Why You Shouldn't Hire the "Qualified" Candidate

I think hiring is one of the hardest skills to learn because it is such a combination of hard skills, soft skills, qualitative, quantitative.

The first hires are replacing something that you're already doing. You're replacing yourself in a small subset of the activities you're doing on a weekly basis.

Every single time you hire someone in any role, you should think of it as there's three different levels of sort of person that you could hire for that role.

They know how to come in and turn the growth engine on, but they've also built a in the past too, which means they're. Once their like system is growing, they can then focus on anything new that would be building.

Because real quick as we're learning, the amount of bandwidth it takes to find the right person to go build something is literally ten times more than finding someone to just maintain a thing you've already built.

If someone is going to build something in your company, it's probably worth spending a hundred hours trying to recruit them. Boom. Welcome back to our another episode of the Espresso Hour, where the running joke is, this is going to be much shorter than an hour. Even though we're back in the afternoon again. Cole, this is gonna be our new spot for the week. I. I kind of like the. It's what, 3:18? It's 2:18 your time. We'll end a week jam session. What do we do? What do we learn? I like it. It's good.

By this point in the week, Monday feels like a year ago. That's like, I just. You're just trying to make sense of it all, you know?

And I feel that at this point, if you asked me what we talked about last week, I could give you a grand total of zero. Like frameworks or words. Oh, okay. We did the core values. I can actually remember it now because I made a whole video on it. But as a default, my brain is usually at like a 10% here, which is actually when some of the best riffings happen because you're just chatting in like you're less of a filter. You just start rambling on some framework you're thinking about, like I'm doing right now. So, anyway, glad to be here for another week.

There's. I forget when I read it, but there's some study that came out that showed how a lot of oftentimes your most creative states are when you are tired. And so the impulse is to go to bed, but really it's no, stay up and push yourself. And like, ideas flow easier.

That's what we're doing right now because it has been one heck of a week. Where do you want to start this week? We just got done with Jim for an hour, just kind of recapping interviews. We've had a couple hires we're making. I know you got a framework that you've been marinating on that we should definitely just go back and forth, fleshing out. Because I don't know if you remember when we were really filming Espresso Hour a ton was when we were going to start the paid newsletter business Bottlenecks. Because every single week we seem to come up with a framework of what we were doing at the time. Granted, we didn't know what we were doing at the time, so that newsletter didn't take off because we were definitely still figuring it out. But I feel like we have a little bit better of a sense of it. But I am enjoying having this time of the week as a forcing function to come up with some of those frameworks to talk about.

Yep. Yeah, I guess to start, you know, I've been hiring people since 2017, so that's eight. Eight years. Ish now. And I. I just. Now I'm starting to feel like I may be getting the hang of it, like maybe and not like just a little bit. I think hiring is one of the hardest skills to learn because there it is such a combination of hard skills, soft skills, qualitative, quantitative. It is very difficult to know whether the person that you're talking to that says they can do all the things that they can do is going to end up being the right fit culturally, interpersonally. There's just so many things that go into it. But I've been thinking about hiring a lot since the Hormozi workshop and especially as we've been hiring some of these new roles. The framework that's been marinating for me that I shared with you and I thought it would be fun to jam on, is this idea of every single time you hire someone in any role, you should think of it as there's three different levels of sort of person that you could hire for that role. And you're either hiring someone to. I'm using the word manage, not in like a hierarchical sense, but just like taking over tasks like maintaining almost. You're hiring someone to maintain, manage a role that you've probably been filling, a role that you've created, the criteria for a role that you've decided how it's supposed to best be done, and you just need someone to do it for you. You know, maintain the next Higher up on the. The rung is someone to grow it. So you did all the things I just said, and you maybe even give them a little bit of direction, like, and here is how to grow it. I want you to take that over, which is usually some skill set blend of like marketing and advertising operations, stuff like that. The third highest is you either have a role that you've been doing or a vertical or something that you haven't done yet. And you give. You want to give someone very minimal direction, and you basically say, now go build it. So they're not maintaining it, they're not growing it. They are literally building it from the ground up. And those three types of roles, you know, it's like, number one, maintain requires the most direction. Grow requires the middle bit of direction. Build requires the least direction. And it was really interesting once this started to click for me, where I realized that 99% of people that I and we have ever hired are not in the build category. You know, they're usually in the maintain or sort of grow category. And there's nothing wrong with that because you need those types of people for those different types of roles. But connecting this to Hormozy's, the theoretical constraint of a business is the sum total of the knowledge inside that business. It makes sense why we, for example, have felt like we weren't able to build as many new things because all of the building is dependent on us. Which is very different than looking at an opportunity and going, you know, I would love to have an entire. For example, when we were talking about, I would love to have an entire department just building affiliates for ship 30 and PGA. Well, my default, and our default has always been we got to go figure out how to do that. And then you start to realize, well, no, that's one version of that role. Another would be we figure out how to do it and then we find someone to grow it. But the ideal is we just go find someone who's already built that department in another similar business, and we incentivize them to literally build it from the ground up. And just now I'm starting to realize, like, that opens up so many other possibilities.

