Saul Talks Hiring + Delegation - How I manage 28 team members and $60,000 in monthly payroll

Hello.

Saul here. Saul talks about stuff. I have a important video. It's been a minute since we made a video and I apologize for that. This question though is an important one and I want to get into the topic pretty quickly here. For those that don't know, my name is Saul. I answer questions on the Internet from people that ask me on Twitter and Discord and YouTube comments. I'm a business owner. I've been doing it for almost 10 years. Five businesses, quite a few people that I employ, quite a few different areas between software, 3pls, Amazon, reselling, our own D2C brand, etc. And some really cool communities that I get to run. And that's where a lot of these questions come from. So the one that I'm answering today is near and dear to me because I sucked at it for a long time. And from what I see online and people I talk to, it's not easy. And a lot of people either want to do it and don't know how or do it too soon. And that is hiring and delegation. Really good friend of mine recently asked to make sure that I made a video on this and it was already in my list, but I bumped it to the top to give you some stats. I do have five entities that do something or other. So again, some of that software, some of that is selling physical products on the Internet, some of that is shipping products to their cost to the customers that buy them off the Internet. Between Those we have 28 staff. Some are full time, some are part time, some are contractors, and payroll is about $60,000 a month across the five I've hired, I don't know, maybe 200 people in my lifetime. As I said Right now, about 28 currently work for me. Prior to starting my own business, I was middle management and I had about 25 or so that were working for me any given time. But the churn rate was a bit higher there. So a lot of interviews came over that six year period. Fortunately, right now when I hire someone generally for my current roles, they tend to stick around, which is really cool because hiring is tedious. Okay, so I took some notes over here. So I look over my left. That's what I'm doing. I have hiring 101 and delegation. They kind of go hand in hand, but they are a little bit different because you can hire the wrong person. You can hire and not know how to delegate. You can hire for the wrong role. So the first question I have written down is when is the right time to hire? It's going to vary a little bit depending on who you are and where you are in your business and your life. For most people, I recommend hiring when you've either hit or very close to hitting a personal wall of some kind in your business. May it be you don't have enough time to do X because you're spending too much time doing Y. Maybe your business is, you know, you know, the pathway to growth, but you just don't have enough time to do it all yourself. Usually it comes down to you needing more bodies, right? More minds, more people to do something that either you're doing or don't know how to do. It kind of falls into those two camps. When I first started hiring, this was my very first hire, was probably 13 years ago. I would mostly hire what I consider now bodies, right, Which I try not to do anymore. But these are people you know. You're hiring because you have a specific role in mind. I'm hiring for someone to do sales, someone to pick up the phone and call prospects, someone to answer emails. And so you, you get resumes, you get CVs, and you essentially you're just hiring a person to sit in that chair and do that job.

