6 Ways To Develop A Successful, Albeit Small, E-Commerce Team

In this exclusive article, Gabrielle Gallo, Head of E-Commerce for The Sak Brand Group, provides six tips for developing a productive and successful small business team. 

It’s a common business complaint — “We don’t have enough resources.” If you’re like many e-Commerce managers, you may be faced with a small team or a tight budget. But that doesn’t mean that you can’t accomplish your goals.

Here at the Sak Brand Group, we view what some would consider a lack of resources as an opportunity to be creative. That’s how we were able to achieve 88% CAGR over the last four years, compared to the e-Commerce industry benchmark of 14% — despite the fact that we had just two to three dedicated people working across our three branded sites.

The Sak Brand Group spans three lifestyle brands — The Sak, Sakroots and Elliott Lucca — and was founded in 1989. We’ve predominantly been in the wholesale business until 2012, when we re-launched our e-Commerce site.

We’ve grown considerably more than the industry average each year — and we’re on track to continue that positive trend. We’ve gotten to this point with a lean team and, perhaps most importantly, low staff turnover. Here are six tips for building and maintaining a successful small business team:

1. Balance Is Key: What I’ve learned from building a lean team is that balance is key. Balance between front-end and back-end expertise is sometimes hard to achieve; teams (and goals) typically skew to one end or the other depending on the experience and interest of the executive team. 

   This can become problematic: You can have the best creative in the world, but if you can’t ship your orders, you’ll quickly lose customers. Conversely, you could have a well-functioning site and strong logistics, but if you aren’t supporting the site with marketing, then it’s likely that few people know it exists — certainly not enough to sustain a business.

2. Hire The Right People: How can you create balance and maintain the team? You need to find the right people. At The Sak, my counterpart in building the e-Commerce team is a talented creative pro who complements my operations and merchandising experience. Together, we focused on team members with broad skill sets who were willing to explore uncharted parts of the business as it grew.

   Of course, we also want to keep team members happy, which we know leads to greater success and less turnover. To do this, we focus on the strengths and interests of our team members and help them carve out a career that works for both them and us.

3. Educate The Team: My team is constantly looking for ways to stay informed and learn about changes and improvements within the industry — whether we’re taking webinars, attending networking dinners, enrolling in certificate programs, or even massive open online courses (MOOCs). Thankfully, we have an executive team that supports this investment in education and it has paid off tremendously. The digital world evolves quickly and the key to continued success is investing in education and networking.

   Spotlighting education also helps my team maintain balance — a balanced skill set and balanced priorities. We obviously need our small team to focus on e-Commerce tactics, but we also reward taking part in educational initiatives that interest them.

4. Establish Business Priorities: By focusing on our team’s interests, and making sure they stay current with the explosive pace of e-Commerce, how do we actually get the work done? Two words: prioritization and outsourcing.

   With a small team and limited resources, “prioritize, prioritize, prioritize” has become our mantra. This means we focus on the “need to have” instead of “nice to have.” Sure it would be great to have an interactive gallery of prints on our redesigned site, but it’s critical that our returns process works.

5. Solicit Outside Expertise: Don’t be afraid to seek outside help. Lean teams like ours typically need to outsource activities to properly run some pieces of the puzzle — SEM (Search Engine Marketing), for example. Though it’s often necessary to look to agency partners for help, it’s equally important that whoever manages the agency knows the function very well. When we transitioned online marketing to an agency, we got certified in Google AdWords so we could better understand how the agency ran our business, ask the right questions, and speak intelligently to the campaign performance.
6. Establish A Culture Of Trust: Importantly, trust your employees. The level of responsibility we give our team members helps to keep them engaged while enabling us to work effectively at a fast pace. As a result, we’ve seen steep growth among all three Sak Brand Group brands, as well as within our team. We are still running a lean team, but we’ve recently expanded to include five dedicated resources. We’re hoping we can continue to grow our team as our brands grow…but we know we’ll never be a group that has too much time on its hands. 

Overall, don’t view a small team as an obstacle to success. View it as an opportunity to maximize your resources and challenge your group. You may be surprised how much your team can accomplish in the right environment.