Hire like Elon Musk, Steve Jobs, and Jeff Bezos

If you want to build the ultimate team, then you're going to have to take all these things to heart. If Elon's super involved with hiring, Jeff Bezos is super involved with hiring, Steve Jobs was super involved with hiring, what were they looking for at the end of the day? The genius way of thinking about hiring is— All right, so how do you build the ultimate marketing agency team? Well, that's a good question. The way I like to think about building teams is I think about the anecdote with Elon Musk, with SpaceX, the story is that he actually interviewed the first 3,000 people himself. And similar story with the DoorDash CEO, I believe he interviewed the first 1,000 people or the first 1,000 people went through him. And there's just a lot of stories like this where the founders are very involved. And another good example of this is when Steve Jobs, I think when he was out of Apple, so he's working at a company called NeXT, he started another company called NeXT, another computer company, and he went to go speak to a group of students at Stanford and they asked him what was the key to hiring success or company success. And one of the students said that, you know, who's going to handle recruiting because that shouldn't be on the CEO because the CEO's probably going to be busy, right? And Steve Jobs said, well, no, he actually disagrees with that. It's actually the most important job, maybe next to product, for the CEO to focus on recruiting, especially when you're smaller. I think the genius way of thinking about hiring is that when you're smaller, Let's say the first 10 people or so, every new person that you have for the first 10 people, that's 10% of your company. And if 3 of the people are bad, that's 30% of people that are B, C, D, or F players, right? You can't have that on your team. And so you got to think about hiring in terms of percentages in the very beginning, and you have to be very close to it. And there's a lot of people on your team that are going to push back because as your team starts to scale faster, they're going to want to hire more resources and they're going to usually, most often, they're going to want to hire people that are Whoever seems competent, whoever seems like they can do the job, and you know you'll tell them well no you know your your core values matter a lot and those things matter and they'll probably roll roll their eyes at you because from their perspective they just need to solve the problem right now because they're going to look bad if they don't solve that problem right now but they don't realize that that short-term decision is going to affect the company for long term and oftentimes they might not even even be around long enough to to realize that right because if they want to make short-term decisions. Well, usually they're going to make short-term decisions for themselves too. So I think those 2 things really stick out to me. The Elon Musk, him hiring the first 3,000 people or so, Steve Jobs on recruiting being the most important thing. And this even happens for Amazon too. Back in the day, Jeff Bezos used to talk to most of the people and Jeff Bezos was known for being very frugal, but he took hiring very seriously. And we'll talk about Amazon a couple of times here, but when I think about the philosophies of Amazon, so there's this book called Working Backwards that's a really amazing book. And the way the book is set up is it's written by a chief of staff that worked with Jeff Bezos for about 2 years or so. So he got to see everything that Jeff saw, every big project that they're working on, right? The other guy, he worked there for about 15 years or so, rose up the ranks, He helped start Amazon Kindle. He helped start the Amazon Fire. And so, you know, Amazon has this concept known as bar raisers, meaning that every single person that you're going to— that the company's going to recruit, they need to be a bar raiser, meaning that they're going to raise the bar for the average of whatever team that they're joining, right? So that's a question that they have to ask themselves. But first and foremost, I think what's important is that when you think about bar raising, let's say you're a founder that's listening to this right now. or a leader that's listening to this right now, you got to think about bar raising or being the bar raiser from a founder's perspective, right? And so, what I mean by that is when I'm talking to someone, for example, when I get involved in the hiring process, in my mind, I'm asking myself, okay, well, one, is this person smarter than me? 2, would I work for this person? And 3, do we have a place where we know this person can really excel? You want to admire the person, you want the person to be smart and you want the person be a bar raiser. And you want to know that there's a seat for this person because not just because you hire the right person doesn't necessarily mean that they're in the right seat, right? So that's something you have to think about too when it comes to hiring. Okay, do you have the right person? Are they in the right seat? And you might have to re-underwrite this every quarter or so, or maybe every year or so, right? Someone that's maybe very good at paid media, maybe they want to do sales in the future. And that's something that you have to wait just and You also have to weigh, hey, just because they want to do that doesn't mean that you should hire them for that, right? So that's what I would say. Amazon has a lot of these anecdotes and the bar raiser thing really sticks with me because they have another situation where they will have people on the team that they'll tap and say, hey, you're now a bar raiser. You're going to be involved with the interview process. Because those of you that are thinking about hiring other people, Well, okay, let's say you're an