And I believe now, after doing it long enough that that is for most roles, the wrong way to look at it. What I do now is, and I actually, I actively tell people I'm interviewing this, like I don't want to hire a body. I firmly believe I can train anyone to do most things. So nine out of ten of my hires, their resumes are important, but what they've done physically, their experience is actually a little bit less important than how they've done it. And the type of human they are, how they've handled problems, how they've navigated through career, even like some of their, like I say, social circle, but how they communicate and hold themselves in social settings, you know, the type of person they are, personality wise, that to me is quote unquote, the X factor. When I hire and arguably the kind of the A higher that I want as opposed to like a B player and a player most, again, I think nine out of 10 roles that person watching this is hiring for, you can train, right? You've probably done it. You're hiring for an Amazon business, you're hiring someone to source inventory, you've sourced inventory, so you've done that. You're hiring someone to prep in a warehouse, you've done that. You're hiring someone to do admin, you've done that. Like as a business owner, you've Likely done pretty much everything in your role or in that job. Not 90%, I should say. So nine out of 10 hires that you're making, you're likely hiring for something that you've done and you can train. Doesn't mean that you have done them perfect, right? Or that you know exactly how to do it like nuts to bolts. But you've done it well enough to train someone to start and then that's where the person comes into play. Because the right person will learn from you, but then also actively learn proactively on their own. They're going to go independently out there, they're going to start watching content, they're going to read books, they're going to take suggestion from you. Hey, like there's this thing going on, there's this YouTube series, there's this great book series, you know, I'm going to pay for some additional training for you and those are the type of people that are going to be excited to do that. So that's when we, we talk about hiring or like the type of person that I hire for 90% of the roles. It's that it's. Yes, it's great if I'm hiring someone, sales, who's done some level of sales before, but not necessity, right? It's, it's more like if I'm hiring for sales and that's gonna be someone on the phone or someone answering emails, how speedy are they in their communication? How well are they spoken? Like, how well spoken are they? How chameleon, right? Like can they fit in with multiple different types of personalities? You know, do they interact well? If people older than them, younger them, um, you know, similar styles to them can, you know, the, the right person for a sales role is someone that can, I can say morph, but when they get on the phone with a prospect, they are emailing back and forth. They read the room really well, right? They read, they understand, they have empathy, sympathy, and so they don't even know, they don't have to know how to sell something to be good at that. That's something that's hard to teach. It's hard to teach that level of that ability. But you can certainly teach them how to sell your particular product, right? And, or you can buy trainings for them. So if I was going to hire someone for sales and they were amazing, their history was like top notch sales companies but they were dry as a board and they didn't know how to read the room and they turned off customers, you know, their experience doesn't matter at that point. And generally what I find, the more experience they have, maybe the more rigid they are in wanting to learn new things. Right. They're, they're less open to change. Not all the time, but certainly some of the time. I've been fortunate to be able to hire people much older than me. And some of them are absolutely like, yeah, like, hey, I'm open to anything. I've done this for 30 years. But like, I don't know at all. And like the people with less ego, like, I love those folks. So when it comes to, we kind of talked. When is the right time? We kind of talked about that very briefly. But I actually think it's more important to talk about the type of person and that's the type of person I like to hire. The latest hire I did was for one of our customer service roles for a D2C brand. So that is an email focused role, interacting with customers on a daily basis who, you know, some percentage of them are just going to have order problems, but another chunk of them are going to have, hey, is this product right for me problems? I have xyz. Is this going to be a good fit for my life? How do I, you know, I haven't bought it yet, but how would I use this to benefit me kind of stuff. And again, I can, I can teach that individual what our product does, how it works, why it benefits the general public. But I can't teach them as quickly or as easily how to take in information from that person and then give it back to them in a way that makes them feel good or how to understand between the lines what they're actually saying. They say X, but they actually mean Y. And you kind of get that through experience or just through your upbringing or, you know, through just the life you've lived. It's much harder to train and teach that quickly than it is to just teach them what the heck is we sell. And then they can kind of do the, they can have the gap stop and they can figure out how they're going to translate that then into making the customer feel seen and heard and interested. And so that was a pretty smooth hire. I've been pretty fortunate over the last, I would say, five years in particular, that very, very, very low churn and in the people I hire. And that comes down to my next point, which is kind of where to look. Right? So how do I, how do I personally hire most of my folks? And then if I can't find anyone in that way, like, what's plan B? So plan A And I think you're going to see this a lot on the Internet, right. I love people that come from personal recommendations. So if I have current employees that I like. Right. That I do a great job, again, going back to the type of person they are, I think, you know, people attract what they, what they are. And so if you're a great employee and you are a hard worker and you're, again, we go back to proactive, like proactive learning, right? You, you kind of seek out problems, you come up with your own solutions, you test things on your own way less handholding. I expect that a percentage of the people you hang out with are going to be that way too. And so if I'm hiring, very first thing I'm going to do is start with people that I already have. Do they know anyone? I don't even care if it's family. I know some people don't like hiring family of employees. I've certainly been there on the receiving end of some of those problems. And honestly, I've done it all. I've had husband, wife work for me. I've had mother, daughter work for me. I've had cousins work for me, brother, sister, people that are dating, that one's probably the riskiest. But I do like the whole friend thing. I think it works well, especially if you can keep them. Right, can keep employees long term. Part of the benefit of the employee, see in you, in your business, is the work environment. So it's not just the work they get to do, but it's also the environment they're in. And if they're working with their friends, they're way more likely to stick around. So that's where I start and I get a little pushy, right? So I'll mention it to the team. If there's anyone that immediately jumps out and say, oh yeah, I have a friend, great, but I'll, I'll talk about it. Pretty much every call, every meeting, I'm like, hey, we're going to be hiring for customer service in this phrase. So in this exact role, I knew we were hiring. I knew we had a Runway. I wanted to hire someone before the holidays. So I kind of started my search in August thinking, hey, I need to have someone in and trained by November 1st. And so I mentioned it to the team in August. No one bit. No one was like, oh yeah, I mentioned it again two weeks later. I had two people were like, oh, you know, maybe there's someone. And so they reached out and then I followed up with them and they're like, you know, they weren't interested in get back to me. So then I think, you know, probably mentioned it another, you know, the next two weeks, every meeting and it wasn't until late like middle of September, so it was over. It was a month maybe probably six weeks after I first mentioned it. Where then on calls, anyone that had shown even brief interest like saying oh, I might know someone or I thought that they were in a position, you know, generally speaking, you know, if they're already doing CS or if they're doing an adjacent role, like we have someone in that, that helps with our marketing, you know, she isn't doing cs, but I think there's, there's a lot of overlap there and they're kind of the right demographic. You know, I think for a lot of times when I hire, I don't really care where they're from or who they are. But I also know over hiring lots of people that there are certain personality types that kind of fit in and do really, really well certain roles. And so.

For CS it's a lot of, I've hired a lot of students, I've hired a lot of people that work full time elsewhere but want a part time job. I've hired a lot of parents. And so the person who I was talking to in marketing, she.

She lives in Chile and I, you know, I mentioned it a couple weeks ago prior and she said that there might be someone. So then coming into September I started having one on ones with people. I was like, hey, you mentioned that like 100, I'm going to have to post this publicly. I'm going to go hire someone the next two weeks. Do you have anyone? Like is there anyone in your life or in your circle? And she goes, you know what, you know, there is actually and that is the person I end up hiring. And so, you know, again, that's not the first time that's happened. I think you just kind of. People don't connect all the time. You have to say things multiple times sometimes for them to think of that person that they're, maybe they just had lunch with them but, but prior to that they weren't thinking of them or maybe they saw something on Facebook or Instagram. You know, like the more you bring it up, the more likely are to kind of connect the dots for you. And that's why I do, you know, if you can give yourself a Runway to hire, certainly, you know, three months is probably where I would give obviously, you know, if you have hired before for this particular role.

