Brett Snyder's path to entrepreneurship wasn't typical — he was selling Speedos online.

But that experience introduced him to the power of SEO and the world of digital marketing. Now, Brett’s the CEO and founder of Knucklepuck, a digital marketing and web development agency that focuses on WordPress development, SEO, paid media, and content marketing services.

For Brett, success came when he decided to take control of his circumstances and own the responsibility of running a business. On The Fastest Growing Companies podcast, he shared his top tips on effectively managing a team for faster growth:

Plan your hires

Aligning Knucklepuck’s recruitment and business development pipeline had always been a challenge for Brett and his team. “You never quite seem to have them both peak at the same time,” Brett shared.

This issue got them to look at their internal processes and think about the importance of hours allocation (AKA the distribution of time spent on different tasks). Brett says to ask yourself: “How long does it take for us to train up a junior person to be able to really be effective on projects — versus how long does it take to recruit and onboard somebody with experience?”

Finding and hiring the right people takes time and careful planning. You have to figure out where you'll be able to meet capacity thresholds and still remain profitable.

So, for anyone looking to optimize their hiring and development strategy, start by projecting the amount of work you anticipate coming and figure out where it makes more sense to hire. Adjust your timeline to include buffers like onboarding and training.

Have a success criteria for hiring

Brett initially had some trouble hiring his business operations manager. “First time, I didn't know what the role was at all,” Brett recalled. “I deferred to [someone who has] since been removed from my board, who referred over somebody who was not qualified to do the job. But I was not qualified to evaluate whether he could do it.”

Brett knew he needed to make himself familiar with the role to avoid a repeat scenario. “For the next business operations person, I wrote down every possible operational or administrative thing that goes into running a business,” Brett said. “It filled 12 feet of whiteboard wall in our conference room. The fatal flaw there is, there were too many things that I put out there.”

So, Brett had to find a balance: he had to delegate responsibilities while keeping that list relevant to the position he was hiring for. You have to know what to take off your plate to know how to find the right person.

A lot of factors go into hiring, but it can be narrowed down by first having a clear success criteria in place. That way, you can feel good knowing that the person you hire can handle what you give to them.

Make sure visions are aligned

When it comes to Knucklepuck’s success, Brett has one answer. “It's the people, right? It's the folks that stepped into these roles,” says Brett. “The woman who now runs operations for us, when we lost our other two managers, she had been running our paid media team at the time. And she basically took over our SEO and our content team.”

For Brett, having employees who understand how the company is run and the importance of certain teams was crucial to their growth. And they know the strengths of the business because their visions are aligned.

“Do you have the right folks around that have an alignment of vision with you, but also the ability to execute on that vision?” Brett asked.

At Knucklepuck, having a team who shares goals is a big contributing factor to their success. When your employees align with your vision, they’ll have a sense of ownership over their responsibilities within the company. Plus, having a shared vision creates a sense of unity across the team.

If you want to foster your own shared vision at your business, start an open dialogue with your employees about it and get their buy-in. Be clear on how their work fits into the big picture and allow them to contribute their own ideas. That way, they’ll have ownership of what the business’s success looks like.

The secret to quick growth?

It’s finding and keeping the right people. Not everyone will stick with your company. But when you find the right people — the ones who are committed — you have to make an effort to keep them happy. Because when you invest in your people, that’s an investment in the overall success of your business.

And ultimately, when it comes to hiring, Brett shared this: “I think the difference was just finding somebody and being open to and trusting a new relationship, right? And being able to know that if you're going to trust it, then you have to go into it believing that it'll work.”