Should You Hire Entrepreneurs to Work in Your Business?

Hey guys, I wanted to record a quick video on hiring entrepreneurs in your business. Should you do it? Should you not? I've seen it go both ways. So the reason this comes up is I went to a conference called Rhodium Weekend a couple weeks ago and I ran into a friend. I leave the name out of it, but he had two employees and one had to leave the company for financial reasons. Loved his job, but had to go back to his previous industry because he needed the money. And the other employee was an entrepreneur at heart. Had his own side projects going, Internet websites that make money. And ultimately those websites are going so well that he was going to leave the business, leaving my friend without his two employees anymore. So that's always the risk with hiring entrepreneurs. You kind of have to know eventually they're probably going to want to start their own business again. Usually entrepreneurs can't work for someone else for the long term and be happy because they have an innate desire to create, to do your own thing, to be a master of your own destiny. So if you are going to hire somebody that's an entrepreneur, go in with the assumption that they are going to want to start another business someday. It really is just a matter of the time frame. So if they want to take maybe three years off from being an entrepreneur and then go start something, you know, that might work out fine. But if they kind of tell you that they are going to be out the door as soon as they can, then it probably isn't going to work out. I kind of had a situation like this in our business. I was trying to hire a digital marketing person for MarketBeat this fall. I had a guy in mind, a good candidate, but he kind of told me that he couldn't commit for more than six months because he was starting a new business on his side, that he wanted to go full time if he could make it work. And I kind of told him that I really needed a commitment to work for me for 12 to 18 months. And he said, I can only commit to you for six. It would have been a really easy hire. I would have been very happy to hire this person. It would have been a done deal, a very easy decision. But six months is just not going to work out for our company because we have some very specific technology that nobody else uses. So if we're going to onboard somebody to use that technology or a platform, we really have to train them. And for somebody that may only work for me for six months, that's just a tough, tough proposition because it'll probably take Them two or three months to get the speed. And it just doesn't make sense to do that if they're only going to stick around for six months. So it can go both ways. In my case, it didn't work out. Thankfully, me and the candidate both figured that out ahead of time. I would still love to hire this person, but they're going off on their own way and that's totally fine. But I've also seen it work out other ways where somebody is a business owner. Maybe the business doesn't work out. They're kind of tired of entrepreneurship for a while and they just kind of want a job somewhere. They can go in and put their 40 hours for the week and provide a significant contribution, but then kind of take a break for a while. Ultimately, you know that person is going to go back and start their own business someday. But you and the employee kind of both have that same time frame in mind and that can work out fine. Something that has worked out better for me is to hire freelancers. So there's a gal that works for me named Rebecca. She's kind of our web operations manager. She's a programmer designer. Mostly a programmer, some design. But she started out as a freelancer. I found her at a co working space three and a half, four years now. And she didn't have. She was pretty good at the work, but she was pretty good at the sales and marketing aspect of being a freelancer. So I had her do a couple projects on a freelance basis. Ultimately, I liked her work and she's worked for me for three and a half years as an employee now, and that was a very good hire. And what is slightly different about freelancers than other entrepreneurs? So all entrepreneurs kind of get motivated by building something and then reaping to financial success. What I kind of figured out about freelancers is that they are really motivated by the ability to create things and see finished projects. And I really saw that in Rebecca. Yes, she wants to make money and do well, but really she likes to build stuff and kind of see the result of building things. So for some freelancers that are developers, designers, whatever, maybe they're more motivated by creating and building things and designing things than they are by building this business system to sell freelance kind of design programming work. They're actually kind of different things. So you might find a freelancer that's having a hard time with sales or they're burned out by doing the same projects over and over again and they just want to do something else. In that case, that freelancer might be a great employee. So in my case, that was true. So, yeah, some freelancers can really become good employees. But entrepreneurs, if you're going to hire an entrepreneur, you really have to think and have a frank conversation with them, saying, hey, I know you're a wire. This way, you're an entrepreneur just like me. Someday you're probably going to go want to start that next business, and that's totally fine. We just need to both be clear on that time frame. And if you're not, you might find that they want to leave within six to 12 months of starting working for you because they have this other thing that they want to do. So just be mindful of that. I think that's it for this video. Thanks for watching.