Hiring The Right People The Right Way to Grow Your Online Business

Are you thinking about hiring somebody? Or maybe you want to hire somebody, but you don’t think you can afford it? Possibly. You’ve tried hiring in the past, but it just didn’t work out. Well, in today’s episode, I’m going to share five keys hiring the right people, the right way to ensure your business grows. Welcome to the podcast, everyone. My name is Eric Dingler. I’m a full time digital nomad entrepreneur traveling around the world with my wife and our four kids who are all four, almost all teenagers. In fact, our oldest recently turned 17. That’s a little insane. But anyway, here we are out traveling around the world, having an amazing time and building a business as we go, in fact, building a couple of businesses as we go. And so this podcast is where I’ve decided to put out there the answers to some of those frequently asked questions. I get things that I was being asked and I found myself repeating over and over. I decided, well, if I put a podcast in there and somebody asked me a question, I could say, Hey, I actually I have an episode that you can go listen to about that. Now, I’ve already recorded one episode about Harry, and I’ll probably I’ll probably record many, many more. But in episode 11 of the podcast, I talk about my process of hiring winners. You know, how do I went and how do I hire winners every time? I’ve been hiring people for over 25 years and onboarding a leading and I have I figured out what works and what doesn’t. And I have a really structured, solid process that works for us over and over and over again. And so I talk about that in episode 11, but in this episode I want to talk about five keys to help you hire the right people at the right time. And I want to start by talking about this. Number one, we’ve got to set realistic expectations. Recently, one of my one on one coaching clients has begun following our process that I use to hire his first team member. And one of the things that he kept running into is he had a couple of of limiting beliefs and it’s not unique to him. I’m not throwing him under the bus by any means. I used to have these a lot of people have these. A lot of people ask me about this kind of stuff. So I know that there’s a a significant amount of people that have these limiting beliefs on on hiring and and expectations. And unfortunately, there’s a lot of really great books out there on the topic. In fact, one book on the topic has just replaced one book on my nine book list. In fact, if you go to my website D and E stands for Digital Nomad Entrepreneur, you go to D and E podcast dot com, click on the resource page. You’re going to scroll down and you’re going to come across nine books. Now, these nine books, this is my what what would I want one of my kids to read if they were going to take over the business or if they came to me and said, Dad, I’m going to start a business, how would I and what would it what would I recommend they do? Well, I decided a long time ago to keep basically a list of like nine books. Why did I choose the number nine? I don’t know. I probably had a reason at the time. I totally forgot what it is now, but I just know it’s nine and that’s it. And it is not easy for a book to get on this list because I read a lot of books, but recently I’ve read a book and I’m like, Holy moly, where has this been? Now there’s a lot in there that I’m like, That’s good. That’s affirming, you know, that’s, that’s really great. We have that now with that way now we have that now. But the concept in the principles specifically around hiring a personal administrative assistant, this is the this is the best book I’ve read on any of this and how to leverage that. The book is called Buy Back Your Time, a link to it in the show notes. You can also find a link to it now in my nine book list. You can go check that out. But one thing I’ll say about that book that I wish the author would have understood, and I think a lot of authors of of books don’t understand or they forget maybe that during the bootstrap days of a business of starting a business without capital. Because what he and I know this, that’s probably a new continent or not a new concept. But this isn’t how this guy went about building his businesses. I don’t believe. I don’t believe maybe he did at the very beginning. But now he does it because he talks about in one part of the book, they’re like three C’s you got to have. And one of them is is capital and he is an investor. And now and so capital is a big, big part of him. But well, you know what? I didn’t raise capital to to start or build my business. And I’m not planning to raise capital to to to grow my business. So we we are bootstrap business builders here. All right. Like we grow at the speed of cash. And everybody I coach and everybody I talk to, almost everybody I’ve got some mentors that I’ve got one mentor that raised $16 million and about a week to launch his last business. Well, here’s the thing. If you go out and raise $16 million to start a business, you go out and you can hire an entire force and you can hire a dream team of a force that I mean, these