Recruiting Staff in a Challenging Climate

Recruitment is such a hot topic at the moment and I know everyone is finding it challenging. In fact, I had my group coaching call today and we were talking about some of the biggest challenges that each of the members have and recruitment came up time and time again. So this podcast episode is really timely and I'm excited to be talking with you just Baumatz today. He runs a recruitment company that helps agencies hire great staff and he has some really interesting insights to share including thinking about your recruitment process in exactly the same way that you would think about a marketing funnel. And he also shares some really good tips on how to interview people. And we apply my favourite expression of slowing down to speed up to make sure that you are really thorough in the recruitment process so that when you hire someone, you know you're giving yourself and them the best chance to be successful. So another action packed episode and let's head over and have a chat with you. Just.

Accelerate your agency's profitable growth with tools, tips and value added interviews with your host agency owner and coach, Rob DaCosta.

Today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast is sponsored by Cloudways. Loved by agencies around the world, Cloudways is a managed cloud hosting platform that takes care of all the web hosting related complexities, leaving users free to focus on growing their businesses and clients. The platform offers unmatched performance, reliability, choice and 24, 7, 365 support that acts as an extension to your own team, making Cloudways the ultimate choice for growing agencies. Now at present Cloudways is offering an exclusive discount for the Agency Accelerator listeners. So visit cloudways.com and use the promo code AA20. That's AA20 to get a discount of 20% off your first three months on the hosting platform of your choice. Okay, on with today's show. Hey everybody and welcome to today's episode of the Agency Accelerator Podcast. I am really excited to have with me today you just baumarks from Recruiter Mill and today we're talking everything to do with recruiting stuff which is such a big frequent topic that I am having with my clients at the moment. So I'm really excited to have you just with me today. Now normally I would give a bit of background information, but I would rather you just did that himself because he can share with you some of the stories, both the good and the bad of what he did that led him to create Recruiter Meal. So welcome to the podcast and hand over to you.

Thank you so much Rob. It's absolute pleasure to be on. Yeah, so I wanted to tell a little bit more about myself and what led me to even and start working on recruitment. So I actually used to run my own business that was not an agency, that was an information product business. And of course I had to hire for that business. And yeah, the first person I hired was about six years ago and that was completely atrocious, I'll be honest with you. And yeah, we can even go into some of the detail of what happened. So it was a developer that I hired. I didn't know much about development at the time, but what happened, what I did realize is that everything he touched basically broke. So whenever there was something that was working after he worked on it, it didn't. And so after not very long time we realized, okay, our path should not go together any longer. But on his last day, what he managed to do was introduce a backdoor into our system. So for a few months we noticed that our sales are kind of dipping, but we couldn't put our finger on it. And finally we got some weird customer support tickets where people are saying, hey, I bought a course from you. Where's the content? What's going on? And so what happened was that the developer who managed to break everything else actually successfully worked on that backdoor of our development system and he was funneling some of the sales towards his, his own account. And of course finally we figured out with some help from some good friends. But yeah, that kind of was a huge wake up call to what can happen when hiring is done poorly, which it was at the time. And it led me to kind of start and explore how I could hire better. But since then it wasn't always that awful and I actually managed to hire quite well afterwards and sorry. So it wasn't always this awful and I managed to hire quite well afterwards and my business grew quite large to high seven figure mark in revenue. So I was quite happy about that. And when I sold my business, I was looking at the next thing I could be doing. And I just kept seeing a lot of my friends were asking for advice specifically in recruitment. And one of those friends, he kept coming back for advice and at one point I even did a hiring interview for him just to show how it's done properly. And after the interview he was like, oh, this is excellent, I wish you could just do it for me. And that's when the light bulb went off that I actually could be doing this for him and for other people. And funnily enough, now we're hiring the sixth person for that friend of mine. And that was only six months ago. So, yeah, that's kind of how I got started in recruitment.

