WHEN SHOULD I HIRE?
I get this question almost daily. Before I can answer, the person asking already has their own answer. They’ll say, “I can’t afford to hire someone now,” and “No one will have the skills I need, without a huge price tag,” or “Everyone else sucks.” The entrepreneur’s conclusion is almost always the same: “I guess I just need to grind it out longer by myself.” They decide they need to delay the hire, and in doing so, stay stuck longer and longer in the Survival Trap. A good rule of thumb is, if you feel you could use help but need to grind it out longer, take that as a desperate subconscious plea to yourself that you need help now, and should make that hire. Remember Celeste’s story at the beginning of this book? No one wants Celeste in that position, working herself into exhaustion and illness, and we surely don’t want it for ourselves. But if the mentality is to just grind it out for yet another day, you are slowly but surely digging yourself a hole that will become harder and harder to get out of.
First, let’s address your mind-set about doing the work yourself. Let me ask you a question. Would you rather make fifty dollars an hour or five dollars an hour? Of course you want that fifty bucks. What if I asked you if you would rather make fifty dollars an hour doing all the work yourself, or five dollars an hour doing no work at all? This is where the Survival Trap reveals itself. Fifty dollars an hour is still better on an hourly return than five dollars an hour, but how much you ultimately earn is determined exclusively by your effort and your ability to sustain. The five dollars an hour (after expenses) comes in regardless of whether you are working or not.
When you figure out that you can keep multiplying five dollars an hour into infinity, you might change your thinking. Let’s say with one good hire you can make five dollars an hour without working, and with two hires you can make ten dollars an hour. With ten hires you can now make fifty dollars an hour without lifting a finger. You’re sick, you make money. You go to your daughter’s school play, you make money. You go on vacation, you make more money. That is the goal of a Clockwork company—that the company runs itself without any dependency on you, all while serving you with the money it creates.
Now that you see you can make money even (or especially) if you don’t do the work yourself, when should you hire? Hiring can’t happen too soon. But it can happen too fast. Those are two different things. If you hire too fast, you are hiring flippantly and without proper consideration. That is a mistake. But you can’t hire too soon. Meaning, any size business will benefit from the right hire, hired under the right parameters, sooner rather than later. For example, say you are in a routine of doing the work yourself, and that it is relatively consistent, but you are not making nearly enough money for yourself. It’s time to hire. Don’t be distracted by the immediate feeling of “I don’t have money.” Think long-term: “I need a way to make more money, without working more.” This is a time to hire, under the right parameters. Meaning, maybe you aren’t ready to hire someone full-time with benefits. Maybe you want someone to work five hours a week, and you can only realistically pay them ten dollars an hour.
Now you may be thinking, “Who wants to work for fifty dollars a week?” There is someone out there who would be thrilled to find a job like that. The mistake entrepreneurs make is to think that all people are seeking full-time jobs, and that all people expect top dollar. For example, Erin Moger has worked part-time for Profit First Professionals from day one. She doesn’t want to work more; she wants to raise her young family. My business partner, Ron Saharyan, and I are both humbled to know her and to work with her. Erin is an amazing team member. So we created a position that is a big win for her because it respects her time, and she serves our company, caring for our members in extraordinary ways. That’s a big win for us.
The first hire I brought on, Jackie Ledowski, worked three hours a day, three days a week. It was perfect for what she wanted in her life at the time and she was perfect for me. I was now able to transition the Doing to her—for nine hours a week, at first—which allowed me to Design more.
The goal for early stage hires (and every stage hires, for that matter) is to free you up to focus more on Designing and less on Doing, and that can’t happen soon enough. Remember, you need to make money without doing the work. Every dollar you make via your company’s effort, and not your own, moves you closer and closer to becoming a Clockwork company.
WHOM SHOULD I HIRE?
The great irony is that you should not hire people based upon the skills on their résumé. The only thing you can give people is skills, and you want to give people the skills to do the work the way you do it. “Skill” jobs can be a trap. When you hire someone who has the skills already, it means they are walking in with the baggage of their past work. They will apply the skills you need, their way, which is rarely the way you want or need the job done. This means there will be, best case, confusion and inconsistency, and, worst case, the need to redo work.
You want to hire people with a great get-it-done attitude, high energy, and high intelligence, people who are a strong cultural fit and who have a desire to do the work you need done. All these are intangibles that can’t be taught. Either they have it or they don’t. So seek out people who have the intangibles you need, then give them the only thing that you really can: the skills.