It'S probably going to be faster also depends on the role. You know, a warehouse employee, if you already have a supervisor and a manager in place, that can go faster than hiring your very first employee or someone that's going to have a larger role in your company. I would say two or three months though, should, should kind of be your wiggle room. The faster you have to hire, the last minute you have to hire, the more likely you are to end up with someone that might not be a great fit. So yeah, so she, she introduced me, we, you know, she emailed, kind of laid the groundwork. I then followed up, we had a meeting. So essentially what I then do next, right? So what does the interview process look like for someone who's been recommended to me? I always do two rounds of interviews. Generally speaking, a lot of the people I hire are remote. So I think people watching this, you're going to be hiring some level of remote employee as well. If you're working on Amazon or an E commerce store, I think remote is fine. I do two REM remote interviews. Essentially. I do like a phone interview. Like I do essentially a. Are you sure you want this interview? So that's. We've emailed, I've asked some level of questions via email. I always asked for at least one thing via email because I got, what I want to know is how quickly they reply and their level of communication style. So when we email, I've always like, maybe they sent me the resume, maybe I asked for it again or maybe I ask for something, you know, whatever it is, I asked for like one piece of information. Um, how fast do they get back to me and how thorough is that? So it's like very, very, very small amount of homework that doesn't feel like homework. Uh, so that's step one. Honestly, a lot of them just don't do that. And if, and, or they take three days, right? If, if you're interested in the role and I email you on a Monday and they say, hey, can you resend me your resume? Right? Simple, simple task and you resend to me on Thursday.

You know, I, you know, and hiring you for a role that's email dependent, that requires a person that is attentive to detail that isn't the greatest look.

You know, especially if I say an email, hey, I want to meet with you this week, can you resend me your resume and we can schedule a call and then that's Monday and you don't send me till Thursday. Well, I said we wanted to meet this week. You know, I understand if you're busy. I personally believe, though, similar to dating, right? Like, if you're interested, you're interested, and you'll find a way and you'll find time. It takes two seconds to. To go on your phone and email to jump on the computer. You know, if this is something that you're interested in doing. So they. Some people just kind of weed themselves out that way. Some people honestly just don't reply, and that's fine too. So first step is some version of a back and forth. Number two, I try to do some kind of like stage one interview. It could be a phone interview, it could be a video interview. If I'm hiring in person, it's always a phone interview. If I'm hiring remote, sometimes it's video first. And that is kind of quote unquote, a more conventional interview for me. Going back to my first point, when I interview, I again, I talk a lot less about their experience.

I straight up tell them, you know, upfront. This is gonna be more of a conversation and interview. I don't have a series of questions. We're gonna go down to answer question, answer, question. I want to have a conversation with you. As a human, I really just enjoy hiring humans. Not robots, not bodies. I want to get to understand what's in their mind, their personality. And so, yes, I'll look at the resume and we'll have some conversations about their past, but it's more specific things that they've done as opposed to where they've worked and how they got the job and all that. It's, you know. Oh, let's say they. I was, you know, hiring for customer support and someone used to work at J. Crew. Well, I'm not gonna necessarily ask them, like, specifically about the J. Crew. I'm gonna ask them more about a thing that when they worked at J. Crew doing customer support, what is something that they wanted to change about their job, about their role? How did they interact? Like, what did they find that their favorite thing their boss did? Right. So how did their boss interact with them that they really appreciated? How did someone interact with them they did not appreciate? Like, how did. How are they best managed? Essentially.

How did they, you know, were they encouraged to bring up new ideas? If so, like, how did they. What were some of those ideas? Were they implemented? How did they go about? You know, again, I. I'm a fail first kind of guy. So when I hire someone, I really push them to fail very quickly. I tell them aggressively that, you know, there's very little that they can do to mess up that we can't fix. And so it's great when they have a history of trying things, of proactively trying things. I really love. You know, a lot of times I hire people that are in their 20s or 30s, so they're kind of closer to the school age. And so it's great to me to understand like I want to talk about something they're really passionate about. So if they have advanced degrees, what did they write? You know, what was like their thesis on if they have, you know, anything at school, like what is a project they did that they really enjoy? Like what is the subject matter that really speaks to them why? You know, it's great to understand what they want outside of work, like what moves them as people, what motivates them, where do they want to be? When I said like, hey, what is the dream? I usually don't mean like what is the career dream? I mean like what is the dream dream? Like, oh, I want to own a farm with a hundred dogs. Like that. That's a dream. That's not specific to their career. Some people have career dreams, which is great, but like the question is designed not to be specific to their career. Again, I'm looking for personality fit, I'm looking for how they interact. I, again, I feel very confident I can train most of these folks to do the job I want. But I, by the end of my hour interview, I really want it to feel like I'm just kind of a conversation you'd have over coffee. Like I want, you know, the walls to come down a little bit and just to feel comfortable. Because when we work together, we are going to work quite a bit together. And while some of my stuff, you know, are very project focused, like do this. Yes. And I'm going to go do it. I'm going to come back to you. A lot of the rules, you know, are startup esque, right? I think almost anything you hire for Amazon or E Commerce is pretty startup focused or D2C. I would consider a startup even though we do, you know, 8 million a year. You know, I think a lot of the things that we do aren't, you know, we're not giant corporations. And so when you're not hired for giant corporation, a lot of the times you hire staff for, for a role, but they have to wear lots of hats, they have to do lots of things and that just requires the ability to communicate back and forth quickly and proficiently and in a friendly manner. And so I would, you know, that is really helpful for me to, to get that Understanding of how they're interacting. So by the end of the interview, it feels like, yes, okay, we have a rapport. And as we're working together, we can, you know, they're going to feel comfortable bringing me ideas. They're going to feel comfortable breaching outside of just like the specific role that I hired them for. Because that's, you know, that's what I would. I want them to want to do and to feel. So again, yeah, kind of the. How do I interview that? That's pretty much it. It's very conversation based. It's very, you know, more a personality, um, per, you know, empathy, sympathy, you know, I kind of talked about a little bit. I'm missing the. I can't think of the exact word I want to say, but.

