Hiring 7 New Roles and Some Thoughts on Interviewing & Hiring in General - Doc the Journey Ep 77

Yo, I just realized I filmed that whole like 12 minute section without the mic connected, so it probably sounds like shit, but I'm not gonna film it again. So lesson learned. Make sure the mic's connected next time. Bosh, yo. Back in a little talking pod or a meeting booth. This one actually makes me feel like fucking light headed. I don't know if anyone gets that. It's like not much oxygen in these things. Yeah, talk about hiring. So we're hiring some six different roles right now, full time in the uk, something I've never done before at that pace. The hiring is also one of those like not very glamorous things that not many people speak about on Twitter and so on. Everyone talks about, you know, marketing, Rice, cac, all that shit. And that is a hugely important part of the business and drives the P and L more in the short term. But obviously if you want to build a legit brand, one that you can exit from long term as well, team's probably the most important thing. And yeah, I've not been historically the best at hiring. I don't think I've been working with the guys and helping me with that. And definitely a steep learning curve. And someone said that as a founder at this stage, especially when you're trying to grow quickly, which ultimately I am, I've chosen that path obviously, VC backed and all that, which definitely has pros and cons. Maybe more on that another time. But I said you should spend like 30% of your time on hiring, which sounds like a lot, but actually it's probably what I'm doing right now. We're hiring six different roles. Six different roles. We just brought in two new people. Creative strategist and a retention manager and then other ones that are currently in process. I'm hiring an md, which is a huge one. Maybe I'll make a video on that separately. Hiring a MPD manager, a senior national account manager to lead retail. What else? I'm forgetting econ manager, which is a difficult one. A lot of nuance to that. I'm not entirely convinced we need that compared to agencies and so on. And then the other one is influencer manager or like influencer marketing lead because you want to crack that channel. Maybe that's a whole other video in itself, but yeah, I was conscious. I probably can't share, you know, I'm not going to show you documents of people I'm interviewing and so on, but I used to just jump on interviews and I would literally just fucking speak and not even plan questions or anything. Not, not Score people, all that shit. But I've now got like a proper scorecard and I cover like technical questions, like a first interview technical questions, you know, culture fit questions like why are you doing this? Where do you want to be, how do you spend your time outside work, all that sort of stuff, like soft skills versus hard skills. And also like filter questions, as I would call them. Basically saying this is going to be really fucking hard. If you want a nine to five, if you just want a nine to five, don't come here, go work somewhere else. You know, go work in a bigger business, probably not a startup. So yeah, is that the questions? I mean, let me pull up one thing I was literally looking at just now. Yeah, so I've got like a scorecard, maybe I'll share a template of this on another video. But oh yeah, the other thing is like values and then I've got a few values of mine that I want people to have. Be obsessed, move fast, pursue greatness and execution over everything. The kind of four things I'm trying to hire around. It's hard to filter that out in the first interview. And then next stage we normally move to depending on the complexity of the role. Like the MD one I did another interview which was an in person meet before moving to the next stage which was like a contextual task. So for example, like an MPD one, I'd get them to basically come up with improvements for current products with specifics, then also come up with an entirely new pitch for a product and how that fits us commercially, why you think it does, while also thinking about compliance. Xyz so you want to make a task that is like really specific to what they would actually do in their role to a like, you know, sense check and bullshit check their skills. Because I think a lot of people are good at interviewing but maybe less good at the actual job. So you want to make sure that's not the case and then also lets you understand how they think and how that aligns with you. Make sure you're not hugely different in opinion on where the business is going and so on because ultimately it's sort of led by me. But you want people to be able to think for themselves and pitch their argument as well. So yeah, we used to work with. I say used to, but I have in the past I've done hiring myself. General experience of that was you find a few, a few gems like if you're the early team that been with you from the start, like Flo, Brad, Lucy, if you're watching the OGs and they're all great at their job. I was lucky. They're like from network, from Twitter. So on other times I've had to try to hire myself. It's never been a. It's been a lot of fucking work because you're floating through applications and stuff. But baby just haven't had the filter on standards. And then we've moved to reviews recruiters. There's typical 15 to 25% of typically 20% of the candidate's salary which I think is pretty crazy generally. But that's just the market rate. Had some good experiences that we hired our social media manager through that. I've had some less good ones where we've hired someone that hasn't worked out or we've just not even had good candidates and it's felt dragged out. What we're doing now is we've got a fractional in house recruiter which is much better. I think it's the best of both worlds. It's way cheaper for a start. But also they're way more on it. They understand me and the brand a bit more. They get more nuance between different candidates and so on. Who would fit this brand? They can put that filter before I or anyone else on the team even speaks to them. So that's what I'm doing currently, I think. Is this a full fucking video? By itself it might be. I think the other thing with hiring that I've learned and by the way, I do not think I'm good at this stuff. I think I'm getting better at this stuff. But I do think I'm fortunate enough to have been mentored and I guess coached by people that have built much, much bigger businesses. One guy I'm working is the founder of a business called tails.com. they're a nine figure revenue business. Had a nine figure exit as well to Nestle. So I've been working with him which came off the back of the investors and then he's invested a bit of money like just so he has skin in the game sort of thing. I've been working with him one day a month and a lot of the things he's helped me with is hiring but also how to think about hiring and there are different ways to do it. There's no right answer, but I always hold my hands up and say