TES 029 - How to Build a Team

Hey there, real quick before we jump into the episode, listen, if your earnings treadmill hasn't set you free yet, running faster won't either. Listen, hustle without principles just going to burn you out. So here's what I want for you. I want you to join me for my money machine experience live. It is three free trainings. Deep dive into how to escape the treadmill and build a money machine that actually works for you. All right, grab your spot here by going to moneymachinelive.com and I'll see you in the free training. Hey there, Mel Abraham here, the number one best selling author of the book the Entrepreneur's Solution and the founder of Business Breakthrough Academy, where we teach you how to design a business and create a life, a life of financial freedom and peace of mind. And welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution show. And in this one we're going to talk a bit about building your team, about talent, about what it is to look for in team or what are the different things that we need to consider in building a team and attracting talent and developing talent. And it may not be what you think it is. So when we get back after this brief introduction, we're going to dig down into it. I'm going to give you my framework for building your dream team. And just like every other episode, this episode comes with a downloadable guidebook, worksheets, tools, templates, and if you want to get it for this episode, just go to melabraham.com session0.

And you'll be able to get that. If you're not at your computer or you happen to be out at the gym driving, do it safely, but go ahead and text mylegacy one word, no spaces to 38470. You'll get a response back with the download link so you can make sure that you get the tools when you get back safely in front of your computer. So we'll see you right after this introduction. See you soon. Bye.

Welcome to the Entrepreneur's Solution where highly successful entrepreneur Mel Abraham becomes your entrepreneurial mentor. Here, Mel reveals his business building strategies and even gets a chance to answer your questions. Mel Abraham, a CPA by education, but an entrepreneur by exhilaration and a true believer in the entrepreneurial way of life. It's through entrepreneurship that we create community, support society and live our dreams.

It's where possibility meets reality again and you can have the life and lifestyle you want. One of freedom and peace of mind. Welcome to this episode of the Entrepreneur's Solution where it's time for you to be bold, dream big, and live life your way.

Hey there, welcome back. Mel Abraham here, the author of the number one best selling book, the Entrepreneur's Solution. And in this episode, we're going to talk about talent, we're going to talk about team, we're going to talk about hiring, we're going to talk a bit about firing, we're going to talk about my philosophy on that. Now, you may be thinking about building a big team or you may be thinking about not building much of a team, but maybe looking at outsourcing or bringing on people that will help you. Virtual assistants and consultants and those types of things. So a lot of this will fit no matter what it is you're doing and where it is you're going. But when we talk about a business or we talk about leveraging a business or scaling business, you're going to need a team. And you know the challenge. One of the biggest challenges entrepreneurs have is that they wear all the hats. And one quick way to get to entrepreneurial burnout is to try and do everything. You then are stressed out because you're trying to do too many things. You're stressed out because you're not sleeping, you're stressed out because you're not eating right and you're trying to juggle things. And I guarantee you something will fall. So at some point you're going to need support. It may just be a personal assistant, maybe a virtual assistant. It may be that you're growing a business, that you're going to need a controller, a cfo, a CEO or finance folks. You're going to need a sales team, you're going to need a marketing team. So no matter where you are, questions, what do we look for? How do we go into it? Now? Now I'm going to do this. We can go really deep into some of these things and really dig into it in a lot of deal. But I want to just give you the fundamentals, the basics and a primer of what to consider and as you move forward and we can dig deeper in later episodes. But one of the first things that I look at is clearly is skills. The person that.

The person that I want to hire, whether it's doing my website, whether it's doing marketing, whether it's doing this videoing and editing and doing these kinds of things, do they have the skill sets? Now the challenge is that many times people.

Looking for jobs, looking for projects, figure that the skills are all they need. In fact, even in my profession as a cpa, one of the things That I see a lot, a lot of is that, well, I got a CPA license or I got a designation, or I got a license, and therefore I have the skills. Which is absolutely true. If you've got a license, if you've got a certificate, you've demonstrated enough proficiency that you actually have a skill set. But the skill set isn't enough. The skill set isn't enough because I can get someone that is technically competent, that knows exactly how to do the work, and they can get the work done. But where they fall off, and this is something that I think is lacking in a lot of organizations, and we don't really think about it in the context of hiring, is where they fall off is on the values. So skill set to me is the minimum price of entry. It's what gets me to pick up the phone and say, hey, I want to interview you. But values are what is going to get them to stay. It's what's going to get me to hire them. Because one of the things that will destroy a business quicker than anything else is the fact that you've got people with differing values or that have conflicting values and that there isn't an alignment of values in the context of how they do their work, how they treat the customers, how they treat fellow team members, how they look at things. And all of a sudden what that does is that in many cases it starts to impact integrity, ethics and some of the other things that are going on in the business. So one of the things that we do in some of my training, my live trainings and online trainings, one of the first things we do is let's figure out what those values are. Because if I'm going to hire based on values, I better know what our values are. I want to know what, organizationally.