You know, making them feel seen, making feel heard, understanding what motivates them? Is it money? Right? Is it freedom? Is it providing for their family? Like what, what gets them out of bed, excited in the morning? Why now? Why this job? Like, why, why are we here today? And if it's money, that's fine. Being motivated by money is not a bad thing. But it's great to understand that what motivates them because eventually your job is going to be to motivate them. Like, that's kind of a lot of your job as an employer is to keep your staff motivated.

I'm trying to think if there's anything else that kind of goes in. I think every interview is kind of unique that I do, but they all kind of service back to that, like, connect us human mentality for. Not again. This is, this is going to nine out of 10 of the staff that we look for. The one out of 10, those are the experts. Those are the people that you hire to own an entire category or line of thinking around your product. So there's a slightly different curriculum for them when we hire. So for example, if I'm hiring someone to lead our entire paid spend department, so that's like they're gonna. Their job is to spend $200,000 a month on Facebook.

I do need them to know what they're doing, right? I, I can't train them to do as if I knew how to do the job as an expert, then yeah, maybe I could hire someone to train them. But at the end of the day, like, I like to hire people that I can trust their brains. And I like, hey, I hired you because you know how to do this. And so I'm going to kind of ask you questions and we're going to back and Forth. But like, at the end of the day, like, I think that you, you know, you're an expert in this particular field now. They still have to be able to work as a team. Personality is still a huge factor. But I do ask then more questions and more things related to the particular work that I'm hiring for. As opposed to, again, 90% of the people I hire, it's more of a personality and work fit and employ, you know, can they fit with the existing crew?

Proactive nature, all that. The other one's a little bit more expert level. And again, I think that's about 10% of the people I hire is more like expert level because you only need like one of those per department and you might have skill sets already that are expert level. So you can go higher and train. It's just like the gaps that you have, like where I'm, you know, I understand meta. I understand it well enough to be a little bit dangerous and ask questions, but I'm certainly not. You know, the people that have, that we have working in those roles, they, they crush it, right? They, they're all, they wake up thinking about it, and that's all they think about. And every new tool that comes in the market, AI or otherwise, they're like, how do I use this to, to spend more money on Meta? You know, I, I don't do that, right. I don't have the flexibility to do that with everything else that I do. So those are the people I want to hire that are already experts at some level. And then, yeah, we continue to train them through, through classes and things. I'm happy to do that, but it's a little bit different than the 90% we talked about. So then, like, it goes to the next phase, like, well, how to train. So we've, we've talked about interviewing, so I've interviewed. So, um, that was kind of remote. I have a warehouse here. I have people that work at the warehouse for those folks I actually had to use. Indeed. So I'm not against Ray. If I don't have anyone in my network, I'll go out for. For those guys used. Indeed. I posted a job within like a week. I had 400 applicants. It was, it was pretty insane. And that's, you know, not unexpected, particularly in person jobs that don't have high levels of requirements. And for those, I just reviewed resumes pretty aggressively. I was looking again, kind of between the lines.

I, you know, what did they do? But more like how long do they work there and what do they talk about in Those jobs, like how do they describe the job in their, in their resume is important to me as opposed to like what they did. Huge gaps in employment, you know, maybe what was going on there, that kind of thing. And so for the 400, I think I probably personally read 75 because, you know, I was sending out messages as I was finding good ones. I messaged everyone on indeed and said, hey, so your resume, I'm interested. Are you still interested? Please reply. Half the people never replied, right? You just kind of weeds them out. The people that replied say great. And then I sent them a Google form for them to fill out and I actually asked them to record a brief video, like a five minute video, essentially, like a video resume. So of the, let's say I had 75 people that I messaged, 35 of them said yes. Of the 35 they sent it to, maybe 15 actually did it. So now we went from 75 to 15 without me talking to anyone. Of the 15, then I did try to schedule interviews, video interviews. And I think of the 15, five showed up, you know, either, either 10, the other 10 didn't schedule or ghosted me. So then we had five show up and you five hired one. So, you know, that's why we talk about taking, you know, I, I recommend kind of giving yourself two to three months. There's gonna be a lot of people, you know, when you first post a job, you're gonna see like a lot of, of interest, but just know it's like a, a, a much smaller percentage of them are actually going to be able to go all the way to the last round. And it's part of your job is to create checkpoints between them applying and getting hired that aren't super time intensive for you. So again, that's simply messaging them and asking for reply. That's asking them to fill out a form that's asking to make a brief video. Like every, you know, every hoop is just an opportunity for someone to remove themselves from contention. And that's why, you know, you see like C Suite, right, the executive level jobs, they go through like eight rounds of interviews, right? There's tons and tons of interviews that happen. And that's because number one, they want to make sure they get it right. It's a lot of money and equity usually on the line. But number two, it also helps them weed out folks, right? It's just like let people remove themselves and go from 400 to 25 without having to, you know, interview or try to interview everyone because that's a full time Job in itself. So you find someone and you want to offer them the job. Of course you have to figure out financials and all that. I like to pay well. So you know, I start at, for local, actually for, for my warehouse staff and for customer service, I start at $20 an hour. A lot of times job listings in my area are $15 an hour. But I'm a big, you know, you, you kind of get what you pay for. And I want people to be motivated, I want the right people to be interested. Um, you know, I find that, you know, if someone's working a job at Chick Fil A. Chick Fil A is a really great training program. So those people are actually really well trained already. But Chick Fil A doesn't pay as well. So maybe I can go and I can pay them a bit more and they want to give their hours to me instead of Chick Fil A. But Chick Fil A did a lot of the legwork. So if you can pay up a bit, oftentimes you can get people that kind of come at least, you know, not pre trained necessarily in exactly what you want, but they've worked in environments that coincide well with what you're looking for.

