How To Grow From One Laptop To A Team Of 15 People In Just 2 Years w/ Jeremy Sherk & Kevin Pasco

You're listening to Freedom Fast Lane, presented by capitalism dot com. This is the show about building businesses and investing the profits so that you can live life on your terms.

How's everybody doing? Good. Awesome. Getting ready to go here. Quick question for you guys.

Show of hands, if any of you have at least one employee in your business.

How about five? Keep your hands up.

10, 15, 20. Okay, caps out around 15. Where we're at, that's good. Good mix of people, though. I do promise you this, wherever you're at in your business, there's going to be value for you in this presentation. Whether you're at zero, you haven't pulled the trigger yet. You're at one or two or upwards of ten plus. So does that sound good? You guys excited? All right, let's get started.

So picture this. It is December 2012, five years ago.

And I'm living in Thailand.

And I'd been there about a year. I had worked my ass off to get to this level of escaping, living in paradise, living the four hour work week, setting my own schedule with my solo sort of business off of a laptop. And that was my dream for many years. And like I said, I worked my ass off to get to this stage. But a year in, after the high wore off of the new experience.

The dream quickly turned into a nightmare.

This feeling of emptiness, this feeling of loneliness, depression, lack of fulfillment. And I asked myself, how could this be? Like, I worked so hard for this. The dream was to just sail off into the sunset and that's it, that's my life. But obviously that's naive looking back, but that was where I was at.

And.

And that was a hard lesson I learned. And out of that lesson and the questions I asked myself about how this could have happened, I came up with two primary things. And number one was the business I was running, I wasn't particularly passionate about. It was focused more on extraction as opposed to contribution, how much I could get out of it. I didn't care what I was offering if it was helping people.

And also I was doing, doing it alone for the most part. I had some contractors here and there helping out, but for the most part, it was a solo venture. And I realized those were two of the big reasons this happened. And when I started thinking about what a new business would be for me and what I'd be wanting to get into.

These were kind of the two prerequisites as to what I was gonna change and the difference I was gonna make for my next venture, so to speak. So out of that Pain. And out of that situation, it led to a Skype call with this man right here, Mr. Kevin Pascoe. And that was about four years ago. Crazy to think about four years ago. And as they say, the rest is history. Kevin and I are here now. We have a company of 15 people, a great culture. It's like a family. Everyone's coming into work excited, engaged, motivated, inspired, every day, amazing culture. And we're going to share with you how we did that over the last two years. But first realize that for the first two years of this company, Kevin and I were still doing the solopreneur thing off of our standing pillow desks.

And we had no plans to build an office and build a team. We were still in the solopreneur freedom lifestyle mindset. And two years in, Kevin and I actually met, not for the very first time, but in the time we were running the business. We met for the first time here in Austin at the first backroom event we attended. So Kevin and I ran this company for the first two years, not even seeing each other, just Skype calls, Slack calls. I was in Thailand, Kevin was in his hometown of Calgary for most of it. But we came here into Austin three and a half years ago, 2015, a while ago, and we realized we faced a dilemma. We're in the back room with people, 15, 20 people, companies doing a million dollars a month and we're looking at ourselves saying we got to think bigger. You know, we can continue coasting, doing the laptop thing and just kind of go on cruise control, or we could go all in, get an office, build a team. And that's what we the decision we made two years ago. And this picture was just taken recently, Christmas postcard of our team. And we've hired people from Pfizer, IBM, Apple, team of A players, owners. We're doing amazing things and we're really building that machine, looking forward to reaching our goal of 100 million by 2023. And we're really excited. So we're also excited about sharing with you how we went from a laptop lifestyle to a team of 15 people in just two years. So there's a lot of information in this presentation. It's very hard to condense two years of lessons into a 50 minute presentation. So there's a lot of info. We're going to move very fast, have your phones out to take screenshots of the slide if necessary and we'll be around to answer your questions after.

So step one, know thyself.

This is paramount. You have to know who you Are as an individual, why you've started the business you've started. Why does your business exist? What do you value? What do you believe in? What do you stand for? If you are not clear on this, you will be unable to attract people who can really buy into your culture and your why. Because if you want to build a great culture, it's not just people looking for a paycheck. It's not just people looking for a job. You've got to get clear on this. So here's some questions to ask yourself. Who am I? What do I believe in?

