When Is the Right Time to Make Your First Hire?

In today’s episode, you’re going to discover three clear signs that’ll tell you you’re ready to make your first hire. Or if they’re missing, then you’ll know you’re not ready. Plus, a simple framework to ensure your first hire isn’t a total financial catastrophe. Welcome to the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast, a show designed to help you lead better, to live better.

Now I’m going to give you real quickly here the four things I’m going to talk about. I’ve got four items, if you will, on the agenda coming up for this episode. And so I’m going to share with you what they are and then jump right into it.

So the first thing we’re going to explore are the five number one reasons. Five number one reasons. That’s kind of a weird way to say it. Let’s start over. The first thing we’re going to talk about is five reasons business owners wait too long to hire and how to overcome them. That’s right. Most business owners wait too long to hire their first team members. Now, what do I mean by business owners? I’m talking about those solopreneurs that have started their own thing and have been working weekends and evenings, many of you while having a nine to five. And at some point you’re ready to take the step, but you’re held back. And I’m going to talk through the five things that hold people back too long.

The second thing we’re going to talk about are the three signs that indicate yes, you are ready, if these three signs are present for you. They are light, bright, flashing green, neon green, flashing yellow, red, green. Like hire. Now is what it is. It’s a big neon sign telling you hire now.

The third thing we’re going to talk about is the first hire framework. I’m going to walk you through exactly what you should do to make sure that your first hire is successful and doesn’t bring you headache and financial calamity. And then I’m going to wrap things up with this week’s Leadership Tip of the Week, which is going to be my last leadership tip of the week. I know I think I said that in a podcast episode a while back, but I just kept coming up with them. I just wanted to share them, and I’m going to share this one. But then I’m going to stop, because this whole podcast is now a leadership podcast.

Well, now that you know the roadmap of what we’re going to talk about, let’s jump right into it.

So recently, I was speaking at a mastermind group for authors and content creators, and the person that invited me to come and speak to his mastermind had people submit questions ahead of time about leading a team, about how to train a team, hire a team, all this stuff, and specifically working with a remote team. And the vast majority of the questions that I got were all around how do I know I’m ready? Or how do I know who I should hire first? How do I know I can afford it? What do I need to have in place before I hire the first person? And the questions just went on and on. But most of them were about this, the first hire. So I decided to go ahead and put some resources together. And I’m so pumped about how well they turned out. I decided to share them with you in this podcast episode. And in fact, I said I wasn’t going to do this several episodes ago, but I couldn’t help myself. I’ve created another new guide, another new resource, and I’m going to tell you in a little bit how you can get your hands on it.

So when’s the right time to make your first hire? Too soon feels risky, but too late is exhausting. Can cause burnout. So maybe that’s you. Maybe you’re here and you’re thinking, I need to make my first hire for my team. I don’t know where to start, though. I don’t know if I’m ready, but I think so. And you’re just wondering what it looks like. Or maybe you’ve already been down this road once or twice and it didn’t go well. And now you find yourself thinking about hiring again. Well, whether you’ve never hired or you’ve hired in the past and it didn’t work well, you’re in the right place.

So what are the five reasons that owners wait too long to hire? Let’s walk down through these.

Number one: scarcity and financial fears. This sounds like, “I don’t have enough money yet.” Or, “What if cashflow dips?” Well, if this is you, the solution is you don’t over hire, and I’ll show you how in a moment. I know that sounds simple, but a lot of people I talk to think that when they go to hire, they have no choice but to hire somebody full time forever. And that’s not the case at all. You can hire somebody for two hours a week, five hours a week, five hours a month. I always advocate for your first hire: hire somebody for three months. I’ve got one of my coaching clients right now, and that’s exactly what he’s doing. He’s making his first hire, and we agreed that the best thing for him was to hire what’s known as an online business manager, somebody that’s going to get some things organized for this guy while he’s working at bringing in more customers and taking care of the customers he has, because he already uses another place to deliver the services he sells. And he’s arranged the services in a really masterful framework. I love selling a good signature framework, and that’s what he does. So he can grow because he has the fulfillment handled. But he’s so busy with admin, and he doesn’t have anything like any systems documented yet. And he was so worried about hiring long term because of some past issues that happened. As I said, well, let’s not hire long term. Let’s literally hire somebody for three months. It ends in three months. They know it ends in three months. Let’s just start there. And he is. So it was like this weight was lifted from him.