Okay, so many different directions we can go here. I really like this framework because it simplifies the order in which you will hire people as well. Because if you are the one who grew, actually stepping back, the first hires are replacing something that you're already doing. You're replacing yourself in a small subset of the activities you're doing on a weekly basis. So you hire an assistant you hire, you know, a sales rep, if you're taking on the calls, whatever it is. And that is always to maintain something that is already going on. And until you have replaced yourself from all things that you are currently just maintaining, you cannot focus on the next hire, which is hiring people to grow something. And then until you have people who are all growing every department for you, you cannot focus on building or making the hire that goes and builds something. It's extremely difficult.

Yeah, because real quick as we're learning, the, the amount of bandwidth it takes to find the right person to go build something is literally ten times more than finding someone to just maintain a thing you've already built.

I would say it's ten times more than grow and that's ten times more than.

Yeah, you're probably right.

Manage, you know, because so for example, right, we're hiring a sales manager. That is the ultimate action. So there's three ways we could make that higher. We could go with someone to manage and just do what I'm doing that is working, but it is not where we ultimately want to get to. But then you can go and do the next one, which would be hire someone that you think could grow it again. As some of the people that we've talked about that are higher level candidates here probably would be good growing candidates. Right. They will take what we have and they will improve it in a good way. And then the third one would ultimately. And the person who I think we just settled on has the capacity to build after they grow. So it's like they know how to come in and turn the growth engine on. But they've also built in the past too, which means they're. Once their like system is growing, they can then focus on anything new that would be building. And it's kind of like more better new in the same way. Right. It's like build, manage or manage, build, manage, grow, build is the same thing. Like you get the employee to just do more of what they're currently doing, then you get them to do it better, which we grow and then ultimately anything new is the build side. So I really like that.

That's true. Yeah, that does match up pretty well. The other thing about hiring this and like watching you go through the process of hiring this sales manager is again, everything takes twice as long as you think it's going to take. And just observing the level of effort that's had to be deployed to do that effectively. And then you, and then, you know, especially the conversation we were just having before this, you See the return on that effort when you look at, you know, oh, if, if we had just settled on the first person we talked to, like, compare the first person to the last person.

Right.

Like, very, very different, you know.

Yeah. And it's so hard to relearn that lesson because at our stage, our time should be only invested. If you had 50 hours, you could find someone in 10 that could manage and then spend 40 trying to onboard them. Or you could spend 25 on grow and then 25 onboarding them or all 50 on a build and then zero, really, on onboarding and ramping and training and all. The long term though, the big lesson, I've had a couple on this one. If someone is going to build something in your company, it's probably worth spending a hundred hours trying to recruit them, at least because of the amount of money that it will make you in the future. Like, we had not actually experienced a build, pure build employee at any stage right now. I'm excited for this to see if it's potentially the first one on the sales manager side. The second is it really can be the only focus of your entire week because of the amount of context switching that comes in when you have multiple recruiters hitting you up. You got. I got different lead sources. I mean, I sourced 10 candidates just from LinkedIn Sales Navigator, sending a bunch of DMS, and now I only sent 10. Like, I could have sent 50 and probably done a ton more interviews by the end. I was like, I, you know, the person we were hopefully ending up hiring. I almost didn't take the interview because I'd taken so many. I was like, now I got my guy. Like, I feel pretty good about this, you know. And the third is there is a direct correlation between the number of interviews you have and the quality of the candidate that you will eventually bring in.

