Notes
Most owners stall before their first hire on two beliefs: I can’t afford anyone, and no one will do it as well as me. Eric has been hiring, onboarding, and leading people for more than 25 years, and in this episode he takes on both, starting with a one on one coaching client who was hiring his first team member and kept running into those same limiting beliefs.
He covers five keys. Set realistic expectations: hire the best you can afford, expect to train and coach, and treat 80% as good as you as the pinnacle. Hire for time, not positions, which often means a junior version of your own role who takes the repetitive prep and launch work, the way Eric’s first junior web designer, Peter, grew into the agency’s director of web services. Develop your leadership, because the right person won’t work with someone who can’t lead them. Start your SOPs now by recording yourself doing a task three times, since the extra recordings catch the variations, then have your new hire turn the videos into checklists. And plan the time you buy back, keeping an hour for Netflix if you want, but pointing most of it at revenue.
The leadership tip of the week: a leader’s focus is doing right over being right. There’s no room in leadership for ego.
Key Highlights
- Hire the best you can afford, and if they do the work 80% as well as you, that’s a win.
- Hire for time, not positions.
- The right person isn’t going to work with somebody who can’t lead them.
- Record yourself doing a task three times, then let your new hire turn the videos into checklists.
- A leader’s focus is doing right over being right, because there’s no room in leadership for ego.
Key Takeaways
Here we go. We’re going to record this podcast episode. Are you thinking about hiring somebody? Or maybe you want to hire somebody, but you don’t think you can afford it? Possibly you’ve tried hiring in the past, but it just didn’t work out. Well, in today’s episode, I’m going to share five keys to hiring the right people the right way to ensure your business grows.
Welcome to the podcast, everyone. My name is Eric Dingler. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids, who are almost all teenagers. In fact, our oldest recently turned 17. That’s a little insane. But anyway, here we are out traveling around the world, having an amazing time and building a business as we go. In fact, building a couple of businesses as we go. And so this podcast is where I’ve decided to put out there the answers to some of those frequently asked questions I get, things that I was being asked and found myself repeating over and over. I decided, well, if I put a podcast out there and somebody asks me a question, I could say, hey, I actually have an episode you can go listen to about that.
Now, I’ve already recorded one episode about hiring, and I’ll probably record many, many more. But in episode 11 of the podcast, I talk about my process of hiring winners. How do I hire winners every time? I’ve been hiring people for over 25 years, and onboarding and leading, and I have figured out what works and what doesn’t. And I have a really structured, solid process that works for us over and over and over again. And so I talk about that in episode 11, but in this episode I want to talk about five keys to help you hire the right people at the right time.
And I want to start by talking about this. Number one, we’ve got to set realistic expectations. Recently, one of my one on one coaching clients has begun following the process I use to hire his first team member. And one of the things he kept running into is he had a couple of limiting beliefs. And it’s not unique to him. I’m not throwing him under the bus by any means. I used to have these. A lot of people have these. A lot of people ask me about this kind of stuff. So I know there’s a significant amount of people that have these limiting beliefs on hiring and expectations.
And there’s a lot of really great books out there on the topic. In fact, one book on the topic has just replaced one book on my nine book list. If you go to my website (DNE stands for Digital Nomad Entrepreneur), you go to DNEPodcast.com, click on the resource page, you’re going to scroll down and you’re going to come across nine books. Now, these nine books, this is my what would I want one of my kids to read if they were going to take over the business, or if they came to me and said, dad, I’m going to start a business, what would I recommend they do? Well, I decided a long time ago to keep a list of nine books. Why did I choose the number nine? I don’t know. I probably had a reason at the time. I totally forgot what it is now, but I just know it’s nine and that’s it. And it is not easy for a book to get on this list, because I read a lot of books. But recently I read a book and I’m like, holy moly, where has this been?
Now there’s a lot in there that I’m like, that’s good, that’s affirming, that’s really great, we have that already. But the concepts and the principles specifically around hiring a personal administrative assistant, this is the best book I’ve read on any of this and how to leverage that. The book is called Buy Back Your Time. There’s a link to it in the show notes. You can also find a link to it now in my nine book list. You can go check that out.