Number two: time and capacity fear. This sounds like, “I don’t have time to train somebody.” Or, “I’ll hire when it’s less chaotic.” Well, one, it’s never going to be less chaotic. And two, if you have to stop and train someone, you’re not ready to hire somebody. Believe it or not, what we do is we have a self-guided onboarding tool that we use for all of our team. In fact, we make this available as part of the training for Team Engine. So you can actually set your team up so you don’t have to stop working, and they can train themselves. So you don’t have to worry about that time and capacity fear.

Number three: control and trust issues. This sounds like, “What if they don’t do it as well as me?” Or, “What if they mess something up?” Well, my answer to this is, you’re going to have to be a leader. You’re going to have to be a leader. And to be honest, I hope we can still be friends after this. Not so dang prideful. I mean, honestly, if you believe that out of the millions and billions of people on earth, no one can do it like you, that’s prideful. There are hundreds of millions of people that can do it just as good and probably even better than you. I mean, if you were the bee’s knees, you would have no financial problems whatsoever, because you would have been discovered by now. You’d have been head hunted. You would have customers banging on your door. So let’s just be honest. You’re good, but you ain’t that good. So you’re gonna have to be a leader. There’s no way around this. And that’s okay. And it’s okay to be scared if you’re like, “I’ve never led before.” Okay, you start learning to lead yourself better. And here’s why this is so important. If you’ve been listening to the podcast for any amount of episodes, you’ve probably heard me say this, and you will definitely hear me say it again and again. Your leadership capacity is the capacity of your business. You’re never going to grow past your leadership capacity. So if one of these fears so far is holding you back, it’s actually a leadership capacity issue. The scarcity and financial fears, well, okay, that may be a reality, that you don’t have enough money. And what if cash flow dips? These are all true things, but you deal with it. It’s not something that stops you. It’s an issue to be resolved. You have to lead yourself through it. The time and capacity fears, well, you don’t have the time to stop, so you create a system that people use to train themselves. The control and trust issues, very simple problem, very simple solutions, there’s so many things you can do to make sure that’s no longer a fear.

Number four: commitment and risk beliefs. I alluded to this a little bit ago. This sounds like, “I can’t hire full time. That’s too big of a commitment.” Or, “What if it doesn’t work out?” Well, let me ask you this. What if it does work out? What if it does work out and your business grows? What if it does work out, and three months from now you’re making twenty five percent more than you are right now? What if it works out and the person is so good that the first project they help you deliver leads people to talk about the experience and you start getting more referral business? What if it works out so well that they help you fix some of the systems you have broken right now? See, this idea of, “What if it doesn’t work out,” that’s a scarcity mindset. That’s a fixed mindset, and it’s not serving you well. So, “I can’t hire full time.” Darn tootin you can’t hire full time. That’s no surprise. So you hire part time. What you hire for doesn’t have to look like all the jobs you’ve ever had. A lot of people think that when they go to hire, it’s got to look like the jobs they’ve had. And I used to be guilty of this. I used to go, gosh, I can’t post this job, I wouldn’t want this job, I wouldn’t take this job. Why would I take a job for five hours a week? I wouldn’t, but I was looking at it through the lens of, I gotta provide for my family, I’m the bread winner, I gotta bring home the bacon. I didn’t look at it through the lens of, hey, I just need five hours to fill a gap. I could only work ten hours a week because I’ve got commitments to my kids and stuff like that, and I would love to have a job that I can do in an hour or two here or there, early morning, late, I would love that flexibility. The world is full, trust me, I’ve lived in twenty countries in the last four years, the world is full of people you’ve never even imagined exist yet. And there are people that will want the job that you create. Just because you may not want it doesn’t mean they won’t.

