5 Mistakes I’ve Made Hiring

It can get super painful. And for me, I've learned that I will never hire someone based on profit share again.

Welcome to the Decision Maker podcast with me, your host, Ali Bjerg. We've been given an amazing opportunity in virtual and digital entrepreneurship that's never been available in any other time period. We're living in a reality where the number of lives that we impact can be directly reflected by the dollars in our bank accounts. This podcast is all about deciding to the person who deserves all of the success you can dream up and also teaching you the strategies and the tactics to bring it to fruition and make it all happen. Can't wait to jump into this episode. Thank you so much for being here and let's get started.

What's up everybody? Welcome back to another episode of the Decision Maker show. I'm super excited to be here today talking about some of the biggest hiring mistakes that I've made through growing my company. I've been in business for about a decade now. In the first six years of being in business, I was a one woman show. I did everything. So to transition from being essentially a solopreneur who wore all of the hats to hiring, to managing a team, to being a leader, to running company, not just a hobby business. It's been a huge learning curve for me and I've made a ton of mistakes. This is actually super embarrassing to even come and record this show and tell you some of the errors that I've made as a total newbie in hiring. But hopefully if I can share this, maybe you'll be able to avoid some of the mistakes that I have made because they have been super painful. So one of the very first mistakes that I made when I was hiring, and this is all mindset based, but I hired a consultant who had a higher monthly fee. He was on a retainer, it was 10k a month. But the mistake that I made in hiring him is that I also gave him a cut of my profit. So I gave him an additional, I think it was 3% or 5% depending on what the cutoff was and how much money we had made that month. Which doesn't seem like a lot, right? But what he ended up doing or writing into the contract was that it was after ad spend but before other expenses. So when you're running a business and you're growing and you're hiring other team members, it was hugely, massively demotivating for me to have to almost pay this consultant more than I was paying myself sometimes every single month. So it ended up Making me kind of apathetic about my own business of like, well, whatever, I'm not even going to try because this consultant is not even working that hard. He's just telling me what to do and I'm doing all the work and then he's making more money than I am, right? So I almost started resenting the fact that this consultant was on a profit share, even though the idea and the theory of it makes a lot of sense. So if somebody's selling you an offer and they're selling you, you know, I'll work as hard as you will and I will, as you grow, you'll pay me more. And like, it sounds great, but if you don't really understand the numbers and you don't understand, is it profit after revenue or after expenses or is it pure purely like based on how much money we make that month, it can get super painful. And for me, I've learned that I will never hire someone based on profit share again because of what it did to my brain, because of how I felt about the business while I had someone else who was taking a cut of the company, even though I was the sole owner and they were there purely giving me advice, right? So that was a huge, huge lesson that I've made and I've even thought about offering that to my students of like, yeah, you know, we'll just partner and you can give me a cut because as you make more money, it makes sense to pay me more and more. But then I remember how it felt and I remember just the resentment that started building up and how the relationship started to crumble because of this weird element of, you know, feeling like I wasn't making enough money for my business, right? So that was three years ago. It was super painful. Like, it was a really tough lesson for me to learn and it honestly knocked me down a couple of pegs and hurt my confidence on if I even knew what I was doing afterwards after we split ways. And it was just a bad situation all around. The other mistakes that I've made include hiring people that are like me, which I like hanging out with people that I get along with, right? Like, I like having fun in my business. I like having people that I can chit chat with on slack all day and that I want to hang out with. But I can't scale a company with a bunch of ADHD people who just want to have fun all day. Like, somebody has to be detail oriented. Someone has to be focused on, you know, all, not just big picture stuff. We need doers, we need implementers. So something that I learned recently is that when I'm hiring in the future, something that's going to be non negotiable is to make sure I'm using personality assessments, right? And I'm looking at, okay, this operations role, what is involved with operations? What character traits does this person have to have to do a really good job in this role? They have to be able to pay attention to all these different moving pieces and to pay attention to the details and be able to have hard conversations. You can't just put someone in a role because you like them and you think they'll grow into it. Which I've done multiple times. And I've tried giving people promotions because I like them and because I like having them on my team. And I think, oh, we have this job opening, they'd be perfect over here. I can train them up, I can get them courses, I can get them coaching, they can grow. But I think I see more in other people than they can see in themselves sometimes. And sometimes people just are not cut out for the roles that we create for them. So really making sure that you pay attention to who you're hiring and what their skill sets are and not just making a bunch of clones who you want to hang out with all day. Yes, we want to have fun, but you are complimented more than you can ever imagine by people who are polar opposites you to you and they will do an amazing job. So really look at every single role on your team and what kind of personality and what kind of traits and strengths would be best in that role. So if it's operations, hire a person that has the strengths built for the operations role. If it's social media, same thing. Marketing, all sales. Like every single role in your business is perfect. Or I mean there are different personalities that are perfect for every single kind of role. So I think for me when I was going into the interview, I was like, yeah, like this person, they say they can do the job, why wouldn't they do the job? But I didn't actually do like pre hiring assessments or test projects or multiple interviews. I like people and I would give them the job on the spot without hiring other people. So that was a huge, huge, massive mistake that I made. Is not doing enough vetting in the interview process. Like I like everybody, I would hire everybody. And hiring is not easy and it involves having direct conversations and hard conversations and letting people down. And if you have any sort of people pleasing tendencies like I do, it can be super hard to have a tough conversation and know that there are going to be people that don't get the job when you're doing the interview process. There's going to be people that you interview that aren't a good fit, that you have to tell them it's not a good fit and you know, they can go on to their next opportunity. But I have had a really hard time doing that. So that was a mistake that I made. Another mistake that I made was outsourcing the hiring process too early. So just trusting other people to do it without really learning what the process should look like, without understanding what the different pieces should be