What drives me?

Why does my business exist.

And what do I value? And this one is, this last one is key because you have to define your value as a company. What you're trying to create, what to you're trying with your culture and with your company. Because values are the foundation of your entire culture. You will hire based on your values. You will fire based on your values. You will reward and acknowledge people based on living the values. You will reprimand based on whether the people are living the values or not. So what is culture? This is the question I want to pose to you guys. Just call it out. We often hear this great company culture, poor company culture. What is culture? What does it mean to you guys?

Anyone? Just shout it out.

Common purpose. Good. Common attitude.

Who you are like as a company, as a group of people.

How you behave. Those are all great answers. The dictionary defines it as shared attitude, beliefs and values.

Now, this is a mouthful here, but it's very important. I wanted to put this up. This is Brian Chesky, co founder and CEO of Airbnb. He says it better than I can. Culture is simply a shared way of doing something with passion. How do we build culture? By upholding our core values in everything we do. Culture is a thousand things a thousand times. It's living the core values. When you hire, when you write an email, when you're working on a project, when you're walking in the hall. We have the power by living the values to build the culture. We also have the power by breaking the values to fuck up the culture. Each one of us has this opportunity, this burden. The stronger the culture, the less corporate process a company needs. This is crucial. When the culture is strong, you can trust everyone to do the right thing. People can be independent and autonomous. Remember that word, autonomous. They can be entrepreneurial. And if we have a company that is entrepreneurial in spirit, we will be able to take our next man or the woman woman to the moon Leap.

And Peter Drucker the famous management Gore says culture eats strategy for breakfast. And what he means by that is, I mean, of course strategy is important, but a shitty culture with a great strategy, that strategy will not be well executed. It'll be sloppy. Things will break down, things will fall through the cracks. But a great culture and a great strategy.

You'Re going to new heights, you're going to amazing places. So with that said, I'm going to pass it over to Mr. Pascoe here for step two. Awesome.

Thank you. How are you guys feeling? Are you good? Yeah.

Good.

Lunch okay.

Good.

My lunch was good, too. Thank you for asking.

Okay, so I want to get into some of the nitty gritty and actually show you how we. We are not geniuses. Although I'd like to think that we're kind of smart. But we just went down. We decided we wanted to go down the path of hiring, and we said, okay, what's next? So then we did research, and then we stumbled down a path, and, oh, my God, two years later, here we are. So I want to take a step back and think about, okay, if I was in your shoes, what would I do next? How would I actually hire? How would I actually approach that and think about it? So I want to talk about taking the plunge. And from the very beginning, one of the greatest things that we did that we never screwed up on. There's a lot of things that we have, and myself included, have screwed up on, learned the lesson, and then found our way to success. Luckily, this is one of the things that we were able to do and get right. First was to look for owners, not employees. So technically, we have employees, but the way we think of them, the way we look at them, the way we talk to them, the way they talk to us, they're owners. So we really look for people that will come into a role no matter what it is, whether it's admin, going through spreadsheets and pulling sales numbers all the way through to making marketing and operations decisions that can be worth thousands, if not millions of dollars down the road is how do we get people really engaged and to care enough so that they actually go the extra mile, so that they actually care, so that they don't just come in, do the 9 to 5, and leave when it's 5 o'?

Clock?

And we think that comes down to looking for owners instead of employees. And the interesting thing is, have you ever seen someone walk in with a neon sign above their head that says owner? No. Well, yeah, because they don't exist. So, I mean, it's not obvious who the owners are. And we think we've done a good job weeding them out. And I want to show you how we do that. So the first thing, when you want to hire someone, you got to sell the damn job. I swear this is like the most obvious thing to do, but if you go onto any site like LinkedIn. So by the way, LinkedIn has been the greatest source for us so far, finding amazing quality people. LinkedIn is almost always the cheapest option. It's only like $299 for a post. And it's extremely quality people because everybody has a standardized resume. Your LinkedIn page is your resume. You're able to find quality people that way without digging through all these weird cover letters and resumes, which is the standard way of doing it on LinkedIn. Go. No matter what city you're in, look at the job postings and you'll find stuff like this. So 99% of job posts you have experience in recommending, developing and executing strategic communications plan. What does that even mean? This could apply to anything. Demonstrated management and leading cross functional teams. I mean it's just the most corporate jargon that doesn't mean anything. And it always says intermediate skills and Ms. Word Office Excel power.

