The Top 5 Mistakes Business Owners Make When Hiring

What's going on, guys? A little bit of a different video today on vacation, as you can probably see. And I felt like this was the perfect video to make around. And sorry, if you see me looking down here, I'm just looking at my notes, but I feel like this was the perfect video to make around hiring and growing your business and having people who can do things without you, as opposed to you having to be the bottleneck in your own business. And so, like, I decided a couple days ago to go with my wife to go to Puerto Rico, just take a little bit of time off. I'm still working a little bit, but my team is able to then work behind the scenes and get stuff done without me having to directly be involved, which it took me transparently, a very long time to get here. And I'm probably not, like, perfect at it yet. Like, I still have things I'm working on with, like, micromanaging and, like, fully delegating because I probably have some control issues. And, like, that's, you know, just being honest. Like, I still have a long ways to go there. But, like, I do think I've made some leaps and bounds to where I have a team of 15 to 16 people behind the scenes being able to work on things, being able to move things forward, being able to move revenue forward, being able to work on things without me having to be directly involved. And in today's video, I'm gonna walk you through a couple of steps that I have around, like, hiring mistakes, who you should hire first, how to hire and find the right people, and then building a team that runs sales semi without you, because you're still gonna have to be involved to a point. But we want to get to the point where we're not having to do everything, and we can start to hire things out to other people and have them take ownership of those things. So the first mistake I see after coaching and full transparency, I've coached over 580 video business owners and videographers up to this point to grow their business, start to hire people, start to buy their time back, and ultimately just love the business again, instead of just being in the rat race of doing everything themselves and being stuck in the business, if that makes sense. So the first thing I see is, like, people wait way too long to hire. And so they're trying to do everything themselves. They're trying to do all of the work themselves. They're trying to build everything themselves. And they're stubborn, and this was me. They're stubborn, and they wait too long to hire somebody because they think that they could save extra money by not doing that. They could, you know, have more money in their pockets. But ultimately plane going by. What this does ultimately is they start to build a business that they hate because they don't have enough time to do things like be with their family and spend time with their loved ones, right? So, like, you don't want to wait too long because if you get to a point where you really just hate doing things and doing everything in your business, like, you've waited too long, now you have to master the task first before you can hire somebody else. Like the other end of the spectrum, as I see people who are like, you know, I want to hire sales, I want to hire marketing. When like, they haven't done that successfully for their business yet either. And so, like, that's the other side of the spectrum that we don't want to lean on. Because if you don't understand how to do that stuff, it's going to be really difficult. Difficult to hire somebody to train somebody on that, because how are you going to teach them, right? And then just hiring for like, skills instead of skills and attitude and work ethic is one of the other big mistakes that I see because you have to hire for skills, but you also have to hire for a culture fit. And like, I've hired people where their skills were good, but they weren't aligned with the culture and everybody hated them on the team. Like, they just didn't like them. And so, like, that's a really big thing you want to watch out for as well, because you have to have skilled people, but they also have to fit the culture, if that makes sense. Now, number two is who you should actually be hiring first. And so you have to be hiring based on what's draining your energy first. And so what we recommend our clients do is they do a time audit, right? So they look at all the things they're doing in a day. We look at what is draining their time and draining their energy, and we offload those things first. So first kind of key, three things we look at is like editor, Virginia Admin and then like a sales position after that. And so the editors, we want to free ourselves from post production so we can still be on set shooting the stuff, but then we can have somebody come in afterwards and edit the project so we don't have to deal with that. Because you'd be surprised if you did a time audit if you're a video business owner, how much time you actually spend editing when that is the Least valuable thing you can do in the business. You have to be focusing on things that make more money then VA admin. We need to stop doing emails and invoicing and scheduling and things like that, which are like low level $10 tasks. And one of my mentors always said this, but it's like if we're doing $10 an hour tasks, you're never going to hit 10k to 100k months. Because million dollar businesses are not built on $10 tasks. We have to hire a VA, an admin, somebody to do emails, invoicing, scheduling. And I heard this objection from one of our clients the other day, but they were like, oh, I don't want to hire an admin because I don't want the quality to go down. Well, all you have to do is we have to interview more VAs to find the right person and we're gonna get into like doing a test project later in this YouTube video. But like, you have to go through enough interviews to find the right person so you don't have a shitty quality person. Right? But like worrying that the quality is gonna get worse is not a reason to not do it at all or not hire the position at all. Like, you have to hire the position. You just hire somebody who's good. And like that mindset of like, no one's gonna do it as good as me kept me stuck for a very long time because I was like, well, no one can do it as good as me. I'm just going to keep doing it. But that bottlenecks your business because the bottleneck is at the top, like it's from you. And you're the one bottlenecking it because you literally have no more time to work on anything else that's more valuable in the business. And then finally a sales closer. So caveat here, you have to know how to close deals yourself first before you hire anybody else. Like, some people are like, I just want to hire a salesperson in my business. And then they fail miserably because they have no way to learn. Like, you have to be the one to teach them how to actually like how to close the deals. And so you have to build up like a bank of 10 to 20 sales calls of you closing the deals yourself to where then you can hire somebody and then say, hey, here's 20 calls that I closed. Here's exactly how to do