And I also find, of course, like, and this isn't rocket science, if you can pay someone well, they're more likely to stick with you because you know, they get to then take that money and use it for the personal life. If that's kids, if that's family, it's, that's home and that's vacation, whatever. I, um, you know, jumping from a $25 an hour job down to a 17 hour job is a big hit financially. So if you can pay up, you tend to get people that last longer. So I, I always start at just slightly above market rate. And then I work in a pretty aggressive raise schedule. I used to work in corporations and it was like 3% a year was kind of standard. I think that's insane.

So I will hire them in day one, essentially help them understand what that race schedule looks like. So for someone, for example, the person in the warehouse, she started at 20. Within six months she was at 25. So what I'll do is, you know, we'll have a three month period, a three month training period. Call it whatever you want. I don't know there's a word that some people call it, but three month period, where it's like a trial basis, if you will. And that's going to be at the 20 and we're going to have, we're you know, at the end of that three months, X, Y, Z, things like, they need to be good at these things, they need to be able to do these things. If they can do all that and everything's good, they're going to get a bump. They're going to immediately get a bump to. I think it was 22 is what I bumped her to. And then we're going to do again, we're saying, all right, hey, we're 22. You're crushing it. Great job. Going to reassess in six months and if you continue to do these things or like we're going to add tasks over the next six months as we add new things and we're still working together and it's going well. At six months we're going to go up to 23, 24, 25. There is usually a ceiling, right? I think right now 25 is kind of like where she's going to be for a bit and then we'll work, you know, potentially as I bring on more team members to the warehouse, she then moves to a managerial role. Then that's a 30 an hour job. So. But she's going to be prepared for that because of all the training that we've done ahead of time and that's worked really well for me. I've done it remotely and in person and I think having those like clear expectations and building them out far enough in advance so it's not like, oh, and having multiple. So it's not like, oh, they work great for three months, they get a little bump and then they kind of like dwindle down again. It's like, oh, we're gonna do three months, we're gonna do six months. Some people do first six months and then a year. I find like three months is nice because like 90 day sprints and then you extend it to six months and then you probably extend it to a year after that. So every like you get three month raise, six month raise and then 12 or will be 18 months after they get hired. So like three tiers. Because the last thing you want to do and what I tell people when I interview is like, I really hate hiring people with an expiration date. It's timely and expensive to hire someone, right? You put a lot of effort in training them, a lot of effort to finding them. Last thing you want is to hire someone and then have them leave in three months or six months. Honestly, I even hate when they leave within like a year. So best case scenario for me is I have someone for at least Three years, Right. That's, that's great.

And you know, being fortunate that it's occurred. But I think part of it is from the day that you're hired, it's actually building an 18 month plan, right? Building a plan that says, hey, over the next 18 months we're going to reward you. As long as work keeps going well, they're incentivized to stay at least 18 months. And it keeps them engaged and keeps them interested. And part of the training of that is, you know, train them well. It's. If they fail, it's on you. You know, if you've done the interviews well and you found the right person and you believe, you know, again, there, there are going to be some rare exceptions where like everything went perfect and the hire was just like the wrong fit and you, you just didn't see it. And that's definitely happened. You know, I've unfortunately had to let people go and it never is fun. But if you've done everything right to begin with, there's a lower chance of that happening. And so you gotta trust that process. And then you get someone in and then you train them and if they don't do well after that, you have to take some of the blame for a while. Now again, eventually it's not going to be on you entirely. But you know, I think as an employer, you know, your staff and your team, they're going to be as successful as you let them be and, and you help them be. And so that's, you know, a huge, a huge, I would say a failing point. But that's something you definitely see with, with owners that have high churn. It could be that they hire poorly, but it also very well and oftentimes I do see this is they train or they manage poorly because it's, it's, you know, you can't. The thing that I see a lot on the Internet is like, well, I hired someone and they're already trained by someone else and they're just gonna immediately start in like plug and play and you know, that's, that might work rarely, but I don't believe that's gonna work most of the time or long term. Um, you know, you really. Cause you, you don't know how they. Well, they were trained and you have no real connection to them. You want them to understand that number one, you know what you're doing, right? In that either you don't, you know what you're doing to help train them or you know what you're doing. Like you have a vision you have a passion. Like people want to work for people that are excited and interested in the thing they're doing. Like, I own a company, if I hate, if I hate the company I own, how are my staff going to feel about that? Or if like, you know, I show no interest or like I always complain about it, or, or I, I, you know, I'm like, eh, I could take it or leave it. Like there's no security there. They're not going to like that. Like, they want to see that you're interested and passionate about what you're building because that will spill off into them. And they're going to be interested and passionate because, you know, at the end of the day, I want people that work for me, that feel like partners and so to, to feel that way and to feel some level of ownership in a company. They need the actual owner to like express that hardcore as well. And that's where training comes in. And training nearly never ends. You're going to have sprints, you're going to have probably like one to two weeks of like hardcore training where they're going to shadow you, they're going to learn from you, you're going to teach them, and then you're going to step back and watch them and then you're going to teach them and watch them. But training will like forever continue. And you need to have somewhat routine standups, you need to have feedback sessions. And during the interview, ideally you've learned how they handle feedback and the type of feedback they want to hear and how they hear it and like how they handle rejection or how they handle being told they're doing something incorrectly so that you can then express it to them in a way that they're actually going to hear and use as opposed to like getting defensive or getting upset. I firmly believe when someone is fired, they should never be surprised unless they've done something absolutely egregious, like they just stole $1,000 from you out of nowhere. Generally speaking, when someone's fired, it's because there's a pattern of issues. They should never be surprised to be fired. It should have been clearly documented and you should have been trying to help them with whatever was causing the problems multiple times.

