Your team is the face of your small business. More often than not, your team will make the first impression on new leads and customers, and be the ones who interact the most with your customers.

The kind of team you build will set the stage for the kind of customer service you provide and, ultimately, how the world sees your business. That’s why building the right team is vitally important to your success.

Attracting — and keeping — a great team is hard enough as it is. As a small business, you likely can’t offer everything a corporation or a big business can offer. Luckily, with your free Small Business Benefits™ account, you’ll be able to offer a host of employee benefits to help you attract — and keep — the best team.

Besides offering competitive employee benefits, here are a few more things you can do to build the best team for your small business.

A small business’s guide to building the best team

Establish your culture

A great team is cohesive, with members who share the same values and are striving for the same mission. To build a great team, you need to hire employees who share your values and mission, which means that, before you start hiring, you need to know what your values and mission are.

Your small business’s culture will determine everything from how you communicate within your team and interact with customers to how you manage your team and plan for the future. It’s not really something you can train. Either your employees fit in with your culture or they don’t.

Before you start looking for the right employees, you need to take some time to think about the culture you want to build. From there, you can identify people with traits that will fit into your culture.

Find the experts you need

Culture fit is incredibly important. Without it, you could end up hiring a bunch of people who have the qualifications and experience you need but who don’t serve your customers the way you would like them to or share your goals. However, culture fit is far from the only important quality in prospective employees.

Culture fit alone won’t make someone right for your business. They also need the technical skills and expertise you’re looking for. Otherwise, you’ll end up with a great culture but an ineffective team. To build a great team, you need both.

Small business owners are often experts at one or two areas, but may not know the ins and outs of every role they need. Don’t be afraid to hire employees who know their role better than you do. And, if your budget is tight, look for candidates with broad skill sets that can handle aspects of different roles.

Hire for potential rather than experience

In their quest for hiring teammates with the technical skills they need, small business owners tend to make the mistake of focusing too much on candidates’ experience. While experience can be somewhat helpful in demonstrating technical skills, it doesn’t paint a full picture.

At the end of the day, all that a candidate’s experience can really tell you is that they did a certain role for a certain length of time. It doesn’t give you any indication of how well they did in the role, how they interacted with their team, how dedicated they were or any of the other soft skills that separate the technically proficient from the truly great.

Experience is no guarantee, and the technical skills learned from experience can often be taught. Look beyond a candidate’s experience at their potential, and give people who are new to the field a chance.

Recognize existing strengths and weaknesses

If you’re hiring for a brand new small business that’s just getting off the ground, it’s easy to see where your areas of need are, and what kind of people you need on your side. But, when you are adding to an existing team, recognizing your own weaknesses can be more of a challenge.

Every team — and every person for that matter — has strengths and weaknesses. If you focus only on your strengths and fail to recognize your areas of weakness, you’ll be in the dark about what your small business needs to get better and reach your future goals.

Try to look at your team from an outside perspective and be brutally honest about what your strengths and weaknesses are. Only then will you be able to properly identify what kind of teammates you need to realize your potential and maximize your strengths.

Show your appreciation

The pandemic has changed a lot of things for employees and employers alike. With more options than ever, employees have left less-than-ideal jobs in droves for opportunities with more flexibility and appreciation.

While offering great benefits through Small Business Benefits can help you attract and retain a phenomenal team, showing a little appreciation for your team can go a long way to getting them to stick around and motivating them to work harder.

Saying thank you and giving feedback constructively is a great starting point, but there are lots of other little things you can do to show your employees that you appreciate them. Actively asking for their feedback, recognizing outstanding team members, providing lunch or treats and celebrating birthdays are just a few ways you can show appreciation to your team.

As the face of your small business, your team is paramount to your success. Building the best team won’t happen overnight, but with these steps and competitive employee benefits, any small business can do it.

Learn more about employee benefits from Small Business Benefits.