One of the things that I have learned, that I frequently share with my clients, is that you don’t grow your business to hire your team. It’s the other way around, you hire a team in order to grow your business. It’s a lot like coaching, you don’t go and make money to get the coach, you get the coach to make the money. You don’t grow your business to hire a team, you hire a team in order to grow your business.
How Hiring a Team Elevates Your Self Perception
Being an entrepreneur, or a successful business owner, is as much about how you show up and who you are, as it is about what you do. Hiring a team is a great way to propel yourself forward. You can grow your business and get to six figures on your own, or with a little bit of help here and there. But if you are looking to get into multiple six figures or seven figures, that is just not something you can do by yourself. Hiring a team changes the definition of how you see yourself. It really makes you embrace being a business owner, instead of interpreting yourself as a solopreneur.
The other thing hiring a team does for you is that it changes how you show up. The truth of the matter is that most of us are more willing to show up for someone else than we are for ourselves.
Do we have to fix that? Yes.
Do we have to work on that? Yes.
In the meantime, use it to your advantage. Hiring someone makes you step up. There’s nothing wrong with that.
Tips & Tactics for Hiring a Five Star Team
Let’s get right into the action steps of hiring a five-star team.
Let Go of All or Nothing Thinking
Humans have a tendency to fall into all or nothing thinking. When we think about that in relation to hiring people, we think, “well, I don’t have enough work to give a full time person.” And that’s perfectly fine. In fact, it’s also fine if you don’t have enough to do to even fill 20 hours a week.
You don’t have to start with 20, 30, or 40 hours a week to hire team members. For example, when I had my last business, when I hired my assistant she started out at five hours a week. She very quickly moved to 10 hours a week, and then it was 20 hours a week. And in a matter of months, she was working 40 hours a week.
I would have never been able to create a business that required a 40 hour a week assistant if I hadn’t started out with an assistant who helped me for five hours a week. I joke around although it’s actually true, that it got to the point where if she called in sick I said, “Heck then I’m not working today either” because I became so reliant on her.
The other thing with all or nothing thinking was that coming out of corporate, it didn’t occur to me that someone would want a five hour a week job. But there are a ton of people out there who love the idea of a gig economy where they can do a couple of different things that keep them interested.
Do the Work Before You Go to Work
Usually when I say “do the work before you go to work” I’m talking about marketing. But it’s important to decide what you want in your business before you grow your business so that you can do it on purpose. So the same way that you reverse engineer your marketing with your client journey, the same thing holds true for hiring.
What do you want the outcome to be that this team member can help provide? I would challenge you and invite you to think beyond just being less busy. It’s going to be hard to hire the ideal candidate if you don’t really know the outcome you’re looking for once they’re on your team. Figuring that out will help you make better decisions in who you hire.
When I was looking for an online business manager, someone to help take our business into massive, scalable mode, I interviewed probably five people for that position. Four of them said to me, “I can help you work less. “ The thing was, I never said I wanted to work less. I happen to like working on my business.
When I met Andrea, what she said that was different was, “I can help you scale your business from six figures to seven figures.” Several of the other candidates were great people, they were very nice. But it wasn’t what I wanted, and I knew that ahead of time. So that made my decision much, much, much easier. When you know what you want the outcome to be, you come from a stronger place of understanding about who is going to help you get there when you are interviewing people.
Hire for Values, Not For Skills
You can’t teach somebody to be honest, you can’t teach somebody to be responsible, you can’t teach somebody to have a good work ethic. That ship has sailed for them. They need to figure that out on their own. You can teach people what to do much more easily than you can teach people how to be.
This does not mean to go out and hire somebody with zero skills. But when you’re looking at your different candidates, understand that it’s very, very, very hard, if not impossible, to change who a person is.
You are better off hiring the right set of values, and helping them up-level their skills. It is better to invest in them as a team member than it is to hire someone with massive skills who is not aligned with your values. That is an exercise in frustration, you will not be happy with that outcome.
When you’re putting your job description together, connect as a human first. I do this the same way I do marketing, and the same way I do sales. As an entrepreneur and small business owner, one of the opportunities that we have that we don’t necessarily have in corporate is that we can drop some of the formalities and connect as a human first.
When I am searching for team members, instead of just including a list of tasks in the job description, I include information on who this is perfect for, as well as who is not a good fit. For example, I always include that if you are a person who needs step by step instructions, I am not a good fit for you because we are in massive growth mode. I don’t see this changing anytime soon, it is where I like to be. We are building this airplane as we are learning to fly it, and we are doing it as a team. So I put it right in the job description that if you are interested in being part of creating something, you will enjoy working with us much more than if you are more comfortable knowing exactly what you need to do ahead of time.
Those are very different personalities, neither one is wrong. This is not about making someone wrong or bad. It’s about knowing what exactly you need. Hiring people who require a lot of oversight can be really hard for an entrepreneur.
