I HAVE LONG believed that being a business owner means making a difference in people’s lives—sometimes just in our immediate communities; sometimes even across the world...
I HAVE LONG believed that being a business owner means making a difference in people’s lives—sometimes just in our immediate communities; sometimes even across the world. We have the power to irrevocably change the lives of every client or customer we touch when we work with them. By working with even more clients and customers, we can create a ripple effect in the world, even a tiny part of it.
The greater the impact we want to make through our business, the higher the level of world-class support we will require to do so.
That said, even if you don’t think of your work as changing lives every day, it is important. You are here to serve people and to make a difference. And you deserve to be supported by the highest-quality people, without exception. That said, most of us were never taught how to hire world-class talent, train them, keep them, and delegate to them effectively. For most of us, the hiring process is far from strategic.
Not getting the support you really need, not hiring soon enough, not hiring the right people, not paying well enough, and not delegating properly or enough are all unconscious acts of self-sabotage. Conversely, hiring properly is an act of self-care. Surrounding yourself with the best team available is self-worth in action.
I have shouted it from the rooftops for many years: You deserve the highest-quality support possible.
You are worth it, your clients and customers are worth it, your mission is worth it, and you deserve to have a team of people who are uniquely brilliant in doing their work, so that you can focus on your unique brilliance as well.
Believe in yourself enough to insist on hiring only the very best people, even if it takes a little longer to find them. This is true leverage.
The Control Enthusiast within is blocking your growth. When you first began your business, it was necessary for you to do everything yourself, put in long hours, and be a Control Enthusiast...
The Control Enthusiast within is blocking your growth. When you first began your business, it was necessary for you to do everything yourself, put in long hours, and be a Control Enthusiast (a term I much prefer over the more common “Control Freak”). Good thing you did, because that is exactly what helped you bring your business to where it is today, at Six or even Seven Figures.
The problem is, you’ve now reached a crucial impasse that happens in every growing business: the point at which there is no more “you” to go around and no more time to work on the projects necessary to grow your business further.
You have officially become the bottleneck in your business, the one likely slowing everything down, growth and revenues included.
Because of this, the business is stuck at its current level. You’re working more hours than you ever would find acceptable working for someone else, and you’re likely making less personally than you would if you were to work for someone else. In fact, you’re tapped out and on the way to burnout if something doesn’t change soon.
If your company is not growing consistently it’s because you’re probably still too much in the day-to-day operations, working “in” the business, rather than “on” growing the business.
Even if you already have an established team or a part-time person in place to help you, the all-too-common mindset of “I can do it better,” “I can do it faster,” and “It would take me longer to train someone else to do this rather than doing it myself,” as well as “Why should I pay someone else to do something I can do so easily?,” all perpetuate your position as the bottleneck of the company.
This is the Control Enthusiast position, in which absolutely every- thing has to be touched by you in one way or another before it goes “out there.”
Now, I’m not suggesting you stop focusing on quality control, no. But the longer you stay in the role of the bottleneck in the company, having everything be done by you or go through you, the longer you will struggle and perpetuate inadequate growth.
You must now embrace your true role in the company. Instead of dealing with the day-to-day administrative tasks of your business, or being the one who delivers all of the work to your clients and customers, it’s time for you to transition to a role in which you focus your tasks on scaling the business beyond its current iteration.
Your job as business owner must now morph to the role of the Visionary, the true entrepreneur, rather than the Doer. Instead of being the one who is locked into the day-to-day, the person who delivers the service or makes the product, going forward, you will switch to being accountable for the:
When you transition from working completely IN the business (daily operations, the delivery of the entirety of goods and services, administrative work, etc.) to working more and more ON the business (mapping out exponential growth plans, overseeing the creation of scalable processes, setting up a team you trust, large-scale business development, etc.), that’s when you will multiply your company’s earnings, gain control of your time, and experience freedom again.
I am not sure there is such a thing as a true self-made millionaire. To achieve more with your business, you must now get more help, expand your team even further and hire rock stars to do what you’re currently doing now. This may seem impossible from where you’re currently standing, and yet this is the rite of passage every business owner must go through to exponentially scale his or her business to its next level.
You do not have “The Employee Curse”; just learn to hire better. It can be very tempting to say, “Okay, if the only way to achieve the next level is to hire someone, then I’ll do it,"...
You do not have “The Employee Curse”; just learn to hire better. It can be very tempting to say, “Okay, if the only way to achieve the next level is to hire someone, then I’ll do it,” only to go hire a friend or some- one you can easily afford. You may have hired others before, only to be supremely disappointed and disillusioned that it didn’t work out or that it wasn’t worth the time and financial investment.
