Episode 236: The Bottom Line - A Players

So the big question is this: how do small business owners like us grow our leadership, develop our teams, and scale our business in a way that allows us to get our products and services out to the world yet still remain profitable? That is the question, and this podcast will give you the answers. I'm Bradley Hamner, and this is the Club Capital Leadership Podcast. Welcome to The Bottom Line, a new weekly podcast series that we drop every Thursday to complement our weekly Monday podcast interviews with the industry leaders. These podcasts are going to be designed to give you short, impactful, and value-driven information that you can start using right away in your business. I value your time and attention and will do my very best not to waste it.

Just get what you need and go.

So with that, let's get into today's episode. Are you an agency owner looking to grow your revenue, increase your bottom line, and better manage your taxes? Club Capital is here to help. Club Capital is the largest accounting and advisory firm for insurance agents in the country, providing monthly accounting, tax strategy, and CFO services. Way more than bookkeeping and your everyday run-of-the-mill tax prep, Club Capital is focused on providing financial and tax advisory services that help you plan and forecast your agency's performance. Their financial dashboards and agency forecasting tools help you better understand your agency's historical performance, Create, measure future targets, and see how your agency compares to your peers around the country. Imagine what it would be like to understand the impact to your bottom line when deciding to hire a new employee, or forecast the impact rate changes or commission rates will have on your business. With over $200 million in tracked annual revenue and $140 million in tracked annual expenses, Club Capital has the data and the team to help you make better informed decisions for your agency. They will help you turn that back office stress into the backbone of your agency's success by giving you the tools to take your agency and your leadership to the next level. Visit club.capital today to book a solution overview with one of our business consultants. Club Capital, way more than a CPA firm.

All right, so you hear me say often, get in the room and at the tables with people that can pour into you, challenge you, and just give you perspective on things. Well, I also will say never trust a coach who doesn't have a coach. I'm a firm believer in that. If you're ever going to hire a business coach, you know, it doesn't matter who it is, I would ask them who is their coach because I think, or who have their coaches been? I mean, it's fine if somebody is in a period of time where they're not being coached in that moment, but they've got to have mentors and coaches that are pouring into them. I'm a, I'm a big believer in that. Well, one of the groups that I was a part of, or I am a part of currently, uh, uh, there's so many things I've learned from it, but recently I was on a call and so I'm giving you guys some of the things that I learned, um, uh, not that long ago that was really impactful to me. So they had somebody on and the title of it was going to be Conductive— Conducting Predictive Interviews. Now obviously, uh, you know, our— one of our podcast sponsors is Autopilot Recruiting, We love those guys. They're going to be able to give you candidates, but there's going to be a place at a time to where you are actually, you or someone in your team, and eventually you, the business owner, are going to be interviewing this person about whether or not that you're going to make the hire, right? Two great books on hiring, really three. Alex's book is awesome. And then there's the books Top Grading and Who. Those three books, Alex's book, Small Business, Big Recruiting. It's fantastic. Who and TopGrading. Okay. Why am I telling you this? Well, in there, there's this— they talk about kind of some questions you ask, and one in particular is around like, what would you hire to do? And so you got to go through there, someone's work history, and you ask the question, okay, what were you hired to do? What accomplishments are you most proud of? It's kind of a structure within that. Okay. The reason I'm getting to this is, is because the things that I learned specifically from the person that was presenting is this. She talked about A-players. Now, I love using the term A-players. I do. I don't know where I got that from, but it's just kind of sat in my vernacular now. And it's what we, you know, share with our clients as well. And so you hear me talk about how do you attract, how do you develop, and how do you retain? Well, specifically, how do you attract, develop, retain A-players? All right. Couple things she said. So whenever she was talking about A-players, I was like, I kind of perked up. Few things that she said. I'm looking at my notes here from that, from that session. She personally had interviewed 5,000 people. She felt like that only 10% of the people out there are A-players. Okay, I don't know if she's right or not. That's maybe her opinion. I don't know where she got that data from, but I'm like, that's probably about right, you know. Um, and then what she did is she went through and she started to say, here's how an A player would answer this question, and here's how a B and a C player would answer this question. And here's where the rubber meets the road. In question 1, where it says, what will you hire today? Hired to do. A-players will talk about outcomes and results, specific things that they were able to achieve. B- and C-players never will talk about results and outcomes. They will not formulate their answer in a measurable way. Oftentimes you'll get lost in the answers, and if you're confused, it's not a good thing. Their mind simply isn't structured properly. B and C players will talk generally about events, people, projects, but they never get into results. And I thought to myself, that's not just about sales. She wasn't specifically talking about a sales position. It's easy to default to hiring salespeople and to think that, and that would certainly be true, but I think it applies even if you're hiring an account manager, a service person, a marketing person, your EA, whatever that may be. A players will talk about outcomes, results, specific things that they were able to achieve, but B and C players never will do that. Furthermore, to keep going with this, she ended up going and saying in question 3, again, this comes from the book Who, what were the low points during the job? And she says, I will not let people off the hook. I can be, I'll admit, it's easy for me to let people off the hook because, you know, I'm Southern and I'm nice. To people, right? So, um, uh, and like many of you are, it's like, ah, well, you know, I didn't really like that answer, but I'm not gonna, not gonna push on them too much. She says, I won't let people off the hook. I'm going to keep frame reframing the question until they try to give me something that did not go well. I want to know about the mistakes. And she said, here's why. A-players will always see things as a learning experience. They'll say, yeah, we failed on that project, but here's what I learned, and I use that moving forward. And A-players will find a way. If you start to see a pattern of someone extracting success out of the jaws of defeat, you might have an A-player. I thought that was such a good one-liner. If you start to see a pattern where someone has snatched or extracted success out of the jaws of defeat, then you indeed might have an A player. She goes on to share a few other things, but those two things specifically, just defining how, you know, what's the difference between— it's one thing to say, here's an A player profile, and that's valuable, but there's also how would an A player answer this? How do B and C players answer this? I thought that that was so cool. I want— that really resonated with me. When something sits with me, I think you can all kind of get it, and I immediately wanted to pass it to you. I shared it with several of my clients as well, and I'll be kind of interweaving that too. So you work with Autopilot Recruiting, they're going to be able to put great candidates in front of you on a consistent basis. You're still going to have to, you know, start developing the skills. How do you get better at developing the skills? And I'll throw this last bonus one in with me— with— in for you. She asked us the question at the beginning. She said, um, what is the goal of the interview? I thought, well, I've never been asked that before. I've never been asked what the goal of the interview is. And we kind of went around and people were answering it pretty typical, right? Fit to role, uh, cultural fit. Is this person, you know, my company person? Can they do the job? You know, just things like that, skills, act, whatever. She said, the goal of the interview is to predict candidates' performance, full stop. That's what it is. I thought, wow, I've never heard that before. That's a really good answer to that question. So there you go. There's my tidbits for the day. Hope that served you. Till next time, lead well.