people are like top of their game. You can go out, you can you can hire a headhunter that goes out and poaches top talent at top dollar. That’s amazing and good for him. That’s fantastic. I mean, I’m excited for him. I can’t do that. I can’t do that. And so this guy in this and buyback your time, he talks a lot about like, you know, if you’re bringing you know, if your salary is 500,000 or 250,000, and I’m sitting there going, dude, most solopreneur is especially in the digital space that I know of. You know, they’re not even over $100,000 yet and personal salary and owner draw from their business. And so one of the things we got to do is we have to set realistic expectations for you and the person that you’re going to hire and the team. Now, some of these expectations are this you’re going to hire the best you can afford. And you’re you’re not. You’re if you’re listening to this podcast, chances are you can’t afford to go out and hire somebody tomorrow at $50 an hour. All right. You just you can’t do it. You probably couldn’t even afford to hire somebody at 20, $25 an hour. And that’s okay in an episode of 11. I talk there about my hiring process and what we use. We hire through Upwork. My typical staff person is around $6 an hour, and I’ve got extremely talented, high quality people who have been trained and are being trained. One of the things that I really was was so excited to see when when when my coaching client a couple weeks ago had like this light bulb moment. It was this moment where he understood that he’s going to hire somebody, that he has to train, he has to develop. He’s he’s going to have to be a leader to this person. He’s he can’t hire with the expectation that somebody is going to do it as good as him. And I’m telling you right now that you’ve totally got to get rid of that expectation. Okay. Now, there are there are people in my team that do things way better than I do. But starting out, most people I hire like their their entry level positions. And and we’re training them, we’re onboarding them, we’re developing them, and they’re going to make mistakes. If you think you’re going to hire somebody and and day one, you’re going to turn over a big project to them and say, Hey, okay, Mr. or Mrs. New Hire, I need you to go out and do the go out. Go out and build this website. Go, go, go, assemble. Here’s all the videos for a new course I’m launching. Go, go, go. You know, organize them. Put them on my. Hey, hey, hey. I need you to go ahead and start just managing my email. Manage my email. You know, whatever it is you think you’re going to hire somebody to do, you’re not going to be able to turn it over to them in and day one. You’re in there and they’re going to make mistakes. They’re going to have to learn. You’re going to have to have the expectations that you’re going to have to grow people into having the skills you need them to have. And that’s okay. That’s okay. And. By doing that, that’s how you’re going to be able to afford them. And you might be thinking, why I a time for that, Eric. I’m got time for that. You do have time and I’m going to tell you how to do it in number four. So stick around to know for whom he’ll tell you exactly how to do it. Let’s now the clear expectation for you is that you’re going to hire the best you can afford. You’re going to have to teach and train and the clear expectations for the people you hire. 80% is amazing. If they can do it at 80% as good as you. That’s like you’ve you’ve reached the pinnacle of it. This is this is absolutely fantastic news and a great place for you to be. So that’s number one setting and having realistic expectations. You’re going to grow into this. You’re not going to go into it right away. They’re not going to. They’re not going to be top of the line employees day one. They’re not going to do it perfect. You’re going to have to teach a train a cover that in point four, but just have some of those realistic expectations. Okay, I’ve repeated that enough. Let’s move on to number two. Number two, hire for time, not positions. Hired for time, not positions. Too many times I see people hire people for a position that they think they have to have hired, that they think is is the thing they got to have somebody doing. And the problem is, this is the thing that that this new business owner, this solopreneur, it’s what they love to do. It’s their most favorite thing to do. They started, you know, they’re they’re a developer and they love developing. But the first thing they got, they think they have to hire is a is a developer. You know, they go, well, I got to hire somebody the hand that off to so I can go out and start doing, you know, basically more administrative tasks. That’s not that’s not always the first position. Now, I think it is great to hire a junior X, Y, Z. Whatever your role is at junior life, you’re a developer. Hire a junior developer. If you’re a copywriter, hire a junior copywriter. If you’re a web designer, a junior web designer, like whatever your role is, hire, hire an entry level. Hire a junior level position on that. That can take on the the the mundane routine task. Everything that we do has some things