Once you realize that you don’t need a “senior specialist with ten years’ experience in social media and product distribution,” you could theoretically hire a teenager who has the right attitude, energy, intelligence, and fit to do the same work. Well, that’s not theory; that is exactly what we did. My office has a teenager who runs our social media and handles product distribution. Since she’s a minor, I’ll change her name to Alice. She may be minor in age, but she is a majorly great employee. (See what I did there?) Alice works for a little above minimum wage—not because we are taking advantage of her, but because that was what she wants for her first job. Oh, and she can’t work until after school gets out at three o’clock, wants time off for sports and band, and needs to be able to walk to work or get a ride from her grandpa, which are all things that we gladly accommodate.
Remember, people don’t pick jobs based on just pay and vacation. And if that is the only consideration those people are making, you don’t want those people, anyway. Yes, people want pay to live their lifestyle and vacation and to do other things, but good employees are also looking for something deeper. Fun, learning, impact, culture, and more.
When looking for new team members, seek diversity. The biggest mistake we make is hiring people whom we like. If we like them, it is usually because they are like us. We need people with different skills and points of view. Hire diversity. Don’t hire people you like; hire people you respect.
Finally, be a trait-seeker. Look for employees with the traits and strengths you need. How to Hire the Best by Dr. Sabrina Starling details an excellent approach to, well, hiring the best. In your trait- seeking role you will want to determine whether this person needs to be super detail oriented, or a great communicator, or analytical. Consider the different jobs you need completed at your office and the specific traits those jobs need, and then hire for them.
Ever notice that when you run an ad for an open position, you get dozens or hundreds of applicants who are not really interested in the job? They are just applying to any job. Those people swamp your inbox with résumés, and if you try to interview them they respond with things like “What job is this again?” or “What is the pay and how much vacation do I get?” and “What do I need to do again?” I am not suggesting these are bad people, but they surely are a bad fit for your company. And a big waste of your valuable time.
To find better candidates, create an ad that defines your culture and disqualifies the résumé spammers all in one shot. How do you pull off that little miracle? Create a looooong ad that describes your culture in detail, prepares potential employees for the fun and not-necessarily-fun job requirements, and embe
ds a little requirement in the ad itself. For example, near the end of the ad, require that an applicant respond with “I’m pumped for this job” in the email subject line of their response. You will find that the vast, vast majority of applicants won’t do this, which means they did not read the ad and are not truly interested in the job, or they are spamming, or they aren’t able to follow instructions (a critical ability). On Clockwork.life, I share one of the best job ads I posted; you are welcome to copy, tweak, and paste it to attract your own part-time or full-time rock stars.
YOUR BIGGEST FEAR—TRUST
I need to get super real with you about something. Do me a favor, just peek around for a second and make sure no one else is listening in. We good? Good. Now get closer to the book. Closer. Lean in a little bit more. That’s it . . . just a little closer. SLAP! There—I slapped you in the face with my faux-leather driving glove. Now that I have your attention, listen up! You have a fear issue. Better said, you likely have a trust issue. (Yes, making you lean into the book and then slapping you may have not been the smartest way to gain your trust, but I need to wake you up to this.) The most common reason that businesses fail to grow and run like clockwork is not the system. Shoot, there are a lot of wildly helpful scaling systems out there, like Gino Wickman’s Traction, Michael E. Gerber’s The E-Myth, and Verne Harnish’s Scaling Up. Yet most people who follow those systems, the Clockwork system, or cherry-pick from all of them, still fail to scale.
Why? Because they can’t trust other people to run the business. I mean, imagine bringing on a key employee who walks in to help with the business and then walks out with all your clients months later. This can and does happen. Imagine that new employee you entrust to take care of clients screwing up and losing you a key client forever. The risk feels too great to trust others. I could tell you to “buck up” and get over it, since you need to trust your people so that you can successfully remove yourself from the day-to-day. But that’s like telling you to just buck up and run a marathon when you’ve never trained for it. The risk of injury is too great, and therefore you may back down and never do it.
So, instead, we are going to do this slowly. Think about marriage. Chances are you don’t just go up to a random person on the street and ask them to marry you. If you did that, you would probably get slapped again, with more than a faux-leather glove. You don’t just get married. More likely, you go on a date or two, or two hundred. You probably spend time learning about each other. Maybe you move in together for a while before tying the knot. There is a courtship . . . usually.
But when it comes to key hires or even business partners, decisions are often made way too quickly. You know a potential business partner for twenty-four hours and feel that is adequate to enter into an agreement to run a business together for life. You will literally spend more time with this partner than your spouse, and yet spend so little time vetting him or her.
So move slowly with hires. Build the trust gradually. When you delegate, as Scott Oldford says, start with handing off the task, then the decision making, then responsibility for the result, and, finally, responsibility for the larger outcome to the company.
HOW DO I ALIGN MY TEAM?