Yeah. And it's funny, isn't it? We so often in life learn our lessons the hard way and they are the best lessons that we learn. And you know, one of the things I'm always trying to do on this podcast is be really honest and share the bad as well as the good. So that's that, that horror story of the developer that you're talking about. While I hope other people haven't had that issue of them finding a backdoor into your software, I'm sure a lot of people will recognize that, you know, hiring is such an inexact science that someone can show up really well at the interview, but then they fail to deliver spectacularly once they start. Start working. So let's, let's kick off with the big topic. First of all, one that I'm asked all the time, which is to talk about the pros and cons of hiring an in house person versus hiring a remote worker. Especially in this very changing world that we currently live in, where actually those lines are getting a bit blurred because in house workers for the last year have had to be remote workers. But what would you say the advantage is of me hiring someone that's going to be a full time employee in my office versus hiring someone that might be somewhere else across the world?

Absolutely. So how I look at this is I try to keep the end in mind and my personal end. And what I'm going for is that I'd like to have a business that's an asset, that's, that's generating income for me, but also that's, that's worth something. And if I treat it as something where I hire help here, here or there, and these people can be really good, but it all depends on me. At the, at the end of the day, to me, that's not a business. To me, a business is something that can run on its own if need be, I can step back for at least for a while and hopefully in the long term for a longer time. And because of this, for me, it was never really a question because I know I want a business for myself, a real business. I want to build a real team with people who can run it by themselves eventually.

Yeah, yeah, and I completely concur with that, I believe. Although I know this isn't a hard, fast rule, but if you try to build your agency solely using freelancers, then it's like building a house on quicksand. And another good point that you've made is that you're not really building much equity into your business if you're just hiring freelancers. And you know, I'm all about building the self running agency and you can't build a self running agency if you are completely intrinsically stuck in the agency as well during, when recording this as well in the UK Anyway, as we're starting to come out of the pandemic and it's been an interesting time for recruitment and I thought, and maybe this will still happen, but I thought that it would become easier for agencies to find good people. But in the UK for sure it's not true or it's still really difficult for people to recruit. So what's your take on that at the moment?

Yeah, in my experience it actually has been a good time for, for hiring and I think that the theory is kind of clear to anyone who's thought about it is that there are many people who lost their jobs, many talented people, so now they are open to the job market. And yeah, for this, for the same number of jobs there, there are a few more people applying for them. So you should be getting better candidates. And generally, to be honest, that's what I'm seeing. It's hard to comment between UK and the global market because my clients, they usually work for the English speaking market, but the candidates are coming from all over the globe. But yeah, I can think of a person that used to be in an airline and now of course that's no longer a viable option for him, but a super talented person and we were able to hire him for one of the clients. They also run an agency or a friend of mine runs a photography information business and so he hired a person that used to be in charge of photography for cruise ships. So he was running a team of 80 people I think somewhere on that scale. And his team is not that big, it's maybe around 20 people. So he got someone again, really, really experienced, really talented just because their industry no longer offers viable options for them. So for in my experience it has been, it has been good in recruitment.

Yeah, I think maybe in the UK it's because we have a pretty robust furlough scheme. So a lot of people are still being paid by the government to not work. And it will be interesting in September 2021 when that ends, whether we will then suddenly find it a lot easier. But I have certainly been having conversations with my clients who are finding it challenging to recruit. And I had, you know, I had a conversation this morning where a client's trying to find a design director and it's just really difficult at the moment. But as I say, I think here people are just staying put where they are and keeping their heads down while they're on furlough. But when that ends, we shall see what the fallout, what the fallout is. So just talk us through, like the recruitment process. Can you share some. If you were advising someone on hiring someone, can you share with them some of the do's and don'ts that they should be focusing on when they're recruiting?