that are like in a like it’s just the same, like it’s not high value. So the example I can use is, is pulling from my own files. So I know you’re listening to this. Not all of you are web designers, but for me, you know, I started out as a, you know, my my business started as a web design business. And one of the first things I did is hired a junior web designer because getting a website ready to build is always the exact same process. Like, it just there’s steps we got to do to get ready to get to the fun part. And then the fun part is designing and putting it all together and making it look good. And, you know, just like you start to create this thing and it’s so amazing and exciting, but then, then you, you get to the end and it’s time to launch this website. And it’s back to just a whole bunch of same old, same old, same old. Every time it’s the same old thing. Hiring for somebody to do those things. It’s like. Absolutely. Recording this podcast episode is my third favorite thing I get to do every week. Thursday, everything I get to do. First favorite thing I get to do. Leadership team meeting with my lead, my leadership team. That’s my number one favorite thing to do at work, one on one coaching with my direct reports and my one on one coaching clients and group coaching calls. That’s my number two favorite things to do. My number three is recording this. I get, Oh my gosh, and I love doing this. It’s absolutely a blast for me. I had so much fun doing this, but once I’m done, once I hit the stop recording button, the process of like now trimming it and getting it ready and adding the intro music and the outro music and show notes and posting it’s Instagram and uploading it to the website and uploading it to Lipson and you know, getting everything done. And out of that that’s always the same. That is draining to me. That’s draining to me. And that, that, that is something I have hired out. I have somebody on my team that that’s what they do. They, we, we for our digital marketing agency, we create YouTube videos every week. I record the I record the content for that. But I don’t edit the videos, you know, I don’t I don’t post the videos to YouTube. You know, I don’t do those things I follow with that. I do the, the, the content creation and then I hand it off for somebody else to do all the post-production work. And then I come in at the very end and just check things over. And so I’m I’ve hired to get that time back. Could I do that. Yeah, because the first five or six episodes I did do all of that. I did all of that. You know, I can edit a video and to be honest, you know, I right now, because of the person I have on my team doing it is new and is learning and stuff like that. There are things I can just do better because I have more experience doing it, but that’s not going to always be the eventually they’ll be better because we, we, we, we, we get better at every single episode. We have a 1% improvement now maybe it could be more maybe we should you for 5%, 10%. You know, whatever I’m thrilled with every single time we do an episode, it’s 1% better than the last time. 1% better quality, 1% better efficiency, 1% better outcome. Like we just we’re making incremental change. We’re growing. They’re growing. And eventually, just like my junior web developer who has now become our CEO, he is our director of Web Services. This guy, Peter, like there are things there are a lot of things he can do now that I can’t do and he can do a whole bunch of things way better than I could do them. I’m I’m going to him now with questions on website stuff and DNS and all of this, and that’s how it should be. And as the company has grown, I’ve been able to afford to pay him more, you know, and that’s great. And we continue to do that. I could not have afforded to hire him at his skill set now, at his salary now, I couldn’t have afforded that, you know, five years ago when I hired him, because we were just we were just way too too small. And so, you know, that that goes back to number one. You got you’re going to hire the best you can for what you can afford. You’re going to grow your team up. You’re going to build them up. And what you what you’re looking to do at that time is you’re looking to hire for time. You’ve got it. It’s why I love the concept. Buy back your time. That’s exactly what the book talks about. And so you want to hire for time, not position number three. Number three, what’s the three key to hiring the right people the right way? You you have to develop your leadership skills. You are a leader even if you don’t have anybody on your team. It’s why this and if you listen to the podcast for a while, you know, at the end and if you’re new, guess what’s going to happen at the end of this episode? I’m going to share a leadership tip of the week. Every episode. I share a leadership tip because leadership is the capacity of your bit. Your business can never will never grow beyond your capacity. We have recently, I should say, I have recently looked at well, it’s we me and my wife, she’s she’s definitely my partner on this We we have been talking recently about the the next stage, our business. We’d