MBA1277 Does Your Business Have a Diversity Problem? + Free Ride Friday!

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It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster and with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals. Hey, today is Free Ride Friday so make sure you hang on to the end of the episode to hear who won this week's Free ride. Every Friday we give away a lifetime membership to our course Easy Course on how to deliver your own online course in 30 days. It's a $500 value over at EasyCourse Co, but somebody's gonna win it for free this Friday and every Friday. All you gotta do is leave us an itunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw. Listen in on Friday to see if you won. It's that simple. It's our way to say thanks for showing us love on itunes. Let's jump into today's episode. Hey O. Welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Real talk for real businesses in the real world every day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online. And in today's lesson you will learn does your business have a diversity problem? This may be a sensitive topic for some people, but I really believe it's an important one. This is not political. This is not me imposing any kind of beliefs. This is recognizing the fact that having a diverse team having Teammates around you to help you build a business that are from different cultures, different walks of life, men, women, helps you create a better product and run a better business. I've experienced this firsthand. The more diversity we have on our team, a better product we deliver because we're getting inputs from different perspectives. And guess what? The world is diverse. Your customer base is diverse. So if you're able to serve that diverse customer base with a diverse team, you have a healthy advantage. So in today's episode, we're going to have you take a look at your own team. We're going to delve into some questions when it comes to hiring. How to find the best talent while having a diverse team at the same time. You don't have to have one or the other. A lot of people are like, well, I just want to hire the best talent. That's great and you should, but you can have a talented, diverse team. We get into how to do it and more in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. What do Google, Pepsi and Disney all have in common? They prioritize diversity when it comes to building their team. They're very outspoken about this. Diversity is something very important to them at all levels of the business. Entry level, middle management, upper management. Now these are big time corporations that have huge stakeholders that they have to answer to. Money is important, the bottom line is important. They're not going to mess about and say, hey, diversity is important just for PR and make some random hires, especially in the higher up positions. They're doing it because they believe it works and everything they do needs to make financial sense because of all the stakeholders they have. For example, Pepsi was one of the first companies to have a marketing director that was African American in the late 60s. Unheard of. In fact, in many areas of the US they lost a lot of business because of this choice. But they knew in the long run it would be good for the business. Because Pepsi's trying to sell their drinks and products to not just one demographic, not just one type of person, but all types. And they want to be able to understand everybody and they want their product to be informed. And when we say product, we're talking about everything. Not just the actual product, but the marketing, the sales, how they approach their customers. They want to be able to do all that right? With that in mind, when you're building your business, when you're creating your product, you're serving a market that is going to be diverse even if you're niche and this could be very subtle. For example, one of the things I learned in our team by having some diversity and being conscious of it is our products is for sale online to non English speaking companies in non English speaking countries. So having people on our team to inform us about our user interface on our software to say, hey, this is not totally clear for a non native speaker, we don't understand what this word means or an icon here would make a lot of sense. If I didn't have somebody on the team to tell me this, I would be oblivious really, because to me it makes total sense. And I wouldn't be catering for my audience, my customers that love my product, but wish maybe it was built for them as well. Listen, we all come from different walks of life, socioeconomic levels, different cultures, different understandings, different upbringings, different beliefs. And those differences really can help your business because you get to see your customers in greater detail, because you have access to people that represent them, people that understand them in a lot of ways. Now this is just as important when it comes to gender. Often when Nicole and I will sit down and say we need to make some hires, we'll take a look at our staff and say, how many men do we have? How many women do we have? And we look at from the perspective that, you know, women are going to contribute a female perspective in a lot of ways and so do men. And these are generalities. And of course there are exceptions, but you want to be able to have some balance. And if you feel, if it's not as balanced and doesn't have to be perfectly 50, 50, but if you feel like there aren't any areas of representation for men or for women in your case, in whatever departments in your business, then you need to address that. You need to be conscious of that at the very least, hey, you know, we don't really have a lot of women on our engineering team or in our team in general. Ask yourself why. Maybe, okay, you hired the best candidate that you could find, but maybe not. Maybe you didn't look hard enough to find a great candidate that was a woman that can help your diversity in your team. And the same goes with just cultural diversity. As a new business, as a new entrepreneur, we often hire people that we get along with, we feel comfortable with, and sometimes we just hire people that look and act like us. And you can go to about pages on many businesses, on many websites and see what I'm talking about. And it's totally natural and it's probably unintentional. You know, you're Just doing what you feel is a good hire. You're making the hire you feel is best. It's totally natural, and it's most likely totally unintentional. You know, you're just making the best hire you can. And that just felt right for you because, hey, they're similar to you. But I actually like to make a hire of somebody who's different than me, somebody who challenges my ideas, somebody who will bring a different perspective. So in that regard, I do believe diversity should be a metric in your hiring system. So if you're looking for education, experience, likability, flexibility, reliability, all that stuff, one of the metrics should be diversity. Is this person going to add to the diversity of the team? And you may say, hey, that's not fair for that person. If I hire somebody who is French and I have a team full of French people, but you're making the hire that's best for your team, Are they going to add diversity? Is there somebody who is equal to this task that can add that diversity to your team? That's a plus. That's something that you want to add. That's what's good for your team. That's what's good for your business. It's just one of the criteria you need to look at.

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One of the ways to find out if you have a diversity problem is to ask your team. Maybe even just do a blind poll or blind survey. Hey, do you think our team is diverse? Do you feel like we have enough diversity to inform our products and services and our business? If there is a way we can improve our diversity, how would it be? Get their feedback. If you're a small team, you know less than 10 people, it's intimate. People are going to give you honest answers. And it's good to know from the outgo, from the start, before you start growing to hundreds of teammates so you can be on the right path, so you can have the right habits. Hey, if you don't agree with me that diversity is an important thing to have in your business, no problem. I can only testify to the fact that when I made it a priority in our team, it really helped us tremendously and a huge benefit is that we learn from each other a whole lot more and therefore we get better, the business gets better. Thank you so much for listening. Today's episode's not over though, because it's Free Riot Friday. I gotta give away a lifetime membership to EZcourse, our 30 day course on how to build your own online course. Let's see who won this week's Free ride. And the winner is MPCorley. MPCorley says powerful. 10 minutes, 5 stars. This podcast is so well done. Somehow Omer is able to pack hours of content in just 10 minutes and he does this while tackling very challenging topics in business and challenges that leaders face. This is a must listen to. Well, thank you so much mpcorley for that awesome review on iTunes. You are our Free Ride Friday winner. Your mission is to email me over at Omar at 100 NBA net so I can hook you up with the free ride. If you want to win a free ride, just leave us an iTunes rating and review and you enter our weekly random draw to win free access to our $500 course. Easy course to build your own online course in 30 days. Thank you so much for listening. Have a wonderful weekend and I'll see you on Monday. But before I go, I want to leave you with this. Just being conscious of the fact that you can improve your business through diversity is a huge step. It's going to help you. It's going to be top of mind. Even when you're just getting started and you're making your first hire or two, being aware of what you need to do and being aware of how to do it is actually a good thing. It's actually a helpful thing. It's not a total waste even if you haven't implemented it yet. Alright, I'll see you on Monday's episode. Until then, take care. Of.

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