I don't even know what that means and it makes me want to do this. So I'm gonna walk you through our job post. This is how we're able to beat out companies like Lululemon, Amazon, Vega and many others for how we actually get qualified applicants. We're averaging right around 200 applicants per job post that we put up without any paid advertising to it. So we tend to think that we do a good job and it really breaks down into a couple different ways. So the first thing is the reframe. So if we look at this type of stuff and it goes into the boring stuff, here's what we require from you directly, straight on. So what we do is we do a pattern interrupt and we reframe it. So we have a great quote that basically says if you don't love your work, you're in the wrong place. So a that gets quality people thinking about, oh well, I want to love my work. I want to love going to my job instead of hating it and coming home and doing God knows what at 5pm and so it's a reframe. That's the first thing that they see on the job post. The second is the hook. And I'm not gonna go through the full thing, but just this is an actual screenshot of what it looks like and it tends to be a bit longer but I couldn't fit it on the page. So the first thing that it goes into after the reframe is we say, do you love to get shit done? A company said shit, oh my God. It reframes them again. Set and achieve goals, work under pressure, be detailed and organized. So it gets people thinking, oh well that's me. Okay, that speaks to me and I want to be like that. So it gets them excited about the job. Then we go into emotion. So keep in mind I haven't even talked about the job yet. This is for, I think one of our marketing coordinator positions. Haven't even mentioned what the job is yet. Go into emotion. So do you have passion? One of the things that we always will hire for, which is one of our core values and values that we have in the company is passion. So we want people to be passionate about what they do. Do you have humor? You know, a lot of companies things are very serious. We want people to have humor and then hunger. We want people to be determined and willing to do whatever it takes. Now. Okay, finally we're about halfway down the job post. Now we've got your role on the team. So we're going to talk about what it's like. This is a full time position in our downtown Vancouver office. You'll be reporting to me uber precise focus on execution. Okay, so now it's sounding more like a regular job post. Expectations. We're very clear about what we are looking for. So there's no point in hiring someone if you don't know how you're going to monitor them and measure results by them. So the one thing that you should do before you hire anybody, whether it's remote or in person, is you need to make sure that when you put them in that role, you and they come to you three months or six months later and they say, gee, so and so am I doing a good job? Am I hitting my numbers? Am I, do I have the green light to get a promotion? And you need to be able to answer that. So that's why we have the expectations so clearly in the job post under our must haves. And then we go into the perks. So this is probably the longest one. I'll pull out a couple. So we do full benefits including vision, dental, medical, massage, naturopath. We give them limited vacation. So that means we don't track vacation. We track people by the results. If they get poor results, we're going to speak to them. If they get great results. And they happen to take a month off to Africa, they can do that. Flexible working hours. We have standing guests. We give everybody a MacBook Pro when they sign up. We do daily meditation and reading time in the morning. So every day at I think 9, 10, we do a 10 minute meditation optional, but it's there. We do lots of free lunches, champagne budgets that we have for parties and stuff. Healthy snacks in office, unlimited growth. And we do 50 bucks a month towards your gym, yoga or health club membership. So we're a healthy company. We like to believe that our employees are healthy too. And that's completely on the honor system. But it works really well for getting people, whether it's a gym membership, all the way down to a new bike or anything like that. So finally at the end, we found it's worked incredibly well to ask three magic questions. And they don't necessarily have to be the same questions that we ask, but they do. A couple things you want to ask, you basically want to ask questions that will get someone to sell themselves on the job. So we think we've done a pretty good job at selling people on the job. Down at the bottom we say, okay, when you apply, send us your resume as well as your thoughts and answers on question one, two and three. And it could be, what's the thing that you love? Why do you want this job? What makes you a good fit for us? And you'll notice that either people will not see it and skip it. That's an indicator. They will either give one word answers or one sentence answers. That's an indicator of what they could be like. Or you might get a two or three page essay on those person's answers. Again, depends on what you're looking for. If you, if you want an incredible amount of detail, you want creative, you're gonna be able to judge it that way. But we found it works really well to answer three, ask three magic questions. Okay, so this is gonna be fast. I wanna keep things rolling. So I'm gonna show you our actual hiring funnel. This is what we spent the last year developing. We could do the whole presentation, if not double time on this. So I'm just gonna run through it really quick. Job post goes up on LinkedIn and indeed we get people, people going through. Our HR manager actually goes through and picks out the good ones based on what we may think, what we think they might be for culture, their resume, their skill suit. There's a lot of factors that go into it. First thing that Happens is a 20 minute Skype where all we're looking for is culture. We just want to see what the person is like. Are they quick, are they slow, are they nice? Did they introduce themselves? Well, if they make it past that step, we'll go into a one hour Skype to get a better feel for the person, to understand what they're like. And if they're bad, you can exit it really quickly. So that's a major key, is that you don't need to waste a lot of time in person being nice, having a lot of people come in and steal your energy. You can do it through Skype. You can cut it off a lot quicker. Even if you're hiring for someone in your city, it does not have to be in person. Then what we do is we bring the person in for a meet the team. If they make it this far, they can meet the team and we look for cultural fit first. We generally haven't focused on their skill set yet. They're going to meet the team and the team will determine if they move on. Because we really value culture. We think that someone who can be a team player and mesh with our team will end up doing a good job. So then we move on to an in person with hr. HR will bring them in and really start grilling them specifically on what the job is going to be done. Then they get moved on to us. So if it's an operations role, they're going to meet with Jeremy. If it's a marketing role, they'll meet with me. Sometimes they meet with the both of us and we will actually personally interview them. Then finally we move to an offer and oftentimes this includes negotiation on salary, on whatever expectations, depends on their situation, whether they're working now or not. Then finally we do legally hire them. We do the contract and we do up the employee agreement and all that good stuff. And then we move into onboarding, which can often, oftentimes be right away. If not, we've had some hires that have had to wait four weeks to get out of their current position and then move in to us.

