How to Build a Company People Want to Work For - 27 Tips on Hiring and Culture

All right, so in this clip I've got something special for you. We've actually put together a collection of videos around hiring culture that we've done over the, over the last bit of time. But before we go into it, don't forget to follow, subscribe, whatever platform you are on if you enjoy clips on marketing, entrepreneurship, and growth. So with culture, with hiring, look, it is the most important thing you can do to grow your business. If you're looking to do lifestyle business, solopreneur, that's totally fine. I have total respect for that. But for those of you that are looking to scale, to get to the next level, it's It's really important that you get these things down, 'cause if you can't get these things down, you aren't gonna be able to build your team, you aren't gonna be able to also retain your team as well. So that's why all this stuff is really important, that's why we combined these clips together to help make it into a mega clip for you to check out to help you grow your business. When you think about hiring salespeople, they're very different people. What I like to do, I got this from when I used to read, I think, The Ultimate Sales Machine by the late Chet Holmes. Read that book. Second thing I recommend reading is The Sales Acceleration Formula, which is by Mark Roberge from HubSpot, helped them go from $0 to $100 million. You gotta ask them to sell you when you're interviewing them. with them, right? So when you're talking with them, ask them to sell you. The number one thing I'm looking for when I'm talking to salespeople is how coachable they are. 'Cause they're coming into your system, they need to know how your system works, but they need to be able to listen. They need to be coachable. If you ask them to sell, you coach them, and they listen, great, onto the next step. If they cannot sell, or if they can't change based on kind of the feedback that you've given, probably not the right fit.

When I was at Facebook, it was interesting. Like, Mark spent like half a million on the office. And I was like, why would you spend so much on the office? I was like, dog, I just need like IKEA chairs and a desk. He's like, people spend a third of their life here. You want to create an environment that people actually want to come to. Like, I think parts of it, some people come, they're like, oh, we have to actually do work. Yeah, but there's a balance. Like, yeah, have the best of everything. It's like, if they're gonna have to be here all day, create a good environment.

But it's also a good recruiting tool too.

Yeah, when you come and there's like, like, if you come in here, there's a massage room. Yeah, so we have a masseuse that comes every week. Pretty cool. And now like, yeah, we need it. You can watch if you want. No, it's because we ran out of space. We're like, we need to use this sometimes.

You have to look for the most impressive work that they've done. So I always like to ask, what's the most impressive thing you've done in terms of SEO and why do you think it's impressive? So from there they can elaborate. You can ask them what projects they were assigned to, what they're specifically asked to do, what was their contribution, what were they measured on. You can start to get really deep with that kind of question. In fact, this is a question that Elon Musk likes to ask when he interviews people and he's very, he's known to be very tough on people, which is why he's built such great companies.

Ultimate culture is just simply who you hire. Right? And so for us, when we're going through the hiring process, we are looking for people that are like us. We want people that are super humble, that work hard, that are super smart, that simply have a results-oriented attitude, that are very team-oriented. They don't have, that's not my job, in their vocabulary, that don't believe in a 9-to-5 work set. Like, they don't mind coming in at 10, 11, but they also don't mind working 10, 11 at night, right?

Mm-hmm.

And so the very first thing from a culture perspective is hiring the right people. If you try to, you know, shoehorn a square peg into a circle hole, and they're just not going to be a good fit for the team. And so before we hire anybody, we make sure we go to lunch with them. We make sure to bring them in for a day. Some of them are working 2, 3 weeks with us before we finally pull the trigger.

You remember '92 with Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird? That was a dream team. And so what I think about in recruiting now these days is like, I want to delegate. And Hiten Shah actually mentioned it to me, and I thought it was a good point where it's like, if you're doing the work, your business is not gonna grow.

Right?

And I was like, nah, that sounds like someone who's lazy. But it's actually not lazy. It's someone who's like, alright, well, the business can either grow in 2 ways. People or technology. And if you can't do it with technology, you have to go with people. And so, what I'm looking for is like, I, like today, nowadays, I can either do it myself or put a little bit of time up front to recruit and then go through the delegation.

Right.