Most of the time we’re hiring because we’re too busy. In fact, too many entrepreneurs are way too busy and then they hire in reaction mode. That puts you behind the eight ball, it forces you to make really bad decisions that you wouldn’t necessarily make otherwise. If you’re making decisions out of desperation instead of inspiration, you will start to let your guard down on who you hire just to relieve the pressure. And that might work in the short term, but it will just annihilate you in the long term.
Hire Complementary Skills and Personality Traits
One of the mistakes I watch entrepreneurs make is they hire people who will just do what they tell them to do. They hire helpers, people who will check the box. Those people usually cost less. The problem is that it adds to your workload instead of subtracting from it.
Alison was my first hire. She joined my team before my business was six months old and I knew I could not do this alone. Allison created most of the processes that we used. She drove that part of my business instead of waiting for me to do it which is why I needed her. If you just hire people to check a box, you’re going to spend more time managing those people than if you hire people who can help drive you forward.
The next piece of the puzzle is to hire for complementary skills and complementary personality traits. Don’t hire duplicates of yourself. I laugh all the time when I say that if working with Allison has taught me one thing, it’s that I don’t communicate as clearly as I think I do. I think I make perfect sense, but then Alison asks questions and reflects back to me the fact that as someone who thinks very differently from me, I’m not making any sense it all. you can’t underestimate how helpful that is.
You want to hire people who will push against you and who will give you their ideas. You want to hire people who could take the outcomes that you as an entrepreneur have identified and turn them into the activities needed to get them there. When you’re a small business, each hire has a much greater impetus on your growth than if you’re a large corporation where there’s so much overlap in positions. Each hire that you make can have a greater effect on your business. It can absolutely have a greater effect on your business, so you want to be more careful about it.
Three Ways to Find Great People to Hire
Tap Into Your Network
Tap into the people who you already know, like and trust. As a growing entrepreneur, a lot of times we’re networking or marketing, we meet other people in our same space. We meet people who do these things. And if you haven’t found this out already, one of the hardest things of being an entrepreneur is finding clients. And what that means is on a regular basis as you are networking and marketing, you are finding people who are amazingly fantastic at what they do. They have an entrepreneurial spirit. But they haven’t quite gotten their feet underneath them with how to find clients.
These people make excellent team members, as it creates an opportunity for these entrepreneurs who are great at what they do to create their entrepreneurial dream within your company. They don’t have to give up the freedom and excitement. But maybe they can back away from the hard part, which is finding new clients. The entrepreneurial spirit in them also is a great way to help push you forward. It’s kind of like Win, win, win.
Create a Dynamic Interview Process
There is nothing wrong with giving somebody a test project or asking somebody to submit a video. Too many times we approach hiring someone with the same downside of how we approach sales: if we don’t make it a little complicated, no one will want it.
Well, that’s kind of what you want. You don’t want just anybody, you don’t want to go through the entire interview process with people who are not really dedicated to being a driving member of your team. Let’s save you time. If they can’t get through somewhat of a dynamic interview process, how are they going to show up for work?
This is something that we were taught as a generation: behave for the job you want, not the job you have. That comes right out of corporate: act in a way for the promotion you want. Don’t wait until someone’s giving you the paycheck. Those are the people you’re looking for to create a five-star team, not just a check-the-box, get-it-done team. Don’t shy away from a somewhat complicated or dynamic interview process that will save you time and energy in the end.
Stop Telling Yourself That Nobody Wants to Work
The third tip for finding the right people is to stop telling yourself that you can’t find any people. Stop telling yourself that this is hard. Stop telling yourself that nobody wants to work. Because when you tell yourself that, your brain is going to do everything it can to make sure you prove yourself right.
What if instead, you told yourself it was easy? What if instead you told yourself there were amazing team members everywhere that couldn’t wait to be part of your business. And then you went out into the world with that type of energy.
Which one is going to have a greater law of attraction? The person who is excited about their business who can’t wait to find all the wonderful people who want to work with them, or the person who’s going out into the universe going, “Oh, wow, this is hard. I’m never gonna be able to find somebody. This is brutal. It doesn’t work.”
Which one of those people is going to attract a five star team member? The perspective on whether or not this is hard or this is fun is entirely up to you. Because whichever one you choose, your brain will make sure that you’re right.
The Number One Obstacle to Hiring a Five-Star Team
The number one obstacle to hiring a five star team is also the number one obstacle to all the things we’re trying to do: ourselves. Can you be brave enough? Can you be the leader it takes? Can you be the visionary it takes? Can you be excited? Can you do the work before going to work? Can you be a CEO or a business owner?
I said it in the beginning. It’s so so so much about who you’re being even more about what you’re doing. And hiring a five star team takes a lot more courage and resolve and resilience than hiring someone who can check the box for you. It’s an invitation to step up. I know if I can do it, other people can do it.