Number five: identity and clarity gaps. This sounds like, “I should be able to handle it myself.” Or, “I don’t even know who to hire first.” Well, let me ask you a question. If you’re thinking to yourself, “I should be able to handle it all myself,” really? Who do you know that handles it all themselves? What business have you ever been to where the business owner literally does all of it, and they’re happy, and they’re thrilled, and they’re making enough to live? That’s not even reality. And the idea of “I don’t even know who to hire first,” I have no clarity on this stuff, well, I’ve got a guide for this podcast episode that I’m going to share with you that’s going to help you figure that out.

So here’s the thing. If you’re a solopreneur, or even if you’re not solo anymore and you have a part time VA, you don’t even have to be full time at this. You could be doing this as a side hustle. Nobody says you have to be working full time for your business before you hire somebody. There are no rules as far as that goes. So if you’re a solopreneur, if you are ready to start onboarding a team, and if you’re somebody that’s growing at the speed of cash, meaning you don’t have investors, you make money, you spend it, you make money, you spend it, because you’re growing at the speed of cash, and if you are ready to grow but you’re not sure how, then this is for you. If any of those fears are fears that you’ve had, kick them to the curb. Don’t let them hold you back anymore.

So what does this look like? Let’s look very specifically at the three signs you’re ready. Let’s walk through this one at a time.

If you are working at eighty percent capacity. All right, so what you have to do is take a second and figure out what your capacity is, as far as hours you want to be or can commit to working in a week. Is it sixty hours? Is it fourteen hours? Is it thirty five? What is that, realistically, for the next year? We’re looking at a season, because here’s the thing about all of this that I’m about to share. All of this breaks after your first couple of hires. This is literally only how you hire those first one to four people. So it’s going to break after that, but that’s okay, you’ll have time then to grow into that next stage. But to get your first hires, what are you doing now? You can’t be like, “Well, I only want to be working thirty five hours,” but right now you’re having to put in seventy. Okay, well, then let’s say your capacity is sixty hours. You’re not going to go from seventy to thirty five by hiring one person. It’s just not going to happen. You’re in a season, you’re growing this business, you’re digging in, you’re making things happen, you’re hustling, and you’re going to make this happen. So sixty hours a week, forty hours, maybe it’s a side hustle, so you’ve got fourteen, I don’t know what it is for you, but you’ve got to figure out what that is, the max. And then you have to know what eighty percent of that is.

If you are working at that number, here’s the second sign: for four straight weeks. If you’re working at eighty percent of your capacity for four weeks straight, not a busy season, but consistently, I am going all in over eighty percent of the time that I can ultimately give to this thing, that’s two of the three signs. And the third one is, if you can cover sixty percent of the pay you’re going to pay someone. These are the three signs. So let me give them to you again. If you’re working at eighty percent capacity for four weeks straight, and you can cover sixty percent of the pay that you would need to pay someone, and we’ll get into what that is here in a little bit, when those three numbers are true for you, you are ready to hire. You are ready to make progress right now, or you are going to burn out, because you are one sick day away from disaster.

My friend, again, if you’re working at eighty percent of your capacity for four weeks straight, and during these last four weeks you could have covered sixty percent of the pay for somebody else, you’re ready. Now, how do you do this? What’s the first hire formula? What’s the framework to make sure that this works for you? I’m going to share that with you. But here’s the thing. If this is hitting close to home for you at all, you’re stretched thin, you’re wondering if now is the time, I’ve got a resource for you, and I don’t want you to miss it. I’m calling it the First Hire Readiness Checklist. It’s a resource, about ten, twenty minutes long. At the very top, it walks you through a quick capacity check, asking about your eighty percent capacity for the last four weeks. There are one, two, three, four, five, six things you check, and it says if you check two or more, you’re over capacity. So now you know you’re ready to delegate. Then there’s a section that talks about the four week rule and the sixty percent rule. That’s the first page. The second page goes into what do you delegate first, and I’ve got some points there to help you figure that out, and a table with blank rows you can start filling in, here’s the things I need to delegate and here’s how much time it’s going to take. The next page after that has twenty ideas for you. Now, you might be thinking, well, what are the ideas? Well, the ideas are for this formula I’m going to share with you right now. At any point, if you want this First Hire Readiness Checklist, you’re going to go to EricDingler.com/firsthire and get access to it.