So I think more and more, if you actually wanna grow your business, you have to get comfortable. How do you delegate and then make sure that they're going in the direction that you want them to go?

What do you think about having your team members, employees, whatever, working on side hustles? And my take on it is I think you should let everyone work on side hustles if they're interested, because it shows they're interested in other things they can develop. And if they develop those skills, then it carries over into your business. Now we have a contingency in our kind of employer agreement, employer-employee agreement, basically saying, hey, you know, you have to work on these things during off hours. You can't be competing with the business, things like that. So we're well covered there. So make sure You have a lawyer that can help you draft something like that up and it helps out. I mean, at the end of the day, great. You know, today we're at, uh, you know, SumoCon and one of their marketing managers happens to be a— moonlights as a DJ as well. And he was the guy handling the music. So, you know, everyone can bring different skills and everyone isn't just like a one-dimensional thing that you put into like a, you know, a square peg at the end of the day, right? People have different talents, they're interested in different things. So I think it's helpful to let other people work on different things versus trying to control them like you own them because you don't. You don't own people on your team. So, that's basically it. You might give them your URL and say, hey, what would you do here? And you ask them to do it right in front of you. Slide them to your laptop and say, hey, what do you see on this website? What would you change? Would you make any technical changes? What would you do from an internal linking perspective? What do you think is wrong with our link profile? Do we have some dirty links? Do we need to disavow? What would you do specifically on my site? And from there, you can really evaluate if they know well, they know what it takes to become successful with SEO.

It looks like water, but it's not.

There it is.

There it is.

What did we learn today?

We learned that it's worth it to invest in a team to make everyone happy. Could you talk to other people on the team? What do they not like? Dark culture. They don't like it when things are bad. Yeah, gotta build a good culture. You gotta— if you don't know how to build a good culture, you gotta study. And how do you study? You read a book like Delivering Happiness by Tony Hsieh, how he built Zappos into a great company. You read Tribal Leadership. That's about how to build a good organization as well.

So just 2, 3 months ago, we did a half-yearly trip. We do 2 trips a year to Seattle, and this is a great time for us to just sort of kick back.

Why Seattle?

So it's the middle of Austin and it's 100 degrees. It's a great time to get to Seattle. For those that don't know, Seattle's like the best-kept secret in America in the summer, right? It's like 70 degrees and sunny for 100 days straight. There's like sailboats everywhere. We went out there and we ended up renting 2 Airbnbs, one in the woods. We spent a couple days there just hiking and Doing some bonfires, enjoying ourselves. And then we did another 3 days in the actual city where we went out and just partied together. And, you know, when you're spending that much time together, that's really like when you get to know someone. Like, you can be working and it's all about work, but once you get out of the office and you're having more personal conversations, you're able to bring that unity back into the office. So we'll make sure to do another one in December.

I find those to be huge. When you actually take yourself out of work and you're getting to know people, you actually become friends instead of just a number or just, you know, we're in this for the 9 to 5 and that's it. So actually, who plans these things? Because I'm interested in, you know, people talk about offsites all the time and things like that. Logistically, it sounds like a nightmare to me. So what do you do?

Well, it varies every single stage you are as you grow. Our first offsite was 5 people. Sean and I planned it. We went up to Big Bear, had a house that we rented out, you know, and it was more about— it was very much about like planning and goal setting and what are we doing for the next 6 months. And everyone was involved. And we've grown, and we've rented a house in Malibu a couple years ago.

So over—

as we've expanded, we now have a full-time HR, you know, head of HR. So he planned that. We have a full-time vibe manager, which is—

Vibe manager?

You know, an office manager, but also taking into account like how the team feels and the fun activities and stuff like that. So there's culture kind of built into that role. So combination of head of HR and our vibe manager, Planning the offsite. And that's, that's where we are now.