Hey guys, this is Ryan. We're going to take a quick break and we'll return to the show in a second.

Hey, fastlaners. Ryan here and I wanted to take a second and brag on one of our backroom members. Our backroom is our mastermind, really. We're focused on getting to $10 million in top line revenue and I wanted to brag on athletic greens. They're in the back room and they have just absolutely killed it. Not Only with expanding their sales, but really by making incredible frickin products. So the products were made out of need by the founders and as a result they've been featured on Tim Ferriss the they were featured in the four Hour Body and you've probably seen them all over the web. The reason why I'm telling you about them today is because I want to support them by encouraging you to go over to athleticgreens.com Amazon obviously you know that I am really big on maximizing your Amazon presence and I also just really believe in the product. So for example, I like to wake up in the morning, put my greens in a water bottle, add in some creatine, some sometimes I add in a fat burner. If I'm on a cut, shake it up and that's sometimes my morning pick me up if you've ever heard me talk about my tribe. 5. I have five habits that I practice on a daily basis. My B point every day is getting to the gym and having my greens. And when I don't have time for a big salad or making a smoothie, I supplement with athletic greens. So I'd highly encourage you to support them. Head over to athleticgreens.com Amazon and give their 30 day packs a try. All right, let's head into the episode.

Thank you, sir. And I just want to emphasize, as Kevin alluded to, it's so important, I think it was mentioned in the panel up here to hire based on values. First, if you're get someone super talented that's applying to your company and you're tempted to go for them but they don't match your values, that is a disaster waiting to happen and that is how you will damage your culture. Overall, skills are important. Of course they're important. But you have to look for the values that is paramount. And that is why our job post goes so in depth at the beginning to attract that person with similar values before we even get into the skills stuff. So step three, stop playing.