So what is the first hire formula in this guide? Well, the first hire formula is this: twenty percent to ten, ten, eighty. Did you get it? Are you ready? I’ll say it again. Twenty percent to ten, ten, eighty. So what do I mean by that? Very simple. You’re going to take twenty percent of your capacity. So let’s say your capacity that you work at is sixty hours, that’s pretty common if you’re a solopreneur starting up your own thing, you’re really working hard, you’ve been grinding it out, you’re going to work forty to sixty hours. So twenty percent of forty hours is eight, twenty percent of fifty is ten, twenty percent of sixty is twelve. So what you’re going to do is hire somebody at that number of hours. If you’re working forty hours a week, you’re going to hire somebody for eight hours a week. If you’re working fifty hours, you’re going to hire somebody for ten hours. And if you’re working sixty hours, you’re going to hire somebody at twelve. Only working twenty hours? You’re going to hire somebody for four. So you’re going to take your capacity, the hours you’ve been working for the last four weeks, and you’re going to hire somebody for twenty percent of those hours.

But before you hire, you’re going to take that number. Let’s say it’s ten hours, just to keep the math easy. You’re going to ten, ten, eighty those ten hours. What do I mean by that? Ten percent, ten percent, eighty percent. So you’re going to take ten percent of the hours. Ten percent of ten is one, so you’re going to take one hour, and you’re going to round these, ten percent of twelve is one point two, so you round it down to one. Round to the nearest hour on these, don’t get caught up in the math. If you’re going to hire somebody for ten hours because you’re working fifty, you’re going to take ten percent of that time and it’s now yours. That’s right, you’re going to stop working that hour. You are a business owner who just bought yourself some time. You’re going to buy yourself a lot more time down the road and really bring your hours down. But you can’t do that on the first hire, and you can’t overhire, you can’t extend beyond your budget. So you take ten percent of the time for this first hire, first three, four hires. That’s me time. And I mean it literally, I want you to put it on your calendar. I want you to come up with a plan. I’m going to go paint. I’m going to sleep in. I’m going to sit by myself and listen to a podcast that has nothing to do with work, except for maybe the Eric Dingler Leadership Podcast. And I’m going to enjoy a cup of coffee. Seriously, I don’t want you to skip this. You’re going to take an hour and it’s yours. Maybe you tell your spouse, hey, I just hired this person, and one of the things I’m doing, I’ve hired them for ten hours to work for me, and I’m taking one of those, and you and I are going to go for a walk every Monday morning at nine o’clock, you and me, babe, we’re going to do this together. Spread it out, take an extra fifteen minutes every day for lunch, I don’t care how you do it, but it’s your time. Why else would you be a business owner? Don’t say, “Whoa, I can’t do it right now, Eric, I just gotta keep hustling.” Well, that’s how you lead to burnout. That doesn’t make sense. Consistency compounds. You need to take that hour. It’s so important that you take it now, that if you’re not going to do it, stop listening to the podcast. Just stop, because it’s that ridiculous. I can’t help you if you’re not willing to help yourself. It’s one hour. And if you’re only hiring somebody for six hours in a week, you’re taking a half hour, ten percent.