100%.

And that has been a lesson because it's not that, like, yeah, we could have had a home run candidate on the first one, but you would only know that they are a home run if you did 10 more. And so in the same way that we just found the best one on the 10th interview, it was only because I had context. And it becomes so much easier to say no, because when you take that many interviews, I only compare each person to the interview I had before. And if they weren't better than them, well, obviously I'm not going to hire them, so I will just move on. But then you have this interplay of like, okay, if you get a top three, you got to make an Offer the first one, hope they say yes, they don't. Then second one, like, there. There's a lot in here that just. It's all I've been able to think about despite being sick this week. So I wasn't able to think about it quite as much. But, like, that was just a big lesson of. It's been the last two weeks the main focus for me, and I think we got the best possible one in, honestly, the entire space, which is actually really exciting to say a lot.

Yep.

I don't want to preemptively do it, but.

Yeah, yeah, I agree. There's something too, where a lot of times I observe that the more people you talk to, the more things you learn a. You didn't know that you cared about. So as you talk to more people, you know, like, all of a sudden when you start, you know, quote, unquote, putting people beside each other, you realize a trait of one person you suddenly value more because you have things to compare against or, or like previous experiences. You know, if you only interview one or two people, it's. You're. You're really just asking yourself, like, are they qualified? But it's not until you interview like, you know, 5, 10, 20 people that then you can start getting into the nuances of, you know, okay, well, yeah, you all maybe played the same role, but this person over here specifically played that role between these two revenue ranges, or while they were doing that, they. They built this other system that we didn't even know to ask for. But now that you say it, oh, it'd be cool if you built that for us. You know, it's that pattern. There's. There's a pattern recognition aspect to hiring that you just can't. There's no way to get around it. It's like, just talk to more people most.

And it's similar to talking to customers. You talk to more people in your program, you're going to learn more, you know.

Yeah.

And I felt that the most with this hire because I went into it saying I'm going to keep taking interviews until I stop learning things. And I actually was still learning things, so maybe I'm breaking my own rule here. But I also said that I wasn't going to make the decision before. I had at least 10 and today was my 10th. And so I feel pretty good about that.

Yeah.

Anything else on that exact hire before? Because you are also making one on the newsletter ghostwriter side that I think you're learning a couple things about, too.

Yeah, same thing. You know, it's like for that role, I don't, in many ways, I don't need. And I wouldn't want a builder to come in for that role.

Right.

Like, that's not what we need, you know. And so it also depends on what function you're. You're trying to fill for A, and then B. Just this broader feeling that we were talking about before this too is because we've grown to the size that we have. The only things that move the needle here, from here are big things. Long gone are the days of like, oh, if we make an extra five grand this month, we feel it. Those days are gone. And so the only things that move the needle are big things. When. When it's only big things that move the needle. That inherently means that these are projects that take 3, 6, 9, 12 months in order to really, like, see them come, come to fruition. And when that's the case, the, the growth of the business is fundamentally constrained by how much you can do. Because right now, like, we are, quote, unquote, the only builders. If we want to do something new, it's, well, it's on us to do it. And so it's been really interesting to reflect on that and realize, you know, how much can we really grow from here if it's. If the sum total of all the knowledge and what we're able to build is like capped by us. And I've been so interested in that question lately.

To even start to make these build hires though, we needed the growers across the board or at least the manage. And so to me, do you remember it was like last June when I started to do the like, portfolio level org chart and then we saw how many like director levels we were playing. I do think that within the next like two weeks, we will actually be out of every director level position. Yep, I think so as of right now. Right. If you say sales, marketing success, operations, brand, we still have some people playing multiple. I do like having brand as its own thing. That's probably the one we're still in.

Brand is the only one.

Right.

Because we have, you know, Katie for success, we have this new person for sales and we have Daniel for marketing. And so really the only thing.

