Founders Cannot Outsource Recruiting

I don't know how involved are you with recruiting, but Naval said founders cannot outsource recruiting, right? It is literally the most important thing. The early people are the DNA of the company.

Mm-hmm.

And the thing is, the important size at which a company starts changing is not some arbitrary number like 20, 30, 40. It's the point at which the founder is not directly recruiting and managing everyone. The moment there are middle layers of management, then you are somewhat disconnected from the company and your ability to directly drive a product team that can take the company from 0 to 1 goes away. So we really cannot outsource recruiting. People think you can, they hire recruiters. Maybe you can outsource a little bit of sourcing, but I would argue even that's difficult. So the non-obvious reason is that the best people truly only want to work with the best people. That's what it is. And you know what that feels like and you won't tolerate working with, like the moment someone starts to like not have the right data, you're just, you've moved on to someone else.

Ah, yes. Yeah.

So I'm curious, how do you do it? Because I know you're not that involved with recruiting.

Mike is, it's one of his best skill sets.

Okay. Which Mike?

Mike Camo.

Yeah.

He spends a lot of time recruiting.

Mike's really good with people.

He's the one who also got Mike Gullickson. Technically JJ got us Mike Gullickson, but—

So he closed.

Mike Camo closed him.

Yeah. So he's a good close. So that's a big reason why your executive staff is so strong.

We closed Mike Gullickson before I met him. I met him after he signed on.

After Mike. So yeah, it's good. So Mike is your co-founder that's on top of recruiting.

Yes. And for all leadership roles, he double checks.

And I wouldn't even say, I mean, like, you know, I don't think you care, but like, I would say when I've seen you recruit in the past yourself, it doesn't usually work. Like not, not usually, but a lot of times it doesn't work out.

Unless it's marketing roles.

Yeah.

Marketing roles, sales roles, I can recruit extremely well at. And I only stick to those. So for example, Nick Roushan, I recruited.

Yeah.

Okay. So when we were interviewing Nick, it was me, Mike Campbell, my co-founder, and Nate. Remember Nate who used to do sales?

Yeah.

And I went to dinner with Nick and I was like, this guy's going to be good. He's going to, he can close.

And he was a paid media person at the time?

Account manager.

Okay.

So he was managing accounts for iProspect.

Had never done sales before?

Had never done sales, but I'm like, this guy will close. He's actually our number one sales guy, right?

Globally. Yeah.

So then, you know, I remember at the time, because we just started up. If you look at our current employee count, Chad is our longest standing employee. Nick is number 2. He's been there almost from day one. I don't know who Chad is. Chad runs all of content.

Okay.

So at that time it was expensive for us. Nick was not a cheap hire. I don't know what his salary was, but it wasn't $100 grand or anything like that. Like it was multiple 6 figures.

And this is first year?

I think including commission, all that kind of stuff. It was going to be expensive hire, right? Because he was already somewhat seasoned. I don't know exactly what it was, but it wasn't like a cheap role where he was in a position making $100 grand a year or anything like that. And sales is commission-based, so you can make more if you do really well. He's one of our best sales reps or is our best sales rep from a revenue generation standpoint. Nick, at that time, Mike, I remember saying, ah, he's expensive. He's just like, this is going to be tough for the organization. Can we afford it?

Yeah.

And I said, we need to hire him. And I remember sitting down with Mike and Nate there and I'm like, he's in sales. If it doesn't work out within 3 to 6 months, you cut. We'll know within 3 months. But I'm like, I'm telling you this will work. And Mike's like, I believe you. He's like, I believe Nick will work too. We both felt that. I didn't have to convince him that he felt Nick was the right person and he didn't have to convince me. And we were just like, screw it. You just go for it. Like when you know someone's right and you can only get so many right people, you just go and get them.

Yep. And to some people it's like, oh, it's a gamble, we can't afford it. But like that gamble will pay off exponentially and sometimes you go for it.

Uh-huh.

