Hiring Talent: A Better System For Hiring The Right People and Growing Your Business with Kevin Kauffman at Joe Polish's Genius Network - Genius Network Episode #124

A mentor of mine once said to me, you're never going to be the person to get yourself to the next level. Congratulations. You're where you're at. You made yourself get to this point and you've made it into this room. And guess what? You're not going to get yourself to the next level. It's going to be because of the leverage that you bring into your life, the relationships that you bring into your life, into your business. It's not going to be because of you.

Kevin Kaufman knows the Secret to Hiring the Right people as a CEO and co founder of Group 4610 Network, a real estate company, Kevin employs over 50 salespeople, 12 support staff, and over the past 10 years, he has hired more than 200 people to consistently elevate his business. And it's working. In this episode, Kevin Kaufman discusses an easy, lucrative and fun recruiting system and sheds light on why entrepreneurs hire the wrong people. Go to geniusnetwork.com 124 to access the show notes for this episode, along with an exercise to help you take action on what Kevin discusses.

Have you ever wanted to hire people for your business, but every time you do, it's a nightmare. Have you ever wished you could just outsource hiring to someone else to take away the pain? Maybe you've even paid large sums of money to a professional recruiter to bring you candidates, but they didn't turn out to be worth it. How much is one great hire worth your company? I can tell you it can be priceless and it can certainly be worth a lot more than $250,000. It's been said that the greatest return on investment will always be in people, not in a product or stock or even your business. That's why it's important to learn an ELF system for hiring. And that's exactly what Kevin Kaufman is going to share with you. Kevin has a staff of over 50 salespeople and 12 support staff in his organization. Plus he's personally hired over 200 people in the last 10 years. In addition, Kevin has spent over 25 days in a classroom, both as a stud and then teaching the art of recruiting and then actually hiring people. As a result, he's learned a thing or two about hiring the right people. Kevin's real estate company, the Group 4610 network, was ranked number 66 in the entire country last year. To put that in perspective, There are about 2 million licensed real estate professionals in the U.S. the main reason Kevin fields his team has done so well, it's because he's hired the right people and you'll be able to do as well. Kevin is going to talk about how you can create an elf easy lucrative fund recruiting pipeline to grow your business. Kevin's title is hiring talent. Please help me welcome Kevin Kaufman to give his very first 10 minute talk.

Thanks, man.

