Trying To
Recruit Talent
Will Hurt You

I'm Alex Charfen and this is the Momentum Podcast made for empire builders, game changers, trailblazers, shot takers, record breakers, world makers, and creators of all kinds. Those among us who can't turn it off, and don't know why anyone would want to. We challenge complacency, destroy apathy, and we are obsessed with creating momentum, so we can roll over bureaucracy and make our greatest contribution. Sure, we pay attention to their rules but only so that we can bend them, break them, then rewrite them around our own will. We don't accept our destiny, we define it. We don't understand defeat because you only lose if you stop, and we don't know how. While the rest of the world strives for average and clings desperately to the status quo, we are the minority, the few who are willing to hallucinate there could be a better future. And instead of just daydreaming of what could be, we endure the vulnerability and exposure it takes to make it real. We are the evolutionary hunters. Clearly the most important people in the world because entrepreneurs are the only source of consistent, positive human evolution, and we always will be.

Trying to recruit talent will hurt you. I apologize for not doing Seeker, the first level of the Billionaire Code. I'll do it tomorrow. But this podcast was a message I felt I just wanted to get out there. A lot of the members of my coaching groups listen to this podcast, and I think like all of them need to hear this, and I think all of you need to hear this if you're in that place where you're ready to build a team.

But before I start, I'm going to explain how recruiting talent will hurt you, but I want you to know something about me upfront. If you haven't noticed yet, I'm an unconventional consultant or coach like I don't look at the rest of the business world. Here's what the average coach or consultant does, just so you know why you get such crappy, mediocre results with most coaches, most consultants out there who have experience like that's the challenge is that in the world I come from most experienced coaches and consultants got crap results. Here's why. The coaching and consulting world says, "What is done most often, and then we'll just suggest that everybody does that." They call it a best practice. It's what most people do. In a lot of ways in the corporate world, consulting is looked at as finding best practices.

Well, here's one of the best practices. One of the best practices is go out and recruit a bunch of people to interviews, and then find the person who has the highest level of talent and appears like they'll do the best in the job. Who's the person who looks like they have the best skill set to job match? And then hire that person.

Here's the challenge with that best practice is that when you go in an entrepreneurial company, like at the Fortune 500 level there's a lot of companies that just do what I just said. They go out and they hire talent. They recruit talent. And then what happens is those companies battle talent for talent like defense contractors. Think of any company that would be uninspiring to work for like huge food producers or chemical manufacturers, but those companies are in a position where for a lot of them they have to go out and find talent, and they battle talent against talent.

But in an entrepreneurial company, we can't do that, we can't afford to battle talent against talent because we need people that buy-in 110%. We need people who are as excited about our mission as we are. We need people who are willing to go the extra mile, who are willing to put in some extra energy, who are passionate about what we are doing. We need people who will look past the issues, the challenges, the lack of resources 'cause all of those things will be present in your company, and the way you do that, the way you find those people is you find true believers.

And all too often what happens to entrepreneurs is we go out, and we try and hire talent from other entrepreneurs like people try and recruit my team all the time, and constantly. Are you kidding me? It's ridiculous. And I take my team places like I don't hide them. I had most of my team at ClickFunnels with me this week, and I wanted them all to get the experience to see what the industry that we're in is all about to understand why we're so excited about ClickFunnels, to see me speak in front of that huge audience like I knew that would be a really incredible bonding moment for our team, so they were there. At an event like ClickFunnels, I guarantee you every single one of my team members is recruited at least a hundred times. People say, "Well, can I get your number? Would you ever talk about doing work with someone else since you're virtual?" Blah, blah, blah. But it happens to them constantly.