Yeah. And I don't care about budget or whatever. It's like once you got that feeling, like we would call it the fuck yes feeling, pardon my language, but you know, you know, and that feeling is right a vast majority of the time.

And then when we started working with Nick, he doesn't have a patience for working with incompetent people.

Mm-hmm.

So then he started, helping us recruit better people in our organization. He helped us recruit JJ. Technically, he tried getting us a guy named John. I won't say his last name. And John wouldn't end up coming, but John referred JJ, who you met back in the day.

Yeah.

JJ was, I forgot what his role at iProspect was. And Nick was like, yeah, he's good. So we ended up getting JJ. JJ was great. JJ helped level up and bring in like one of our best operations people, Tracy. And then from there, like it just kept snowballing. He kept bringing in more and more people.

Yep. That's what happens. So going back to the point, good talent likes to work with good talent.

Yes.

One final thing before we move on from this one. So Naval, the tweet says, so one good test, and I didn't actually think about this before, but one good test is when you're recruiting a new person, you should be able to say to them, Walk into that room where the rest of the team is sitting. Take anyone you want, pick them at random, pull them aside for 30 minutes and interview them. And if you aren't personally impressed by them, don't join. When you do that test, you instinctively flinch at the idea of them interviewing randomly a certain person that's kind of in the back of your mind. Okay, maybe don't talk to that person, right? That's the person you need to let go because that's the person keeping you from having this high-functioning team that all wants to impress each other.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And when you just have those people, they figure out how to make a business grow.

Yeah. Yeah, you don't need to tell them what to do. You can be the bumpers. Like, have you done the bowling with the bumpers? You're basically the bumpers.

Yeah, yeah, they're like the blankets.

So they don't fall into the gutter. Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So. My favorite thing is someone asked me today, hey, one of our executives is going to someone else in the marketing space. They're not a competitor. You know about this, we talked about this a few weeks ago. And they're just like, okay, we got a few other people on our team that they're managing. Who wants to take this over and manage these people? And I was just like, no one. We should have people who we don't have to actually manage like that and really oversee on a day-to-day basis. They're like, yeah, but some of these people need to actually be overseen. And I was like, cool. What does this tell you? This tells you that you need to end up replacing them with better talent and be fair to them and give them severance and stuff. And at first I told them, have you actually talked to those people and tried to get them to improve? They're like, yeah, we've tried. We tried training them. We've documented things. They just can't. They're not a right fit. I'm like, yeah. So the key is not to manage them. The key is to just put in the right people.

The best people are self-managing. Yes, dude.

I had this conversation with Salo who runs our marketing because We have someone who is going on maternity leave and they're not, or she's on maternity leave and she's not going to come back after. And I'm like, all right, that's cool. That's fine. And we made some changes in our internal marketing team. And he's like, dude, what should we be doing? How many people do we need? And I want more people. I was like, Salo, the key with really good marketers is you don't need a lot of them. You just need, or the key to a good marketing team is you don't need a lot of marketers. You just need good marketers. And I'm like, you're telling me how you need like 10, 20 people. I'm like, we just need 4 or 5 really really amazing people and that's it. Small team, nothing more, and we can crank. And we've been slowly shifting to that for over a year and our team's been getting smaller and smaller and the results have actually been getting better and better. And then we mix in whenever we need hourly contractors and we mix in our own agency to help here and there.

They call it 2 pizza teams at Amazon, right? You want to have a team that can be fed by 2 pizzas, right? And so Anyway, today we kind of talk more about people, but one thing I want to talk about too. So we have, you know, I was talking to someone on the team today earlier, right? And he got an offer that was basically 2 times his salary. I'm like, why didn't you just take that? He's like, and so he's like, look, I'm getting hit up every single day by recruiters. It's a very hot market, especially in AI right now. And I'm like, so you're talking to these people. He's like, I'm like, why didn't you take one of these? He's like, Because the difference is you care about my family and you let me, you're not like micromanaging my hours or whatever. There's no like, I don't need to relocate or anything like that, right? Now I'm not saying this is going to work for everyone, but I didn't know that that level, like people care about different things. So it's really important when you're talking to A-players on your team, constantly going to them, hey Neil, what do I need to do? Like we really value you. What do we need to do to keep you working at Single Grain forever? Is it money? Is it more time? Like what is it? And you just constantly go to every 90 days, every 180 days or so, you're just going to them, right?