The likelihood is, you hired the wrong person.
Have some compassion for yourself, though. This happens to most business owners, especially in the beginning. Getting a person, any person with a pulse, to help you in the business is better than not having anyone. Or at least that’s the mindset that drives people making their first hires (this happened to me too, so no judgment here). Sadly, it is a tactic devoid of strategy, one that I too practiced all too often in the beginning.
Most every time you hire someone in haste, just to stop the bleeding, you eventually begin to wonder why things aren’t getting done, why they’re getting done wrong, why mistakes are being made, and why certain aspects of that person’s job are being avoided.
So you fire the person and hire the next person right under your nose, as quickly as you can, because you like them or they seem to know what they’re doing, and, sadly, you likely experience the same disappointments all over again.
Logically, this could make you believe, especially when this happens repeatedly, that you’re a terrible manager and that maybe you have the “employee curse.” This curse is made up of beliefs that you are not able to hire well, keep employees, or, perhaps, that you’re not meant to have any.
Worse, if this continues, you may actually contemplate not staying in business because you’re stuck between a rock and a hard place: the rock is knowing that you’re already overwhelmed and can’t do it alone; the hard place is that you clearly can’t manage other people and don’t see the light at the end of this tunnel of complexity.
Which means that you stop hiring people or choose to do it by yourself, which of course doesn’t work either. After many iterations, the business stops growing because you spend more time figuring out your team issues than you do scaling the business and increasing cash flow and profits.
This won’t work, certainly not in the long term.
The point is, none of your assumptions about being a bad manager are correct.
No, you are not a bad manager. You simply were never taught how to hire strategically, or follow processes that bring you the right person for a particular job. You may have never been given best practices on how to delegate in a way that things get done on time, and the way you want them done.
However, when you follow a precise hiring and training methodology (more on this in a minute), everything changes. Your company then becomes a sought-out company to work for and turnover reduces drastically.
Don’t hire a warm body just to stop the bleeding. Here’s what’s important for you to know: When you hire someone not suited or wired to do a particular type of work, they will 1) never be good at it, 2) begin resenting that part of their job, 3) likely sabotage their own efforts, and 4) may eventually leave, or force you to fire them.
Why? Because of the lack of “fit,” this person’s job feels to them like they are continually rowing upstream, like they are going against the grain. It’s just too hard for them to do their job and you become increasingly frustrated that things aren’t working out.
Hiring without strategy doesn’t work. Instead, every role in your company needs someone specifically wired for it.
Is the position one that requires precision, specificity and exactness? Then the person you must hire for this position is someone who is pro- cess-driven, who can create systems and make sure that no one deviates from the system.
Conversely, are you looking for someone who can charm, woo and sell like nobody’s business? Then this will require someone who can improvise, influence, be relationship-driven, who is unafraid of confrontation and enjoys answering objections and asking for the sale. Someone who can be pleasantly persistent.
In my experience, these two types of hires are polar opposites.
That said, business owners often make the mistake of trying to plug two “holes” in their company with one “stopper,” thinking it’s a wise move to try to hire one person for two roles, with an eye toward saving money. For example, they’ll hire one person to do a combination of administrative tasks and sales, because they feel that there may not be enough work for a full time admin and a full time salesperson. (It’s normal. I too made this mistake in the beginning.)
What the business owner doesn’t realize is that they are dooming their business by making this decision. A person who loves sales typically resists minutiae, rigid processes, procedures and systems (not always, but this is often the case). They love the game of winning others over, to hunt and get things done their way, even if it doesn’t follow a specific process. Often, the ends justify the means in this situation.
Conversely, a person who is wired for processes, procedures and systems, who loves dotting the “i”s and crossing the “t”s, often feels nervous when put in a position of having to improvise for too long or be quick on their feet. Often, they have a great fear of getting on the phone to ask for the business or not take no for an answer. They prefer to be behind their computer, and just get their work done, without having to interact with a lot of people. There are exceptions to this, of course, but in my experience, they are few and far between.
Where you may have previously been stuck in building your team, as I was, is in not realizing that different people are wired differently and should be hired accordingly.
We know this to be true because of years of seeing the proof in the pudding. Within our work, we have used several different assessments with our members over the years, and it’s proven that there are different types of people with different innate skill sets, falling into distinct categories.