I think it's safe to say most of us right now or at one point in our business started off as a solopreneur. How many of us started off as a solopreneur in this room? Okay, a good amount and that's fine. There's a lot of pride in that. The tenacity that's required, the resourcefulness, you know, the discipline, the hard work. The problem is we get to a point where all the jobs we're doing, customer service, marketing, social media.

Product sourcing, research, customer service, whatever we're doing all of that, and eventually we start taking sales, getting business, and those different positions start to become too much for one person to handle. And what are we looking at here? What is this.

Hockey rink? Excellent. We're from Canada, so I'm gonna give you the hockey analogy. We're crazy about hockey in Canada. But suppose you're one of these sides and you're playing all the positions.

All of a sudden, those positions become a bit too much for you to handle. I see one of two things happening. Either you stay stuck and are unable to pull the trigger on hiring someone, and your business starts to break, breakdown and the growth bottlenecks, and it can't go much further because it's all depending on you. Or number two.

I should say there's three things. Number two, a lot of that fear comes from what do I hire for. It's a combination of many things. This isn't like one specific role I can hire for. I had a question about that recently. And you need to find people for those initial hires. You need to find a jack of all trades, someone who can wear many hats, someone who's got a multiple skill set, who's a hustler, a grinder. They aren't afraid to get their hands dirty. That is a great first hire for you. So I just want to get that out of the way, because a lot of the fear I hear from people is I don't know who to hire. What does that position look like? You want a grinder. You want someone who can move into different positions and is open to that.

But what also happens then when we start hiring people? What I've found is.

We'Re afraid to truly let go of that position. We still want to micromanage.

We still have to make decisions. We still have to control things. And talented people, Owners will not put up with that for long. They want to take charge. They want to own their position. And it's your job to. Once they're trained, once you feel comfortable with their ability to perform, you have to get out of their way. Like Jeff Hoffman said this morning, you hire great people who fill in the skills that you're not good at, and you get out of their way. Because how good can a hockey team be or any sport be if there's one person out there on the ice getting in the way of everyone else who are trying to perform? That hockey team would not perform well at all.

So instead of being the superhero that we're all taught to be as a solopreneur, out there on the ice trying to make all the big plays. You have to stop playing and start recognizing yourself as the coach. You are no longer a player on the ice. You are a coach, you are a mentor, you are a leader. And that is really your new lifelong study and how you need to look at yourself if you're going to embark upon this path of hiring people. And if you do not consider yourself a great leader and it's not something you want to embark upon, you need to partner up and find someone who is, because that's the only way a great company and a great culture can thrive. You need that leadership. You need those EQ skills. I was talking to someone just a bit earlier. The one partner is not good with that. He gives it all to that person to handle the people because he has the people skills. Great quote by Simon Sinek. Leaders are not responsible for the numbers. Leaders are responsible for the people.

Responsible for the numbers. So that's exactly what I'm talking about. Leadership is your new position in the company. You have to study and learn and become a better leader if you're really gonna scale your company.

So this is an internal switch. Like I said, I found it was difficult for me in the beginning, like, completely honest, letting go of things. I had trouble with that. But once you start doing it, once you start flexing that muscle, it gets easier. The ability to delegate, the ability to trust. Obviously, you want to hire good people that are trustworthy. If you're hiring someone who's not a good person, yeah, the fear is there that things won't go the way you want, but that goes back to the quality of the hires you're making. You're not a superhero. Get that out of your head. You have one, two good skills, and you need to double down on those, whatever those are, and let the others do what they do best.

Give a fuck rule. I just have to mention this real quick. Our branding manager who works for us was at this design conference, and there was two founders on stage talking about the dynamic between them. And, you know, how do they make decisions when there's disagreement, which will happen as your team grows. And they call it the give a fuck rule. If they're having kind of a difficult time making a decision, they'll just say, how many fucks do you give about this out of ten? One out of ten? You might say five. The other guy might say, well, I give two fucks. So you take this, whatever. It's just a good, quick scale to get out of your own head. Because our egos often get in the way, even Kevin and I, you know, it's not always been smooth sailing, but we were able to work through things because we let each other perform in our areas of expertise and we get out of each other's way. It goes all the way back to the founder level. It's not just the employee to the founder level. And limit your decisions. This is a key point.