But one thing I’ll say about that book that I wish the author would have understood, and I think a lot of authors of books forget maybe, is that during the bootstrap days of starting a business without capital. Because this isn’t how this guy went about building his businesses, I don’t believe. Maybe he did at the very beginning. But now he talks in one part of the book about three C’s you’ve got to have. And one of them is capital, and he is an investor. And so capital is a big, big part of him. But you know what? I didn’t raise capital to start or build my business. And I’m not planning to raise capital to grow my business. So we are bootstrap business builders here. We grow at the speed of cash. And everybody I coach, almost everybody, I’ve got one mentor that raised 16 million dollars in about a week to launch his last business. Well, here’s the thing. If you go out and raise 16 million dollars to start a business, you can hire an entire dream team of a force, and I mean these people are top of their game. You can go out and hire a headhunter that goes out and poaches top talent at top dollar. That’s amazing and good for him. That’s fantastic. I’m excited for him. I can’t do that. I can’t do that.
And so in Buy Back Your Time, he talks a lot about, you know, if your salary is 500,000 or 250,000, and I’m sitting there going, dude, most solopreneurs, especially in the digital space that I know of, they’re not even over 100,000 yet in personal salary and owner draw from their business. And so one of the things we’ve got to do is set realistic expectations for you and the person you’re going to hire and the team.
Now, some of these expectations are this. You’re going to hire the best you can afford. And if you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you can’t afford to go out and hire somebody tomorrow at 50 dollars an hour. You just can’t do it. You probably couldn’t even afford to hire somebody at 20, 25 dollars an hour. And that’s okay. In episode 11 I talk about my hiring process and what we use. We hire through Upwork. My typical staff person is around 6 dollars an hour, and I’ve got extremely talented, high quality people who have been trained and are being trained.
One of the things I was so excited to see when my coaching client a couple weeks ago had this light bulb moment. It was this moment where he understood that he’s going to hire somebody that he has to train, he has to develop. He’s going to have to be a leader to this person. He can’t hire with the expectation that somebody is going to do it as good as him. And I’m telling you right now, you’ve totally got to get rid of that expectation. Now, there are people on my team that do things way better than I do. But starting out, most people I hire are entry level positions. And we’re training them, we’re onboarding them, we’re developing them, and they’re going to make mistakes.
If you think you’re going to hire somebody and day one you’re going to turn over a big project to them and say, hey, okay, Mr. or Mrs. New Hire, I need you to go out and build this website. Go, go, go. Here’s all the videos for a new course I’m launching. Go, organize them, put them up. Hey, I need you to go ahead and start managing my email. Whatever it is you think you’re going to hire somebody to do, you’re not going to be able to turn it over to them on day one. They’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to have to learn. You’re going to have to have the expectation that you’re going to grow people into having the skills you need them to have. And that’s okay. And by doing that, that’s how you’re going to be able to afford them.
And you might be thinking, I ain’t got time for that, Eric. You do have time, and I’m going to tell you how to do it in number four. So stick around to number four. He’ll tell you exactly how to do it. Now, the clear expectation for you is that you’re going to hire the best you can afford. You’re going to have to teach and train. And the clear expectation for the people you hire, 80% is amazing. If they can do it at 80% as good as you, you’ve reached the pinnacle of it. This is absolutely fantastic news and a great place for you to be.
So that’s number one. Setting and having realistic expectations. You’re going to grow into this. They’re not going to be top of the line employees day one. They’re not going to do it perfect. You’re going to have to teach and train, I cover that in point four, but just have some of those realistic expectations. Okay, I’ve repeated that enough. Let’s move on to number two.
Number two, hire for time, not positions. Hire for time, not positions. Too many times I see people hire for a position that they think they have to have, that they think is the thing they’ve got to have somebody doing. And the problem is, this is the thing that this new business owner, this solopreneur, it’s what they love to do. It’s their most favorite thing to do. They started as a developer and they love developing. But the first thing they think they have to hire is a developer. They go, well, I’ve got to hire somebody to hand that off to so I can go out and start doing more administrative tasks. That’s not always the first position.
Now, I think it is great to hire a junior X, Y, Z. Whatever your role is, hire a junior. If you’re a developer, hire a junior developer. If you’re a copywriter, hire a junior copywriter. If you’re a web designer, a junior web designer. Whatever your role is, hire an entry level, junior level position that can take on the mundane, routine tasks. Everything we do has some things that are just the same, that are not high value. So the example I can use is pulling from my own files. Not all of you are web designers, but for me, my business started as a web design business. And one of the first things I did is hired a junior web designer, because getting a website ready to build is always the exact same process. There’s steps we’ve got to do to get ready to get to the fun part. And then the fun part is designing and putting it all together and making it look good. You start to create this thing and it’s so amazing and exciting, but then you get to the end and it’s time to launch this website, and it’s back to just a whole bunch of same old, same old, same old. Every time it’s the same old thing. Hiring somebody to do those things, it’s like, absolutely.
