You can't do it all alone...

Hey all,

Recently, I've noticed an increasing number of people in our community signing a good number of clients, it’s been awesome to see.

With this in mind, I wanted to jump on here today and provide some insights into an important aspect of business that I see a lot of people get wrong - hiring a team.

I’ve learnt a tremendous amount about when and how to build effective and efficient teams these past 18 months that can save you a bunch of unnecessary pain.

However, before we go any further, I want to ensure that you should ACTUALLY be reading this post.

I see far too many people focusing on problems they should not be focusing on yet. I call it ‘anticipatory anxiety’.

If you haven't started generating leads and signing clients, focus on that first.

Once you've tackled that, you can revisit this post when you're ready to scale.

Now, for those signing clients, let's decide if you even need a team:

Many hire prematurely. Your job as a founder is to learn and execute all roles in your business, then fire yourself from those roles as your time becomes limited.

Yes, sometimes you will need a developer as soon as you start, however you should still learn the basics of how the systems are built.

I like to do this via a ‘calendar audit’.

Every six weeks, I review which tasks consume the most time and then hire for those high-volume tasks, ensuring there's a robust system for replication.

For example, if lead generation is taking up 60% of your time, create SOPs for it and hire VAs or lead gen experts to handle the task. Learn, optimize, then delegate.

Next, how do you find the right people?

I’ve made a lot of mistakes at AICG over the past year and have learnt the following lesson the hard way - hire for cultural fit, motivation, and drive over technical skills. You can always train technical skills, but you can't teach passion and perseverance.

Yes, you need to make sure they are technically capable of performing the tasks you are hiring them for but do not put that as the north star metric.

Find passionate people and ensure your systems and training is strong enough to build them into the most effective person possible for your organization.

I believe the best people are those already operating in this space with the drive to seize this opportunity. Our Institute is a great place to find this talent – we hire most of our team from it. If you’re interested, click here.

Once you’ve found this person, you need to figure out the best way to structure the relationship.

For us, we use contractor agreements in 90% of cases and make everyone go through a 15 day trial period first before signing onto a long term contract.

Make sure you do this, give them a few tasks that will expose their strengths and weaknesses in this 15 day period and then make your evaluation from there. Words are cheap, you need to see this person actually working to see if they’re the right fit or not.

For those wondering about compensation, we use hourly, monthly fixed, or performance-based pay, depending on the role.

Now aside from the above, here are my five biggest lessons from the past year in hiring and building teams:

Cultivate a "learn it all" culture, not a "know it all" culture.

As Hormozi says, “Be slow to hire and quick to fire.”

Set clear expectations and SOPs before hiring.

If hiring managers, hire people you would report to.

Lead by example – your standards set the quality of your team.

I hope this gives you insight into when to hire, who to hire, how to vet people, and some of my lessons.

Let me know in the comments if you enjoy this content, and I'll continue to expand on it in the coming weeks!

Frank