Yeah.

'Cause you never know who they're talking to. And they're actually, it was a competitor I was trying to poach them doing something similar to what we're doing on the software side. So smart on them, right? But you know, it's like, yeah, I will never sacrifice money for, like, I'm like, what if they offered you half a million dollars? He's like, wouldn't matter. It's family first. But like, you know, it's different for every person. If you're in B2B, here's the deal. LinkedIn account-based marketing sucks, but it doesn't have to. With Karat, it allows you to create personalized, ads towards your customers and also personalized landing pages that align with the ads. So you're going to have higher conversions and influence pipeline reporting to prove that your ABM works. So if you want to learn more, just go to karrot.ai and you can join the waitlist. Again, it's karrot.ai and we'll see you on the other side.

Speaking of marketing, you have this topic in here, 21 million YouTube video reveals a new trend. Yeah, I'm curious on that. And the link doesn't work for me, but maybe it'll work for you.

No, it's gone. But I kind of remember it. So this is from Patty Galloway. So Patty Galloway, I'm going to go to his Twitter. So he was showing a thumbnail of like a Red Bull video.

Okay.

And this Red Bull video, it's the thumbnail is just like, it shows a mountain and then there's like a helicopter.

Okay.

Neil's about to fall asleep. So, and then Basically, it's like, it's not some crazy packaging or crazy intro, whatever. It's just, it's a very interesting video, right? It's no like, we're going to try to like do all these jump cuts and things like that. It's— so he's just saying that the meta now, the way you play YouTube is it might be a longer form video, but like a lot of people enjoy the vlogs, for example, right? You don't need to do any crazy cuts. And so that's what he's saying is a little different with the game now. And I'm trying to find it right now, but— That's kind of the high level. And he's showing, look, his— I would recommend following him on Twitter too, because he's done all of these videos. I'm trying to find it still right now. But all these screenshots are like 12 million views on this video, 121 million views. So I think the key thing is if you want to win on YouTube, look, this is the Midwit meme, okay? So on the left side and the right side, it just says, make good videos my viewers want to watch.

Uh-huh.

In the middle, it's like the algorithm has shifted, got to 10% click-through rate, 10 minutes AVD, optimal posting time, hyperanalyze every second. So he has a lot of these examples where he's like, the video just takes off because it's a good idea, right? And the comment I've gotten from our YouTube strategy team, I was like, guys, why isn't the Marketing School YouTube channel growing more? Like, are we idiots? And so one guy, the one guy that gave us comments on it, I think his name's Josh. He was like, no, like, I watch all your stuff and I like all the stuff that you and Neil talk about. But the problem is podcasts are a commitment and there needs to be a big sense of novelty.

Yeah.

With it, right? And I'm like, well, we talk about the newest trends. We're talking about this type of stuff. What's happening right now, I started digging in more and more to my brand team. We have 2 full-time editors. One editor is doing one video per week, okay? Full-time. The other editor is—

Only one a week?

Yeah. The other one is doing one video per week. I just found this out this week. And I'm like, what? And then I went to our, we have like an agency guy. He's like manages a bunch of editors. I'm like, I'm like, what are you delivering?

Right?

And like, you'll see this, right? And he's like, well, I find out for what we're paying each month, we're getting like 20 net new pieces of content. And then we're also not posting on time for social. So I just opened up my Instagram grid, right? Because that's a good proxy. Because I know you have a good amount of clips from this 80 minutes. I know I have a good amount too. But in the last 10 videos that we posted, there are only 2.

2.

clips from this podcast. The other 8 are from PB Launch, which is doing a great job. They're very good with Shorts. And so my point of saying all this is that one, if we go to Patty Gattaway for long form, yes, have interesting videos, sure, right? Just make good videos.