Absolutely. And there's so many tactics that I want to share today and I think we'll get to the best ones. But I think it's worth starting with kind of the mindset and how you should look at hiring in the first place. So I've kind of gone through three stages of having a mindset about hiring. So the first one was kind of I didn't know what I was doing and you heard a horror story earlier and that's what it led to. And there were other mistakes that were maybe not as spectacular, but still quite bad. And that's kind of not knowing what to do. And usually you end up copying someone else. You post a generic job ad and yeah, on my first interviews, I had no idea what to say. The interviews didn't seem productive. I didn't feel like I was learning about the candidates. And that's kind of one approach. Of course you don't want to be in that approach. The other kind of way to, to approach hiring is what I call the headhunting model, where you're either approaching people on LinkedIn, but even more commonly you ask every single friend of yours, are they interested? You probably have a few people that you spotted over the years that you think, yes, I would like to work with them someday. Then you ask your employees to do the same thing. And I've messaged or kind of scrolled through my friends list on Facebook at least six times when I was in this stage, kind of hoping to find someone that I haven't thought of previously. And that's not a bad approach. Honestly. Many of my first best hires were people that someone else recommended or that I knew from contacts. But it is a limited approach because I'm at least not the kind of person that goes out and networks and meets a a lot of new people. And the people I meet usually own their own businesses and they're already looking for someone, so they're not really helpful in these terms. So the last approach and the one I've kind of evolved to is treating hiring as a marketing Funnel, basically. So, yeah, making sure that you know who you want to approach, making sure that you know where to approach them, how to approach them, how to filter them later on in the process. And that's brought me by far the best results because then it's kind of a. Yeah, it's almost like any other marketing funnel where you see the numbers and when something's not working, you can see exactly where it's not working and then you go in and can fix it. And that's been by far the biggest breakthrough for myself. And then everything else around it is tactics, kind of figuring out where to post, what kind of job ad to write and so forth. And yeah, I'm happy to share that. But this one mindset switch was the biggest one for me.

Yeah, I guess it's interesting as well because you also have to, like, a lot of my clients are agencies with sort of five to 20 staff and they might be trying to hire that next big person, but they need to, they need to have a positive mindset about their agency that this person will be on, should be honored to come and work at the agency and not, oh my God, I'd be so pleased if they chose to come and work with me because I think it makes recruitment much harder. So there's that mindset piece. I'm just interested in the whole marketing funnel analogy because that's really interesting. Can you just, I don't know if you can break that down a bit and look at some of the component parts of that funnel from a recruitment perspective.

Yeah, absolutely. And over the years, kind of. And it's not even necessarily working with my clients initially I started sharing with other businesses because it was kind of a pain point for us, kind of a pain point for them. And everyone's trying to figure it out and kind of learn about it. And we learned together. And what I see now, years later, for many of them who also implemented a similar approach successfully, is that they're always kind of the same steps. So the first step is knowing who you want to hire. And that's not as simple as it may sound. So what you do there is kind of list all the attributes and all the things that you're looking in a person. How I usually break it down is what I'm looking for in anyone that I'm working with. So general attributes that make a solid team player and someone I like working with. And then it's role specific attributes that I'm looking at. And some people call this the job scorecard. And I think that's a fine name. And that's pretty much the first step, realizing, okay, who am I really going for? And a great way how to realize what are those attributes that you should be working with? And how I first came up with them, was looking at every single person that I worked with in the past and kind of realized, okay, what's great about them, what's not so great? Or people that didn't work out, why didn't it work out? And by the end of this exercise, you come up with a few around 10 maybe attributes that you were looking in someone. And yeah, then you kind of know, okay, now I know them beforehand. And when someone applies, I can kind of run them against the checklist and see whether they'll be a good fit or there's already that I see. No, this is deal breaker for me. I just can't work with this person. And because you have this mindset that you mentioned previously, you don't have just anyone who can walk into them is hired by you. If you don't have that mindset, then you have the confidence to say no to someone who might even look good otherwise. And that's, that's the first step, definitely to the process.

Yeah, that's really interesting. And then what's next after that?