And explaining to them what would happen. Thumbs up, explain to them what would happen, right? Like, hey, you're not, this is not going well, let's work on it, blah, blah, blah, blah. Like let's, you know, we need to get to this level. And then they don't gather and then you have a conversation, hey, wait Listen, we talked about this. We trained on it. We're not getting there. You know, we really need this to be xyz for, you know, this to work out, for the company to be successful, for you to be successful in this role. Let's go over it one more time. You know, by the third time, you know, if you're like, hey, I don't think you're a good fit for this role, it should be surprising because you've essentially tried to train them twice or tried to talk to them twice about the thing that you're letting them go for. So if they're surprised, being fired for something that they wasn't like, horrible thing they did, again, I think that you're not managing them well, you're not training them well, you're not having great feedback with them. So. And just assume similar to, again, you've probably listening to this, have worked in a job before. Complacency happens. It's natural. We're human, you know, you will eventually start to slow down. You eventually get a little lazy, a little bored. So having continued conversations with them actively, like giving them slightly different tasks or new tasks, like upping the ante, being like, hey, you've been doing really well doing this thing. You know, for example, at the warehouse I started, all she was, all she was doing was prep, pack and ship, right? So she was just pulling stuff offline, prepping it and shipping it out. She got really fast. She made no mistakes. Like, there was a period, I think that was like the first three to five months was just like her crushing that. Well, then we started adding in. All right, well, like, hey, now we're going to start doing Amazon. Now we're going to start doing ebay. Now you're going to start listing or taking pictures. Now you're going to start like more happily doing returns. Like, we're adding layers to her job so it doesn't get boring, it doesn't complacent. She feels seen that. She feels like rewarded. And with that, of course, comes a raise. So, like, again, that's, that's what we try to do and that's what I try to do. Even if the goal is that this person's only going to do one thing, it's going to be sourcing, right? Well, if you're teaching them how to source inventory for Amazon for the first three to six months, I assume, sorry, trying to sneeze that they're going to have spend goals, they're going to have a budget or they're going to have like, Specific types of products, looking for, hey, like, I need products that are at least $5 profit, 30% ROI, etc. Well, if they're getting really good at that and they can do that kind of in their sleep, well, then let's up the ante. Like, hey, all right, you, like, you've been spending a thousand dollars a day. Let's spend $3,000 a day, and let's look for products that we can make at least a hundred dollars on a sale. Like, let's change some of the. The variables. And you're gonna take everything you learned from the first part, but now we're gonna make it a little more challenging, a little more interesting. I think there was a study, right, like, you ultimately want things to be 9% harder than what you're capable of doing, right? Like, I think it's like 9 or 11% harder than what you're doing currently. So if you like, are you running a mile in 10 minutes? Well, like, you want to shoot for running a mile in, like, nine minutes, right? Like, it should always be, like, it should be like, between like, 9 and 11% more challenging. And that's like the perfect human.

Zone to then actually, like, meet that. So if you went from, like, running a mile in 10 minutes, running a mile in five minutes, that's been overwhelmingly difficult, and you're likely going to give up, but 10 minutes to 9 minutes, 9 minutes to 8 minutes, right? Like, we break it up into pieces, but it's challenging. And so it's the same thing here. Like, if you can add, like, little challenges to the role over time, keeps them engaged, keeps them excited, you ideally have found what motivates them early on. And so, you know, sometimes it's money that's great, his raises, but sometimes it's other stuff. So, like, for example, one of my staff, they were motivated because they wanted to take a vacation like they want. They like to travel, and they were looking for a job that would allow. That would pay well enough, but really would allow them to, like, travel more because it was remote and they could work anywhere and all these things. And so instead of motivating them with, like, a bonus, let's say I could have given them a thousand dollars bonus because I'm a big bonus guy. I just, like, I. I'm a fan of that rewarding. But for them, instead, we bought them a week long, like, on a week long. It was a long weekend trip. So we're like, hey, like, you know, obviously, like, if you're a Sally and ECOM seller, you probably have a lot of credit card points. I was like, go pick a hotel in this city which I know they wanted to visit and we're going to send you there for three days. I'll pay for the hotel. I'll pay to get you there. When you're there, like, yeah, you're like, you know, you probably buy your own food and stuff, but like we're going to cover essentially 90% of the bulk costs of that trip. That was incredibly motivating to them. That was like, that was way better than $1,000 because, you know, I've taken out a lot of like the, the Pain of Shrek figuring out the travel situation. But they also saw way more value in being able to travel. That was what they were motivated to do. So find out motivates people and it's way easier or like someone and as you get to know them as humans, it's also like I have someone who like absolutely loves animals. And so, you know, if you know that as you're like looking for things to reward them or to make them feel seen, like you can then go and do things that are animal oriented for them. Like it's kind of, again, it's like if you're dating someone and you actually listen to what they're talking about, you'd be able to buy the better gifts. Well, it's the same thing with your employees. Like I do think that you should like keep your ears open and listen to what they're saying. So then you can reward slash, like make sure they feel seen in ways that resonate with them personally.

