One of the biggest misses most entrepreneurs experience while they’re growing their business is the unanticipated impact of people. No matter how smart you are, how well-advised you are in matters of finance, strategy and all the rational elements of your business, the biggest trip-ups we see have to do with employees.

Whether it’s failure to anticipate the impact of one bad apple on the team, failure to estimate the true cost of hiring and paying employees, or the true cost of losing a really great employee—most entrepreneurs aren’t particularly well-skilled in the subject of managing the people portions of their business.

How Young Businesses Can Land Great Talent

When you’re starting out, hiring seems like a monumental expense, because for a startup it is. You can’t really afford the best talent in the marketplace, so you settle for what you can afford because you need feet on the ground to get it all done. That’s the first mistake, and it’s horrendous to undo (and, frankly, can undo you if you aren’t careful).

There are more important things to people than money. You just have to figure out what motivates them. And we aren’t talking about “people” in the broadest sense. We’re talking about what motivates every specific individual in your organization.

Find that one thing—it often doesn’t cost much, and sometimes doesn’t cost anything, to motivate without money. Some employees might like a flexible schedule to manage their family lives or their hobbies or dreams. Some people might like to be rewarded with potential equity. And some people really just want to feel as though they’re a valued contributor because they completely believe in what you’re doing.

That last part is essential because people adopt what they help create. In a startup, that’s the formation of your belief systems, the root of your culture. And culture has nothing to do with being cool and having a pingpong table in the back room.

Chickens, Eggs and Growing Companies

People prudence is hard to achieve when you’re scaling up, too. Finding that balance between not hiring too soon and not hiring too late is really difficult to pull off. Do you hire once you have the work or before the work comes in? If you hire before the work comes in—and then it doesn’t—how strapped for funds will you be? If you hire after the work comes in and you have someone on deck who is only just finding their way, how do you expect to retain clients? It is always the same chicken-and-egg story.

For our company, we hire ahead of the work. We are very realistic about how long it might take to fill the plates of new employees from a financial perspective, but we try to keep them busy assisting in all the different areas of the company so that when the clients come, our new people will be prepared to wow them.

This will cut into your profitability, and you have to be prepared for that cost. But you also have to prepare to successfully onboard new clients if you’re lucky enough to have them select you. Having a well-trained staff already in place is essential.

Get Help With ‘Help Wanted’

You don’t have to figure it all out on your own. If you’re thinking about expanding, bounce your ideas off your entrepreneur friends. There also are groups like the Helzberg Entrepreneurial Mentoring Program, which I’m part of, that can offer advice.

Lastly, and this is something that entrepreneurs avoid like the plague, get professional help with human resources. To grow your company, you’re going to need the assistance of an HR professional, the same way you might hire a lawyer to handle your contracts or an accountant to assemble your tax records.

Think of good HR practices as an insurance policy, especially the parts that deal with compliance. You’re subject to most federal and state statutes at the time you hire your very first employee. And those regulations and responsibilities increase at 10, 20 and then again at 50 headcount. It can vary by the industry you’ve chosen to work in, or the state or states you’ve chosen to do business in, and if you don’t know what applies to you, then you’re an accident waiting to happen.