But why even just pay those people? You should just not pay those people.

We'll come to that in a second. So, 'cause this is new information to me this week, right? But on the other side too, you need to have people who have been there, done that, and you need to have a brand manager that's on top of things.

Right?

Because I don't know who your brand manager is, but like I was talking to Raghav who works with Gary Vee now. He used to work at Single Grain. So he's like Gary Vee's right-hand man when it comes to creative and brand. He's like, oh yeah, you like, he's like, you're missing a brand strategist that's like on top of everything. We had that, but they weren't on top of everything, right? And so all that to say is like, there's only one person to blame, me. But if you want to get this right, it's like, I think we have the right long-form stuff. You have to make sure you have the right people that have taste and are cutting up the right moments too. Been there, done that, people. Going back to talent again.

But why do you even need 2 people? You could get it all done with one person and—

That's what I'm saying.

They can be done for way cheaper.

That's what I'm saying.

And you're paying 2 people in the United States?

No.

Okay.

Yeah, yeah.

So it could be one person for probably less than what you pay the current person and they'll do multiple clips a day.

Yep. But this is what happens. And so again, the only person to blame is me, right? But what I would say is if you have a brand manager, like who brought the brand manager? I did, right? But if the brand manager hasn't been there, done that, and they start to hire whoever and they don't have experience there, what ends up happening is you're under attack. Right? And that's why I think that's when things, the growth slows down. So this is a good microcosm of that.

Yesterday I was, I did lunch with someone who's a YouTuber, social media guy. His name's Marcel. So he's like in like the self-help space. Okay. Does well, has tons of Ferraris, nice home, yada, yada. You get the point. So he tells me about this YouTuber that he's working with. This couple, they're getting more views than MrBeast right now on a daily basis. They're literally the most popular YouTuber right now, not for total number of subscribers, but views. When you just look at views.

Yeah.

And I said, what kind of content is it? And he's like, brain rot. When he says brain rot, he means just like random content that just passes time, like entertainment. So I was like, okay, what are they going to do? He's like, dude, he's like, just imagine the brand deals. He's like, If I get him a brand deal, he's like, you know how much money they can make? And I was like, they're not going to make much money at all. He's like, why? I was like, brands don't want to be associated with brain rot that much because it doesn't convert. It doesn't actually drive real revenue. If you look at MrBeast, a lot of his revenue comes from his own products like Beastables and snackable burgers or whatever it is.

Lunchly.

Lunchly.

Beast Burger shut down.

Beast Burger shut down.

He just opened a theme park though.

Oh, that's cool. But I know he does a lot of the chocolates, whatever they're called.

He does toys now too. Yeah.

Okay. I've seen the toys as well, but that's how he monetizes really well.

Sure.

He has sponsors, but he's built such a big brand. It's very rare to get those sponsors and the sponsors don't make him that much money. It covers a lot of the costs for the videos. It's not a massive profit organization. It's a high revenue generation from Everything that he does. But when you look at his content, people are like, oh, I got brain rot content. I'm just going to go get sponsors. I'm like, no, you're better off creating content around a specific vertical, having a fraction of the views, having less than a million followers, and you probably can make more income. It's very hard to replicate the MrBeast model or the Kim Kardashian model and make a killing. If you look at all of them, None of them make enough money from brand deals. They made the majority of their wealth from their own products. And if you're known for content for brain rot, it's hard to create your own product that's applicable to everyone.

Yep. So if we go back to this piece over here, okay, so he actually, here's the thumbnail. This is a 16 million view video, okay? So a private tour of an Indian billionaire secret wildlife rescue center, okay? So like, I know some people want the payoff, so I'm going to give you a payoff at least for one of these. So here's why this video did well. 3 key components. 1, a big swing idea built on existing format. 2, access packaging. People need to know about this, right? And also like private or whatever. Okay. 3, video design for retention and satisfaction. Okay, that's fine. But going back to your point, what ends up driving more revenue? You look at this podcast, for example, right? Earlier this week, I was— we were supposed to connect on— there's a publicly traded company that wants to do a creator deal with us, right? You and I keep getting these influencer deals on the side, even though that's not our main business.