agency, for example. Let's use my agency, for example. So at Single Grain, we do performance marketing, we do SEO, we do paid media, we do conversion rate optimization, creative, and things like that, right? Let's say we want to hire people for the SEO team because we have so much SEO work that's coming in right now. In fact, we're overcapacity right now, right? People are stressed out. It's really difficult. And so if I'm the hiring manager on the SEO side, I'm very incentivized to find the next body that fits, and I'm going to try to hire that person ASAP. Because I want to alleviate my team. I want to alleviate myself. It's, I need that painkiller. I need that painkiller right now, right? It feels good, right? If we can fit that person in. And well, that goes at odds with having high standards. That goes at— that's at odds with having bar raisers. And so where a bar raiser fits in here is this person might come from a different department. Let's say paid media, for example. They don't necessarily have a vested interest in this role. And so they will just focus on, hey, is this person actually going to be good for the team? Is this person smarter than me? Is this person going to raise the average of not just that team, but the entire company, right? And if they don't feel it, then they're going to speak up about it. And it's going to be helpful because maybe in the beginning of the company, maybe when it's smaller, the founder is very much that person that's the bar raiser, that's very focused on making sure that everyone comes in, is a cultural fit, a values fit, and they can actually do the job. But that's what I would say. I mean, that's what's interesting about Amazon. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you wanna grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. I want to go back again to the bar-raiser founder piece. The buck stops with you at the end of the day as a founder, or even if you're a leader executive at the company, you want to make sure your standards are very high and you don't want to let someone in just because they seem like a good person. There's plenty of good people out there in the world, but Just because there's a good person out there doesn't mean that you necessarily should hire these people. You're not trying to make more friends at the end of the day. You're trying to do better for your customers at the end of the day so your company can do better. That's what really matters, right? It's not about, oh, being Mr. Nice Person and being a very friendly person because ultimately what ends up happening there is if you end up settling, then your team will pay the price for it at the end of the day. And whose fault is it? It's your fault at the end of the day. And by the way, If your team hires people that are poor fit, whose fault is that at the end of the day? Still your fault at the end of the day, right? I've done this so many times. You know, I felt bad. You know, I'll be at the very end of the hiring process. You know, everyone will like the person and I just felt like this person wasn't a fit. And that's another thing. You got to trust your gut feeling at the end of the day because if you don't trust your gut feeling, then that's going to lead to the bozo explosion in your company. And when you have the bozo explosion, that's going to be very hard to undo. And I'll share a story with you over here about the Bozo explosion. And so, back in the day when we had acquired a couple companies at the same time, that's 2 integrations we had to handle at the same time. And when you have to handle 2 integrations, it's one integration is already very difficult. And what I mean by integration is once you buy a company, you have to think about, okay, how are these people going to fit in? Culturally, how is the work going to fit? And do we need to change any processes? Do we need how how do we make these people feel safe? And so what happened was we had integrated two companies that were completely different from us, right? A lot of people weren't the right fit at the end of the day. And what I could have done differently there is we could have focused more on a bar raiser interview during the due diligence process. And so if you're going to think about buying a company, you have to talk to maybe the top. 10%, the top 15% of the people on the team and get their views on what their overview on the company is, what their outlook for the company is, and who they think the smartest person at the company is because you should for sure talk to that person and who maybe they're not excited to talk about in the future. And maybe what you might be gleaning from this talk is it's all about talent at the end of the day. I don't care if you're a products business or you're a services business, it's all about talent. And as you get bigger, you're inevitably going to have B and C players because you can only maintain an all-A-player team for so long, but you want to hold out and hold off for as long as you can. And that's going to help you level up. And what I've learned from a couple of other people, one guy, he sold his agency, I think for a couple hundred million dollars. And he told me one day, he's like, look, if you find a 10x hire, you do it no matter what. You do it if you can't afford it. I mean, go get a loan or something like that. If you find this person's a 10x hire, you do it. And every single time, I've had that gut feeling about that 10x hire and I've made that hire. It's always been a win for us. In fact, I'm trying to remember right now when it's been a loss. And by the way, on the flip side of that, anytime I've had a gut feeling about, hey, this person might not be the right fit and we made that hire anyway because I really like the, you know, someone on the team or really I like the idea of hiring that person, that's always never worked out, right? I