What are my value priorities? What are the things that are really important to me? It's what I call what are we going to stand for? And I need to get clarity on that first if I'm going to hire people to fit that role. So one of the things that you need to do in the context of looking to build a team is get your values set first. So figure out what your values are and then through the interview process, through the process of engaging with them, start to understand what their values are. So I may ask questions about their skills, I may see it on the resume, but the majority of my questions are going to be values based questions. I want to see how they respond in tough situations. I want to see their critical thinking and what their critical Priorities are in processing that. And if I see that they don't have a set of values that's consistent or in alignment with how we would handle things now, then then they're probably not a good fit. They may have the best skill set, but if there isn't a value fit, then I typically won't hire them. So when I look at this, the skills and the values is where the hiring line starts. So first things first, skills that got to be there, values need to be there. Now we have something to discuss with respect to hiring that person. So now all of a sudden I hire this person. What do we do with them? Because one of the challenges that I think happens with many folks is that people need to be challenged, people need to feel like they're growing people. The tend is the natural tendency of humanity is to grow, not to shrink, to become more and to expand.

In that way. And so I think one of the responsibilities for entrepreneurs and leaders is to continue to develop our team, to develop our people, to allow them to self actualize that growth. And in that process, in that process, we get a chance to do some things. So there's three things that I want to look at putting in my organization. When I start to build a team. I want to make sure that I have some of these things in place to be real clear with the team members and individual team members and the team as a whole as to how things go and if I want to get higher results. And the first is really understand the core functions.

One, what are the core functions of my business? Sales, marketing, delivery, customer experience, financial, all of that become core functions. Then alternatively looking at each individual, each individual team member and say, this is the person that I'm going to hire for this position. What are their specific core functions? And they may be part of the sales team, but now we need to break it down into some of the other elements, the smaller elements and task oriented things that are their core functions that they need to master, that they need to grow in to be part of that sales team. And when we understand what the core functions of our business are and we communicate that well and we understand what the core functions of that individual team member, the person that we're looking to hire is, and we communicate that well. Now we have a basis, a foundation where to build from the next is to understand what the critical outcomes are. State this another way, is what does success look like? What does success look like for my business? What does success look like for this team member? What does success look like in the team members? Mind and ask the question, you know, working here or working with me or doing these kinds of things, what does success look like for you? But then also ask yourself the question, in order for this team member to be a success in your eyes, what does it look like? And make sure that there's a communication there. Because if your expectation from your team member is different, your picture of success is different than what the team members is. The team members working, working, working. And they're putting their heart and their soul into it. And they look at it and they're evaluating it based on their success criteria. And they say, God, I'm doing well, I'm really doing well. And then all of a sudden they get blindsided because your success criteria is different. So what are the critical outcomes that you want that team member to achieve? What are the critical outcomes that this team member is going to contribute to for the business to achieve? Ask those questions, get clarity on those answers and then communicate them well to the team member that you're looking at hiring. And then the last piece is this coaching.

Remember I said as an entrepreneur and as a leader, one of your tasks, one of your jobs, is to develop your team, to develop the people that are working for you, supporting you and working with you and to develop them. So that's going to take coaching, that's going to take guidance, that's going to take mentoring, that's going to take working with them. If you truly want to develop a team, it's never really a hands off. There is some interaction and transaction that goes on between you to help develop them. And so if we're looking at developing skills, they came into the game, remember I said the price of entry is their skill set. So they came into the game with a set of skills. They have a set of values that was in alignment with ours. We hire them, we communicate the core functions of the business, we communicate the core functions of their job and their role. We communicate the critical outcomes of the business. We communicate the critical outcomes of their role in that which is really the success criteria. But now we need to coach them because we need them to grow. As they grow, they become more valuable to us, they feel more valuable to themselves, and they feel more fulfilled. Many, I mean, there's study after study after studying that shows that people aren't there for money alone. And I think that if we start to look at society once their fundamental, this goes to Maslow's hierarchy of needs. But once their fundamental financial base is taken care of, they start to look at other things. And one of those things is personal growth, professional development, to be able to be more, to see that they have more in life, they have more.