The mark of a great leader.

Is how few decisions you have to make. The more decisions you have to make, the more things that funnel back through you. The more of a bottleneck you're going to become, the more burnt out you're going to get and the more decision fatigue you're going to experience. The mark of a great leader is how few the amount of decisions they have to make. I can't emphasize this enough. Give your people ownership.

Let them decide. If they stumble, they fall, you're there to help them up. You want to have proper self fail safes in place so nothing crazy happens but let your people go out on the field and perform and be there to guide, mentor, coach and lead them as needed. Step four it's all about eq.

Gary Vee said those words from this exact stage. Actually maybe not this exact stage, but two years ago at the first Freedom Fast Lane live event. You want to go from 1 million to 100 million? It's about people. There's no algorithm, there's no platform, there's no fucking math arbitrage. To build something from 1 million to a hundred million you will have to tap into your EQ skills, not your IQ skills. I don't know if that's me or what popping, but.

What is EQ gonna put it to you guys, what is eq?

Shout it out.

Emotional quotient.

Ability to relate to people. Excellent.

I like to define.

High EQ as the ability to relate to people. As this gentleman just said, the ability to read people in situations. How is your emotional radar with people.

Really Think about that.

Everyone's different. Every individual on your team as you start hiring is a different individual who's wired a different way. What is your ability to communicate on an individual level and adapt your leadership style to each individual? That is eq. That's the core essence of it and it's the ability to adapt your response to each situation. You need to be like a chameleon as a leader. Not in a manipulative or non genuine way, in an authentic way, but you need to acknowledge the types of people you're dealing with, how they're wired, how to communicate with them, to really meet them on their level and get people to thrive. And I like to say, like different situations, different people call for different actions. Sometimes people need encouragement, sometimes they need the day off, sometimes they need appreciation, sometimes they need a kick in, in the ass. And that's really honing your EQ skills. And again, this is a lifelong study. It's the management of emotions or like I say, energy in others. We often hear as a leader, it's your job to bring out the best in others.

But what does that really mean to bring out the best in others? What brings out the best in others? Does threatening someone bring out the best in others?

Does constricting their work schedule and telling them they have to be at the office from fucking nine to five with a half hour lunch break bring out the best in others? Does that really cause them to thrive? Going back to what Kevin said in the job post, we offer unlimited vacation time. A lot of these startups, Silicon Valley companies, this is a common thing. Now can that be abused? Of course it can. And that's something you can monitor. But if you're hiring owners, if you're hiring driven people that want to grow and succeed, they're not going to abuse that. And actually Kevin and I were speaking with a gentleman who won best workplace, I think it was Canada, maybe it was Vancouver. He won the best workplace in our city and he runs a very similar culture. And he says a beautiful thing happens once you start to grow and you get a certain number of people on board with you. Is that this sort of freedom and sort of relaxation around schedule, work hours, you know, not being so tight with people, having such a firm grip on people, they actually begin to self police it because no one wants to fuck it up. No one wants to be the guy that abuses it and ruins it for everyone else. It's a beautiful thing that's happened. And we're 15 people strong now. Sometimes people come in for the day, we have work from home days, we don't really care. It's not how many hours your butt is in the chair, it's the results you're getting. And in this day and age with online businesses, like if you're working in retail and you need a customer service rep dealing with customers, fine, someone needs to follow a schedule there. But with online businesses, like I was in Panama all of November, but I'm not just doing that as a leader, we're passing that along to our people. They can have that freedom as well. I want you to think this way. This is what talented people expect and demand These days. And that's really how you're going to attract a level talent and keep a level talent is by kind of shifting your mindset in this sense.

Don't have time for that, unfortunately.

Great book. Here's one of a few more book recommendations. We're going to make Daniel Pink drive the Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us. And he found three things motivate us in the workplace. Money, perks, and vacation.

Sorry, I'm joking. That's not really it. That's what many people think make people thrive. That's really what we think motivate people. It's got to be a high salary. It's got to be lots of perks. Those are like an add on. Yeah, you got to pay good people well. But at the end of the day, on really the primal level, what people crave is autonomy, self direction, self control. That goes back to what I'm talking about with the schedule, the workplace. You can dictate your own schedule if you're getting the results.