So that, that's like, to me, I know it's already 40 minutes in. That's to me like kind of the hiring quote unquote, 101. It was like, when is the right time? The type of person I like to hire, where to look, whatever we talked about, like, generally speaking, I like to look within my circle. If that's people already worked for me or people I trust, I'll talk to other business owners, friends. But referrals are great, especially for those expert level people. If you can get a referral from like another business who's worked with them, that's wonderful. How to interview, how to train and how to motivate. The second part, which hopefully we will take another 40 minutes on is kind of like delegation. We talked about a little bit through the hiring people have and I in I'm a person. So I mean I suffered from this. I think it's natural to feel.

Feel like there's a Control problem, right. Like, well, I'm owner. I'm the only person that's going to care about this at this level. So like no one's going to do it, right? Or to this extreme or whatever it is. No one's going to do it the way I do it and I can't trust anyone else to do it this way. So like I'm just never going to.

That is, you know.

That, that is, I want to say how businesses die. But stagnation, hardcore stagnation.

You know, we talked about my background. You know, there's, there's five companies that I'm either a full owner or part owner of.

I work on probably three any given day and like three of those five. But I also, at this point in time could disappear for a week.

And I think that the companies would still, they, they would, they would, they would do well. Right? Again, I don't think that they would, you know, if I disappeared for a year.

Would they explode? Would they continue to scale as aggressively? Probably not. But I could certainly go away for a week or two weeks. I got really, really sick last fall in 2024.

Last October, actually almost a year ago. Exactly. And.

It led to some really extreme stuff. A lot of hospital stays and I was pretty much out of it for six months.

If not longer, but like really bad for like four or five months.

My businesses, they didn't grow. It was Q4, so it was unfortunate they didn't grow as well as they could have, but they're still here and they did grow and I didn't fear for them to stop running. And the only way that's possible is through delegation and through team members and through partners.

You know, I have a very young family. I have a nine month old son. I really want to spend time with him. I have a wife with, with some medical stuff and I want to spend time with her. And so I design my life around being able to do that. And so for me, delegation was not something that I had a choice in. Right. Like it had to happen. But I did drag my feet way too long. And so when we talk about hiring, this goes back to the type person, if I hire a body, just a person to fill a seat and click some buttons and do a job, like do this. Yes sir. That person is way less likely to take ownership, way less likely to step up when needed. If I just disappeared, are they going to be proactive? Are they going to realize things aren't getting done and maybe they just start doing them?

There's no better feeling than to disappear and realize you're really not needed. And so.

When I hire, I hire with the type of person that I would want to replace me personality wise. They might not be interested in that, but I like that they like they could. And so when you do that, delegation becomes a lot easier.

And then it goes down to training. Right. And you also have to realize that they're not you. But that doesn't mean that they're not as good or as you know, they can't do as great of a job as you. They're just going to do it maybe differently. And I agree that as an owner, no one's going to care more than you, most likely, but they could care 95% as much and that might be enough. So if you really want someone to care as much as you, then you should go and find partners, which I'm a big fan of all my businesses. So four out of five of those businesses have other owners or partners that either I've started the business and sold some of it too, or I came in as a partner, huge fan of that. So picking your partner is probably a whole other video if you want this to be like hours and hours long. But that's, you know, that's the same as finding someone to marry, right? A partner is a big deal. You might talk to them more than you talk to your spouse. But if you hire the right team, they almost act as partners in a lot of ways. And you empower them to do so. You empower them again to make decisions and to make mistakes. And as they grow, you empower them to make more decisions. You know, my warehouse now, I, last year I was there every day. I was, I was hands on every day. Now I, you know, if I get there once every like 10 days, that's probably average, sometimes once every two or three weeks. But it runs about 85 to 90% as well as if I was there, right. Like I think that if I was there, it might be a little faster a smidge.

There might be some more decisions I make that they're not comfortable making or haven't thought of. But that's because I know where the company's going. Like I want it to grow in a certain way that they are not thinking. But though that day to day, like what needs to get done is done. The communication is still there. I talk to them every day.

And that wouldn't have been possible, right. That was a big trusting for me because there's a lot of inventory, a lot of money sitting there. We have clients that expect things from us. And so being able to walk away was important. When I was.