But my team also knows that part of the reason they get up every day, and the reason they're excited about what they do, and the reason that work doesn't feel like work, and the reason that we all are really passionate about what we do together, and we all support each other is that we all believe in what we're doing, and they are true believers. My whole team listens to the podcast, and they don't get paid to do that. They just listen to it 'cause they're part of the team. They all want to know how events go, and they all want to see the videos, and they all want to understand what's going on, and they're all in our platforms, and they all use our planners. They all joke about water. You see my team anywhere, you're going to see a team of people carrying a bottle of water 'cause they've all been through The 10-day Natural Thirst Challenge. That's why we're able to do what we do with a small team.

Now, I've made mistakes in the past. I've been in the situation where I hired talent and I didn't understand why it didn't work. I don't want you to feel bad if you've done this because man, I've done it. These are lessons I had to learn. There were times in my career where I hired like I tried to recruit from other companies. Here's what happens. If you're in a long business career you get confused by things because I've recruited from other companies, I've recruited talent, and had extraordinary results. But now that I've been in place where I've employed hundreds of people I can look back and say every time I recruited someone from another company where I had extraordinary results, the other factor was that they were a true believer. And every time I recruited somebody from another company and it didn't work, it's because I recruited someone else's true believer and they weren't mine. They just weren't as excited about the work. They weren't as passionate about what they were doing. I took them out of Momentum, and into a feeling of some level of constraint, and that dramatically affected their performance.

Once I started realizing that difference I stopped recruiting people's talent. Well, that's not true. That's not true. Actually I continued to aggressively recruit people's talent, but I did it differently. I'll share with you a time that it was really successful with somebody I recruited to run marketing for us. His name was Chris Scott, or it still is Chris Scott. He didn't die. He's here in Austin. He's one of the best executive team members I've ever had. He was a true business partner. He was always looking out for what was best for the company, and how could we get the biggest result doing what was going to make us look good? What was going to maintain our marketing image, wasn't going to hurt the brand, would always grow what we were doing? He was extraordinary.

He, I mean, was such a big part of Cadey and I getting the CDP onto the Inc. 500 list. I don't know that we could have done it without Chris. When we won that award, Chris actually went with me to Washington D.C. with Travis, our CTO. We went to the event and we took the pictures together because there's no ... like that was our award. I didn't do that on my own.

But here was the the difference. Chris worked with a very large educational organization at the time, not necessarily a competitor, but in the same industry, in the same business. If I had just recruited him, and I didn't know him that would have been a huge risk 'cause then he would have had to become my true believer. But I knew, this was at the point where I really wanted the right people in the building. I wanted people who believed in what we were doing, and especially at the executive level.

Chris and I knew each other for about a year before I ever offered him a position. We had hung out at several conferences, and I knew he was becoming a true believer 'cause he would tell me about everything we were doing. He would say, "Oh, I loved your marketing, and I really liked your email sequence. You did this landing page that I ended up spending a lot of time on." He'd tell me how he was reading our blog, or saw my videos, or saw me on TV, so I knew that he was a true believer before I ever even considered him working with us.

And then I did recruit him away from another major company, and it was crazy successful because Chris is insanely talented, and driven, and motivated at a level that most people just don't get. He actually went on to be a partner in a company called The Paperless Agent. I'm incredibly proud of how many people have worked with me and then become independent entrepreneurs, and Chris is insanely successful now running his own educational company in the real estate industry.

So when you recruit talent that is your true believer, it works. And so, throughout my history that would happen. I would sometimes have good experiences, sometimes bad, and it was hard to add up why it was different. The fact is that when you recruit true believers everything changes, and you have to in an entrepreneurial company. Bigger, huge multinational companies, they can fight talent against talent. But in an entrepreneurial company you need that discretionary effort. You need someone who's going to push past the faults, past the issues, past the challenges.

Now, earlier I said that in multinationals they usually fight talent against talent, but that's not how it always is. In fact an easy company for me to talk about like I've worked with some major, large organizations like Logitech was a unique organization because everyone at Logitech was really excited about Logitech. They owned that category. But I remember, I would talk to product engineers at Logitech and they were passionate about the product. I remember working with a few of the product managers at Logitech and they couldn't stop talking about the Logitech product, and Logitech owned their category.