remember we hired someone that was good on paper when it came to, let's say, helping us source people. And it wasn't until maybe a year later that I found out that all the people we had sourced and recruited were— not all of them, maybe 90% of them, maybe all of them were not the right fit at the end of the day. And that's another lesson. If you're a founder, you got to trust that gut feeling because that gut feeling comes from years and years of experience. And it also comes from you reading things and understand it comes from your reading experiences. It comes from your actual work experiences. It comes from your experiences of talking to other people. You've accumulated all this pattern recognition. It would be a shame for you not to use it. So you got to trust that gut. If the company's been around for a while, that's also, you've compounded for a lot longer with this company. So you understand what works and what doesn't. Now, that's not saying you should micromanage everything, but you got to trust, but you got to verify at the end of the day. And you don't want to give away trust freely. Trust is earned. And once trust is earned, you got to make sure that you continue to verify. Because what I found over time too is if you're trying to keep the talent bar very high, processes will start to decay, entropy will start to kick in, and you have to be the one that's constantly pushing the pace, right? So this stuff, it's exhausting, it never ends. But if you want to build the ultimate agency team, then you're going to have to take all these things to heart, right? So we talk about the Amazon bar raiser concept. We talk about founders like Steve Jobs and Elon being involved with hiring You know, to the very last detail, right? And, you know, always being on the hunt. So for me, like I might be reading what people are saying on LinkedIn. I might be reading what people are sharing on Twitter, for example. And sometimes I'll see someone constantly pop up over and over my feed and I'll reach out to those people oftentimes just to talk, see what they're up to. I remember just a couple weeks ago, I saw someone that did really good creative work. He was marketing himself very well. And he's only 22 years old, graduated from a great school, and he's doing 7 figures a year right now as a 22-year-old. And I think the sky's the limit for this guy. And I just wanted to talk with him. And we ended up meeting in New York and we ended up walking for about an hour or so. We went to go get tea and then we just walked around New York and that was great. And who knows, maybe our paths will cross in the future. But always being on the hunt, maybe we can partner up, maybe we can do something in the future, maybe we can partner up from agency side in the future too, right? Yeah. And so, I'm always on the hunt for talent and there's always angles to figure out how to work together. And sometimes it might take you 1 year, 2 years, 3 years, 4 years to hire someone really amazing. And that's okay because great talent, often they're not looking for a job. But if you keep the conversation going, that's going to help you. And a lot of people just aren't willing to invest that time and effort, right? I find that the benefit for me is when I go around the world speaking at conferences, I'll try my best to meet with people, whether it's talent or other agencies or even clients, prospects, things like that, or get a group of people together in the area and just hang out. The other thing I'll say too is there's a really good book when it comes to hiring that will change the game for you. And that book is called Who, and that's written by a guy named Jeff Smart. And he has this concept called role scorecards. And so most people typically like to create a job description first and then they might just go to the internet and cut and paste whatever job descriptions are out there, but that's not really thinking through what you actually need. And a role scorecard is great because it forces a hiring manager to think about, okay, what are the outcomes that I want to accomplish? So for example, if I want to hire a CFO that is really good at mergers and acquisitions, okay, they've done agency mergers and acquisitions deals. They've had a history of doing that. They've had a history of operating a company at X dollars amount of EBITDA, right? And so maybe I have 4 or 5 Outcomes that I'm looking for, and then I can grade them on each of those when I interview these people, right? And then I can have the responsibilities and competencies and things like that. And then the job description will be created based off of that role scorecard. And so a lot of people aren't willing to do it. And oftentimes a hiring manager will just go to HR and say, hey, can you create a job description? And HR doesn't even know what you're looking for. So they'll just throw something that's kind of half-baked. Well, then you end up hiring someone that's half-baked because The process was half-baked from the very beginning. And I'm a firm believer that how you do anything is how you do everything. And if we don't take things seriously from the very beginning of it and we don't take our processes seriously, then what are we doing at the end of the day? And so that's what it is. And you can't let your hiring process decay because it is the most important thing. And it took me a very long time to realize that. And as tedious as it is, I know I'm doing the right thing for the company long-term. And I just wish more people could think like that. And so here's the other thing. I'll say that one of the mistakes I made when it came to hiring people is I— my thought is this, right? And I'll say that now, this thought is incorrect and maybe this works for somebody else, but not for me. And my thinking, my philosophy has always been, look, if someone like me who didn't necessarily do