So, so next you have to kind of learn about the role and that's, that's kind of also works in the, in the first step. But yeah, you have to know who you're going for and then you have to really understand the person. So let's say you're hiring a link builder, which is a quite popular position to hire for. It could be anything else really that you're hiring. Could be a video editor, could be an online marketer. And one thing that I often like to Google is what's awful about being a link builder or what's awful about being a videographer or a customer support person. And I kind of read some forums, Reddit, Quora, whatever it is, and I understand what it is that they don't like about the job. And I compare it to my job and see, oh, can I offer something that people usually don't receive in these roles and kind of try to approach them from an angle? Yeah, I'm providing something special between these hundreds of job ads they could be choosing between. They should go with me because I have something no one else has. And that's the second step. Another thing to do here is to go in actual job boards. So first of all, you need to find them and see where you could find A person that you're looking for, see if there are more ads like, like the one for your position. Because if there aren't any, if no link builders are going there, no videographers are going there, no, if no one's advertising there, the videographers won't be going there. So then you know it's not worth posting there as well. But if there are the, if the job ads are there, then you can look what everyone else is saying and usually they're not that good. So once again you have the opportunity to learn from others mistakes and see what it is that they're not including. Kind of really try to put them in the shoes of a person that would want to work with you or that you would want to hire and kind of make them. Yeah, make them want to work with you pretty much.

That's, that's, that's, that's some really great tips there, especially doing that research. So now we're at the interview stage and we are sitting down with these people. What's your tips about separating the superstars from the kind of time wasters, useless people that are salesmen.

Yeah. So my number one tip is actually to get rid of people who would waste your time in the first place. So before I go to interviews, there are a couple more steps. Number one is the application. And so what I see people usually doing is send me your cover letter, send me your resume and we'll get back to you. And to me, that's kind of an awful approach to be honest, because whenever someone's writing a covered letter, there's no set standard, there's nothing, there are no guidelines. So whatever they write in there, it's kind of hard to judge. Of course, if it's completely awful, it's full of mistakes, or the sentences don't make sense, of course then you can disregard them. But if you want to hire someone good, which of course you should want to, then it's much harder to learn anything from a cover letter. So what I do in my applications forms is ask a few specific questions and I even give instructions to how they should fill out the form. I say show off, don't be shy to do it. We want to work with the best people. So show us why you're one of them. Give us thorough answers, give us complete answers, don't skip fields instructions like that one or like those. And then from the application you can see, often you can see in seconds, okay, this person will not fit because they skipped questions or they're not giving, they're Giving me one sentence answers and you'd be shocked how many people you can just discard by doing this. It's 80 to 90% of people don't make to the next step. And so that's one step. And this is kind of how you filter everyone who's definitely not up for the job. And of course you can also look at their experience and see, okay, this looks like a very solid person, but they just don't have the experience that you're looking for. So the other thing that, that you do once people have passed your application stage is you give them a test job. And that is how I like to look at things here, is that this is the best predictor of how well they do an actual job. So if you give them something that they'll actually have to do on the job and they can do it well, chances are when they come on the first day and they have to do the same thing, they'll, they'll keep excelling. Whereas if there's someone who can do the job or they can do kind of poorly, yeah, probably not much is going to change by the time they join your team. So I've also had this experience where I learned, okay, I can't be having these awful people that, that are making backdoors into my development system. So let's really check for a fit and that they are a good person and check references and so forth and that needs to be done. But you also need to check for their technical ability so that they're able to really do the job. And still to this day, most people, if they're able to do the job really well, fit. Yeah, usually we can figure out. So yeah, that would be my number, number one tip. Have them do something, show them their input because from the interviews people might appear really cool, really nice, nice people, but if they can't do the job, that doesn't help you. So you need someone who can get things done.

And how do you assess cultural fit as well as competency? So I think in a small agency, having someone that's going to be a team player and fit culturally is almost as important as their competency to actually do the link building or the graphic design or the web design or whatever it is you're hiring them for. So any thoughts on that cultural fit piece?

