autonomy so that they can do things their way, provided you’ve put in place the appropriate guiderails, and provided you’re able to step in and help if things do go wrong.

This means not being too harsh on people if they mess up, and also making sure your team feel well supported so that if they do make mistakes, it’s not the end of the world.

If you don’t trust people, they can quickly feel frustrated and undervalued. But if they feel empowered, you’ll probably find that you’ll get a lot more from them.

10. Create an Agency that You Would Want to Work For

If you want to build a truly stellar team, then you need to create an agency that you yourself would want to work for. This might seem obvious, but if you dread coming into work every day and you’re not doing work that you enjoy, then you shouldn’t be too surprised if you struggle to attract good people and build a strong team.

The good news is that this isn’t something you need to do on your own, and in fact it shouldn’t be. You may be the one who created your business in the first place, and you may also be the one who creates the vision and the values, but one of the most rewarding things about growing a successful agency is that, once you start to bring in good people, the personality and culture of the agency starts to grow by itself, often in wonderful ways that you never anticipated.

This is a good thing, and if you follow the points I’ve laid out in this article, then you should have no trouble in building a truly great team; one that is the backbone of a great agency.