And Daniel for operations.

Yeah, yeah.

Which is awesome because we had a conversation about that and that will eventually potentially be a bottleneck if you have to go hard on one of the others and like, what that means for maintenance on the last one. But yeah, brand, I'm actually happy to still manage. Right. Because that is if you and I are spending a lot of time there. Like we, the business is going to grow. This podcast us creating personal content. That is where our time is best spent. And so the more that we are there with growers on every other part of the fulfillment process and sales process and marketing process, we just generate eyeballs. That's a pretty good gig.

Yep.

You know, and that's ultimately where we'd want to get to because then if it's like how I've been having conversations with these sales managers, it's. I want to spend time high level strategy. Like what. Where's attention going? That means one on ones with department heads and execs, which I got to do this week. And then just creating content and then surgically going in, it's like, okay, actually no, we need to really scale up our retargeting efforts. That's all I'm going to do this week and then pick and choose the people that I need to communicate with during that time. But we're very close to being able to just the business will run at its current pace and then the new effort is just a choice by us of where we deploy it.

Yeah, it's been crazy to think about all the different stages that we've had to get through to get to this point. And then also sort of the, the irony of this new point is, okay, yeah, you're out of these different roles. But in many ways the burden grows because not only are we responsible obviously for the whole thing that we've just built, but all of our attention gets put on marketing and generating the attention that goes into the business. And so then like the business's growth is predicated on how well are we able to do that. Yeah, you know, I'm fine with taking.

That one on though.

Say for same like that I think of all of our skills, that's both of our best skills anyway. And so that is what it should be, you know, but it's just funny to look back for like two years and like I think we've seen that we're like, oh, if we could just get there. And it like you just had to have had to go through so many different growth periods in order to get there.

Yeah. But at the same time, over the last two years we've had to do all those roles and continue to generate the eyeballs that we ran. So, you know, it should be easier to do that, which is the whole point of this. But I mean, we had to just learn these lessons of you have to get yourself out of the operational side of Things, but you can't skip them. You can't skip. You know, maybe I could have hired a sales manager a little bit earlier, but not below a team of five or six. Like, I had to be the one to do that, or there had to be like a very clear progression within, but there just wasn't, you know.

Yep.

But we're close. We're close. And that's exact.

It's very exciting. Yeah. You know, I remember obviously we are experiencing this just on a relative scale, a much smaller scale. But you always hear executives talk about how the higher. The higher up you get in the org chart, how it's. It's. You no longer are making tons of tiny decisions. You're making one or two really important decisions, you know, And I remember when I was younger, I would hear that and I was like, oh, that sounds so easy. You know, you just wake up and you're like, oh, I got to make one big decision, you know? But again, going back to hiring like this, this is. Has been such a great example for me. Even just observing you go through it, where it's like, that's the one thing that you've basically focused on and it's one decision and it seems simple, but it's not. And it takes a lot of mental bandwidth and there's a lot of complexity and there's a lot of switching cost, and there's a lot of time that you just have to sit and think about it and be like pros and cons and who would mesh better and who would be harder or easier to train and who would bring other skills to the table. And like, there actually is a tremendous amount to think through. And that's it. Like, it just makes so much sense why you can or can't do certain things at certain stages in business. Because, like, how. How could you make advanced decisions like that while you're still in the fulfillment or while you're still playing sales manager? Like, it just. It's. It. I'm more and more understanding why that's the natural progression of things.

You know, the hard part is when you are the one that played that director level, making the hire means you have to spend less time at that director level, which ultimately leads to, like, a slight dip in performance.

Yeah, sure.

At that thing. And so it becomes another problem of communication. Right. To hire someone, to hire someone to replace you at a director level, you have to communicate to everyone that's been reporting to you, like, why you're making this change, why it's better for them, what's going to happen in the immediate term as I give this less attention and why it has to be put over here. And here's what the long term benefit of that is. So that's been another new thing too, of like me stepping out of, you know, daily sales management meeting, 15 call reviews per week, like three per day, trying to have three per closer per week. Things like that that have gone down, that then have to ramp back up when you have the person replace you. But that was an unexpected challenge for me, was watching underperformance happen and know that if I step in and give it all my attention, I'm going to hurt us in the long run. That was a, it's been a challenging month on that front because you just have to let the little fires burn. Like Hormozi says on that, you're just going to underperform until you have the ability to direct someone else to go build the things that you want to build.