Yeah, so that's, that's the other important part. And there is a really helpful resource for that that I recommend to anyone who's taking hiring seriously. I mentioned the business owners that I've talked to in the past and the ones who follow this framework, they pretty much hiring is not a headache for them anymore. And the book and the best way to learn about this is called who the A Method for Hiring. The author's last name, I believe is smart. And that's one resource that I can recommend. They kind of go through the entire process, but especially this checking for fit stage of the interview process really, really thoroughly. And they pretty much have a foolproof process that you need to follow. And so I can talk a little bit more about the process just to give the listeners a better idea of what it is all about. So what you do is in the interview stage, you go through after you've screened them. So you get on a quick call and ask a few questions and see that, yeah, this, this seems like a reasonable person to talk to. And usually they are. If they can complete the test job, then you move on to a much longer interview. The kind of brand name for it's called Top Grading. And in that interview, what you do is go through every single job on their resume and you ask the same about 10 questions. So we asked, how did you get this job? What did you have to do? What were your responsibilities? What were your successes, mistakes? What did you enjoy most? What did you enjoy least? How, how was it working with your supervisor? And what would they, the supervisor tell about you? And why did you leave the shop? And I think those are pretty much all the questions that, that we always ask. And these interviews take about three hours. So in three hours it's impossible to fake. So the real you is going to show up. And I actually tell candidates that it's a good thing because we're trying to learn about each other, so we're not, not trying to hide anything. And before both of us invest hundreds of hours into training and onboarding and leaving our jobs, sometimes that it's a good idea to spend these few hours in advance and kind of really, really get to know each other. So, yeah, this, this process is so worth it because in these three hours you pretty much learn everything you can, at least in this amount of time, about the person. And by the end of that call, you have a great feeling of what they'll be like. And what is great is that no one's perfect. So you also learn about what are the potential weaknesses and you can already start thinking about them. Okay, can I work with this? How can I work with this? And usually they're awesome candidates. They have one or two flaws, and because you know them in advance, you're kind of already working around them. And that's not only great for filtering candidates, but also learning about them and kind of working with them effectively once you've hired them. So yeah, I can only recommend this process.

Yeah, I really, really love that. And it's interesting because I've done a few interviews with clients and when you ask them those negative questions, sometimes they get a bit flustered about it because of course they prepared in their head all the positive things to say. But now I'm asking the negative things and I always think if someone says, oh, I can't think of anything negative, then that's a big black mark against them because of course we can all think of something negative about our. Where our skills aren't as strong as other areas and we need to show up as human beings in the interviews. So if we're not willing to reveal that, then for me that would be a bit of a warning flag that perhaps they're not the right candidate.

Absolutely. And I have a little script for my introduction of every single interview that I do. And that's one of the things I say that no one's perfect, but we have enough experience to realize that we can take these things into context and kind of take the good with the bad. But we do expect honesty. And if there's no honesty, that's a much bigger red flag than anything bad that ever happened. So yeah, if someone's not willing open up about things, there's usually a reason to be honest and it's better to stay away from that.

So to the listeners, you just is really encouraging you to do the thing that I tell all my clients all the time. My favorite expression, which is slow down to speed up, take your time, go through these steps that we've just been talking about. Be really thorough. Don't feel that you can't take three hours to do an interview because you're only a three man agency. Of course you can because you know, you want to get that higher. Right. And you want to make sure that they will be able to do the job and they will also fit in. So let me ask you one other big question, a question that's always asked to me and I know that you're going to have a slightly biased answer to this, but that, but I'm still interested to hear your views. Should I'm looking to recruit, should I use an agency or should I do it myself?

Yeah, I'll definitely have a biased answer. I guess it depends on where everyone is at. But yeah, it's such an important part of the business that I've just seen so many changes by what happens before you're hiring and what happens after that. It's really, really important to get it right. And whether you an agency, whether you read books, whether you learn from someone else, just, yeah, it is something you have to get right. So whatever way you get it right, make sure you do it. And of course, as always, doing things on your own is the longest path. So if you have six years, like I had to kind of spend in getting hiring right, and for some reason it might be the right choice because they're billing for really the long term, then absolutely, go ahead and learn about things. If you're unsure and there's seven other fires that you need to put out, then I would encourage getting help.

