How to Onboard New Employees into Your Business

Hey, guys. Matt Paulson here. In this video, we are going to talk about onboarding new employees. MarketBeat just brought on two new employees last week, and I want to kind of COVID the process that we use to kind of help our new employees be successful and to get them kind of up and going in their first week of business. Now, I think it's really important to give employees just a really good start in the company and set them up for success. A failed hire costs a lot of money, costs a lot of time, because if somebody doesn't work out, that means you kind of lost the time working with them. And then you have to do a whole new hiring process again, which certainly costs time and money. So anything that I can do to set my employees up for success, kind of at the beginning, I want to do that because that will just make them more likely to be a successful employee in a company. I think in too many cases, employees, when they start at a company, they're handed a computer, they're handed a desk. Here's your kind of logins for your job. Some minimal training, but just not enough to really get going and be successful. When you hire somebody, you're spending a lot of money on payroll. When you bring on an employee and you just really want them to have a good understanding of your organization, what your organization stands for, how you operate. And you really want to have these things ingrained in their mind before they even do any work. So here's kind of what we did to bring on our two new employees. I've got a new developer named Ryan Kwam and a new operations and biz dev guy named Will Bushy. So to get these two guys on board first, before they even had their first day, we just made sure we had all the paperwork covered ahead of time. So when you hire a new employee, you have to have them complete a W4 form, and that just tells you how much to withhold from further taxes. You have to do an i9 form, which verifies that they are allowed to legally work in the United States. And then you also have to report them as new employees to the state. And then that way you can get them registered for unemployment insurance. Probably a couple other things, too, that my accountant did that I've forgotten about. We also have a health plan, so we had to register our new employees for that so they can have health insurance when their current plans expire at the end of the year. At the first year, they'll be on MarketBeat's health plan through Wellmark. So we get all These things kind of wrapped up ahead of time and that way they could focus on their first day, not on paperwork, but on kind of learning about the company. I don't think anybody for the first thing they do for a company is want to fill out a bunch of paperwork. Probably not. You want to really get to know the company on your first day of work. So that's what we tried to do. Another thing that we did ahead of time was we ordered our new employees laptops. That way they had the computers they needed for their first day of work. Now I let everyone pick out their own laptop up to about $2,000. I figure if I'm going to pay a professional high five figure, even a six figure salary to somebody, I shouldn't waste their time by making them deal with a slow or underpowered computer. So I just said, here's your budget. Pick out whatever laptop you want that will allow you to do your job the best that you were able to do and be the most productive with. I think a lot of employers are shooting themselves in the foot by giving their employees not enough, not sufficient technology. When I had a job previously, I was getting paid maybe 50, 60 grand a year and I was handed a $500 computer from Walmart. And yes, I could technically do the job with that, but just imagine how much time I spent dealing with a subpar computer and how much money that ultimately cost that employer because I was dealing with the technology problems that cheaping out on a computer caused versus just spending the money on a decent computer in the first place. So that, you know, we. I've made sure not to make that mistake in my business and just say, okay, here's your budget, tell me what you want, I'll order it, I'll send it to your house and that way you'll have it from the get go. On the actual first day, we were fortunate enough that both Will and Ryan were able to start on that same day. So I planned a training and education day for them that I just called Market University. So we rented out a space at the Zio center for Entrepreneurship. Just said, hey, show up at 8:30, we'll be done kind of by 3 o'. Clock. And that way you guys can all spend some time together. I can teach you about the company, its history, its core values, all that stuff. And another thing that I did, I had my other employee, Rebecca, who is in town here, I had her attend the whole thing. Now she's been working with the company for three and a half years. So you know, there's not a lot she doesn't know. But I'm really glad she did come because she picked out quite a few things that she just wasn't aware of, you know, parts of the business she wasn't involved with. It actually ended up being a really good thing for her to attend as well. And she was also able to kind of contribute to that conversation and fill in the gaps where I missed it. So at MarketBeat University, the first thing we covered was the company history dating back to 2006 when I started a personal finance blog on Blogger and how that evolved into investing content and how that started the Brand Analyst Ratings Network, which then evolved over into MarketBeat finally. So we talked about that whole history. We talked about the core values of the company that are in another video that I recorded. We walked through the organization's business model. We talked about our primary revenue sources. We talked about who our key business partners are outside of the company. We talked about who our key competitors are. We talked about the third party contractors we work with. We talked about who our customer is, who is our customer avatar, what does our typical customer look like? We talked about the roles that each of us fill on the team and kind of what our company's general expectations for employees are. We also have two remote employees. I have an employee in Denver right now and then I have an employee in Florida. So we had them just both skype in for 15 minutes and kind of introduce themselves to our local team as well. And that was good just to put a name with a face for the people that aren't in Sioux falls. At about 11:30 we broke for lunch and we went to Buffalo Wild Ring some. We had no formal agenda for the lunch on purpose. Just wanted to give us an opportunity to talk kind of more outside of a work setting. So we talked, went to Buffalo Wild Wings. We talked a lot about personal stuff, talked about our families, talked about our kids, talked about our hobbies. When we talked about stuff that generally people don't know about us, I intentionally didn't lead this conversation. I just kind of let it naturally flow wherever it flowed. I learned that Will was born in Canada, didn't know that. And. And I learned that Ryan Kwam had danced on stage with some band and I've already forgotten the name of the band, but I think it was some 90s band. So that was interesting to learn that. After lunch we moved on to some more kind of hands on, practical things. I kind of gave them a tour of the MarketBeat website and I gave them a tour of the back end, what we call the MarketBeat web admin that powers our business. I also showed them through a kind of server configuration setup how we've built our customer database. We also set up their development environments on their machine. That way they could start writing code and start working on our systems. As these tasks come up, the last thing I had them do is start on their first task. That way they were assigned and that way they could do a little bit of real work while I was there to answer questions. So it was a good day. We went from about 8:30 to 3 and that was kind of the first day. Just a lot of information about the company. Try to get them a little bit excited about our mission and our vision and our values and just kind of show them how we do things before we ever ask them to do anything specific. So kind of on a second day, they're remote employees. We don't have an office by design. So I let them work in whatever environment they wanted to. One of the employees will asked if we could meet up and go over a couple things. Very happy to do that with him. So we met up at 10 at Queen City Bakery and then I checked in with Ryan kind of later in the morning as well just to see how things are going. And it's been good. They're going to be free. I'm recording this video on a Wednesday, so they'll have Thursday and Friday to kind of work on the stuff. And certainly they can always call, email Slack and ask questions. But our next kind of in person touchpoint will be on Monday morning when we kind of have a team meeting to discuss the work projects that we want to focus on next week. I'm thinking we'll probably have kind of an in person kind of weekly meeting on Monday mornings. And that way we can plan out everything we want to do in a given week. So that's kind of our next step. And that will probably be the recurring step since we don't have an office, we're not going to see each other every day. By design, we are going to have that weekly touch point and then hopefully that will break for the week. Obviously we'll communicate on Slack, but we'll all go do our own stuff and then we'll report back to next week what we got done. So hopefully maybe you can pick something up out of here if you're starting a new employee with your business. This is how we did it. Certainly not saying it's the perfect way to go, but maybe you'll get some ideas out of it. Enjoy this video. If you enjoyed this video, maybe press the like button on YouTube if you want to see more videos like this. You can also press the subscribe button and I think there's another button that says get notifications and you can click that if you really want to make sure you see all of the videos. Thanks for watching. I'll see you in the next one.