Yeah.

So we know our audience is more valuable. So all that to say is that I know for on the podcast side, on the audio side, we do well, but there's no reason the YouTube side shouldn't be doing well. So I'm actually doing a, those of you that are listening to or watching this right now, if you want to help the Marketing School Podcast, if you can find a way to clip this long form, find the right moments and prove that you've been there, done that, don't just say you want to work with us, we will consider that, right? Because we put effort, one, we get to eat lunch after usually, but we put a lot of effort into this. Noah's like live streaming this right now and all that. Like we've been doing this for like 8, 9 years or so.

Yeah.

And the fact that we have sponsors on the other side for audio only, I know this can go far and there's no reason why it shouldn't be able to.

No, I agree with that. It's just finding the right person who can package it all up and make it all make sense. And if you look at what Eric and I do is we try not to optimize views. Are we saying we're as good as MrBeast in getting views? No, we're not. Are we saying that we can get a million views? We've created content that goes viral and gets millions and millions of views. It doesn't monetize well for what we do and it doesn't make great money. So we choose to not go that direction.

You know what I think we do wrong with YouTube though? This goes for both of us, is I think the types of content we make, the bottom of the funnel is the right, not the bottom of the funnel necessarily, but it's the right content. But I forgot where I read recently, but I've felt like this for years. It's like you do need to have like a set of like wide TAM content so the algorithm kind of respects you. And then you have, you know, some of this other like Maybe bottom of the funnel type content?

I'm seeing something. So, okay. So when you think about bottom of funnel and top of funnel content, I probably got less views on social media this year than I did last year. So remember I've told you RFP numbers for my business in the United States. So in 2023, I'm going back 2 years at this point, we're at 16. 2025, we were at 25. Which is 56.25% growth. 2020, no, sorry, 2024 was 25. So 2023 over 2024, that's a 56.25% growth. 2025, now the month isn't over, the year's not over. We're at 39, right? Remember last year was 25. This is in the United States. That's generating a 56% growth exactly.

Mm-hmm.

At the beginning of the month, I told my team if they just hit 39, I would be happy. I'll be okay with not having the 0.25%.

So you're over the moon now?

No, they already hit 39. And when they hit 39, there's call it 20-ish days left in the month because those numbers are a few days old. This is December 12th when we're recording this. I told them, guys, guys, we only need 41. And it'll be a good year. And then no one responded to my text messages. So then I waited a day and then I sent again. I'm like, guys, let's get 41. What do we need to do? Again, no one responded to me.

At least you know how people respond to how you work now.

Uh-huh. And they know it well because when we were starting in November, we're just like, all right, it's been a tough year because of tariffs. If we just get a 40% growth, you know, 45% growth, somewhere around there, 50, that's good enough, guys. That's close enough to last year, law of large numbers, slower growth. And they're like, yeah, we think we can do it. And then as they started creeping up, you know, they said, Neil, you're just going to ask more. We shouldn't tell you the numbers because no matter what we hit, even if it's above what you told us a month ago, you're just going to want to keep having more and more.

You know, I talked to someone on my team recently. I said like, look, there's, no matter what you do, like whether it's you're running the company or people working for a company, people will try to game metrics or all these things or game how to work with you, right?

Yeah.

And that person was like, Eric, I would never try to game anything with you. And I'm like, what are you talking about? Like this whole thing is a game, right? If I, if you're trying to meet this profitability metric, you're going to, you might look to cut costs here and there. Or if like Neil, for example, is pushing you all the time, then, you know, maybe not to give him the metrics as quickly. Maybe you delay the metrics a little bit. So he's not going to always be, you know, Pushing you for the next one, the next one, right? Everything is a game, and I think people don't want to accept that.

No.

Yeah.

And that's just how entrepreneurs are built, where it's like we enjoy the game.

That's where we're going to end because I really need to pee. So goodbye, guys.