MBA2238 Guest Teacher – Alvin Poh – How to hire the right people in order to scale up your business

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Ready to Save on New Tech 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 oh welcome to the $100 NBA Show. No fluff, just the good Stu every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is a guest teacher episode. On our guest teacher episodes we bring on an expert to teach their area of expertise. Today we have Alvin Po and Alvin's going to be teaching you how to hire the right people in order to scale up your business. And Alvin Poe, our guest teacher, knows a little bit about scaling. Alvin is the founder of superscaling.com he was also the founder of Voidant, which was the number one web hosting company in Singapore. He went from $0 to 35,000 clients with a team of 150 people and then sold the company for $30 million. He knows how important finding the right talent is to building the team you need to scale and he's going to share with you today how to do exactly that. He's also going to share what most businesses get wrong when it comes to hiring, how to create an attractive company culture so the best people want to work for you, and how to use his MMA framework to attract great talent to work for you long term. This episode is special. We got a serious expert on our hands. Let's get into it. Let's get down to business. I'm really excited to have Alvin Po on today's podcast because he's walked. The Talk started with zero, scaled his business to 150 teammates, was able to sell his company for $30 million. Really built an amazing asset. But he learned a lot of things along the way. A lot of mistakes were made and instead of you making those mistakes, he's going to show you how to avoid them so you save time, money and Effort as the leader of your business. Hiring is really your main job. Recruitment. Finding the right people to do the right jobs so that they can do the work, not you. But mistakes in these areas can be costly. Not in terms of spending salary on people that aren't doing their job. You're hand handing over the keys to your company to many of these people. They can do serious damage to your reputation, to your actual business or product. And they can create a culture within your company that doesn't allow you to attract the right people. So without further ado, I'm going to pass it on to Alvin Po to teach his guest teacher lesson. But I'll be back to wrap up today's episode and give my takeaways. But for now, take it away, Alvin.

Hey everybody, I'm Alvin Po. Thank you for joining me today.

Thank you.

Today I'll be teaching you how to hire the right people in order to scale up your business. So let's get down to it. Since 2020, I've been coaching clients who run businesses from traditional SMBs to new age SaaS companies. The stuff I coach them are on business fundamentals, so it cuts across all kinds of businesses. One of the biggest issues that businesses face is building up a powerful team. There are only two things that you need to focus on to scale up your business, and that's people and processes. If you aren't able to attract good people to join your business, you're going to face serious problems in scaling up your business. Today I'm going to talk about one fundamental way to attract and hire the right kind of people in order to scale your business. What a lot of business owners don't realize is that hiring is a two way street. As business owners, we aren't just looking to hire employees. Employees are also looking to join great businesses that they'd be proud to be part of and happy to be working in. Hiring needs to be more than just a transaction. As business owners, we need to build businesses that create a sense of purpose and growth for our team members. Over my own personal journey of scaling up my own business from a bootstrapped business to an eventual $30 million exit, I found that businesses need to focus on the concept of mma. And I'm not talking about knocking people out in mixed martial arts here. What I'm talking about is something completely different. These are the three pillars that every single business should have in order to create a company DNA, company culture and hiring environment in which people would want to join and want to do their best work in, but don't take my word for it. Let's look at the a study done by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. In this study, they gave the participants challenges to perform. To incentivize performance, they provided three levels of reward. You get a small monetary reward if you performed averagely. If you performed better than average, you get a bigger monetary reward. And if you did really well and became one of the top performers in the study, you get a large monetary price. Sounds familiar. This is exactly how businesses typically reward their employees. Top performers got monetary rewards in the form of bonuses, equity, and pay increments. If you performed averagely, you probably not get anything extra. Low performers don't get anything extra in the study. Here's what the folks at MIT found out. As long as the tasks were mechanical in nature, the incentive scheme worked as they expected. Meaning the bigger the reward, the bigger the performance. But here's where things became interesting. Once the tasks changed from being purely mechanical to tasks that involved more cognitive skill, greater rewards translated into poorer performance. Strange, isn't it? This defies how we thought the world worked. And these results have been replicated over and over and over again. These results have been what countless studies have been finding across industries, jobs, and countries. Only simple, straightforward, rudimentary tasks benefit from monetary incentives. Whenever tasks get more complicated and require the candidate to have more conceptual, bigger picture thinking, monetary incentives, they don't work. I'm not saying to completely remove money from the equation. Money needs to be there as a hygiene factor. People have families to feed, lifestyles to live, hobbies to indulge in. That needs money. So we have to pay our people well enough, but that's about it. To attract great people to join us and to encourage performance, we need more than monetary incentives. That's where MMA comes in. So let's talk about what it really means for your business. The first M stands for meaning. Meaning is the fundamental reason your business exists. Business owners need to stop focusing on a profit motive. That's why bad things happen to businesses that simply focus on higher and higher numbers. It's a curse that happens to businesses, especially those businesses that are listed because they are beholden to a group of shareholders and investors that continually press for greater and greater financial performance.

Performance.