Yep.

Like on the, on the manager call that I just walked through with you, and he was like, yeah, the team could be way bigger. It's like, I know that's why I'm here, you know, like, because I can't do that right now. And if I tried to do that, then ultimately I would be stuck managing a bigger team, which would be harder to place myself out of. Like, lots of nuance there. But I'm glad you picked up on that because yeah, that's the whole reason is we want to grow this department. I can't be the one to do that.

And other things in the business suffer, like right now, not just sales, but you, you also play other roles as well. So if you were to go, okay, I'm going to take this upon myself to build this. You're taking time from somewhere.

Right.

You know, you're taking mental bandwidth from somewhere. And again, that's why I really think that the way Hormozi put that is just so brilliant because you can see how as long as it's dependent on you like that, you, you are the bottleneck to the entire growth of the business. And so it's cool to be at a point where we're not just identifying these things, but you can tell we're working through changing the thought pattern and changing the default. Admittedly, my default is always, every time I look at something, I'm like, oh, I gotta go do that this weekend. And it's like, no, that is not the default anymore. The default is asking the question like, is this the right thing to work on? And and if it is, who's doing it besides you and how do you identify that person?

You know, I think we talked about this as we were building the team to the size we got to of we're increasing the overall capacity. But until this sales manager hire was made, we actually didn't increase the capacity of the business. It was maxed out. Where from here, I do think we have the capacity to triple the monthly revenue run rate and without any additional hires.

Yep.

Just based on the scaling of advertising, brand and potential new ways of generating demand. Right. And we can be far more prolific with that when that is all I focus on, which is exciting. Again, it took a lot of glass chewing to get here.

Yeah. For real. For real. But I feel like we say this at every. Every new level, which is like, oh, what an exciting level now. You know, it just more growth, more things to learn.

That's all for this week. I think, you know, that was. We're not going to have a zillion takeaways every week, but I am excited to have these underway and then start to use this, like weekly espresso hour jam session. Like, what are the cool new things we're building? Because there are new. There's webinars. There's just new things to experiment with that we can only do when we can align our efforts. And that's when we had the biggest returns ever in the business, were when you and I were working on very similar things rather than always in silo, which it was. Okay. Because we had to play these roles to get here. But when we go really hard on. Okay, we're going to run a model monthly webinar. How do you do that at level 10? Okay. We're going to build a DM setting funnel. What do we need to do on the content creation side for that? Or. Yeah, there's tons and tons and tons. We're only going to focus on scaling the back end and keep front end the same size. What are all the things we need to put in place for that? So we've built that foundation for tripling over the next 18 months is what I would roughly pencil it in at. And that can probably be a double for 25 and then a sting like a 1.5 for 26. And that puts it in a pretty good spot.

I'm ready for it. Yep, that was.

Let's get this offer letter written, you know.

Yeah, that's right. We got some work to do.

That's right. That's right. So anything else jam on today?

No, that's it. I just, I think it's good getting back in the habit of crystallizing these takeaways as they pop up, you know, so we don't forget them because we got something new every week.

Exactly. And we'll do it in a year. Special hour, montage, highlight reel, all that good stuff. So that's it for this week's shorter episode. If you're on YouTube, leave a comment. Throw us a like, subscribe and watch some of the other espresso hours. If you want to go down the rabbit hole of all the different business frameworks that we've talked about for the last two years, building up to 14 + million in revenue and ultimately far beyond there. If you're on Spotify or Apple podcasts, you get any Instagram tags? I don't think I did. We haven't released a new one. Actually, we haven't released a new one since last week, so.

That's right.

If you're watching this and you're on Instagram, Cole and I are actively building there. Throw a story up, tag us, we will repost it. And we love to hear espresso our listeners in the wild. That's it for this week. See you guys here next Friday. Peace.