So let's say your team has 10, 20, 30 people on it or whatever, and you're working with great people, right? Because you know how to hire great people. Well, chances are if you've hired great people, they probably know great people too. So why aren't you reaching out to these people to figure out how you can talk to their network to get an idea of, well, who you should be adding to your team? So the whole thing around forced hiring is from the book called The Sales Acceleration Machine. Which is written by Mark Roberge, and he talks about the concept of forced hiring. And with forced hiring, it's really important to understand that you have to be really deliberate about the way you look at, um, you know, who you want to bring onto your team. So for example, for us, we're looking to hire a lot more paid advertising managers, a lot of salespeople, right? So here's what I would do if I go into LinkedIn. I'm going to keep it really simple. My podcast co-host Neil Patel has a really big network. A lot of people follow him on LinkedIn. So it's easy for me to just take a look at him and see, hey, who should I be talking to? Right? So what I'm doing, what I'm going to do here, let's take a look at my screen. Go to, go to Neil Patel. Here we go. Find him right here.

Okay.

And basically we take a look at him and then we say, okay, well here's Neil. And then what we do is we go to the right side and we hit see connections and we see who he's connected with.

Right?

And what we can do on the right side here, we can see, okay, these are the connections of Neil Patel. And we probably want to look for second-degree connections. First-degree connections are people that you already know, so you probably don't want to talk to those people, right? Or at least not ask Neil for an introduction to these people, because forced hiring is you basically go to this person, you ask. So here's what we're going to do. We are looking at connections of Neil Patel, and then also we need to look at keywords as well. Now keywords, we can just say, okay, um, let's say we're looking for people that, you know, have PPC in their title, right? So PPC could be something for paid advertising people, so can SEM. So let's go ahead and, you know, let's hit enter and now LinkedIn will do the searches. So I'm seeing 3 people right here. So if I'm looking for a director of PPC, here's a guy right here, director SEO PPC services. We have a guy right here, uh, you know, marketing in the digital world. So basically what I'll do is I'll go to Neil and I'll say, I might send him a message on LinkedIn. I might send him an email as well. I'll say, hey Neil, long time no talk, or I talk with Neil a lot. So let's just say somebody that you don't know that well. So, long time no talk, I hope all is well. Um, you know, we're looking to hire a paid advertising manager and, you know, I came across these 3 people on your profile. Who do you think I should talk to? Because we're looking to really add great people and I know that you know great people, right?

Mm-hmm.

Kind of stroking their ego a little bit. And so from there, basically they'll respond to you because I know that when I send out an InMail through LinkedIn to people that I already know, 20% response rate. When I send them an email as well, it's a 7% response rate. So you got a, you got a 27% response rate. which is pretty good. You have your network, you spent the time cultivating these relationships. This is a way to maximize these relationships.

Finding people that absolutely love marketing, people that truly want to be the absolute best at what they do. So if you're looking for a growth marketer, you want someone that lives and breathes growth marketing morning till night, thinking about how they can get better and learn.

Our core values up here on the wall: health above all else, display grit without ego. Serve and inspire, seek perpetual growth, spread joy and optimism.

And how did you— what are core values and how did you come up with these?

Took us a long time, actually. We actually had like 9 core values from our previous business. We thought, it was like, hey, this is too long. Let's boil it down even more to 5 core values so everyone can remember them. And it was a multiple-week process, back and forth with the team, suggestions, team voting, all that. Ultimately, we got the top 5.

So how do you— do you hire and fire based on them? Like, how important are these core values to you?

Yeah, so that's part of our hiring process, is to make sure that the people that we're bringing on board either display these core values or we believe have the aptitude to have the core values.

Perpetual growth. Well, let's talk about that one. Seek perpetual growth. How do you measure for perpetual growth?

Questions that I ask in our hiring process is, what did you listen to on the way into this interview? What do you listen to on commutes? What do you listen to in the gym? What was the last book you read? What blogs do you like to read? How are you being like curious and passionate about learning? And you can tell when someone's like, they know exactly what podcasts they subscribe to, what books they've read, what blogs they frequent, all the different areas of content, and they're able to tell you.

Love it.

And there's a lot of people that actually don't. They listen to the radio and That's not really seeking perpetual growth.

I always like to ask for referrals when I'm trying to source talent. So one of the key problems with finding good SEOs is there's a big shortage of SEOs nowadays. So I like asking for referrals all the time because, well, in the marketing space, if you look at, even if you aren't known in the marketing space, if you go to a site like inbound.org, if you go to a site like growthhackers.com, you can get referrals just by looking at the people that are posting there. So that's a good place to source talent. I think going to Upwork, for example, it's a hit or miss for the most part. When I come in here, you know, I see it's a great looking office environment. You know, people look like they're working hard, people are high-fiving and things like that. How do you hire for the right culture fit?