Thanks, Kevin. Appreciate it. I need to have an intro like that all the time. That's absolutely amazing. So my first meeting was back in January and I was thinking, what the hell am I doing in this room? And Ben Hardy shared something about the fact that what we're here to do is help everybody else in this room. It's not so much that we're here to get, although we will get something. And then we started having this conversation on what's our unique ability. And it came to me in that moment that my unique ability has the one thing I've worked on the most over the last 10 years, very specifically and heavily the last five years, which is hiring people, recruiting people, and looking for talent all the time. And so Joe said, hey, everyone should give a 10 minute talk. So here we are. So I had a mentor of mine and Jimmy and Linda, I know you've heard this a time or two in your day, that when we hit a ceiling of achievement, what we're missing is a relationship. It's not a skill, it's not a mindset. It's a relationship that we're missing. All right, who here has ever hired somebody out of pain? Raise your hand. Now keep your hand up if you absolutely nailed that hire. Okay? Nobody. All right, so the reality is that's what happens with most entrepreneurs. Now I talk to mostly people in the real estate world, but also plenty of people in other industries. What I see is mostly hiring from pain. Meaning, oh my God, this is just one more thing I've got to do. And they don't have a pipeline a lot. Like a lot of people don't have leads for their business. A lot of this, it's the same exact problem probably that a lot of us consult with our clients about. We don't have enough leads. And that has to be the problem. A mentor of mine once said to me, you're never going to be the person to get yourself to the next level. Congratulations, you're where you're at. You made yourself get to this point and you've made it into this room. And guess what? You're not going to get yourself to the next level. It's going to be because of the leverage that you bring into your Life, the relationships that you bring into your life, into your business, it's not going to be because of you. I thought, wow, that's interesting. Thanks, Gary. I apparently have topped out already a couple years into my career. Good news. But the truth is, it's real. I experienced it. So in 2014, my business partner Fred and I were honestly at a crossroads in our business. We weren't sure what we wanted to do with our business. We looked up when we realized there's so many key relationships here missing. What are we going to do? Because we clearly can't do this by ourselves anyways. So after implementing the process that I'm going to share with you here, we went from literally three years, about $800,000 in revenue, to over four and a half million dollars last year by adding key relationships and talent, leverage, et cetera. So here's the bad news. The bad news is that not having this strategy for this hurts and it slows you down and it causes us to hire the wrong people. Not bad people, but the wrong people for our business, for our world, or whatever it is that's going to help us get to our next level. More bad news. Recruiting and hiring is a process, not an event. Here's the deal, though. When you put this into place, you realize this is very easy. And in fact, your everyday conversations with your clients and your friends, your genius network buddies, can pay off years and years down the road. And Aaron Lubovic, who's a business partner of ours for our real estate company, who runs our entire Colorado division, we met in 2011, actually from a blind email. The guy just cold emailed me one day because I was putting on an event. He wanted to host it. Last year alone made, bottom line, after expenses, $270,000 in our business. Because that relationship, this guy that emailed me in 2011, we then built a relationship with him, and in 2014, we. We got into business with him. Joe, I think I misquoted this. It was 15 years. Mike corrected me earlier today. But you guys ran into each other at an Apple store, and here we are 15 years later, and now Mike is here. Now, whether Joe is doing that purposefully or not, he has an ELF strategy for hiring, so I can help. Here's the process and the strategy for finding the right relationships for your business. We call it ongoing recruiting. The ongoing recruiting through your sphere, your clients, your friends, your peers, somebody else in your industry. It's literally done through the exact same conversations you're already having. The problem is we're not looking at People the way we could as it pertains to hiring, because we see that as an event rather than an ongoing process. So phone calls, handwritten notes, emails. Does anybody in the room do any of those things ever during their week? I know I do. So what I started to do is I started to look at people and the converse. Not people, but the conversations I was having with people. And so I'm talking to Jim. I'm looking at Jim. Is Jim a possible future wealth manager for me? Is he a possible client for my real estate business? Is he a potential hire? Does he know a potential hire? And I just started to apply tactics that my mentor has taught to me, and I put it into recruiting, and not just into the sale or all the other parts that go into our business that we tend to get caught up in. So all we have to do is start to ask ourselves the question, if Ian and I are having a conversation and I'm meeting him, what am I recruiting him to? Because the reality is we're all recruiting all the time. We're all selling all the time. And so what can I recruit him to? What's the process I can enroll him in? So, couple tips. Don't trust yourself, because if you're in sales, you're going to tend, or at least I've found that we tend to sell the job. And we don't tend to recruit or hire. We tend to sell somebody. Why they should come with us and they should join our mission and they should join our company. Trust your coach. If you don't have a coach, perhaps that's someone else that can come into your process to help you defend your decisions, defend your hires. Maybe it's a genius network, buddy, but don't rely on this 100% on yourself. Again, the good news is it doesn't have to be hard. It doesn't have to hurt. Most of the entrepreneurs I talk to when it comes to hiring, they are hurting. But if they had an ongoing recruiting process and strategy, this can be easy. Or as Joe likes to say, elf part of our business. So here's what I'm going to ask you to do. Write down the relationship in your business right now that you're missing the most. And if you think you're not missing one, write down the one that if you had another option, maybe it's a, what we call a top grade that you would replace today. My guess is that if you don't know the person that could come into your business already, it's because you just haven't started thinking about it or you haven't started asking the right questions. And if you will, just start asking yourself, hey, is this person going to be a potential client, customer, employee, business partner, et cetera? In your everyday communications? You will build a pipeline that will last a lifetime and hiring will never hurt again. A couple additional resources that I've studied that you may want to write down or just take note of are a few books that have helped me, as I've learned, to hire and recruit. Which is, number one is who by Jeffrey Smart and Randy Street. It's an amazing book with a very great detailed process, especially on the interviewing process, the rare find, and actually Moneyball. And that's it. Thank you.

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