Another reality that you will need to face when hiring employees to expand your business is the fact that if anything goes wrong, your clients will blame you, not your employees, even if they were responsible for the failure. Whining and telling your client that your employee screwed up is not only a waste of time, but it will also make you appear to be an incompetent leader who doesn't know how to keep his subordinates under control. The key thing you need to keep in mind when hiring employees is that, if they screw up on a project, your client could place the blame on you and potentially terminate the relationship. Imagine all the time and effort it took you to acquire this account, only to have them go to the competition because a member of your team was lazy or incompetent when it came to the completion of a project. Not only can this happen, it will happen if you are not cautious.
This is why it is so critical to hire good people from the very beginning. When it comes to hiring employees, the best strategy is to “hire slowly but fire quickly.” What I mean by this is that you should spend a great deal of time evaluating a potential employee before allowing them to become a member of your team, and if they screw up badly enough, you should fire them quickly before they cause more problems or damage to your reputation.
When hiring employees, you should use the same amount of care and caution that you would use when selecting a stock to invest in. After all, your employees are assets, and a high quality employee can dramatically increase your income. At the same time, a poor quality employee can cause your income to fall, as their screw ups alienate your clients. Just as you would not want to invest in the stocks of a poorly performing company, under no circumstances should you hire an employee who doesn't operate at a high standard.