How to Hire the Right Employees

Let them make mistakes, learn from those mistakes, be a coach, be a leader. You're not helping yourself or them, you don't do that. Hey there, Dan Martell here, serial entrepreneur, investor, and creator of SaaS Academy. In this episode, I'm gonna share with you a framework for how to think about who to hire next in your business. It's what I use to make all of my hires, it's how I teach my clients to make their decisions, it's based on a methodology called the Next Hire Focuser, and it's gonna allow you to not feel like, man, if I hire this next person, it's gonna cause a bunch of work, or what if they don't work out, or how is this gonna help my business? These questions and strategy, I've never shared before, and I wanna give them to you because it's part of my new book, Buy Back Your Time. Get unstuck, reclaim your freedom, and build your empire, because I believe that most entrepreneurs should not hire to add capacity to their business, they should hire to buy back time out of their calendar. So using that as a first principle approach to scaling companies so that you make more money and you have more awesome activities to work on throughout your day that light you up, these are the lessons. Oftentimes, I work with entrepreneurs that have the financial resources to hire, but the more they hire, they hit these ceilings. Usually it's about a million and a half in revenue, 12 employees, where they wake up, and maybe you can resonate with this, they wake up and they spend their whole day keeping everybody else busy, on track, focused on the right thing, and they had a to-do list that they started with that doesn't get done, and at the end of the day, they spend most of their nights trying to get caught up, process their inbox, and get some few projects moving forward. That is not the way we wanna work, because if you do that, you're gonna hit this growth ceiling where you're just gonna feel this pain every time you get there, and you're gonna wanna reduce the complexity, reduce the amount of people reporting to you, because it just feels painful. So what I wanna share with you is this methodology, and there's three strategies that you need to understand. I've broken them down into these three components for you to understand. Let's get into it. Number one is the four questions. Okay, so this is the questions I ask my clients, I ask myself, to identify places where I might wanna hire somebody to buy back some of my time. The first one is, where are some low-value time suckers? Okay, so low-value time suckers is like things that suck my time that I could pay somebody very little amount of money to do. Okay, so I want you to look at your calendar, audit your time, and make a list of low-value time suckers. The next question that I ask people is, you know, where's the bottlenecks? If you tripled your business next month, what parts of the business would break, okay? Because I want you to be able to grow without feeling pain, and no entrepreneur will grow into pain. If there's a wall, and it says pain, you will not drive into it headfirst. You will put the brakes on, you will drive with the handbrakes on, you'll slow that impact, and I want you to first say, where's the bottlenecks? If I grew, how do I solve those today so that I don't pull back, right? Number three is the curse of the gifted, okay? What I've discovered a long time ago is your number one strength as a CEO becomes your Achilles heel to scaling, why? Because it's the thing that you're gonna be most critical of, okay? You're gonna like, if you hire somebody, you're gonna be super critical of them. And two, it's gonna be the last thing you're gonna wanna give somebody else to do. So think about this, I do not enjoy finances, I'm not gifted at it, I don't care. It was the first thing I gave somebody else to do. I like product, I like product creation. That is the bottleneck that I had to solve because without it, I'm always required in it. And if you're the CEO, and you're building a multi-seven, eight-figure-a-year company, you cannot be in the business anymore. You have to be working on the business, focusing on the people, the vision, and the finances to make sure you can continue to grow. That's what I wanna share with you, so make sure you ask yourself that question. And then the other one is, where are the blockers in your growth? Do you need to get more customers, do you need to retain more customers, or do you need to make more from each customer? So out of those three, where in your business do you feel like there's friction? If you ask yourself those four questions and get the answers, you'll start to see the types of hires you can make. Do you need to hire somebody that's an executive admin? Do you need to hire somebody to take care of marketing? Do you need to hire somebody to be a project manager? You'll start to see the three options for hiring people. Number two, give them a score, okay? This is the way I do it. I say, okay, well, I could hire this person, this person, this person. All right, well, based on these three criterias, I'm gonna rate them from one to 10, what is the, or sorry, one to three, what is the score, okay? So the first criteria is like one to three, will it make me money? Hiring a project manager may not make me money. Hiring a salesperson will make me money, right? See the difference? So one to three, I would say a salesperson's a three, a project manager might be a one, right? An executive assistant is a one. They're operational, they're not client facing, they're not gonna unlock revenue. Number two is how much time