on the team and really developing my skillset as a leader, because those tendencies are still there. So. So just because I hired someone who could be like a fractional HR person, she was amazing, by the way. But I think I would have better benefited from learning how to do it myself because those habits that would have made me not great at hiring made me not a great boss in other areas because people pleasing tendencies. I was not direct enough. I would not manage. I would just take almost overly take personal responsibility for everything of like, well, they didn't do what I asked them to do. But it's probably my fault because I didn't explain it well or I didn't, you know, put it in the project management system well enough, or I didn't do this or I didn't do that. Instead of having direct conversation conversations, I would just avoid it and I would take the blame and I would try to fix it. Right. But if you're a leader of a company and you're trying to grow, you can't be cleaning up all the messes and you can't be trying to fix everything yourself, otherwise you're going to stay plateaued. So I think really developing that muscle and the ability to have direct conversations and, you know, be firm but kind. That's something I learned from the book Radical Candor, which if you're looking at hiring learning, that's a really good place to start, is how do you have these conversations? And that's another big mistake that I made is not having enough conversations with people that were on the team. So in the book Radical Candor, she talks about dedicating at least an hour per team member to having a meeting one on one with that team member to review their questions, to look at what they're doing, which means you have to be dialed in to what that team member is doing. You have to be paying attention. I often made the mistake of like, okay, that spot is filled they're doing their job. I don't really like meetings. I don't like sitting on Zoom for long periods of time. Like it feels inefficient to me. I would rather just trust people are doing their jobs. But I think that almost created a culture of complacency where, where they thought I wasn't paying attention and I truthfully wasn't paying attention. So they were not working as hard as they probably could have been or should have been. So I think behaving like a manager and acting like you are responsible for what is being fulfilled in that role and having key performance indicators of every single role in your team so you know what they're supposed to be doing, you know what done looks like, you know what high quality project looks like and they are accountable to what you've decided is the key performance indicator of that role. For example, if someone is in customer service, the key performance indicator for them is how many emails are answered within 24 hours. If x percent are not updated or not responded to in 24 hours, something is wrong and we need to build a better system. We need to fix that issue. So that was another big mistake that I had made also just making sure that I have a lot of variety on the team and that I have very specific roles filled. Big mistake I made was seeing an open, you know, something I needed help with and moving people from one department to the other department without even really knowing if it was a good fit for them or not or if it was something they wanted to do. I also gave people a lot of, a lot of leeway on what they were doing in their jobs. And I was would build the jobs to suit the person and what the person wanted instead of looking at my overall org structure and saying like okay, I actually need someone who's going to do this and only this. So I have to hire someone and if that other person is the wrong person in the wrong seat, then they just need to go. And another really great book that I've read about this topic is called Traction. It's part of the EOS framework. So I really. By Gino Wickman I really recommend that book too. If you're looking to learn about hiring. They talk a lot of this stuff inside of those books. So this is honestly like my biggest development area that I'm going to be focusing on in 2023. I've had a lot of changeover in my team in the last couple of days. Not because last couple of weeks I should say, and not because anything negative and everyone's parted on great terms. One wanted to retire. She wanted to, you know, have a. She knows that I'm actually pacing up. I'm going to get busier, I'm going to have a lot more going on in the company. I'm growing, I'm scaling and she wanted to slow down. So it's not a good fit anymore. The other person who recently left the team wanted an in person component so she could have more know just interaction in real life which when you have a digital business there's not a lot we can do to help fulfill needing people. Right. Like we can have zoom calls but at some point it's just not the same. So really making sure that you are a culture fit. So as I hire in the future and as I'm going to be posting jobs and I'm going to be building up a rockstar team, I'm going to have a very specific process to how I hire and I'm going to have only superstars allowed on the team, only a players, only people who are as dedicated to the mission as I am and making sure that culture is super clear of what it's going to look like to be on the team and what it's going to look like to work together and what kind of experience we're going to provide for our students. Making sure that we're all on that same level and we're all in it to make sure we're providing the best experience possible for our students. You know, that's obviously the number one priority. So I'm learning and I will keep sharing as I go. But those are some of the biggest lessons that I've learned. Gosh, even in like the last month about how to run a business and scale business as I'm working towards scaling towards 10 million and beyond. So that's. I'll keep you updated. I'm sure there's going to be a lot more aha moments and a lot more lessons and I'm grateful to be here with you sharing in those. If you have any questions about hiring, if you want to stick around and learn more about growing a business online, all the different things that go into it from hiring, marketing, messaging, offers, sales, all the stuff that we talk about, especially mindset. We have a really heavy mindset focus on this show obviously as the decision maker show. I'm deciding to become a better boss and I'm deciding to become a manager of people and to understand how to build a massive amazing team while remaining profitable. I mean there are hundreds of challenges that come with growing a business and getting, you know, every time you hit a new revenue number, there's another challenge. So making sure that I am fulfilling my duty to myself to be a lifelong student and to decide to keep learning and to decide to be a leader and to do everything that I need to do to to always be the best version of myself in all the different areas of my life. That's a huge focus for me and something that we talk a lot about on the Decision Maker show. So grateful that you're here. I appreciate you. Let me know what questions you have. Leave them in the comments. Send them to me. As a DM on Instagram, I'm always happy to jam out on this stuff, and I hope you have a fantastic rest of your day. Thanks for being here. Bye.

All right, fam, that's what we've got for today's episode. Please make sure that you subscribe to this podcast to make sure you don't miss any updates in the future. Also, please send me a message on Instagram. I would love to know any takeaways that you had or anything, any questions that came up for you. And if you'd like to get support in your business, head to my website and book a call with a member of my team and learn about all the different ways that we can support you as you grow on this journey as an entrepreneur. Thanks so much for being here. Talk soon.