Some people are great at systemizing and double-checking every- thing, while others are more fluid and can adapt to change very quickly. Some don’t mind risk and uncertainty, while their counterparts wish to stabilize every situation to reduce risk, at all cost. Some like to imagine and think conceptually, while others prefer building with their hands or seeing things detailed on paper. Finally, some like to fact-find extensively before making any decision, while others are better at going with the flow, simplifying big concepts and preferring estimations or summaries to long lists of facts.
This is important for you to know, especially if you’ve been unhappy with past hires. In fact, I believe there are four important components to consider when hiring someone:
I now believe that the first two can be taught or eventually acquired.
The second two cannot, especially the “wiring” part. I consider the wiring criteria to be the most important and weigh it accordingly in the hiring process.
To build a highly cohesive team and leverage the skills of all your team members, all must be working within their unique wiring. It’s important that you know how they are specifically wired and what type of position they will thrive in. When a team member is hired for a position that uses their strengths, they produce better results, and are more productive and much happier.
This is why when hiring any new member of a team, I recommend you first look at how the candidate is wired to take action, what their innate strengths are, and how they respond to external expectations by using a variety of assessments, such as the Kolbe A Index, Gallup’s StrengthsFinder tools, the Four Tendencies assessment, and others.
Using assessments with prospective team members gives you a more complete picture of whether the person in front of you will be a rock star at their particular role, or just another warm body that eventually disappoints you. This produces much better hires than hiring blindly or based on personality and past experience alone.
In our business, we follow a very specific process for using assessments and look at the results of these before any formal interview is ever scheduled, seeing it as the first important factor to bringing on an ideal team member. It turns the hiring process into a science rather than a game of eeny meeny miny moe.
Let me give you an example. Years ago, my Team had narrowed down the search process to one candidate for a website coding position. A meeting was scheduled for me to interview him and the day before the interview, I reviewed his assessment scores. I knew that someone for this kind of position would need to be process-driven, detail-oriented and systems-focused.
The problem is, his scores pointed entirely in the opposite direction. He was wired as someone who was erratic in this behavior, who improvised greatly, and took risks and chances. He was innately wired as the kind of person to not follow rules or processes. He had characteristics of a serial entrepreneur, someone unlikely to stick with one thing for any length of time.
These were big red flags for me, and when I gently pointed this out to the members of the team that had suggested that we hire him, they too agreed that doing so would have been a big mistake, as this was the exact opposite of the person we were looking to hire.
Yes, his skill set was good, as was his experience. But it was clear that he wouldn’t have lasted long in the position and would have likely made sloppy mistakes, neither of which we were willing to experience or take a chance with. To me, it was clear that there was no reason to follow through with the interview, so we canceled it.
We ended up hiring someone perfectly wired for the position, with the right skill set, the right experience and who fit our culture perfectly. He, in turn, has been with us for many, many years and has produced exceptional work. This is an employee we consider to be a rock star. And his assessment scores (practically) predicted this.
The point I’m trying to make is the following: when you consistently hire the right team members, you build a team of uniquely brilliant people, where each person is in the right role, is wired for their role, and happy in their position. Because they love their job, they’re committed to the company and stay longer, getting better and better at their role every day. They appreciate working with you and it shows.
In the end, team members who are hired properly and are a great fit for the role are more invested and productive, and feel a sense of ownership, which makes them eager to want to help move the business forward.
Having a team full of these types of hires is one element that helps you scale your business much more quickly and consistently. This is what you want.
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” —Wayne Gretzky
“I skate to where the puck is going to be, not where it has been.” —Wayne Gretzky
Yes, you can afford that next employee now, not later. While you likely started your business on a shoestring budget, like I did, previously having focused on low-cost to no-cost growth measures, this changes at the Leverage stage of your business. At this point, you’re going to need to invest more significantly in the business and this includes investing in your team, even if it doesn’t always feel like you have the cash flow to do so. I’ve rarely met someone at Six Figures who says, “I have all the money in the world to hire the team I want.”
Repeatedly, business owners tell me, “Yes, Fabienne, I dream of hiring lots of people, but I just don’t have the cash to do that right now. I need to wait until the money shows up.”
Yes, admittedly, growth sucks cash. And that means that you don’t always feel comfortable investing in your business in the form of new hires. Doing so feels like a heavy responsibility. That being said, to get to the next level of growth, and really leverage your business (eventually to Seven Figures) you will need to hire someone else to help you get out from the day-to-day operations of your business, including the administrative ones, so that you can focus on bigger projects that will help you move the company forward.
