Eric Siu breaks down MrBeast's 36-page employee handbook, which emphasizes hiring only top performers, measuring output instead of hours, and encouraging crew to find unique locations like castles. The guide prioritizes initiative and practical shoot planning with built-in buffer days.
MrBeast created a book for his employees. It's a 36-page book. It's an onboarding book and it's called How to Succeed in MrBeast Production. And it was really well done. I want to name off a couple of things over here because keep in mind, MrBeast, he's still in his mid-20s right now. And one of the key things he talks about in the book is like, I only want to hire A players because B players, C players, they drag each other down and we can only afford to work with A players. He also talks about the very end. For your career, at the very end, he's like, don't just wait for your career to happen to you. Come to me if you want to grow. There's plenty of things that we want to do, and if you're pushing, you're always asking, we will help you create something, and we want you to make a lot of money. I think it's pretty inspirational. Grammatically, he's not the best at this, and he says this in the very beginning, but this is his expectations for how the company should be ran. And he's like, I don't care how traditional media does things, like, we're different. Here he says this: the amount of hours you work is irrelevant. Someone might solve a problem in 30 minutes, And then a team of five couldn't do it in a week. I don't care. It's all about output, and I think we can agree with that. And he talks in here about if you want to learn how to go viral on YouTube, there's a lot of stuff in here on how to do it. But he just teaches all he can. And dude, go the extra mile. Sometimes I might need a castle, but sometimes as we're looking for castles, we might find someone that has like a giant, like the biggest bouncy ball house in the world. If you don't use that, you're not creative enough. Like we need you to be creative. So it's just a really intense onboarding document. I love this stuff.
And it's when I'm like, why the heck would you want castles? I'm like, oh yeah, Mr. Beast probably does need castles and random things. But dude, you never appreciate.
I appreciate the fact that you have to look at many different castles, and then within those castles there's like gems that you can find, and you have to figure out how to hook them all together. Yeah. And then when you plan for a shoot, it's not just for one day. You need to plan like multiple buffer days because shit can go wrong, right? So there's a lot in here that I can appreciate, and it's for free. So I highly recommend everyone read it, and probably it's helpful. Like, you don't need to have a 36-page book for your company, but it's helpful. Like, for us, we define our standards of excellence, right? We have a lot of pages of this stuff. And we had a new guy that onboarded last week and we had him read this as well. He's all, yours is pretty much the same thing. I was like, okay, that's good.