Recording this podcast episode is my third favorite thing I get to do every week. Thursday, everything I get to do. First favorite thing I get to do, leadership team meeting with my leadership team. That’s my number one favorite thing to do at work. One on one coaching with my direct reports and my one on one coaching clients and group coaching calls, that’s my number two favorite thing to do. My number three is recording this. Oh my gosh, I love doing this. It’s absolutely a blast for me. I have so much fun doing this. But once I hit the stop recording button, the process of now trimming it and getting it ready and adding the intro music and the outro music and show notes and posting it to Instagram and uploading it to the website and uploading it to Libsyn, getting everything done, that’s always the same. That is draining to me. And that is something I have hired out. I have somebody on my team that that’s what they do.
For our digital marketing agency, we create YouTube videos every week. I record the content for that. But I don’t edit the videos. I don’t post the videos to YouTube. I do the content creation, and then I hand it off for somebody else to do all the post-production work. And then I come in at the very end and just check things over. So I’ve hired to get that time back. Could I do that? Yeah, because the first five or six episodes I did do all of that. I can edit a video. And to be honest, right now, because the person I have on my team doing it is new and is learning, there are things I can just do better because I have more experience doing it. But that’s not going to always be. Eventually they’ll be better, because we get better at every single episode. We have a 1% improvement. Now maybe it could be more, maybe we should shoot for 5%, 10%. Whatever, I’m thrilled with every single time we do an episode it’s 1% better than the last time. 1% better quality, 1% better efficiency, 1% better outcome. We’re making incremental change. We’re growing. They’re growing.
And eventually, just like my junior web developer who has now become our director of Web Services, this guy Peter, there are a lot of things he can do now that I can’t do, and he can do a whole bunch of things way better than I could do them. I’m going to him now with questions on website stuff and DNS and all of this, and that’s how it should be. And as the company has grown, I’ve been able to afford to pay him more, and that’s great. I could not have afforded to hire him at his skill set now, at his salary now. I couldn’t have afforded that five years ago when I hired him, because we were just way too small. And so that goes back to number one. You’re going to hire the best you can for what you can afford. You’re going to grow your team up. You’re going to build them up. And what you’re looking to do is hire for time. It’s why I love the concept, Buy Back Your Time. That’s exactly what the book talks about. So you want to hire for time, not position.
Number three. What’s the third key to hiring the right people the right way? You have to develop your leadership skills. You are a leader even if you don’t have anybody on your team. It’s why, if you listen to the podcast for a while, you know at the end, and if you’re new, guess what’s going to happen at the end of this episode, I’m going to share a leadership tip of the week. Every episode I share a leadership tip, because leadership is the capacity of your business. Your business can never, will never, grow beyond your capacity.
Recently, I should say we, me and my wife, she’s definitely my partner on this, we have been talking recently about the next stage of our business. We’d like to get our business there. And I am having some very vulnerable conversations about here’s where I’m not ready to lead us there. We can’t get to that point because I’m not ready. I don’t know how to lead at that level. And so I’m having to learn some new things, seek out some new mentors, make some new plans, and I’ve got to keep working on my leadership skills. The same is true for you. You’ve got to work on your leadership skills to hire the right people, because the right person isn’t going to work with somebody who can’t lead them. So develop your leadership skills.
Now, before I get to number four, I’ve got a resource I want to share with you. If you’ve listened up to this point and you have not downloaded my Remote Work Success Bundle, here’s why you should. You might be thinking, wait, remote work success, why is that? What am I going to get out of that? We’re talking about hiring people. Because the third section, and there are three whole parts to the Remote Work Success Bundle, the third section is all about leading remote teams effectively. And this is for remote team leaders or aspiring leaders. And I include in it a lot of details about hiring. The first thing you have to do is you have to be clear on your mission, vision, and core values. And I have some resources in there to help you create that if you don’t have it. I share ours as an example. Our brand promise, our mission, our vision, our core values. I have a section in here on tips. It’s called Tips on Hiring the Right People. And it’s going to tell you what to look for. There’s a section in there on crafting the perfect job descriptions, talking about the interview processes, assessment tools that we use, how we hire people for test projects. There’s a link to a sample job description, as well as a link to a video where I share my screen and show you our onboarding tool.