Yes, you're giving me the polite answer, but I'll give the answer. This is what I would tell my clients, is hire an agency. Because we all want our clients to hire us because we're specialists and we should do the same thing when it comes to recruitment. And fundamentally, you either have time or money. And most agencies don't have tons of time. They're already stretched in 20 directions. They think it's going to be much cheaper to try and do some LinkedIn advertising or some advertising on Monster or wherever, and then they get inundated with a million CVs that they need to work through and most of them are rubbish. And suddenly then they're rushing through the interview and then they make a hire and then it's a mistake. And then suddenly it has cost them way more in time and probably money that it would have done if they'd have reached out to a good agency in the first place. So my advice to all of my clients is bite the bullets. Spend the money up front with an agency like yours so that they get the right person, because that is worth a heck of a lot of money. Hiring the wrong person isn't just costly in terms of, you know, the money that they've paid that person, it's costly in terms of the impact on the business, the other team members and the clients. So my advice is hire an agency. And on that note, how do we separate? Again, another unfair question to ask you, but how do we separate the good agency from the not so good agency?

That's a great question, and I wish I had a good answer here because I'm also working with agencies and for that exact reason, because I want certain things to happen in my business, but I just don't know how. And I would rather spend my Focus on the very, very most important things. One or two that I definitely need to get right before I start like trying to do every single little thing. But hiring an agency, I mean. Well.

Sorry, sorry. So let me just interject because I'm might have misinterpreted. I mean I'm. I've decided I want to use a recruitment company to hire someone like you. And I'm talking to three different recruiters. How do I decide which. Which is the good ones and which is the not so good ones.

Yeah, I see what you mean. So I'd kind of look at. Yeah. Anything else that's. That you'd be looking at when hiring the agency, what sort of risk are they taking on? When do they get paid and what are their incentive structure? And kind of go by those things and more specifically in recruitment. So one thing that to look out for is how much and when do you pay. So of course every agency will want a little fee up front because they're investing some work. But the bulk of their kind of return or their income should be based on success, I believe, because you only get the benefit when you get the employee. So they also should only get the benefit when they get an employee. And the other thing is how they approach hiring and what is their lead time. And that's one of our brand promises, is that we'll hire as strictly for you as we hire for ourselves. And many times it has happened where I talk a client out of hiring someone because I just see it, it won't be a fit. I've, I've made this mistake before for myself or I've seen other people making this mistake. You don't need to do it. And, and they're appreciative that, that I'm telling them these things. But yeah, it has to be kind of a thing that, that they're willing to do. And I don't know how to check for that beforehand, maybe from references or reviews. But that's a really important thing because it's the most natural thing in the world. If you're getting paid when, when you deliver someone, then you're, you're going to want to deliver as soon as possible. And sometimes you're not checking for the quality of what you're delivering. So that's one thing when I'm setting up my business that I'm looking out for. I can't forget this. And I'm telling every single employee of mine as well that this is not something we can afford to do because yeah, we want to work with our clients for the long term. And we don't want to just make one hire, we want to make several hires of choice. Yeah, yeah. So that's, that's a very huge thing to look out for.

Just, just a last quick question because this came up this morning with a client. So I said I'd ask you, I told them I was interviewing you today. What should be the guarantees that. Is there a typical example of a guarantee that a recruiter will make? Like we will return if the person leaves within three months. You get this much back if they leave in six months. Because this client was telling me that they had someone that cost them a lot of money to hire, but they left after eight months and they were frustrated with the recruitment company. And I was like, well, I'm not sure you can really blame the recruitment company after eight months that that person's left. Maybe you need to look at your own management processes internally. I don't know what your view is on that.

Yeah. So on that one, eight months is a long time to expect kind of some sort of reimbursement for, for a hired that state for that long. But one thing I would recommend for is, or looking out for is actually being involved in the hiring process. So you want, you want the help and you want someone to kind of show you how things are done and do bulk of the work. But once the decision is made, you at least want to participate and you want to review the candidates in detail. You want to at least watch those long interviews that, that your recruiter is hopefully doing. And if you, if you don't have a good feeling about the candidate or you think something is off, then you're probably right. And no one else knows your business better than you do. So for that person that's, that asks you this question, I would ask how, how involved were you actually in the decision making process? And if they weren't, unfortunately, that's on them.