The next ten percent, are you ready for this? The next ten percent, you’re going to give it to leadership, because now you have someone to lead. You’re going to need an hour a week to meet with them. You’re going to spend a half hour meeting with them, not about their job, there may be another hour you meet to talk about projects, no, you’re going to meet with them a half hour a week to develop them. Hey, this week I want to talk about clear communication with customers. This week we’re going to talk about time management. This week we’re going to talk about our vision and where we’re headed. This week we’re going to talk about the importance of systems. This week we’re going to talk about the importance of self-care. You’re going to have a list of this, and you’re going to lead your person, and then take another half hour to prepare for that. Maybe you just meet with them once a month for development, that’s okay. This isn’t, “I gotta meet with them and go over projects, do a project brief,” no, no, no, this is development time. This is where you begin to develop them from week one, from month one. Hey, we’re going to meet once a month for an hour and we’re going to develop a skill. Maybe you read a book together. There’s so many things you can do with this. This is why people that come to my weekly open office hours, I’ve started doing leadership talks once a week with them and give them a handout they can use with their team. Leadership talks that I’ve prepared for other people from my team. I use these talks during our weekly office hours, I spend the first fifteen minutes giving them these talks, and then I give them the handout so they can turn around and do it with their team. So there’s so much you can do. But you’re a leader now, even if you don’t have a team. Your business is never going to grow beyond your leadership capacity.

So when you make your first hire, if you hire somebody for ten hours a week to take ten hours of the stuff you’ve been doing, here’s the other thing, don’t hire somebody to do something you’re not doing. You’re going to hire somebody to take ten hours off of your plate. So you’re going to identify ten hours of stuff you’re not going to do anymore, but you’re going to give it to somebody else to do. You don’t hire somebody so that now you have your fifty hours plus their ten hours and you can work sixty hours in a week. No, no, no, no, no. That’s not what this is. This first hire is taking ten hours off of your plate. But you’re too young of a business, you don’t have enough going where you can just stop working ten hours. Well, I was working fifty, but then I hired this person for ten, and now I only work forty. That would be great, but come on, realistically, do you think that’s going to happen? You wouldn’t believe me if I told you that was true, because it’s not. But you’ve got to make sure you’re hiring the right people. This is why preparing to hire the right person is so important. You’ve got to sit down and say, what are ten hours of things I’m doing every week that I’m not doing anymore? And so now, those ten hours, I’m taking one of them for me, I’m going to dedicate one of them to lead my person, I’m going to be the leader they want to follow.

Now, the other eighty percent, let’s say this could be eight hours, it could be four hours, doesn’t matter, the other eight hours, what do you do with it? You have these ten hours because you took ten hours worth of stuff off your calendar and gave it to somebody else, and now you’ve taken one of those hours for you time. Congratulations, you’re a business owner, that’s what you get to do. You’re going to take an hour of it and dedicate it to developing your person, you and your person, you’re going to be a leader working on you, on your team, on your leadership, one hour a week. Now you’re going to take eight hours, or four, depends on how many, it’s eighty percent, let’s just keep with fifty hours to make the math easy. You’re going to take eight hours and put that time toward revenue generating activity, new activity you’ve never done before, things you haven’t had the time to do. You’re going to be able to take a whole day, or two hours a day, an hour, whatever it is, and put it toward revenue generating activity. And I know you’re thinking, well, what is that? That’s the list of twenty things in the guide.

What does that look like? You could spend time creating and running a client reactivation campaign. Attend one local or online networking event. Optimize your own website or a landing page. Send out a weekly email to your email list. Put together and run your first ad. Call all of your past clients. Work your pipeline, take a little more time in the sales process so you can increase the per ticket sale that you make. Look at where you’re spending money, are there any recurring expenses you don’t need? There’s a list of them, just twenty, and there’s so many more. But on this list, it shows twenty things, and the suggested hours per week to give it, and how fast you should see impact. The very first thing, follow up with warm leads or past quotes, two to four hours, results immediate, one to two weeks. Reach out to all of your existing clients with an upsell or cross-sell offer, you spend two hours a week on that, figuring out the script you’ll call, the email you’ll send before or after you make the call when you weren’t able to get them on the phone. You’re now going to have time to plan an effective strategy and execute it, again, immediate results in one to two weeks.