We have a self onboarding tool. When new hires come onto the team, we have a whole set of prerecorded videos and things for them to watch to learn how to do their job. I don’t take the time to train people to do their job. We equip them. Now, you might be thinking, I ain’t got time to create a bunch of training videos and all that kind of stuff. Most of the training videos we use, I haven’t recorded. We’re using videos that other people have recorded. Some of them are videos we have found on YouTube. Lots of them are videos from some of our vendors. Like when new hires have to learn how to use our project management tool, we link to specific videos we want our new hires to watch that are created by our project management tool vendor. And so there are all kinds of tips in there on how to put this together. I’m going to share one with you here in just a little bit. But being able to watch that video where I show you exactly what ours looks like, a link to the position description, that’s worth downloading the Remote Work Success Bundle right there, just for section three. But it’s got two other sections.
Section two is about productivity, and I share with you what I use to be productive in my work. I’ve got a video exploring my time management system and how I produce at a high level, because I’ve got a lot of things going on and I don’t want to not spend time with my family. So I share that. And then section one is crafting your mobile headquarters. Maybe you’re listening to this and you’re not going to be a full time digital nomad like me. But maybe you are. Maybe you’re going to be part time, or maybe you just want to go work at co-working spaces. In section one, I talk about how to set up a portable, I call it the world headquarters. And I’ve got a video that’s a tour of my portable office and how I set it up and the tools I use. And I’ve got a series of questions there that you can work through and processes to help you out with that. Because I live out of a carry on bag and a personal bag. We don’t do check luggage, we do carry on luggage. And so everything, my office, has to fit into my personal carry on backpack. So I share all of that. But the whole onboarding process for new hires is golden content for you. So if you haven’t yet, go to my website DNEPodcast.com, scroll down to the bottom of any of the pages, and you’ll see there where you can download the Remote Work Success Bundle.
All right, number four. I’ve got two final tips for you here, and then this week’s leadership tip of the week, and we’re going to be wrapped up. So let’s go ahead and do it. Number four, start creating your standard operating procedures, your SOPs, right now. These are going to be the things that are part of your onboarding process, part of your ongoing team’s work. And you can start creating these right now. And here’s the very simple way to do it. This is one of those things, there were a lot of things in Buy Back Your Time that I was like, great, we’re already doing that. Great, we’re already doing that. And it’s really affirming, because sometimes I’ll read a book and I’m like, oh my gosh, we’re not doing anything right. But this is one where I’m like, there’s so much we can learn, but there’s so much we’re already getting right.
And so for a long time, we’ve already done this. This is one way you can start doing this right now. Just begin recording yourself. And I talk a little bit about this in episode five, I have a whole episode on standard operating procedures. Go back and listen to episode five. But right now, just start recording yourself, every time, for everything. Every time you go to do something, record yourself. You’ve got to send an invoice to a client, make a recording, and record it three different times. And here’s why. We’ve been making one recording. And I will say that in Buy Back Your Time, I did learn he had a really good point. They record it three times, and that solves a problem we have run into. And that is, very few things that you do, do you do exactly the same way every single time. There are little differences, little iterations here and there.
It’s easy to say, well, here’s our process. Here’s an example. Today I was following our process to send an agreement to a new client. We have a new client that wants an agreement, because they’re spending tens of thousands of dollars with us, and they want to make sure their investment is protected. So we sent them out an agreement. But there are things in our typical standard agreement that this customer isn’t going to be using. And so I had to delete a couple of sections, because I wanted the agreement to make sense. I don’t like sending our agreement when it talks about services that customer isn’t using, because it feels a little too boilerplate for me. Maybe that’s just one of my quirks. Maybe it doesn’t bother you, it bothers me. But when you record yourself doing something three times, you’re almost always going to catch those things.
So the next three times you’re going to send an invoice, record yourself. The next time you go to do a single task of any kind, you’re going to record yourself and begin creating a library. Upload it someplace like Vimeo or something like that, where you’re going to store it and have it there for free and nobody can access it. Put it up there, and then start a Google Doc, or a Word doc if you’re not a Google user. I use Google Docs, and just start a list of categories. Financial procedures, sending an invoice, adding a new customer to our invoicing system, whatever it is. And you record those, you put them in there, and that’s all you’re going to do right now. You’re going to start recording these videos and you’re going to start having a library grow.
And then when you go to hire someone, you’re going to be able to say, hey, Mr. or Mrs. New Hire, welcome to the team. Here are some videos I’d like for you to watch this week, and I want you to create a checklist while you’re watching these videos. You’ve just hired somebody to do the boring part of creating SOPs, unless you’re like a checklist creator weirdo, and I know some of you are out there. But for most of us, that’s not what we want to do. I’ll record a video and put it out there. And now they are going to be learning how to do it. They’re going to be discovering what the process is. And now you’ve got a stronger system.