like to get our business there. And I am having some very vulnerable conversations about here’s, here’s where I’m not ready to lead us there. We can’t get to that point because I’m not ready. I don’t know how to lead. At that level. And so I’m having to learn some new things, seek out some new mentors, make some new plans, and I’ve got to keep working on my leadership skills. The same is true for you. You’ve got to work on your leadership skills to to hire the right people because the right person isn’t going to work with somebody who can’t lead them. So develop your leadership skills. Now, before I get to number four, I’ve got a resource I want to share with you. And I really if you’ve been listening and you’ve listened up to this point and you have not downloaded my remote work success bundle, here’s why you should. You might be thinking, Wait. Remote work. Success. Why is that? What am I going to get out of that? We’re talking about hiring people because the third section and there’s three whole parts to the remote work success bundle. And number three, the third section is all about leading remote teams effectively. All right. And this is for remote team leaders or aspiring leaders. And I include in it a lot of details about hiring. The first person you had to do is you have to be clear on your mission, vision and core values. And I have some resources in there to help you create that if you don’t have it. I share ours as an example. Our brand promise, our our mission, our vision, our core values. I have a section in here on tips. It’s called Tips on Hiring the Right People. And it’s going to tell you what to look for. It’s going to. There’s a section in there in crafting the perfect job descriptions, talking about the interview processes, assessment tools that we use, how we hire people for test projects as link to a sample job description, as well as a link to a video where I share my screen and show you our onboarding tool. The, the, the on. But we have a self onboarding tool when new hires come on to the team. We have a whole set of prerecorded videos and things within the watch to learn how to do their job. I don’t take the time to train people to do their job. We have equip them. Now, you might be thinking, I got time to do that. I ain’t got time to create a bunch of a bunch of training videos and all that kind of stuff. Most of the training videos we use I haven’t recorded. We in fact, we’re using videos we that other people have recorded. Some of them are videos we have found on YouTube. Lots of them are videos from some of our vendors. Like when, you know, people, new hires have to learn how to use our project management tool. We link to specific videos. We want them to watch our new hires to watch that are created by our project management tool vendor. And so there’s all kinds of tips in there on how to put this together. I’m going to share one with you here in just a little bit. But that right there is being able to watch that video where I show you exactly what ours looks like, a link to the position description. Like that’s worth downloading the remote work success bundle right there just for section three, but it’s got two other sections. Sections Section two is about productivity, and I share with you what I use to to be productive in my work. I’ve got a video exploring my time management system and how I produce at at a high level because I’ve got a lot of things going on and I don’t want to not spend time with my family and stuff like that. So I share that. And then in section one is crafting your mobile headquarters. Maybe you’re not. Maybe you’re listening to this and and you’re not going to be full time digital digital nomad like me. But maybe you are. Maybe you’re going to be part time, you know, or maybe you just want to go work at co-working spaces like and things like that. In section one, I talk about how to set up a portable I call it the world headquarters. And I’ve got a video that’s a tour of my portable office and how I set it up and the tools I use. And I’ve got a series of of questions there that you can work through and and processes to help help you out with that. Because I live out of a carry on bag and a personal bag. We don’t do check luggage, we do carry on luggage. And so everything my office has to fit into my personal carry on backpack. So I share all of that. But the whole onboarding process for new hires is. Golden content for you. So if you haven’t yet, go to my website D and E podcast dot com. Scroll down to the bottom of any of the pages and you’ll see there where you can download the Remote Work Success Bundle. All right, number four, I’ve got two final tips for you here. And then this week’s leadership tip of the week. And we’re going to be wrapped up. So let’s go ahead and do it. Number four, start creating your standard operating procedures, your SOPs. Right now, these are going to be the things that are part of your onboarding process, part of your ongoing staff’s team’s work. And you can start creating these right now. And here’s the very simple way to do it. All right. And it was so this is one of those things. There have been a lot of