Because here’s the thing. If you don’t do this, what are you going to do? You’re going to hire somebody, take some time off your plate, give it to them, and then you’re going to start doing stupid, busy stuff. “I’ve always needed to clean out my email.” Why? Does cleaning out your email pay the mortgage? Does it put braces on the kids’ teeth? No. “I’ve been meaning to organize my Google Drive.” Great, Skippy, but you’re not going to do that with this time. You’re going to be under so much financial pressure in a couple of months, it’s going to be unbearable for you. You have to say, I’m going to take these ten hours, this is the specific list of activities I’m hiring someone to do, I’m going to give it to them, and then I’m going to take ten percent of the time for me, ten percent of the time to develop this team member and myself, and then eighty percent on brand new activity that is only focused on generating revenue. Because what’s going to happen is you’re going to start getting results. This isn’t busy work. This isn’t spending the next three months trying to figure out a new lead magnet or building a whole new complex system. No, you’re going to sell stuff, my friend. That’s what you’re going to do. Because now you’ve got the time and you’re going to see quick results. And then the sixty percent very quickly becomes you’re easily able to afford one hundred percent. Otherwise, you’re in a lot of trouble. And now you’re going to quickly get the capacity of revenue to hire the second person, or take their hours up. “Hey, first hire, I know we started at ten hours, but I’d like to increase you to fourteen hours, I’ve got four more hours of work I can give you.” Or maybe the next things you want to take off your plate aren’t in that person’s skill set, so now you’re going to hire somebody else.

Because here’s the thing. If you hire right, almost anything you want to hire for at this stage, for this first hire, you can easily hire for ten dollars an hour or less, if you’re willing to learn how to hire offshore. I’m serious. If you’re listening, you’re a solopreneur, you’re a one person operation, you are not being tasked to take care of a nuclear power plant. You’re not being brought in to do brain surgery. You’ve got these four, six, eight, ten hours worth of stuff on your calendar that you don’t need to be doing. You think you need to do it, you don’t need to do it. So you’re going to hire somebody, and we’re talking ten dollars an hour, one hundred dollars a week, four hundred dollars a month. Can you cover sixty percent? Can you cover sixty dollars of that easily? Well, okay, now you’re going to go out and sell forty dollars of something. You can’t sell forty dollars in eight hours? You can. You can call up a customer and get them to hire you for forty dollars to fix one thing, to solve one thing. In fact, you can go way beyond that. See how possible this becomes? This is life giving to you. You can do this. But you’ve had some mindsets around this that are broken, they’re not serving you well. You’re thinking, I need to hire somebody, and that’s going to cost me fifty four thousand dollars a year, I can’t afford that, I can barely pay myself that. Why are you trying to cover a whole year’s worth of salary? You grow into it, you don’t go into it.

Just try it. Try it for three months. “I need to hire somebody for three months to come in and help me with this.” Now, if you’re hiring a freelancer for three months, they probably already know how to do it, maybe you have to pay them fifteen dollars an hour. Now I know you’re thinking, well, I don’t have the systems in place, I have to stop and build the systems. No you don’t. Because this is what you do when you’re interviewing somebody, you say, hey, just so you know, I’m going to hire you, you’re the first employee, and I’m going to be honest with you, behind the scenes it’s just chaos, the plane’s taking off but the seats aren’t bolted down, I’m hiring you to help me get this plane organized. And each week you’re going to be taking two hours and creating documentation, documenting processes, helping me learn how to do this and organize it. I’ve got video of me doing the job I’m going to have you start to do, so the first week you’ve got like ten hours of pre-recorded video of me doing the work, you’re going to watch that the first week, and the second week you’re going to start doing it, and I’m going to stop doing it. And I’ve got this list of other things I’m going to do to go out and make more money. And the third and fourth week, we’re going to start seeing this new money come in, because I have a plan. I’m a leader and it’s what we’re going to do, and I want you to be a part of it. That’s how you interview somebody. That’s how you bring your first hire in. And if they’re too afraid to be a part of it, they’re going to go, this ain’t for me, all right, so you interview the next person. The last time I posted a job, it was for four hours, that’s all, I just wanted to hire somebody for four hours. I had thirty six people apply, thirty six people, in twenty four hours, for a four hour position. I’m telling you, it’s out there.