The first step in aligning your team is understanding your (and, by extension, your business’s) soul. What is your purpose? Your corporate mission? Purpose is the intersection of something that gives you joy and has a positive impact on others. For example, my life’s purpose is to eradicate entrepreneurial poverty. Alone, it sounds like a tag line, but it means a lot to me. I made my business an amplification of my personal purpose. It is our corporate mission.
When I consider new members for my team, I talk about what our mission means, how I feel it impacts our world, and why it is important to me. They may or may not find it important. Some can relate; others can’t. Those who can’t, even if they are great employees, won’t have a compelling mission pulling them forward. They may do well, but are not compelled to stay or do extraordinary things, since the mission does not speak to them.
If you have not defined your life and your business’s purpose, don’t worry; it can be done anytime. But until you do it, you won’t have the ultimate tool for aligning employees within a company and an energizing force to pull the company forward. You can look to your QBR for clues about your mission.
Take Life is Good, for example. Its corporate mission is “to spread the power of optimism.” I met the company’s cofounder, Bert Jacobs, in Massachusetts years ago and he shared the story of how he and his brother John served their QBR. The brothers would host parties in their apartment where they had scrolled different drawings and phrases on the wall. In exchange for free beer, their guests would circle the drawings and sayings that they felt were most optimistic. That’s how the marquee drawing of Jake and the company name, Life is Good, came to be. The QBR was the creation of optimistic phrases and drawings, and from day one Bert and John empowered the community to support the QBR. Genius.
When you have a corporate mission, speak about it often and in different ways, inside and outside the company. Tell new stories of when the mission succeeds and the impact it has. Share company folklore of what your company has done to deliver on the mission. Highlight and publicly award employees who deliver on the mission. The corporate mission is the reason you are doing what you are doing, and it is the wind in your sails.
The reason you need to be clear about your mission is to be sure you have the right people working for you before moving them into the right roles. The right people are a cultural fit. They do more than support the mission of the company (doing their job); they see themselves as an integral part of it.
Once you’re sure that your team is in alignment with your mission, you can begin to move people into the right positions, and that begins with the Job Traits Analysis.
EXERCISE: JOB TRAITS ANALYSIS
Understand that a company position, such as a receptionist, salesperson, or something else, has a list of jobs/tasks required of that position. This list defines a round hole, yet people are square pegs. Finding someone who has traits that allow them to excel in every job/task that the position requires is unlikely. You are better served evaluating the strong traits your people have and matching those traits with the different jobs/tasks, regardless of position titles. For example, someone who has excellent phone skills may be great for some aspects of reception work, sales work, and customer service. At the same time, their disheveled presentation may make them unsuitable for other aspects of reception work, sales work, and customer service work. Your goal: Match people’s best traits to the jobs and tasks that need those traits.
JOB TRAITS ANALYSIS
JOB/TASK
EXCEL TRAIT
IMPORTANCE
QBR/HIGH/MEDIUM/LOW
CURRENT
PERSON SERVING JOB
BEST
PERSON SERVING JOB
Figure 17
(downloadable and printable versions available at Clockwork.life)
In this next exercise, you will conduct a Job Traits Analysis.
In the left column, fill in all the jobs and tasks for a position in your company. Do this for all the positions you have in your company, including your own.
In the Excel Trait column, enter the primary behavior that would allow a person to excel at this job/task. For example, if a job/task is “Managing Inbound Calls from Customers,” the Excel Trait may be “professional and confident voice” or “empathetic and clear communication.” Don’t get into minutiae like “ability to dial on keypad,” or “can transfer calls.” Yes, that stuff is necessary, but what we are looking for here is not the skills required (you can train on skills). We are looking for inherent ability and enthusiasm that is difficult or impossible to train. Ju
st write down one, not multiple, traits. What is the one critical trait that moves that task forward the most successfully?
Importance: This column is for the impact it will have on the company. Mark each task as one of these four levels: QBR, High, Medium, Low. QBR is the most critical level. High is the primary task that must be done when the QBR is protected. Medium and Low are necessary but not critical functions.
Current Person Serving Job: List any people who currently do this job or task.
Then fill in Best Person Serving Job by listing the person (or people) who, based upon the match-up with the trait, is best to do this work.
Then move people to the most critical tasks, starting with the most important first—the QBR. Match the person with a strength trait to the job that needs that trait. Move and observe.
People are not their titles. People are their strongest trait. You no longer are seeking a receptionist, for example. You are seeking “The Great Communicator,” so identify who that person is and match them with the tasks and jobs that need a great communicator.
As such, we get rid of the traditional pyramid structure of organization charts, which focus on seniority and power/position. People need to “climb the ladder” and often move into positions that don’t use much of their traits or abilities. A Clockwork company is not about the old pyramid structure; instead, it uses a web of connections, matching strength where strength is needed, resulting in a network structured like a brain.
Clockwork: Design Your Business to Run Itself Page 13