will they save? One to three, right? An executive assistant could be a three because they're gonna buy back a lot of your time, whereas somebody else might only be a one for you, okay? And these are for you, the CEO, not for your business. That's the biggest mistake people make. And number three is how affordable are they, right? Is this person a multiple seven figure hire? Seven figure hire, 50K a year, outsource for, you know, 24,000 a year in the Philippines kind of thing. Is it a one, two, or a three? If you score each three options to hire through that scoring system, you'll start to see which one will buy back the most of your time and be the best hire. Number three, avoid these three mistakes, okay? Now you have three options. You've scored them. These are the three mistakes. Number one is single role. A long time ago, I realised entrepreneurs wear multiple hats, I wear multiple hats. I wake up and I'm CEO, I'm this, I'm that, I wear multiple hats. Why can't I hire somebody to do that? It's like when we hired our house manager, people were like, what does she do? She does everything that I would normally do in my life in my house or my wife would do in my house. Well, where do you find somebody like that? I mean, this is not complicated. You hire somebody that lives and hopefully they're responsible for living and they take care of the exact same stuff in their household, they just do it for you. So they take care of the cars, they take care of the groceries, they take care of the cooking, they take care of the cleaning, they take care of the purchasing, they take care of monitoring when filters need to be changed and all these things. They are the CEO of your house. And to me, you can hire somebody that can wear multiple hats in a single role. So you can hire somebody in your business that does your social media posting and also does your accounts receivable. That can be one person. So when you're looking at the three roles, understand that one of the mistakes people make is they think I've got to hire an all or nothing type position when I'd rather hire a person that's talented, train them on two or three different kind of things that need to get done. So I can have one person on the team that's dedicated doing three different roles and over time I can kind of take a hat off and give it to somebody else. The second thing is in their onboarding, okay? If you have not defined the first two weeks of that new hire's onboarding, then do not make the offer. Until you've had the time to sit down and list here's the training videos, and you can use external videos, internal content or whatever. Until you've documented what their first two weeks should look like, you shouldn't hire them. Because you don't want to be responsible for having to train them. You want other people. So you might have like, Monday I want you to do these three things. Tuesday I want you to do these three things. And on there might be, talk to this person and ask them these questions so you can understand how our business works. Listen to these sales calls. Watch these videos. Go through all the documents inside of our document repository so you understand what's there and what we've talked about in the past. You know, whatever it is. But the first two weeks should be documented so that when they hit the ground they run, right? Because you want to get them ramped up as fast as possible. The third mistake that people make is they don't let go. They literally hire somebody to do a role and then they don't let them dive deep into the deep end. You know, for example, recently one of my executives hired an assistant and when I double clicked on the way they were working with them, they had yet to give them full access to the inbox. They were using their assistant to like CC them on an email to like schedule a call. And I was like, whoa, whoa, whoa. No, no, no, no, no. Give them access to your inbox. Well, I don't know if I feel comfortable. Look, at the end of the day you hired somebody, you look for values, you look for trust, you look for experience. If you're holding them back from being able to demonstrate to you that they're capable, that's on you. You've got to push them into the deep end and say to them, I trust you. I've hired you to do this role. If there's anything that you don't know how to do, make a list of it. When we talk, we will review them. I will train you. But I want you to understand you own 100% of this outcome. Let it go. Give it to them. Let them make mistakes. Learn from those mistakes. Be a coach. Be a leader. You're not helping yourself or them if you don't do that. Those are the three big lessons learned I've had when it comes to who you hire next, okay? First off, the four questions. You've got to ask yourself these questions. Identify where in your calendar is there opportunities for you to buy back your time? Number two is you've got to score them with money. Are they going to make me money? Are they going to save me time? And are they affordable? And then third, you've got to avoid the three pitfalls that most people do when they hire folks to buy back your time. These and many more strategies I cover in my new book called Buy Back Your Time. And if you'd love to support it, I encourage you to click the link to buy a copy of the pre-order today. I would appreciate it so much. It's called Buy Back Your Time. Get unstuck, reclaim your freedom, and build your empire. So click the link to get your copy today. And as per usual, I want to challenge you to live a bigger life, a buy back lifestyle, and build a bigger business. I'll see you next Monday.