This results in bad products, bad services, and uninspiring workplaces. People just don't like to do great work in places like this. That's why coming up with a company vision and mission that you believe in as a business owner is more important than you think. This will form the basis of your company's DNA and give your team a reason why they get up in the mornings raring to go to work. Heck, it's definitely something that will give you motivation as well. And this isn't just theory. I've had a client probably just tell me, albeit with a little bit of surprise, that one of his managers actually turned down a higher paying offer from another company just to stay on with his business. The reason? Because she believed in the work that the business was trying to do and that also translated into her own work being a lot more meaningful. The Next M is Mastery we all want to get better at things. It's all linked to dopamine. Dopamine is what's in our brain that is released whenever we hit achievements. That's why video games are so addictive. Video games are psychologically engineered to have us seeking for the next achievement. Whether it's beating a level or getting a high score. We are rewarded by a dopamine release and we keep seeking that. This is what happens with people with any kind of hobby, whether it's sports or fitness or music or crafts. These activities don't make people money, but yet people keep at it. In fact, sometimes they spend lots of money on their hobbies. Why? Simply because it's fun. Because they get better and better over time. Because it's satisfying and fulfilling. Well, guess what? We can use these same concepts in our businesses as well. Your business needs to have a strong reason for being this will translate into roles that, once properly structured and planned for, can allow for your employees to gain mastery. This gets people excited at coming to work and allows you to get better talent. Finally, the A in MMA stands for autonomy. One of my favorite companies is Atlassian, a software company that's based in Australia. They are behind products that you might have heard of Jira and Confluence. I like these guys simply because of the way they are managed and how they've grown. Atlassian is a public company, but doesn't act like a typical public company. One of the cool things that they've created is their shipitation days. It's a 24 hour hackathon organized every quarter where anyone in Atlassian can come together, form a team or not, and work on a project of their choice. 24 full hours of autonomy. This has led to the birth of cool ideas and new products like Jira Help Desk and numerous bug fixes for customers. These wouldn't have been born if not for this one special day that Atlassian has incorporated into their company culture before I figured the secrets to scaling up my business. I was just doing what every other business was doing, focusing on just giving out bonuses for performance. Turns out there's so much more that you can get from your business and do so while making everybody happier. So there you have it. MMA or meaning mastery and Autonomy. As business owners, we have a lot of responsibility upon us. By focusing on the right things, we can build organizations that make lives for our teams and ourselves so much more rewarding and fulfilling. Not to mention the to make our world maybe just a little bit better. That's how you hire the right people in order to scale up your business. Alright, this was Alvin Po. If you want to find out more about how to scale up your business, you can visit my website@www.superscaling.com. thanks again for joining me today. Now back to Omar.

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What a fantastic lesson by Alvin Po. I was taking notes. I love the stories he shared. I love the Atlassian example of giving the team members autonomy. We do this in our own company at Webinar Ninja. It's a huge perk that our team members love where they get to build fun, creative things that they came up with and use the tools and resources of the company to make it happen and see it come to life in the real world. It's pretty exciting. I also want to add my own tip. If you enjoy your time on the interview, if you feel like this person gave you energy meaning at the end of the call you're like, wow, that was fun. That was a great conversation. I would want that conversation to continue. That's a good sign. This is somebody that can add value to your culture. Somebody that's actually just pleasant to be around, has a great attitude. Sometimes I'll interview people for our team that are amazing on paper. They have great qualifications, they're smart and they've ticked all the boxes. But after the call, I just don't feel that motivated. I don't feel like I want to hang out with them later on. And often when I made that hire, it was a mistake because it's not a good cultural fit. Listen, everybody on your team is working 40, 50, sometimes 60 hours a week with these people that they are teamed up with, okay? They have to get along. They have to enjoy that experience. If they don't, they're going to look elsewhere and find jobs where they will enjoy their time. So culture fit is important and that's what I found out in my own experience. If you don't want to hang out with them in just a short call, why would you want to hang out with them all day long, every single day, even if you're remote? If you want to learn more from alvanpoe, go to superscaling.com and he's got a really cool resource for you@superscaling.com Rules for creating a World Class Team. All the words there are hyphenated. A lot of great stuff at that site. Go ahead and check it out. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 NBA show. If you love what you hear, make sure you hit Follow on your favorite podcast, Apple Podcasts, or Spotify. Just hit those triple dots in the top right hand corner and click the plus button, the follow button so that you get our next episodes automatically and get access to our archived episodes, over 2200 episodes in our back catalog. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. I grew up playing sports, team sports in particular and basketball in particular. And as a basketball player, even pick a basketball. One of the things that I know is very important is when you start picking teams, right who you have on your team. The collection of players is really going to impact how much fun you're going to have and doesn't necessarily mean all the best players. You can have, you know, five great players on your team and still lose because the chemistry is not there. You need people to play different roles. There'll be times where I'll have a team. I'll be like, for sure we're going to win. And guess what? We don't. And it's all about that fit, making sure all the pieces work together. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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