the best in school growing up, if I can figure a lot of this stuff out, then I believe that anybody that puts in their effort, they're going to be able to figure things out. Now, when you apply that, it's like, okay, well, if I can figure it out, I'm very self-motivated. I love learning things. But I also have to understand that not necessarily everyone's like that. And so, I had this philosophy of hiring these GMs and these CEOs that one, they seemed like they had potential. They seemed like they had a lot of potential to learn. And I drank the Kool-Aid from Twitter back in the day saying, hire these GMs, these CEOs, and get out of their way. And I saw a lot of people hiring people that were employees at other companies that didn't necessarily have CEO experience. And it seemed like they were doing well. And I think I really fell in love with the idea. And so, you know, we hired these people and, you know, I got out of their way very quickly. Maybe I onboarded them for maybe 2 to 4 weeks or so, but I quickly got out of their way. In fact, in some cases, I disappeared from the company for 5 to 6 months or so. And honestly, I got a little bored and I was kind of like, you know, how are things going? And then it wasn't until 6 months later where 2 people from my team, they staged an intervention. And said, hey, we need to get together. And long story short, it was that person wasn't working out and I could sense it the whole time. I could sense that it wasn't working out. The gut feeling was there, right? The gut feeling I was talking about earlier. And so, what I've learned over the years is that if you want to hire people, especially for agencies, right? Because agencies, it's a very people-oriented business. You want to look for someone that A, has tenure. And what I mean by that is they're not job hopping around every 1 year, every 2 years or so, they're hopping around. And here's another thing I'll call out. If someone's hopping around every 2 years, they're probably not that good at their job. Even 1 year for sure, they're not that good at their job, right? If every 1 year they're changing, well, it takes, okay, let's say it takes 6 months to onboard, another 6 months to kind of figure things out. Maybe like it takes another year to really see if that person's got it. You know, there's a handful of warnings, things like that. If it's a big company, it's hard to kind of, you know, spot those people sometimes. So it might take a year or 2 years. And so if someone's job hopping all the time, 2 years, That's not a very good sign. So you want someone that's maybe stayed at a company a couple years, you know, 3, 4, 5, 6 years plus. And they— you want to see a history of promotions, ideally 2 promotions, right? Or maybe even 3 promotions plus, because then it shows that company actually valued them and they not only kept them, but they had a history of promotions. Because I can tell you that we've hired people from big companies that have worked there for 10, 15 years or so, but maybe they only got promoted once. Yeah. And then we found out very quickly, okay, maybe there's a reason as to why they're only promoted once. And you got to make sure you ask tough questions during the interview process too when you're doing the reference checks, right? And there's this thing called extreme reference checking and I highly recommend you all Google that. And one of the questions I like to ask is, hey, why do you think this person wasn't promoted further? And they'll give you an answer and hopefully you believe it, hopefully you don't. But I would also say this, Amazon, they actually don't do reference checks but I do believe that they do backdoor reference checks, right? Because usually the front door reference checks, They're always going to be beaming and things are going to sound amazing, right? They're going to sound— things are going to sound good about that person. But when you do the backdoor reference checks, you can quickly sense if there's excitement or aura around this person, and then you can start to ask about the potential red flags. And so that's what I would say. If you do want to do backdoor reference checks, the one thing I would say is you got to make sure that you ask the candidate and say, hey, I'm planning to do some backdoor reference checks. Who should I not talk to, right? Because then you don't risk putting their job at jeopardy in case you don't hire them, right? You don't want to tip anybody off. So that's what I would say. You want to hire people with tenure. You want to hire people that have had a history, maybe 2+ promotions. And ideally it's a company that's 2 to 3 times your size because let's say you're an agency that's doing, I don't know, for easy numbers, you're doing $1 million a year. And then you try to hire this person from a company that's doing a billion a year. Well, a billion is $1,000 million. And so that company size is too— the disparity is too big. Maybe you're looking for an agency that's— you're hiring someone from agencies that maybe doing $2, $3, $4, $5 million a year, $6 million a year, right? Because it's the smaller numbers. But as you get bigger over time, if you're doing $10 million or so, maybe you're looking to hire from someone that's An agency that's doing $20 or $30 million or so. And that's what I would say. You want to hire people that have a history of success. And earlier we talked about, okay, look, if Elon's super involved with hiring, Jeff Bezos is super involved with hiring, Steve Jobs was super involved with hiring, what were they looking for at the end of the day? They are looking for people that they trust will do a great job. Yeah. And that means they're looking for A players, meaning that you can't afford to have B and C players. Because what did we talk about earlier? If you have 10 people on the team, 20% are B players, C players, that