there were a lot of things and buyback your time that I was like, great, we’re already doing that. Great. We’re already doing that great. We’re already doing that. And it’s really affirming because I’m like, nice. We’re like, sometimes I’ll read a book and I’m like, Oh my gosh, we’re not doing anything right. And but this is one where I’m like, there’s, there’s so much we can learn, but there’s so much we’re already getting, right? And so for a long time, we’ve already we’ve already done this. This is one way that you can start doing this right now is just begin recording yourself. Okay. And I talk a little bit about this, and in episode five, I have a whole episode on standard operating procedures. You go back and listen to episode five, but right now, just start recording yourself every time for everything. Every time you go to do something, record yourself. You’ve got to send an invoice to a client, make a recording and record it three different times. And here, here’s why. Now, we’ve been we’ve been making one recording. And I will say that in buyback your time, I did learn he had a really good point. They do this, but they record they record it three times and this that solves a problem that we have run into. And that is very few things that you do do you do it exactly the same way every single time? There’s there’s little differences, little iterations here. They’re like, you know, it’s easy to say, well, here’s our process to say, here’s an example. Today I was following our process to send a an agreement to a new client. We have a new client, you know, that that wants an agreement because it’s you know, they’re spending tens of thousands of dollars with us. And they, you know, they want to make sure that their investment is protected and stuff like that. And that’s great. So we we sent them out an agreement, but there are things in our typical standard agreement that this customer isn’t going to be using. And so I had to I had to delete a couple of sections because I wanted the agreement to make sense. I don’t like sending our agreement when it talks about services that that customer is using because it doesn’t it feels a little too boilerplate for me. I just one of my quirks maybe it doesn’t bother you bothers me, but when you record yourself doing something three times, you’re almost always going to catch those things. So the next three times you’re going to send an invoice record yourself. The next time you go to do a single task of any kind, you know a thing. You’re going to record yourself and begin creating a library, upload it to someplace like Vimeo or something like that. Where are you going to, you know, store it and have it there for for free and nobody can access it, put it up there and then start a Google doc or a word doc if you’re not a Google user or whatever. But you know, I use Google started Google Docs and just start a list of categories, you know, financial procedures and sending an invoice, you know, for adding a new customer to our our invoicing system, whatever it is. And you record those, you put them in there, and that’s all you going to do right now. And you’re going to start recording these videos and you’re going to start having a library grow. And then when you go to hire someone, you’re going to be able to say, Hey, Mr. or Mrs. New Hire, welcome to the team Here are some videos I’d like for you to watch this week, and I want you to create a check list while you’re watching these videos. Hello. You’re just you’ve just hired somebody to do the boring part of creating suppose unless you’re like a checklist creator, you know, weirdo, and I know some of you are out there, but for most of us, like, that’s not what we want to do. I’ll record a video and and put it out there. And but now you have sources. They are going to be learning how to do it. They’re going to be discovering what the process is. And now you’ve got a stronger system. And then. You just have to require that they use those checklists. They use that also. P Any time they’re doing the job, that’s it like it is. It’s a non-negotiable. If you’re doing the task, you have to have the checklist open. Now maybe that team person wants to download and print them and create a binder. That’s fine, I don’t care. Maybe they want to download and have it on a tablet so they can market out. I don’t care. Maybe they have a second monitor. Maybe they like switching back and forth between browser tabs. I really don’t care. That’s up to them. That’s up to them. But you can very easily right now get started. Now is the best time to start preparing number five. The five key is prepare a plan for the time you’re going to be buying back. This, my friend, is the single biggest mistake I see. When somebody starts to hire for the first time, they’ll go out and they’ll hire someone and they bring them on and they get the person trained and they get them on and then they, you know, get everything going and then they don’t have a plan for what they’re now going to do. So unfortunately, they tend to start doing low hanging fruit things. They just start taking on more and different administrative tasks. They start doing other things