Mastery. People crave mastery. The ability to grow and become better.

That need for growth, give that to your people. Give them a succession plan. Show them how they can grow within your company. Like Ezra was saying here in the panel earlier, you know, showing someone, in the next 18 months, I want you to be the best at Facebook ads. Here's how we're gonna get you there. That gives someone like a destination, a goal, and that's again, how you get that loyalty and really get that high level of performance. And of course, purpose. Purpose is one of the core truths that motivate us. What's the greater why of your company? Why do you exist beyond just making money? Those questions I had in step one, getting clear on that stuff, you need to be able to communicate that to your people. And I'm going to discuss that in a moment a little bit later. And we're running quite short on time, so I'm going to let you step in, my man.

Thank you, sir. Okay.

So before we go to that, to recap, so go to LinkedIn, put up a post. Don't make a bad post. Make a good post.

Little bit easier said than done, but you can be really creative to find great people. Obviously, a lot of you want to find good people, right? Put up your hand if you want to find good people. Owners. Okay, good. So the way you'll be able to do that is to do the pattern interrupt. Get their attention first. Show them what you are. Communicate that through the job post. Then do something similar to us with A hiring funnel. Weed people out. You're going to hopefully get a lot of people coming through. You want a very small amount of people coming out the end. So, big filtration process, then. What we want to do is, see, Jeremy and I aren't HR guys. In fact, we just learned it in the last two years. So with us putting a big focus on ownership, it was only right to hire an HR manager. And I actually think this is one of the best things that we did. I think it's one of the best hires that you'll make as well. See, we hired an HR manager right when we were around 11, 12 people, which is insane for most small companies. They don't even think about hiring an HR manager until about 50 people. I've heard some companies going up to 100 people without having an HR manager, but I think it's one of the best hires you can make when you do it early because they take your hiring funnel and own it. So all of the hard work and the effort and the energy that you put into running a hiring funnel, it is now their job, it's now their ownership to run that for you. And if you hire an owner, like I said, they'll do it all for you. And this is probably one of the most satisfying things that I've gone through is if you do it right and if they run the hiring funnel for you, they will come to you at the end and say, these are the top three choices. This is their resume. These are the notes from the interview. This is a video that they put together or whatever it's going to be. This is their cover letter. Here's what I think of them, and here's what I recommend you do next. All I have to do is go into three interviews, Pick the best one, and we've also got a plan B and C so that if the first one falls through, we can go back and get someone that's our second choice.

So now you have a quality person finding you more quality people. I think one of the things that unites all of us in this room is you don't want to do the same thing over and over and over again unless you love it. And if you love being an HR manager, then maybe you're in the wrong room, because I'm pretty sure we're all entrepreneurs and, and business owners. I actually really enjoy hr, but it's not my passion, it's not my love. I have respect for it, but I want to hand that off to someone else who does love it and who is Passionate about it and can really own it. Which I believe if you get a quality person, finding more quality people, that's going to benefit you more than you running it yourself. So HR is culture management. A lot of people think that HR is just running, you know, the person that you go to for complaints, the person that runs the payroll, the person that runs all the legal stuff. And that's definitely true. They do need to do that. But it really gives life to your organization. When you bring in someone who's good at HR and you show them your culture, there's a fit there as well as they have expertise. On top of that, they're going to bring life to the organization. And one thing that you should always do, like I mentioned in the beginning, when we have the job post with the clear expectations, is you want to have KPIs. Like, how do you measure HR? So what number are you going to put on them? Is it. We have something called a vibe meter. So every Friday, HR puts out a survey and we get back a real number that we can put our finger on and say, okay, our vibes are at this level for our culture. And you want to give them a budget as well. They'll elevate your team on your behalf and they'll do so. Our HR manager does a lot of really cool things that they've actually came up with the ideas to do. And we just say, oh, that's amazing. You go do it. So they do team outings. They take our team out for yoga and for other events, hiking. We went trampolining. We're gonna go go karting soon. They also do succession planning. This is something that I think is really important when you're playing in this level and you are actually a boss with real people on salary and an HR person to manage them. If you're doing it right, your people will want to succeed. You will have people coming to you six months after you hire them saying, how can I get promoted? How can I become a manager? How can I lead a team? And initially you're gonna go, oh, shit. Like now I've gotta be responsible not only for these people's jobs and livelihood, but also for their careers. HR is gonna be able to help you do that by doing succession planning. They'll be able to do raises.