In hiring at this stage, it’s tempting to want to save money and either not hire anyone until you really need them, hire a part-time person to save some cash, or hire someone you would score a 4 out of 10 (10 being ideal) just to save a few bucks. Instead of hiring the person you truly need, the one who has all four criteria to get you to that elusive next level, it’s tempting to play safe and not spend the money.
The problem is, hiring inadequately is probably more detrimental to your business than investing in a great hire would be.
I’ve been there. There have been many times in my own business that, to move to the next big level, I had to confront a fear stemming from the following question, “How will I be able to afford this person and everything else I need to pay for?” Each time, the fear stopped me in my tracks. Little did I know that I wasn’t the only one who experiences these fears. It’s rather normal at this stage.
There are many fears that show up when it’s time to hire someone for the first time or greatly expand an existing team. Here is a list that usually resonates with our members when asked about the fears or reasons they haven’t delegated or hired yet:
Do you recognize some of your own mindset blocks on this list? (If so, it’s absolutely normal at this stage of your business.)
It’s a common dance among growth-minded entrepreneurs, a dance called resistance. You feel that you’re “too big to be small and continue doing everything yourself” while at the same time being “too small to hire big.” Again, this is commonplace and also a rite of passage for getting to the other side of exponential growth.
Because of the doubt and fear that come up with hiring, it’s tempting to think about shooting for a “safe” option: hiring someone part-time or who is less than adequate because you want to save money; you’re too scared to commit a full time employee or someone you consider to be in the “big leagues.”
Here’s what I see people do: they need an operations manager to take over the day-to-day operations of the business, but they get really nervous about paying this type of yearly salary, so they say, “I’ll just look for a part-time administrative person to do that job.” The problem with doing this is that a part-time assistant is typically a person who will never be as invested as a full-time team member would. They typically just don’t yet have the gravitas to run the day-to-day operations of what will become a million-dollar (or million-pound) company. In my observation, there is often a different mindset in someone part-time from someone who has committed to a full-time career.
If you have hired someone, but not someone you feel great about, you’ve essentially bluffed yourself into thinking that you successfully took care of the problem, but in fact, you didn’t. Deep inside, you still feel the need to micromanage, to double check everything and you may even feel that the proverbial “other shoe” will soon drop.
Yes, you saved a few bucks, but you also likely became (or will continue to be) the bottleneck in your company. Even with this hire, there will still not be enough of you to go around, not enough time to get everything done, and things will continue to stay at the status quo, leaving you wondering why you even bothered to hire anyone in the first place.
This may inevitably lead you to think, “See, I knew it! I hired someone and, as always, it didn’t work! It wasn’t worth the time to train them or
the money I spent. I’m still overwhelmed and I don’t feel I’ve gotten ahead. Now I have to let this person go, and as always, I’m alone again and back to square one.”
When hired properly, each one of your employees will pay for themselves. Listen, I get it. Right now, cash is likely tight and you’re not sure whether you can afford the person you really need. But without better support in the business, you will probably continue to stay stuck and overwhelmed.
What do you do? Here’s a six-step “Hire Hustle” process we teach in the program that shifts your mindset and your ability to hire now, not later:
Instead of seeing the act of hiring someone new as a cost, using this process allows you to see this new hire as someone who pays for him or herself.
From my experience, if you’ve hired the right person, and you train them properly, focusing on a quick return on monthly investment, they will often pay for themselves in as little as three to four months.
The additional benefit of having a full-time person who is really suited to help you is that you’re much more likely to start delegating things instead of staying in a place of overwhelm and white knuckling from a place of control. You will likely find yourself saying, “Well, I’m paying for that operations manager or assistant, and he’s not as busy as I’d like him to be. I might as well offload all of this other stuff to him!”
The result of boldly hiring someone new using this process is that it frees you up to work on important growth tasks that you would never have been able to focus on otherwise. At the same time, the amount of implementation and action overall in the business increases rapidly, which drives growth and revenues forward without you being the one to do all of the driving.
In the realm of delegation, your employees likely aren’t the problem as much as you are.
In the realm of delegation, your employees likely aren’t the problem as much as you are.
Congratulations! You got clear on your hiring needs and how the person should be wired to succeed in that role; you did your due diligence; you evaluated how many more clients you would need to pay for your new hire and increased sales and marketing efforts; then you strategically came up with things for this person to do so that they would pay for themselves. You did the hardest part.
Or did you?
With a new hire in place, when it comes time to delegate, many business owners assume that this person will just know intuitively what to do, what it’s supposed to look like, how to get it done, and when it is due for completion, like you would.
The problem with this theory is that you’re not “most people.” You are an individualist.