Running the, when we started a group called the Buy Box, which is our kind of Amazon e commerce support server, for the first two years it was pretty much just me doing kind of ticket support and I was getting massively burnt out. And we started high, we had, we had hired team members and staff and I just didn't think, you know, at that time it was difficult to get someone that I thought was like as in it as I was in the weeds and like would do like the level of work that I was doing for, for our members. But we did find those people and we found them because we, they were originally members. They joined our community. We taught them not how to be staff, we taught them how to sell on Amazon and how to sell online. And they saw the difference we made in their lives and they wanted to start making a difference on others. And so they came on board as staff. And so we talk about what motivated them, right? We talk about how I found them. And then from there over the years they ultimately became part owners. So now I have partners in that business that care as much as I do. And you know, maybe when I'm gone they push in different ways, they have different feelings about the success of the company. But I know that they care deeply about our members as I do because they were one and I don't have to be as in the weeds every day. So you know, it doesn't happen immediately but it is important to get there if you want to grow. You know I talked about here under delegation, I wrote the question why? And it kind of goes back to the hiring is like when is the right time? Well it's like when you start delegating, you have to ask yourself why are you delegating? Like why are you? You know, it could be because the work itself is burning you out. You know, that's where I was with the Buy box. It could be that the time that you're putting into doing whatever it is you're doing, you can do more with that time. So that's at the warehouse. You know, I, I was packing orders.

And that wasn't the best use of my time.

It could be that you want to spend more time doing other things non work related. You want the freedom, right? A lot of us get into this for freedom and you know, my son was, and my son was born in January.

So suddenly, you know, I was really into freedom before. But I, I could work 12, 15, 16 hours a day as I Wanted to, but now I, I don't. You know, I want to sometimes still, but I also would prefer, like to see him, you know, just exist, right? Like feed him lunch. I get, I get to have lunch with my son, like, every day. I take him every morning and I, you know, I make him eggs.

There's a freedom in that. That's impossible if I don't delegate. And so the people that I see asking this question and the people that get stuck.

Mostly I see them burning out. And what you'll find also if you don't delegate eventually is things start failing.

You know, you have every intention of doing everything, but you can't. And so eventually things start falling through the cracks and you.

I hate to say, start disappointing people. But that's inevitably what happens because you start saying yes, because you truly want to do something, but you can't. And so you don't do it, or you don't do it very quickly, you don't do it well, and that disappoints people. And so you actually are hurting the thing that you love by not letting other people help you. And you don't need, like, just let anyone help you. But if you go back to, we talked about, like, you can find the right people. You can 100%, especially if you've been doing it long enough. You have likely customers or friends or community members or social media people. Like, you have people that have watched you for long enough or been a part of what you're doing that would 100% work with you as, as a team or staff or partners. You just need to ask them. You need to give them the tools to be successful. You have to give them trust. You have to understand they're going to do things differently than you, but that's okay.

But you got to put the time in to help them see your why and why you're. Why you do what you do.

But yeah, that's, you know, delegation is a really hard skill, but it is a skill and it takes practice. So start small, but start.

That being said, don't start too early.

Unless you know the reason that you might want to start delegating. Day one is if, like, again, you already own a few businesses, you're already doing other things, you've done it before and you want to scale, right? So you start a business and you immediately hire people because you know how you've done it. That's different. But I think most people maybe delegate. Some people, I think the majority of people don't delegate enough. Then there's A small substitute of people who delegate too quickly and they, they start an Amazon business, for example, and two weeks later they've hired a sourcing person, but they don't know how to source. The, the owner doesn't like know how to source exclusively very well. So they like hire someone and they believe that that person's gonna know. And like the employee then is teaching the employer, which is fine.

In some ways. But you have to, again, going back to like with me with, with ads, you have to be, you have to know enough to be dangerous. Like, you have to know enough to know when someone's pulling the wool over your eyes or like what questions to ask to like force a real answer. If you know absolutely nothing, someone can tell you anything. Right. And so.

Delegate tasks away that like make sense for you. Start with ones that you know when someone's BSing you and you know how to do but aren't likely a great use of your time anymore.

And then once you start doing a couple and you see how it works, you'll, you'll be into it. It's going to cost you money. You're going to have to spend money to make money in this case because obviously you got to hire people. It costs you money. So when you first start delegating or start doing things, you know, you might see profits go down a little bit or revenue. Yeah, mostly profits. Right. Because revenue shouldn't change, but that should be a long term success play. Right. If you delegate correctly. Like when I stopped working in the warehouse, well, I pay my team between 20 and $25 an hour. So if they work for eight hours, one of them works eight hours. You know, they're making say $200 or $300.

That's not nothing, right? That's money. I have to pay them. But eight hours of me here on the computer buying inventory, I can make a lot more than $3. So, you know, figure out what you're gonna do with your time when you start delegating. Or it could be, I said, like, I want to spend the time with my family and so it's an investment and that, that's fine too. But understand that it's of course, like likely you see a small dip in your profitability for a little bit, but it will work out in the long run, very much so.

As you grow. So we did 55 minutes. I think this is the longest one yet. I appreciate you hanging out with me again. My name is Saul. I'm gonna, I've been trying to do these somewhat regularly this was a really good question. Hopefully I did it justice. I think that again, I'll probably do another one on partnerships starting, starting a business and finding partners, that business, or having a business and bringing in partners, because I think that's equally important. But for now, it's just kind of like hiring and delegation. If you have questions on this topic that I didn't cover or you want more detail on something specific, you can put a comment on YouTube or you can go on Twitter at salcellstuff is my name. You can send me a dm. You can come to any of my tweets. Yeah, I'm pretty available on the Internet. Again, I have some paid stuff, but I have a lot of just like me just hanging out like this. And I'm happy to answer questions that come my way. So thank you all, as always, and I'll see you on the next one.