Yeah, I don't know, but I think one thing I said to them, which you've just said, which is good to hear, is that you can go through all this process, but you also need to listen to your gut instinct. You can measure them against roles and responsibilities and job descriptions and you can have application forms and tests, but your gut instinct is also going to give you a lot of safety and security. And I think we're quite good at ignoring our guts sometimes.

Absolutely. And one thing that I've also painfully learned over the years is that there's never been. And that's not actually about hiring. It's about keeping people on the team. I never made a mistake firing someone on my team, and I've made many mistakes by not firing people. So whenever you're in that situation, you probably have to do it. You have to muster the courage to do it and to bring it back to recruitment. If there's a candidate that you really want to take on, but in your gut, you feel, no, it's not going to work, you shouldn't take that person because that never, never ever works out. If there's someone who you feel great about, it may work out, may not work out, then you shouldn't trust your gut in a positive sense. But if your gut is telling you no, then you definitely should listen.

Yeah, absolutely. I completely agree with that. I think that's true in business in all senses, isn't it? Okay, so I'm conscious of time. You just. But let me ask you the question that I ask all of my guests, which is, if you go back in time and give your younger self just starting out in business one piece of advice, what would that be?

Yeah, so I was thinking about that, and the answer I came up with is that I would want to trust my employees more. And that's something actually I'm still struggling with and kind of working my way through, because it always feels like I'm the person that knows how the business should be run. I started it. So, yeah, I can, of course, help them, only help them by being involved. But I'm just seeing when. When I take a step back and reflect that it's not always true. And I also am conscious of the fact that I need to let my employees grow, need to put them in a position where they can actually grow the business for me. Not necessarily. I'm always the person that's. That's doing the growing. So that's something I wish I've started on earlier. I've now started, and I'm still working through it. So I think many people have. Have a similar problem. But I think that is the good fight to fight. So that's what I'm trying to do.

Great piece of advice. And I'm always, always surprised that I've almost never had the same response to this question with the guests I've had on the podcast. And I must have had 40 guests now. That's why I love asking that question. Such a good piece of advice. Entrepreneurs are terrible at letting go and relinquishing control. Yeah. If you want to build an agency that's less dependent on you and you want the flexibility and freedom. You have to be willing to relinquish control because you can't have one without the other. They're like mutually exclusive. So I guess on that note, hiring the best people you possibly can afford so that you can delegate down and relinquish as much control to them as possible. Listen, you just. Thank you so much for today. I always know I've had a good guest on the podcast when we go over time and there's so many more questions to ask. But we'll get you back at some point in the future and we can dig into some of these things in a little bit more detail. I know the listeners are going to find this episode really useful, especially some of those kind of funnel steps that you outlined. And I will also put a link in the show notes to the book that you mentioned. But if people wanted to get hold of you and find out more about recruitermill, where are the best place for them to go?

Yeah, absolutely. So the best place is to go to recruitermill.com and so you can learn a little more about my kind of hiring philosophy and how I approach it and hopefully learn something from that. If you'd like to work together, the best thing to do is to book a call and my approach there is to have a 30 minute strategy call. So in those 30 minutes we kind of outline what are the things that need to be done. And if you have the resource, if you have the kind of willpower to go through that journey, I'm happy if you do. And if you'd like to work together afterwards, that's of course also an option. So yeah, going to our website recruitermill.com is the best thing to do.

Fantastic. Okay, so we'll put that into the show notes as well. And I just want to say a big thank you for your time on the podcast today.

Thank you so much, Rob.

I hope you'll agree that was a really action packed episode and I hope you had a pen and paper and took some notes. If not, then head over to dacostacoaching.co.uk, forward/recruitment and you can grab a summary of the key points that you just made today. And don't forget to check out the show notes for the book that he mentioned and obviously links to his business as well. Other than that, I will see you next week for the next episode. And oh by the way, make sure you've hit subscribe and please consider leaving a review on Apple podcast. Otherwise, have a great weekend and I will see you next week, Sarah.