Culture, it starts from the top down, from C-level down throughout the entire organization. We have to, we have to live it ourselves and be an example. And then we also have to proactively plan cool stuff. Like, you know, we just, we just had an offsite 2 weeks ago. We went up to Malibu Wines and the entire team, we had some fun team building games.

All 140?

All of us. We all went and then we all wine tasted in the afternoon and there was really nothing planned in the afternoon. Usually we have some sort of agenda, but this time around we're just like, you know what, we're gonna do some team building games in the, in the, in the morning since we've grown the team very fast. A lot of people don't know each other as well as they could have. And then in the afternoon, it was just have some lunch and some wine and people just chat and And it went over really well. I mean, people loved it.

You have to make sure that you double, triple check on your reference checking. A lot of people will get to the final point and it's like everything passed. They did well on the test, they did well on their SEO process. You're feeling good about them, but when you get to the reference check portion, people aren't feeling that excited about them, especially the first 3 references. Oftentimes you can read between the lines and be like, oh yeah, that guy Noah. You can tell from that point, He's not really that excited, right? You can tell when people are gushing. Like let's say for example, some person, a person we hired recently, talked to reference check and they were gushing. And I said, so how did you feel when that person left?

Devastated.

Why'd you feel devastated? That person was everything to me. How would you rate that person on a scale of 1 to 10 versus their peers?

10.

Right? I never hear 10s. Maybe sometimes I'll get a 9, but I like asking that question because when someone's at a 7 or 8, Okay, great. What's stopping them from being a 9 or 10? Then you'd start to realize what their true weaknesses are and if they're really, they're really a good fit.

I'm working with one of my best friends. No matter what, when you're looking for a business partner, the process is the same whether they're a friend or not. And I think it's identifying the values. Work ethic is important. You know, you want somebody that is in the trenches with you who's willing to roll up their sleeves. And I think looking back, one thing that we probably should have done too is, and I think is really useful is taking a personality test. There's different services that can do it and they're free. You can go online. It was interesting too because we took that personality test and all 3 of our personalities completely complement each other. We're all different, you know, in different ways. I think communication is really important.

What I'm hearing is, A, set up boundaries initially, right?

Definitely.

Then you also have to have criteria. Then the 3rd thing is taking like a Myers-Briggs or even like a Tony Robbins DISC assessment.

Yeah, personality test to see what our strengths and weaknesses are. Also, I think in the beginning you should clearly, as best as you can, lay out the roles and responsibilities. That way everybody has a clear idea of their value-add because I feel like that's important. Sometimes it feels bad if you don't— if personally you don't feel like you're adding value to the company. I think getting all that out in the beginning and recognizing each other for each other's value-add is important. Communication is a huge piece of it. When it gets tough, you'll see people's true character come out, right?

Yeah.

But I think it's establishing those rules and those criteria and then being able to move forward from that, right?

It's almost like you have to overcommunicate in the beginning. It's like, it's no different than a relationship with, you know, outside of work, like, you know, with your significant other. Communication is key. And that's no different than, you know, in entrepreneurship.

You want someone that's always focused on moving things forward, getting things done, not just sitting around waiting to be told what to do. Rather identifying opportunities and realizing, quite frankly, that we're never done. We can always be better.

Make sure that you do second-order reference checking. You have the first line of defense, the first 3, but you want to ask the first line of defense, hey, who else should I be talking to? Then you get to the real meat and you get to talk to other people that, well, aren't the— aren't buddy-buddies with the first line of defense. You talked about the Monday morning meetings. What do you guys do in those meetings?

So the Monday morning meeting is a great time for us to do 3 things. Number one, it's an update on the goal, right? What— how are we tracking both on the monthly goal as well as the yearly goal? The second thing is just tracking everybody's individual goal. Everyone provides an update on how are they moving forward on their individual goal, whether that's Facebook ads, whether that's the deals closed, whether that's the average revenue per deal, average revenue per email. Then the final thing that we end up doing is We talk about our weekend. You know, it's a great time for us to just catch up, like, hey, are there any highlights from the weekend? We crack jokes for the first 5 minutes. It just sort of sets the mood for the team, and then we're able to game plan what are we gonna do for the final week, the rest of the week.

