Transcript of a YouTube interview (host Nate Tilley) with Sabri Suby on attracting A-player employees and entrepreneurial mindset. Key points: entrepreneurs often believe "no one can do it as well as me," but to scale they must accept hires who perform at ~70–80% and make themselves redundant to focus on high-leverage activities (incentive systems, team structure, culture). Tactical advice: write job ads as targeted sales letters to one ideal candidate; build an employer brand and energized culture (celebrate small wins); and address skill shortages by creating internal training (example: King Kong Academy) to upskill hires. Ends with YouTube CTA.
Questions this video answers
King Kong Academy (an internal learning-management bootcamp for digital marketing).
Chapters
Amanda Sabri Subhi joins me now in the studio. I really look at business as an incredible vehicle to really, like, make good and make change in the world.
So what's been your biggest mindset challenge in building the business?
I think in the beginning is the limiting mindset that a lot of entrepreneurs have had that like, no one's gonna be able to do this as good as me. And that's the truth. No one is going to be able to do it as good as you. But, like, you have to be okay with that. And it's like the whole thing is like, you can find someone that can do something as 70% as good or 80% as good as you, then you have to be okay with that. Unless you want to create a job for yourself. If you want a business and you want the thing to be able to run without you, and you want to be able to take the family to Bali and switch off for a couple of weeks and not come back to, like, some rubble and rocks on the ground of a business, and you want people that can actually do something, then that's just something that you have to be okay with. Like, there's going to be areas of the business that people can do things that are way better than you, and then there's going to be other areas where it's like you're watching people fumble around and do things that you know that you could do way better. Right. But that's not like a higher order. Tasks like, the job is really to make yourself redundant at every step of the way so you can focus on more higher leverage tasks like designing incentive systems and team structures and leadership and building a team and fostering culture and bringing in great talent within the company that people want to work with. Like, they're, they're the important things. You can't be so wrapped up with maybe a one to one interaction with one particular client or vendor or whoever it might be. Sure, you might be able to do it better, but you have to buy back that time. Like, when you speak to any entrepreneurs, they're like, yeah, good people. Just, they don't exist. Like, it's like, where are all the good people hiding?
And I hear that so much from people I work with.
The biggest challenge, the biggest that everybody talks about, and the first thing is, like, it's easy to look at it that way, but that's kind of deferring ownership of the problem. Like, what kind of company would you need to build where it wouldn't be hard to get people to come and work for you is another lens to look that through, right? And looking at your employer brand and your job ads and the opportunity and the culture that you're building that people want to come and work in, right? It's like, you know, I've got incredible people that work on my team and like, so the people are there, they definitely exist. There are skill shortages in some industries and stuff like that. But I just don't kind of give in to that negative speak that a lot of people do where they sit around and they just talk about how hard it is to find good people or to retain good people. But more so it's like, well, how do you solve that problem?
So how would you say you've done that? If you were to describe the King Kong employer brand, how would you describe that? Like, what have you done that's attracting people to your business?
Yeah, sure. So first of all is just like putting out incredible work where people talk about the stuff that you're doing because it's so good. And then the other thing is like making sure that like, you know, when you're writing a job ad, you're basically selling people to come and work for your organization. So it needs to be a very good sales letter and there needs to be lots of reasons that those people would want to come in and, and work on your team and be a part of that company. And that's the first thing that most people get wrong. They write like these boring ass vanilla job ads that like just is a snooze fest and they expect to just get the unicorn talent. Like if you're looking to fill a role, you're probably looking for one person more often than not. So don't write that job ad to a hundred people. Write it to the one person that you really want within your organization. That it needs to be very specific, it needs to be long, it needs to be attracting the kind of person that you are trying to attract. So that's the first thing on the advertising side of things, being out there, putting out good work, being somewhere that people have, there's a reputation around and they want to come and work there and the gong is just gone off in the background. One of my sales guys has just come in to ring the gong. That's another thing, right? Is this like celebrating the small wins, creating a culture that people want to come and work in? That's intoxicating that when you walk in the office you can feel the energy crackling down your back and there's a whole bunch of people that really want to be there. And that is the thing that kind of attracts people. And then another big hurdle to overcome is that if there is a skill shortage and if there is a lack of people within the industry that you operate that is going to be operating at the level that you want them to be in order for you to be comfortable to pay them what it is that they're asking for, then the logical thing is, well, how do you create a surplus there? Or how can you find somebody and then train them to be as good as you want them to be? Right? And that's something that I've had to do. Like digital marketing. There is a huge skill shortage in my sector. And then Covid has accelerated that because the demand for digital has increased exponentially. And that means that more people need to hire more people that do digital marketing. So we built something called like the King Kong Academy, which is like, it's like an internal university, a learning management system that has hundreds of hours of content on there on all the different disciplines of digital marketing. That puts us in a position where we can hire people that are a bit green and we can run them through like an eight week bootcamp. That makes them way better than the type of talent that we can hire out there in the marketplace. If you enjoyed this video, please like and subscribe. We're dropping a video like this almost every single day on YouTube and if you've got any questions, leave them in the comments box below. Below with heysubrey and I'll do my best to get in there and get that answered.