And then you just have to require that they use those checklists, they use that SOP any time they’re doing the job. That’s it. It’s a non-negotiable. If you’re doing the task, you have to have the checklist open. Now, maybe that team person wants to download and print them and create a binder. That’s fine, I don’t care. Maybe they want to download and have it on a tablet so they can mark it up. I don’t care. Maybe they have a second monitor. Maybe they like switching back and forth between browser tabs. I really don’t care. That’s up to them. But you can very easily right now get started. Now is the best time to start preparing.
Number five. The fifth key is prepare a plan for the time you’re going to be buying back. This, my friend, is the single biggest mistake I see when somebody starts to hire for the first time. They’ll go out and hire someone and bring them on and get the person trained and get everything going, and then they don’t have a plan for what they’re now going to do. So unfortunately, they tend to start doing low hanging fruit things. They just start taking on more and different administrative tasks. They start doing other things that are not bringing in additional revenue for the business. And if you’re listening to this, you’re probably the business owner, the solopreneur. This is the thing you’re trying to build. You have to own the business bringing in cash. You’ve got to be a part of that. You’ve got to be doing what you can do that brings the highest value to the company.
And what I want you to do is start thinking now, if I had an employee, if I had somebody taking care of X, Y, Z for 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week, 5 hours a week. If you hire somebody for 5 hours a week, what do you do with those 5 hours? Are you going to watch Netflix? That would probably be dumb. All right, now maybe. Say I just hired somebody to cover 5 hours. I’m going to take one of those hours and I’m going to watch me some Netflix. Okay, there’s one. Welcome to the reward of being a business owner. You’ve just bought back some of your time. So all right, I’m going to take an hour of this and I’m watching Netflix. I’m going to take a second hour and I’m going to go for a walk once a week with my spouse or one of my kids. And then you take the other 3 hours and you apply it to revenue generating activities. Attending a networking event, having meetings with clients, something you should have been doing that you haven’t been doing enough of. Strategy sessions with clients where you’re able to present opportunities to upsell them into new services. Making prospecting calls. Putting a little more time into that next proposal, so you can raise the rates on that proposal because you were able to figure out how to add some pizzazz to it, add some benefit to it that’s a low cost addition for you. You can start taking some of those 3 hours and improving systems so that you increase your profit margins. You can start to say, hey, now that I’ve got these 3 hours, I’m going to make it so we’re faster at doing X, Y, Z, so we make more profit on it. There’s lots of things you can do with this time. But you’ve got to create a plan before you hire somebody.
Because if you don’t, you’re hiring people the wrong way. And this episode is about hiring the right people the right way to grow your online business. If you don’t have a plan for what you’re going to do for those hours you’re buying back for yourself, my friend, you’re not going to grow your business. You’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to be like, it’s just not working. I hired them, the needle’s not moving forward. It’s just costing me money. It’s not helping me make money. Or maybe you’re frustrated because you’re like, I’ve hired them, but my goodness, I’m spending all my time training them. Well, you haven’t prepared properly. You’re not prepared with an onboarding process for your new hires. You need to download the Remote Work Success Bundle and see our onboarding process. It’ll blow your ever loving mind. And I’m not just saying that. This is literally what people say every single time I share it with them in a coaching call or something like that. So you’re going to want to get that and check it out.
All right. Well, those are my five keys for today for hiring the right people the right way to grow your business. Number one, you’ve got to have realistic expectations of who you’re going to hire, how much you’re going to have to invest in training them and preparing them and coaching them. It’s not really time in training them, you should have a self onboard training, but you are going to have to spend time coaching them, and that’s okay. That’s a realistic expectation. So number one, set realistic expectations. Number two, hire for time, not position. Number three, develop your leadership skills. Number four, start creating your SOPs today. Number five, prepare a plan for the time you’re buying back.
Now, what is this week’s leadership tip of the week? Before we wrap things up. A leader’s focus is doing right over being right. Too many times people think that as the leader, they’re somehow automatically always right. Well, I’m the leader, I’m right. No, that’s not true at all. There are many times a day I’m wrong. I have to be open to that. Your focus has to be on doing what’s right over being right. I am constantly looking for ways for us to be doing something the right way, a better way, over holding onto it really tight and saying, oh no, no, no, this is how I know best. I know best. Basically, there’s no room in leadership for ego. There’s not. You can’t even spell the word ego from the word leadership. Can’t do it. So there’s no room in leadership for an ego.
Well, my friend, thanks for listening. I would really appreciate hearing your feedback. Send me an email, [email protected]. Make sure you check out episode 11. Make sure you download the Remote Work Success Bundle. And until next time, chase the big dream, lead with courage, and safe travels.
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