Mediation as well. So whenever there are conflicts, HR is able to see step in and a lot more, which I think is a big deal. This guy, we all know him, don't have time for a story there, Although he has a beautiful face. Step six so systemize everything. This one is really quick, so who knows what SOPs are? Yeah, okay, well, you're cheating. I wrote it. I'm just kidding. So, standard operating procedures, everything. Almost, I would say 99% of the stuff in your company, no matter if it's creating a new shipment, creating a new product, marketing a product, anything, customer service, it doesn't matter. There can be a standard operating procedure for it. You can write down, step one, do this, step two, do this, look up this video, contact this person. Let me know if you need help. You are able to write it out. You can do checklists and screen cam videos to make it really easy. And if you're doing something new in your business, then right after you do it, when it's fresh in your mind, do a quick video on it or write out a checklist for it. Then what you do is you put into a training portal. We use Guru and Asana. I don't get paid to say that. I think it's getguru.com and then asana is task management. So in Guru, we house all of our training tutorials. So if you want to learn how to create coupon codes, send them out to the social media team and run a product launch, you'll be able to find that as an employee in our Guru training profile. Then you'll get the table Cass assigned you in Asana and you'll know who to follow up with if you have any questions. So those two tools have been really great for us. They're both really cheap. Anyone in this room, no matter what kind of business you have, you'll be able to use either of those, if not both, to house your SOPs, train your employees, and then do the follow up to actually make sure that they're done.

Thank you, sir.

So step seven, again, the book drive. Saying what really motivates people is purpose. And that really comes from the vision that you set as a founder. Again, why does your company exist? I'm hammering on that point, getting clear on that, what you believe in, what difference you're making in the world.

There's a great scene in the movie Saving Private Ryan where Tom Hanks is leading these men to find Private Ryan amidst World War II. And they're kind of in, they're in transit and they come across a Nazi machine gunner, like up on a hill. And the machine gunner doesn't like, they kind of see it in the bunker or whatever and the machine gunner doesn't spot them. So they kind of rush, they kind of get down low and they're like, okay, what are we going to do here, sir? What are we going to do here? Tom Hanks starts strategizing, saying, you go here, you go here. And one of the soldiers is like, sir, I don't think this is a good idea. This is, you know, this could get messy real quick. Why don't we just. Why don't we just pass through here? He hasn't seen us. We can get out of here alive. And Tom Hanks says.

Well, what's going to happen to the next group of soldiers that comes through here if we don't take this machine gun out?

And the soldier says, but, sergeant, sure, our mission is to save Private Ryan. Our mission is not to deal with this machine gunner. And Tom Hanks says, our mission is to win the war.

Our mission is to win the war. And you see the mind shift that that makes in the individual. The mission, yes, was to save Private Ryan, but the larger scale vision is to win the war. And that's setting the vision in your people. It creates a whole new perspective in their day to day.

It obliterates that, that's not my job sort of mindset. It gets people to step up, to see the larger picture, to go above and beyond. Another quick story with JFK. He was at the NASA Space center in the 1960s, and he sees a janitor mopping the floor. And he goes up to me, says, hello, sir. What are you doing here? He says, well, Mr. President, I'm helping put a man on the moon.

A janitor sweeping the floor has that vision in his mind of what he's contributing to. That's powerful, and that's what setting the vision is all about. Elon Musk, SpaceX. You walk in, there's a big picture of Mars, there's a big picture of Earth right next to it. People are not working there for a paycheck. They are wanting to put a man on Mars. And that's why people slave long hours there, break their backs, go the extra mile. It all comes down to the vision. So think about your vision as a company and what you represent and the difference you're trying to make in the world. And then repeat, repeat, repeat to your people.

Sa.