Are you losing more and more sleep trying to keep up the promises you’ve made to clients and customers?
If so, it may be time for you to hire new team members to relieve pressure off yourself.
And if you continue reading, you’ll see how you could qualify, train, and manage that growing team which just might let you get reacquainted with your favorite pillow.
YOUR FIRST HIRE
It’s no secret that this can be a frighteningly exciting moment in you’re growing business.
When you decide to hire someone you take on the added responsibility of leading this person in his or her own growth and success; not to mention being sure the payroll is on time and clears the bank account each week. Notice I said leading the person, not babysitting and there is an important distinction between the two. In order for you to have someone that you can lead you want to qualify them before you hire them, right?
So, how do you qualify a potential employee?
First, decide what you need help with the most. Then write a detailed description of what that job entails so the potential employee knows exactly what they’re getting into and what’s expected of them. Within the description, you can include action steps the potential employee needs to take. This way you can find out right from the very beginning whether or not the person can follow instructions.
The first instruction could ask the candidate to visit your website to fill out a survey. Now, within the survey, you include qualifying questions, the type of questions that you feel are important for what you and your growing company need.
If you’re anything like me, resumes are not all that important to you. In fact, I don’t ask for resumes from my candidates because I don’t have one myself. I’m a self-made entrepreneur and I don’t have an illustrious business background, so while I couldn’t get a job at many big firms I’ve generated tens of millions of dollars for my clients over the last several years. So, is a resume really all that important?
If no resume, then what?
If you do decide that resumes are not important to you, upfront, what are you going to ask and how will you determine whether a person is right for you and your company?
You could lean heavily on soft skills instead of hard skills. Hard skills, you could say, are the technical aspects of the job that you’re looking for while soft skills are more about the communication and interaction that a person is capable of. You’ll also want someone who is willing to be taught and learn on their own so that learning the technical hard skills is only a formality.
One of my top-level marketing employees had absolutely no background in this before we hired him. He was making a living as a customer service rep and a Japanese chef, but there was something about him that made us believe he could do a great job for us and we have not been disappointed.
in short, the more hoops you make someone jump through the better qualified they will be to work with you and your growing company. And, in my opinion, be sure to look at the person and not just the paper.
Training the new hire
Great job, you hired somebody now you get to train. This is the next common wonderful tragedy you get the pleasure of experiencing well your business is growing.
But, you can actually streamline the training of all of your new employees rather easily and here’s how.
Documentation!
Yes, documentation. Instead of waiting to hire someone and then trying to figure out how to train the person while you continue serving clients you can document all the processes that you do on video. That way you can simply sit the person in front of the computer and hit play.
So, the more thorough your documentation is the simpler your onboarding and training of new employees will be. Luckily, you know your business better than anyone which means if you just record your own actions your new team members simply have to emulate what you do. Yes, you will still need to guide them from time to time but, instead of starting from scratch you know that they are very teachable and most likely a self-starter because you qualified them on those attributes.
Managing the growing team
As your team grows it will be important for you to find the right tools to help manage time, productivity, and communications.
As my team has grown from just myself to around 60 employees over the last couple of years I have a series of team management tools that I can now share with you. These are the tools that I found to be most effective for managing my team of both local employees in my office as well as my remote employees that I have scattered across the globe.
Loom – this is a simple screen recording software I use to document job activities and to standardize training with video.
Egnyte – is what my marketing agency uses for file storage and internal sharing
Workplace and Workchat – this is basically Facebook and Messenger for business and we use it for internal communications.
Zoom – is what we use for video meetings and conferences
Basecamp – is a production and communication software we use mostly for checklists and onboarding of employees and clients
Trello – is also a production and communication software but we use it more for step-by-step production tracking
Time Doctor – we use for employee time management and tracking project expenses, with it, we can easily calculate the employee investment into each completed project
More Growth Equals More Growth
We started this journey because your business was growing, which meant you needed to grow your team. Of course, as your team grows you will be able to get more work done quicker and that leads to your ability to go out and grow the business even more. You might see how this can quickly lead to a positive feedback loop where growing business leads to a growing team which leads to a growing business which leads to a growing team, Etc.
And, when you do an excellent job qualifying, hiring, training, and managing the team you will quickly realize that you can help far more people, make much more money, and still get that formerly elusive 8 hours of sleep every night.
See you next time.
