How to Find ROCKSTAR Employees for Your Business

First up, we got Christoph who's saying, hello, thank you so much for your inspiring and educational video. You're so helpful to my life. My question is, how do you find good people to work with to scale your business?

Christoph, shall I go back to a little quote I did with Evan Carmichael? He'll know this. One of our— he's a legend in terms of a business person, Steve Jobs. So Christoph, his quote is a famous quote. You know, the big demotivator, hashtag number one demotivator for talented people is to have to put up with bozos. So Steve Jobs said nothing's more frustrating than A players having to work with B players who absolutely number one, slow them down and two, suck their energy from them. So the best thing you can do as a leader obviously is hire great people. And Steve Jobs said it's better than giving them Fußballer or sushi, free sushi, you want to hire A-players. So how do you do that? That's the crux of your question. I think number one, you have obviously a brand out there, a big idea, and I think actually if you do that well, it attracts great people. Secondly, I'd always, always go out to your network. And we've sort of talked about on previous broadcasts about how you go out and attract really good people, but first of all, identify them. You'll know if you're working in a company today or you're starting off on your own, people who really impress you and people who consistently kind of knock the ball out of the park, they'd be great targets to join your personal crusade in your business. So I think a lot of it is around kind of networks. Obviously things like LinkedIn and stuff like that make it even easier. But I think most of all, you really want to build a business and a company that attracts the very best, attracts rock stars. And probably the most important thing you can do as a growing business actually, probably the most important thing, is to actually invest your time making really smart hires. And candidly, I've made bad hires in my life. I've made lots of mistakes. And if you do make lots of mistakes, then, you know, on hiring, it's somewhere where it can hurt you. But if you have made a mistake, let's be honest, everybody's done it. And what you've got to do is really be honest with yourself and have the honest conversation with the person you've hired and, you know, cut them loose if they're not happy and they're not going to make it in your company. You're much better off having someone really motivated and really capable to do that job. But the best way to do it is build a great company, great brand, and that will actually draw, you know, the bees to the honeypot.

Just always keeping an eye out for talented people, whether you're at a networking event, whether you're going to Sage Summit, whether you're, you know, at a conference, whatever it is. If you see somebody who really impresses you and there might be a way to work together on it, on a project that you have coming up, you always want to— you're always looking for— you always want to keep that in mind. You're looking for talented people to help join and build this thing that you're creating? If you're posting out on social media, you know, Stephen talked about having a really galvanizing message and something powerful that people want to come and be attracted to. Are people responding to that? Is there somebody who's going above and beyond? And, you know, if you're looking for a programmer, is there somebody on there who's like sharing their programming skills that you can ask to join your team? You know, people who love your mission already. I think it's great to be able to involve them in what you're doing. So Steve, I'm thinking now, you know, when you came to Sage, it's still, you know, relatively new, I guess. It hasn't been something you've been at for 20 years. Yeah. When you came over, how did you go about building your team? Obviously there's a team in place, you're bringing new people on as well. How do you think about the people that you surround yourself with there?

Yeah, you know, one of the most critical things we had to do was hire huge talent and, We made a lot of changes in the team. So just a few data points, we've got about 14,000 people. But I think it's a lot about capability, some experience, and attitude. But if you've got attitude and you've got desire, it's amazing what you can overcome. So we've actually kind of really focused on hiring millennials. We've really focused on a much better gender balance. So in the senior management team, I'm really pleased to say I think we've now gone up from about 22% female, it's now 32%, and that's just in less than a couple of years. So there's loads of elements, not just capability, but it comes back to that culture you want to build. You want to be an inclusive company, a company which is obviously high-performing, but also a company that really encourages young people to come in and learn and rotate through their careers so they can go into one function and go off. And it's great actually, in Vancouver, I met a guy called Tom Gough, who used to work in the London office, now he's working in Vancouver. You know, 27, 28-year-old guy, fantastic. What an opportunity if we can create a company where people, individuals, colleagues have huge aspirations and their aspirations and their dreams touch and connect with Sage so that they can make a career. But I'll also say, Evan, you know, I met, um, a 23-year-old entrepreneur this morning who blew me away, a guy called Jack. And Jack has just started a company. He's got, I think he's closing around to get about $8 million of funding. But what impressed me with Jack, firstly, he contacted me on Twitter. He said, "Can I have a coffee with you?" The answer was yes. He's done that with Ronan Dunne, who's a rock star at Verizon. He's done it with superb female entrepreneurs. And he's just assembled an unbelievable little company of about, you know, a dozen people. But he's also done that through just perspiration, hard work, hard graft, and being bold and asking people. And actually, you know, a quote is, "If you don't ask, you don't get." So I think when you're looking for talent, it's exactly what you say, save some of all these great conferences you go to, look and network and find out who the stars are, share with them your big idea and your vision. And you always find people gravitate to leaders and fantastic business ideas as well, and a mission and a good cause with a great culture.