What are required for start-ups?
When you first initiate a start-up, you need to find people you trust, and people who obtain resources (skills, knowledge, and capital) to come up with a team, to combine interests and integrate visions.
When recruiting members for your start-ups, make sure the dreams you’re selling are realistic and feasible. Don’t turn dreams into horror movies!
Start-up companies are new with inventions and ideas, high risks come with irregular pay dates for employees.
People who join start-ups all have families, families mean mortgages and long-term debts. Therefore, people’s family responsibilities need to be taken into consideration as well.
Life Cycle of a firm
(4 stages of a life cycle: Survival- Development- Growth- Expansion/ Decline)
Survival: 3-5 years
Development: 6-12 years
Growth: 13-20 years
Expansion/ Decline: Firm growth might start declining if not expanded.
At the first stage, when you attract talents, you can only use possible futures to recruit them and hope that your firms hang around long enough so the talents can enjoy the benefits. The later the stages the firms are in, you have profits to recruit talents with realistic benefits.
At different stages of a firm’s life cycle, the methods of recruitment and retention are different. The more the market and demand changes, the more you recruit, and the more your human resources change, including more talents from diversified cultures. How you recruit and who you recruit make the shape and the foundation of the company.
When old and new employees work together, there will be conflicts in different beliefs from different trainings. There must be training budgets allocated for newcomers in order to transfer the company knowledge. The role of HRM is important for recruitment, performance measurement, rewards, and how values are developed within the firms.
In addition, Dr. Tan Wee Liang suggests that there are still ways to protect the companies’ IPR (Intellectual Property Right) when the companies are still young and lack of funds.
The answer is- Make your formula a secret! Have different suppliers for each ingredient, so no competitors can guess your formulas.
Also, when the companies start earning money, they should start investing in company branding to grow.
During the lecture, Dr. Tan Wee Liang also included three discussion sessions with examples questions to help students think and apply the knowledge learnt in class. Students are set in groups, and everyone is encouraged to voice their opinions with the example questions and answering sessions. The entire class discusses together after groups sharing their ideas or answers to the questions.