means that 20 to 30% of your team are the people that aren't that good. And you might think Bs are good, but Bs are actually the worst because they're— and Frank Slootman, the CEO of Snowflake, likes to say this— they're the ultimate passenger, right? They're along for the ride. They do just enough to get done. And there's a tweet that I saw recently saying that B players are maybe doing 80 to 85% of their maximum capacity, whereas A players is probably doing 115 to 130%. And then C players are doing less than 50%. And that's the disparity that you get. And that's why there is very much a concept of people that bring 10x the value, 100x of the value. And that's why I said earlier, if you can find a 10x hire, you hire that person no matter what. My gut feeling going back to that That word again. My gut feeling has always been right when it comes to identifying superstars. And my gut feeling has always been right when I had a little bit of a, eh, I'm not so sure about this person. That has been right 100% of the time. You got to trust that feeling, right? And when you hire people, again, don't give trust blindly. You want to trust. Once that trust is established, you want to make sure you continually verify over time. All right. Quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain. And Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. And so, I want to talk about a couple of new strategies. And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. We're building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from, from an SEO standpoint. And we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website. and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Earlier I talked about the book Who, and Who is a great book written by Jeff Smart. I would also say Scaling People by Claire Hughes Johnson. She was the Chief Operating Officer of Stripe. She also ran, I think she ran Gmail. At Google, and then she ran YouTube for a little bit as well. These are all great books if you want to learn how to scale and build the ultimate agency team. And I think this entire little masterclass over here should help you get there. And I'd encourage you, you watch this multiple times because over time, the things that I say, it's going to hit you differently as you're at different stages. Also hiring coaches for your people too. And so for example, for my chief of staff, I hired a chief of staff from a much larger company. And he's had a lot of experience doing it for a very long time. He's in his mid-30s. In fact, I think he's probably around the same age as I am. And so he brings a lot of experience. And so you can pay these people per hour. Let's say your HR person needs some work, needs some help in terms of leveling up. You can have a coach come in and help that person. And the benefit of this too is you can go to the coach and say, hey, what are some areas this person needs to work on? And based on your assessment, where would you rate this person on a scale of 1 to 10? Right? And they'll give you an honest assessment because you're actually paying them for their time too. And so that's what I would also say. And I just want to end it on this piece over here. So talking about people with tenure, people that have been at companies larger than your size, ultimately what you're looking for is people that have been there, done that, because they know a lot of things that you don't. And you want to hire smart people to tell you what to do so you don't have to go around constantly telling people what to do, constantly having to micromanage every little detail and ultimately becoming exhausted. Because in the very beginning, as the founder, you are doing everything. You are managing all the details. You're getting the clients, you're marketing, you're serving the clients, you're hiring people, you're the janitor as well. It's a very stressful thing. But, and just because you did that in the beginning doesn't mean you should do that forever. And I would say for as long as you can, yes, manage the details, right? But eventually you're going to have to let go as the team grows. And so hiring people that have been there, done that, they might not do things at 100% of your energy, but if they can do things even at 80% of your energy, that's great. And they'll probably know a lot of things that you don't and they're going to be able to push things through. And related to that note, I would say that there's 2 different types of people at a company. I highly recommend that you Google this. So Google barrels and ammunition. Keith, K-E-I-T-H, so Keith Rabois, he was one of the high-ups at PayPal and Square. I think he was the chief operating officer at Square and very popular investor. He has this concept known as barrels and ammunition. And barrels and ammunition, when you think about your team, you can have all the ammunition in the world, but if you only have 5 barrels or 5 cannons, let's call it, you can only push 5 major initiatives through at any given time. And you know what the barrels look like at a company. They just make things happen. They're like magic. And you give them something, they just jump on it and it just, it gets done at the end of the day. And those people are very, very hard to find. Yeah. And so, the more barrels you can find, the better, which is these are the 10x hires. Because again, you can have all the ammunition in the world, but if you don't have enough barrels to push these initiatives through, These are the resources that you're constrained by. So do what you can to afford these 10x hires. He's been there, done that, A players, and you're going to be in a good spot. And that being said, hope you enjoyed this. Let me know in the comment what you plan to do to scale your agency or what other challenges you're facing, because that always helps in terms of ideas. And we'll catch you later.