To experience in life. And part of our responsibility as the entrepreneur, as the business owner, as the leader is to coach them, to grow them. I got to tell you, I look at some of the things that I've gone through through my life and some of the people that I've been fortunate and blessed with to have as mentors and coaches in my life, and they've developed me, they've coached me, they've taken me through hard times, they've given me difficult choices. They've certainly turned around and said, man, you are so way off base on that. And I've been beaten up one side and the other at times and well deserved. But that's what got me to grow. That's what's gotten me to be who I am, to understand at the level that I do. And trust me, I got plenty of more learning to do, and I'm growing each and every day. That's why I still have coaches in my world. I still have mentors that I work with. I still have colleagues that I work with. But when we take on the responsibility of someone coming under our umbrella that we say we want to employ you, whether it's a contract worker or as an employee or as a team member, we take the responsibility in some senses to contribute to their life, to make a difference in their life, to make their life better. And we have that ability. They're going to spend one third of their waking hours, or possibly more.

Running for us and fighting for our mission and really champing our cause. Well, I think in return, we owe it to them to be their cheerleader, to be their champion, to give them the tools that they need to grow, to know that by working with us, by working together as a team, that ultimately they develop new skills.

That we know that when we develop new skills in our team, when they grow, we grow and we end up with higher results. And so I think that what we need to look at in building our team and building our dream team and looking at these things is to understand that it's not about hiring someone and the salary you're going to give them. It's about hiring someone that fits, that fits the culture, that fits the values. I'll give you, for example, and many of you may know, when they changed the rules for the Olympics, the US Put their dream team together for basketball. They went in 1992, and they just dominated. I think the average point spread was 40 points. I mean, they just dominated from 1992 until 2004. And these were the best players of the NBA, that was the best players in the United States playing on that team in the Olympics. And they just, they beat team after team after team. In 2004, they came back together to play again and they did awful.

They were sloppy, they looked embarrassing at times and they didn't do well. And they brought in new coaching, they brought in a new philosophy and they told the team, they said, those of you that are going to be part of our dream team.

Need to make a three year commitment. And the reason for that is not about the commitment itself. It's about realizing that if we're going to really develop a business, it's about the team, it's about the culture, it's about everyone in alignment. And unless they were on, if they were simply going to play their couple of games in the Olympics and that was their sole focal point, then there was no way that they were going to create a culture of success, a culture of commitment, a culture of dependency on each other, which is what a team does. And so that's the reason that we need to look at this culture, the way we treat them, the value system, giving them the core functions, giving them the critical outcomes, giving them coaching to develop a team in an environment, a culture that fits their values, so they can grow and become more. And in the process, the byproduct, in the process, the byproduct is our own success. So by us serving again, I mean an entrepreneur always comes from a place of service. They're serving their customer by changing their lives, by transforming their lives with their products or services and their offerings. But they're also changing their team members lives by giving them a place to work, by giving them a place to be something, a place to grow, a place to live their dreams, to allow those things to come to fruition. And when they feel that energy and that coming into their life, they're going to fight for you, they're going to scream for you, they're going to champion you, they're going to cheerlead you and they're going to keep fighting for you. And in that process, everyone wins. So that's really it. I mean, I think that if you look at it at the fundamental level, if we get this right, get the skills, get the values, core functions, critical outcomes, give them coaching, help them develop their new skills so they feel like they're growing and your results will become the byproduct. So hope you found this of value to you. Again, if you want to get the downloadable guidebook that talks about how to hire people based upon values, go ahead and go to melabraham.com session029 and if you're not at your computer, go ahead and text mylegacy one word, no spaces mylegacy to 38470. We'll give you the download link. And if you found this a value, why don't you share it with a friend and subscribe to it? If you haven't done so already, make sure you subscribe because we're doing these things on a regular basis. It's the only way I can be your entrepreneurial mentor. It's how I can be your advisor and your mentor in your back pocket as you're trying to build your business. And if you have questions for me or things that you want to discuss about business, success, wealth, any of those types of things, go to askmelnow.com leave me your question and we'll make sure we get it answered on one of the upcoming episodes. And until we get a chance to see each other in the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant. See you soon. Cheers. Bye.

We hope you enjoyed this episode. Make sure you subscribe so you get access to all of Mel's business and success tips. And if you like this episode, share it with a friend. If you have a specific business or success question, you can ask it at www.askmelnow.com. remember, it's all about being bold, dreaming big, and living your way because the world needs you. Until the next episode, may your vision be grand, your journey epic, and your legacy significant.

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