You had the courage to leave the herd and start your own business. In the beginning, you did everything yourself, without anyone’s help (you had no choice as you had no cash). Very often, you acted intuitively and impulsively. You know what it’s like to be the lone ranger who is comfortable figuring it out on your own, without much help from anyone.
And, by God, you expect the people you hire to do the same, and be able to figure it out on their own, too! I mean, that’s why you hired them, right? You can almost hear yourself say, “That’s right! They should know intuitively what to do without me holding their hand. Isn’t that what I’m paying them so much money for??”
This is what I affectionately call Drive-by Delegating: where you are so relieved to finally have help that you cocoon into your office and get on with your work without checking in with your new hire much. Or, you assume your new team member should know what’s expected of them and should go off to do it on their own, without much input or direction from you.
If either of these scenarios is the approach you’ve taken in the past, the result is going to be a less-than-ideal outcome of disappointment and frustration, on both sides.
Business owners who take this approach very quickly get angry, saying, “Three weeks into this and it’s not even done right?? What have they been doing all this time? I could have done it myself in just three days, and it would have been so much better!”
Disappointed and frustrated, the business owner fires the employee or independent contractor. Then hires another one. The same process occurs, the same result, and then the same outcome, again and again. And the business owner begins to question if she’ll ever be able to man- age people or whether this is ever going to work.
“See, I told you I was a bad manager! I knew this wouldn’t work!”
But, it doesn’t have to be this way.
The mindset shift required to turn this around is to realize that (in most cases) nothing was wrong with the employee. No, the problem lies in drive-by delegating. And the responsibility to get the right outcome is yours, not theirs. (Again, have some compassion for yourself, this is absolutely normal until you are taught how to delegate differently.)
Give your team members what they need to succeed and they will. Along the way, it’s easy for a team member to feel lost, frustrated and to be embarrassed about asking for more direction from you. More than anything, they want to do good work and make you proud. They don’t want to bother you too much, or feel like an annoyance to you.
You must know though, that not having enough direction or guidance from you will mean they’ll go down the wrong rabbit hole, one you won’t find out about until the project is past due. The end result will likely not be what you wanted, not even close. You’ll feel frustrated and they’ll feel embarrassed.
Here’s the thing: It’s not the employee’s job to read your mind or guess what you want her to do or what the finished project will look like. Especially if your team members are wired differently than you are, it’s imperative that you give them the tools they need to produce the desired outcome, efficiently and on time.
This requires that you learn to delegate properly.
Your job going forward is to shift your mindset to equip your team members to succeed. You do this by giving them:
This is not about impatiently awaiting results, but rather investing in their training so that you can eventually have a self-sustaining team that feels empowered to do things without you having to micromanage them.
If you’d like to get increasingly better results from your team and avoid a revolving door of independent contractors or employees, change your mindset around how to communicate with and delegate to each team member.
Take on the role of coach, not dictator or wizard behind the curtain, the one they never see. This is an internal shift you must make, focusing on the long-term success and the future of your team and your company. Doing this empowers your team to eventually know how to do things without much input from you.
It’s worth putting in the effort now and going forward, even if you have too much on your plate currently. This is what will scale your business significantly.
In the end, you owe it to yourself and your big mission to leverage a uniquely brilliant team, one made up of rock stars in different disciplines of your business (marketing, sales, operations, customer care, finance and human resources, etc.) Obviously, not every business starts needing all of these different disciplines at once. But over time and as your business grows, you will eventually hire them so you can remove yourself from these areas.
You don’t need to be well-rounded, you need to be well-supported.
As I mentioned before, I have never met a self-made millionaire. The person who reaches Seven Figures is the one who is smart enough to recognize that she cannot do it alone, that she must focus on what she’s exceptionally capable of doing, and that she is deserving enough to be helped by people who are capable of doing things she cannot. That’s how you get to Seven Figures and gain your life and freedom back.
What’s the impact of applying the Team Activator in your business? Rachel explains it to you in her own words: “Eight years later, we’ve gone from one team member to eight, revenues have gone from low Six Figures to very close to Seven Figures, and we are leaders in our field. My mindset is supported here at the Leveraged Business program in a way that allows me to lead this company and handle anything that comes my way. The community is amazing. Everyone is each other’s champion.
“So yes, when my well-meaning team member asked me (back in 2009) whether the program was really worth it and whether we couldn’t simply figure this out on our own . . . Yes, it’s worth it. I wouldn’t be where I am without Fabienne and the community I have found in this program.
“If you’re ready to have an amazing home to grow yourself and your business, there’s nothing else out there quite like this.” —Rachel Wall
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