This is exactly what I help people do in the ninety day accelerator called Team Engine. We build all of these systems to recruit, onboard, delegate and develop your team. Now, some people want to do it before they make their first hire, and I applaud that, that is smart. Some people have their first hire or two and then do it, and that works as well, either way. But if you’ve never gotten started, now is your time. The First Hire Readiness Checklist is for you. It’s going to give you those twenty things, and then there’s a six part section of the handout, five statements that, if you mark all five of them, you are ready to actually make your first hire. You’re ready if you’re at eighty percent capacity for four straight weeks and you can cover sixty percent, you are ready to get things going. But you also need to know what tasks you’re going to delegate first, and you’re going to have to plan your reclaim time. If you don’t have that, you’re not ready, you’ve got to get those things right. So I want you to get this, and I want you to get it today, the First Hire Readiness Checklist at EricDingler.com/firsthire. This is the document that’s going to get you positioned to bring that first person on.

So what is this week’s Leadership Tip of the Week, what am I closing it down on? You know, this was a big decision. I’ve already shared fifty two of them, I have another fifty or so at least to go. So I went through all the things I haven’t shared and thought, what am I going to wrap it up with for this weekly leadership tip of the week? And here it is: feedback is the oxygen of leadership. Oh, that’s good. I don’t care what you think, that is good. What I mean by feedback is the oxygen of leadership, everything needs oxygen to live, people need oxygen. When you give feedback to your team, you’re giving oxygen to them, you’re giving them something they need to live. They need to hear your feedback. You need their feedback. Your feedback to them, or from them, lets you know that they’ve heard you, lets you know that they’re on the same page with you, lets you know how you’re doing as a leader. Your feedback to them lets them know how they’re doing, lets them know if they’re in alignment with your vision, if they’re part of the mission, if they’re living out the core values of your company. Feedback is the oxygen of leadership. If you squelch feedback, the light will go out. Two of our kids are doing science still as part of their school curriculum, and today I went downstairs and they were covering candles with jars, different sized jars, covering a candle, measuring how long it took for the flame to go out. You’ve probably done this when you were in school, because when the oxygen is gone, the flame burns out. If you hold back feedback from your team, the light will go out. If you don’t get feedback from your team, and other places, you need to get feedback from your customers and clients, peers, your spouse, your kids. Feedback is the oxygen of leadership. You need it, and you need to give it.

And why am I closing on this? Because I want your feedback. I’d love to hear from you. How is this new format of the podcast, focusing the whole thing on leadership, talking about leadership, not holding back any punches, diving in, saying this is what it is, how do you like this new format? I want to hear from you. You can email me, [email protected], I’m that big of an egomaniac that you can just email me. Or if you listen on Spotify, leave a comment. But I would really love to get your feedback. Even if you’ve got something good to say, I want to hear it. But it would mean the world to me if you would share it in a review. Your reviews give this show oxygen. It helps the show burn a little bit brighter and be seen amongst all the other podcasts out there. So if any of this spoke to you, if any of this was like, wow, that was good, I’m just going to ask for your feedback in the form of a review. Leave a review. Make sure you’re subscribed.

Okay, my friends, what a recap. Three things for you. One, don’t hire until you know exactly what you’re going to do with the time you’re taking back. Twenty percent to ten, ten, eighty. You’re going to buy back twenty percent of your time, you’re going to take ten percent of that for you, ten percent of that into leadership, and eighty percent into brand new revenue generating activity. That’s so exciting to me. That’s takeaway number one. Takeaway number two, if you’re at eighty percent capacity for four weeks and can cover sixty percent of the new hire, you’re ready to hire. And finally, make sure you go to EricDingler.com/firsthire. Until next time, pick one of these things, take action on it, to help you lead better, to live better.