it. And then they can just reverse engineer how to actually close the deals. But if you hire somebody, you're like, hey, I need you to close deals. And they're like, okay, send me the call recordings that you've done and the, the sales calls that you've closed and you're like, oh, I don't have any. Then like, they're not going to be able to grow. They're not going to be able to scale the business. Like, they can't close deals because they have nothing to model, right? So that's super key as well. And then number three is like how to. How to find and hire the right people, right? And so like I said, hire for attitude and train for skill. Now, that doesn't mean don't find people who are not talented, but it means I want to find people who are talented and a culture fit. And oftentimes people just don't interview enough people. Like, for each role that you hire for, you should be hiring at least. You should be interviewing at least 20 people per role. And a lot of people interview like two people and then they pick the first one and then they wonder why it didn't work out and that person sucked, right? It's because you literally didn't talk to enough people. It's like going on dates. Like, you probably didn't find the first person you're gonna end up being with, like the first time you ever dated anybody, right? So you have to. It's the same thing with hiring. You have to go through multiple people and multiple rounds of interviews. So. So you can actually find that right person and find that right fit, and then the next thing is doing a test project. So like, let's say with the editor, like, this is something we do a lot. Let's say that you have an editor, you give them a test project on editing, and if you have to pay them for it, like pay them 50 to 100 bucks and get a bunch of interviews, Get a bunch of interviewees and then whittle that down to people that you like and then do a Test project with five to 10 of them. Pay them for the test project, and then get the test project backed back and then basically see who did it best and then hire the person who's best. Like you want to try before you buy. And same thing with like a VA or admin, do a test project with them, see how good they are, and then basically have them respond to a couple example emails and then see who you like, like whose response you like better. And then you hire that person, right? It's a very low risk way of getting people, you know, to see what they're like. And then you're not spending all this Time hiring them and having to fire them and then hire a new person. And it's like all this work, right? And then, like, I always, like, I'll kind of walk you through how I hire people as well. Like, number one, I look at referrals. So, like, if I have people who are already working for me, like, if I'm looking for a new salesperson, I'll say, like, hey, Danny, Hakeem, Evan, like, these are people who work for me. Like, I'd say, hey, who do you know who's a really good closer that could help us, right? And then I go through referrals first, and then if I tap that out, usually referrals are the best people. That's how I got. I got my first person from a Facebook group, and then everyone else I've gotten is from referrals after that. And so if you can use referrals, then after I tap out the referrals, I'll go Facebook groups, LinkedIn, organic posts there. Then I'll go job boards after that. Now, if you're hiring for a va, I would go to onlinejobs and then basically make a post there. Get 100 people who apply, pick your top 10 and then do a group interview, pick your top 3 to 4, do a test project with the top 3 to 4 and then make your last, you know, pick from those people. That's how I would do it if you're doing like an overseas va and then finally, like building a team that runs without you. So, like, you have to train them well and give them ownership over their role and you have to find a KPI that you track them on. So if it's like a closer, it's like, how many units are you bringing in every month if it's a va, like, how quick is our response time? And you have to give them metrics. Or how many referrals did we get if you're like working with a csm? Or how many upgrades did we get if we're working with like a CSM? And so you have to have those KPIs and then you have them self monitor based on those KPIs. And so essentially, like, if you have somebody who is, you know, a closer, then you'd be like, okay, how many are you shooting for this week? And then after you, after you figure out how many they're shooting for, then you hold them to that standard of, hey, you're looking for, you're going to bring in 20 units this week or this month. Okay, great. Where are we at with that. Right? And so that's finally like, that's where you go from there. But you want to hold them accountable to that, that actual expectation. So then they have a way of tracking their own metrics and you give them ownership over that. Instead of checking in with them, telling them what to do, having them do what's next. Like you give them ownership of that actual outcome. And just having clear expectations and better performance is really important as well. And then you want to train them to deliver and not micromanage them. We want to build leaders, not employees. That's super, super key. And one of the biggest things I learned from one of my mentors is transformational leadership versus transactional leadership. Transformational leadership is going to be when you're holding somebody accountable to a KPI and then you're holding them accountable, they have ownership over the out. Whereas transactional leadership is more so when you have people where you're telling them what to do, you check that they do it and then you're telling them what to do again. Right. And it's exhausting because when you have too many people, you literally can't tell them all what to do because all your day would be spent like micromanaging and saying, do this. Okay, did you do it? Okay, great, do this again. Did you do it? Okay, do this again. And like you're having to do that every single time, which is absolutely exhausting. You have to switch to having them having ownership over the project and ownership over the outcome. So then you don't have to be involved as much where I can go on vacation for a couple days, not have to worry about things, and everything is running smoothly with little to no involvement for me. And transparently, it did take me multiple years to get here and it was not an overnight thing. So I want to be super clear about that and just super up front. But once you get here, it is very, very nice to have that freedom to where you don't have to be micromanaging every single thing that your team's doing. So and little plug for master filmmaker. If you want to learn how we help our clients get more clients, grow their video business, hire people and not have to be micromanaging their every move. There should be a link below this video to schedule demo with our team, learn more about what we do. And happy to go into that and see if we can help. So if not, no worries. Keep enjoying the YouTube videos we'll see in the next one.