When you look at an example today, Apple computer is an easy company for me to talk about because my cousin works there. He came down to an event once, and he and I did a little presentation, and somebody in the audience, actually twice two people said critical things about Apple, and Eric had like the defense cued up like he was a company spokesperson. It was clear. It was definitive. I was impressed with like how he clearly knew how to defend the company. He was passionate about the company, but what I was most impressed with was the level of conviction that he shared. It was personal. When he answered the people who criticized Apple, he answered why the things, like one of them asked I think why the phone screens broke any time you drop them, and then another one asked something different, but he had an answer that he answered with such conviction that the people who asked the questions just accepted it. I was so impressed.

And then, here's the fact though. When I talked to Eric about Apple, everyone an Apple, their dream job was working at Apple, so everyone there is a true believer in their dream job. Look at how incredible Apple is. I mean that's a multinational that hires true believers that has created enough of a passionate following, an environment where so many people in the world are passionate followers of that company that they are true believers, and so Apple does the extraordinary. Apple sets the bar.

How does it really work in most of the computer electronics industry these days? Everybody waits to see what Apple innovates, and then goes like crazy trying to catch up and copy it. Let's be honest, it's still happening. I know that there's some other companies that are coming out with some new products, but really Apple's still leading the charge in so many ways, and it's because there's an entire, huge, massive ecosystem of true believers who are holding each other accountable. The lateral pressure at Apple is huge.

Now, let's take another example of a company that hires talent here in Texas, Dell Computer. How many true believers in Dell do you think there are? I know the Dell family, but do you really think there's anybody else who gets excited about a Dell computer? Have you ever heard anyone, like have you ever seen anyone anywhere posting pictures of a new Dell computer? I've seen tons of Apple computers, or Apple phones, or Apple notebooks, or iPads. But, have you ever see anybody posting a Dell? Have you ever heard a kid saying, "On my wishlist, I want a Dell."? It's hard to be a passionate true believer of Dell. The company's entire product line is completely uninspiring. Even if you go look at their names, the Dell Inspiron, maybe the most uninspiring product in the history of computer electronics. They tried to name it inspiring 'cause it was so uninspiring.

When you look at Dell Computer, there's a lot of talent at Dell. I've met a lot of the people that work there. It's an incredibly talented organization, but it has all the challenges, and issues, and frustrations of an organization that doesn't have true believers. When you compare Apple's margins and Dell's margins, go look at them, you will see that Apple's margins are significantly enriched by the discretionary efforts they are getting from having assembled a multinational team of true believers, I would say at almost every level. Like every once in awhile you'll find somebody in an Apple Store who isn't crazy about Apple, but most of the time those guys came in pretrained because they're so passionate about the products. They already knew how to use them. That goes all the way through the building. So even at the highest level recruiting talent will hurt you. It's the difference between Dell and Apple.

When you go out to find people start looking for the people who are true believers, and find people who have talent that you appreciate, find people who you know you can work with, find people who will develop themselves, and you'll find some of the most incredible team members you've ever had in your career. I know that's how I've done it.

If you want to understand where you are in your business career, and when you should start bringing people in, and how soon you should have a team, and what size team you should have, you want to understand the Billionaire Code. If you go to billionairecode.com, and answer a few quick questions, we will make sure we send you out a full summary of the Billionaire Code, which is the clear path to entrepreneurial success that I just shared this week at ClickFunnels. It will show you where you are in your path as an entrepreneur, where you should be focused, so you stop wasting time doing anything else. It will also show you what type of team you should have, and what's coming next, so you can anticipate it because when it comes to anything you're trying to do as an entrepreneur, it's a lot easier to do it when you're surrounded by a team of passionate true believers. I want you to know exactly when you should start building that team, and how, so go to billionaire code.com, fill out a few questions, and we'll get you your results.