I love that because the fact that it's— okay, you have your metrics in there, but it shows that the other part is you show that you actually care about each other. Yeah, not a lot of companies do that. I mean, when you hear about especially the kind of Silicon Valley stand-up that you typically hear about, it's just One thing you're struggling with, one big thing you're working on, and then, you know, that's basically it, right? So I think it's really important to get that human aspect in there where you're actually, you're hanging out with each other, you're asking personal questions, things like that, because you are working with humans at the end of the day, and you don't wanna go to work with people that you don't like, right?

You want someone that respects themselves and also respects others. Just a great addition to your team and cares about building and fostering a great environment.

What I also recommend is Objective Management Group. This sales assessment has been a game changer You can pay them a certain amount of money. I think we paid $2,500 for a certain amount, and then they tailor the test based on kind of what you're looking for. So we're looking for consultative salespeople, and they're scored a certain way, and it's been accurate every single time for us. You should absolutely ask for salary history if you're able to, if it's legal in your country, in the very beginning, because that fundamentally shapes how your interview is gonna go on. So for example, if I'm hiring a software engineer, And this engineer is looking for $250,000 and then the other one's looking for $50,000 and you know, let's say in the past, you know, they were making $40,000 and then the $200,000 or $250,000 one was making, you know, $180,000 or something like that. Think about it. You're going to be asking these people fundamentally different questions. If you don't know the salary history and you don't know what they're looking for as well, you cannot shape how your interview is going to go next. You don't know the right questions to ask. They could be too junior. They could be too senior. Should you waste your time at all if they're looking for too much? If they made too much in the past, are you wasting your time already? How are you going to know? This is an important question to ask and it is relevant because it shows where they're at. What you're making at the moment does show kind of what your level is, right? And people are compensated based on the level that they're at. What's their SEO process? Tell me how you approach SEO. What's your 90-day plan? How do you look at it? Do you start with an audit first? What do you do exactly? You want to understand how they think. And you need to understand how they think so you can determine whether it aligns with how your thinking is when it comes to SEO. Would you admire this person? Would you work for this person? I think that's really important because we're looking to hire leaders. We're looking to hire smart people on our team.

It's actually kind of cool when they're on a sales call, that light will turn on up there, on air. Um, marketing team, free lunches, drinks, and then we built a Japanese bar. It's actually kind of cool. This is Chris and Sarah. They write our content. That's Matt. He does sales. They do more than that in life. That's just what they help us out here. I think this is kind of cool. Yeah. Yeah, so we have like a— so every Friday Chad will make happy hour drinks. He'll make like crazy cocktails just every Friday.

Badass.

And the whole team just gets off 5:30. He'll ring the bell. I don't know, where's the bell?

You guys need a gong. That's what you need.

Every sales team member has a gong. Do you see on their desks? So every time they make a sale, they'll do a gong. Love it.

Sneaky, sneaky.

Love it.

For me, culture is what your employees say about you and the company when you're not there. Picture, you know, a couple employees hanging out on a Friday night having a beer or whatever, and their friend— they bump into a friend And a friend's like, oh, you're working at Snack Nation now. What's Snack Nation all about? Culture is how do they— what's the feeling that they have inside of them when they're describing what Snack Nation is all about? And are they incredibly enthusiastic about it and they love it? Or do they have kind of this like downtrodden, you know, depressed kind of like, oh yeah, it's just a job.

Right.

Or no, you know, Snack Nation or wherever they're working, it's my lifestyle. I have friends there. How they light up and how they feel about it. That's, to me, that's what cult— that's what culture is.

So I hope you enjoyed this clip on hiring and culture. And if you want to watch more videos like this on hiring and culture, culture, culture, check out the next clip and it's going to be amazing. Also let us know in the comments what you thought about this, what you thought really stuck out to you, and don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe, and we'll see you tomorrow.