that are not bringing in additional revenue for the business. And if you’re listening to this, you’re probably the business owner, you’re the solopreneur. This is your thing you’re trying to build. You have to own the business, bringing in cash. You’ve got to be a part of that. You’ve got to be doing what you what you can do that brings the highest value to the company. And what I want you to do is start thinking now, if I had an employee, if I had somebody taking care of X, Y, Z for, you know, 20 hours a week 10 hours a week, 4 hours a week, 5 hours a week. If you hire somebody for 5 hours a week. What do you do with those 5 hours? I mean, are you gonna watch Netflix? That would probably be dumb. All right, now, maybe. And this would be, say, I just hired somebody to cover 5 hours. I’m going to take one of those hours and I’m going to watch me and Netflix. Okay. There’s another one. Hello. Welcome to the reward of being a business owner. You’ve you’ve just bought back some of your time. Take say. All right, I’m going to take an hour of this. And I’m watching Netflix. I’m going to take a second hour and I’m going to go for a walk once a week with my spouse or one of my kids. And then you take the other 3 hours and you apply it to revenue generating activities, attending a networking event, having meetings with clients, something that you should have been doing that you haven’t been doing enough of, have checking meeting strategy sessions with clients where you’re able to present opportunities to upsell them into new services, making prospecting calls you know, putting a little more time into that next proposal. So you can you can raise the rates on that proposal because you were able to to figure out how you can add some some pizzazz to it, add some some benefit to it, that that’s a low cost addition for you. You can take start taking some of those those 3 hours and in improving systems so that you increase your profit margins. You can start to say, hey, now that I’ve got these 3 hours, I’m going to make it so we’re faster at doing X, Y, Z, so we make more profit on it. Like, there’s lots of things you can do with this time, but you’ve got to create a plan before you hire somebody. Because if you don’t, you’re hiring people the wrong way. And this episode is about hiring the right people, the right way to grow your online business. If you don’t have a plan for what you’re going to do for those hours, you’re buying back for yourself, my friend. You’re not going to grow your business. You’re going to get frustrated. You’re going to be like, It’s just not working. You know, I hired them. The needle’s not moving forward. It’s just cost and money. It’s not helping me make money. Or maybe you’re frustrated because you’re like, I’ve hired them, but my goodness, you know, I’m spending all my time training them. Well, you haven’t prepared properly. You’re not prepared and onboarding process for your new hires. You need to download the Remote Works Success Bundle and see our onboarding process. It’ll blow your ever loving mind. You’re gonna be like, Oh my gosh, this is fantastic. And I’m not just saying that this is literally what people say every single time I share it with them and in a coaching call or something like that. So you’re going to want to get that and check it out. All right. Well, those are my five keys for today for hiring the right people, the right way to grow your business. Number one, you got to have realistic expectations of who you’re going to hire, how much you going to have to invest in training them and preparing them and coaching them. It’s not it’s not really time and training them. You should have a self onboard training, but you are going to have to spend time coaching them and that’s okay. You that’s an that’s a that’s a realistic expectation. So number one, set realistic expectations. Number two, hire for time, not position hire. Number three, develop your leadership skills. Number four, start creating your SOPs today. Number five, prepare a plan for the time you’re buying back. Now, what is this week’s leadership tip of the week? Before we wrap things up, a leader’s focus is doing right over being right. Too many times people think that is the leader. They’re there somehow, automatically always right. Well, I’m the leader. I’m right. No, that’s not true at all. There are many times a day I’m wrong. I have to be open to that. And that’s I. Your focus has to be on doing what’s right, over being right. I am constantly looking for ways to to for us to be doing something the right way, a better way over, holding on to it really tight and saying, oh no, no, no, this is this is how I know best. I know best. Basically, there’s no room in leadership for ego. There’s not you can’t even spell the word ego from the word leadership can’t do it. So there’s no room in leadership for an ego. Well, my friend. Thanks for listening. I would really appreciate hearing your feedback. Send me an email. Eric at Danny podcast dot com. Make sure you check out episode 11. Make sure you download the remote work success bundle and till next time, chase the big dream. Lead with courage and safe travels.