this is not gospel. This is just me documenting what I'm doing and the things I'm learning. But I think yeah, the whole hire to grow versus higher once you've grown debate is an interesting one. There's some hires I've thought we probably didn't need that. Head of Growth is one I used to think that on because I was kind of a growth guy. But actually that's been a big, big unlock for me to focus more on other stuff because there's always more stuff. Someone that can really own acquisition, all the technical stuff. Well, I just focus more on product and brand, which is broadly what I want to do. Ironically where the business is lacking right now because I haven't been doing it. Other ones like retention manager, I think we hired way too late. I should have hired way sooner for that because ultimately the right hire is going to have huge, huge ROI and a 10, 20, 30x ROI on their salary in terms of the impact on the P and L ultimately. So yeah, Retention manager was a huge one. MPD manager was one I was too slow on before. Like I did all the MPD myself for two years, obviously working with suppliers. But I'm not an MPD guy. And ultimately we're a product. Every brand is a product first brand. Yes, we're like a marketing business at its core, but you can't outmarket a bad product. Then we got someone fractional, which was good, it was a step in the right direction. But now we need someone full time. So yeah, that's an example of one that's been we should have hired sooner probably. Anything else? Yeah, I think the thing about like people say, is it higher slow, fire fast or is it fire fast fire fast? I mean definitely I'd lean towards higher slow fire fast. And it's very true. My mindset on it now is if you do all the interviewing you want to do and you know, put them through a rigorous process and thorough and all that shit, which will definitely help the chances of success. But I think in the first month you want to, yes, onboard people, handhold them a little bit, get them up to speed, give them what they need, but at the same time throw them in the deep end, sink or swim sort of mindset. And I've heard that from a few people that are much more successful and ahead of me in the hiring and business game in general. So it's kind of my approach, you know, let them own stuff. And I do not want to be micromanaging, I do not want to be hand holding beyond obviously like onboarding and getting people up to speed, that's obviously relevant and needed. But throw people in the deep end, pursue them owning something and really being confident. And the other thing as well is in a business of this Size we're not many people like 10 people equivalent now plus a few agencies. So like over a million per person annual rev now run rate wise quite a bit over which I think is a good benchmark broadly but obviously there's nuance to that depending on the business. So when I'm hiring people I don't want to hire anyone that's so senior they want to delegate everything and hire a massive team because that's not fucking happening right now. I'm not not paying for that and we don't need it. But I also don't want to hire people that are so junior that they need a manager above them to lead them. So really you want to hire kind of mid. Well the irony is I would say you want to hire manager level people or senior manager level people but the irony is you also don't want to hire middle managers. But I guess when they're the only person in each department to some extent mpd we have one person, it's not like we've got an MPD team. So I think that's the right level at this stage of business. Hire people that can own stuff, don't need hand holding but also don't expect to delegate everything to someone else because A there's probably not someone else beneath them outside the marketing team. There's barely anyone in the team apart from them in every department like retention, npd, cx, all that shit. But also you want them to be willing to get stuck in, roll their sleeves up and fucking do stuff because you don't want someone to come in and be like ah, strategy this, strategy that. Which I think is just a buzzword for procrastination really. So yeah, that's kind of my view on hiring right now. I think we've got a great team now. I think we're hiring more good people. You also want to make sure the standards get higher and higher. At the end of the day the right people will make or break the business. I think you can't do everything yourself as a founder especially if you want to build a business that is setting the foundations to scale. I'm definitely approaching hiring a bit more now. How do we set the foundations to get to 30 million and then 50 million in revenue over the next two, three years. And that is a different mindset to just being like keep it as lean as possible, focus on margin as much as possible, keep overheads as lean as possible. Obviously an element of that comes from being a venture backed brand where growth is like the number one target, efficient growth as well. But growth ultimately compared to maybe a lifestyle business where you're not that bothered and it's purely about how much money can I pull out every year? Because it just is a different way of doing things and there's no right or wrong. Again, it's just what I'm doing. So yeah, I don't know if that was useful, hiring a bunch of roles. Like I said, I will document as I go. Just some thoughts on hiring. I think ultimately the main takeaway from this is try and learn from people that are way fucking smarter than you are and have done it and have built legitimate teams and legitimate brands, not just, you know, the dropshipper next door who outsource. Outsource everything to the Philippines, which by the way is nothing wrong with. I used to do that. But it is different to trying to build, you know, category defining big brand, which is ultimately my goal. We're nowhere near that yet. I haven't even got close. But that's what I want to do. So that's the way I'm approaching it. And yeah, always learning from people on Twitter, people in my network, angel investors, all that sort of shit. And ultimately I'd only take advice on this stuff from people that have done what you want to do. And I want to build a big category leading brand that one day I can exit from. So fortunately I know people and I'm working with people that actually done that, which is not that many people and had a good exit as well. Not just built a brand flopped, you know, distress exit, any of that. So anyway, I'm rambling. I've got more calls to do. It's a bit fucking cold questioning why I'm in London right now. But it's where I'm at for now. There's a lot to do, a lot of new people to onboard. Starting to build a bit of a team culture which is new to me. I'm probably my default is like autistic Chad scaler in my fucking cupboard scaling by myself. But it's quite nice to have people on the team in person now and then as well. So. Yeah, anyway, enough rambling. We'll catch you next one. Cheers for watching. Subscribe to the vlog.