The Most Important Hire You Can Make Part 2

This is the Momentum podcast. Thanks for coming back. I am excited to share this second half of the most important hire, you can make part two. And what is the most important, how you can make the one you don't have to if you can prevent from hiring somebody in instead of bringing in another person into your business? There are so many reasons you should. Number one, you lower complexity in your business, you lower how many people you have to manage and oversee. Number two, you save a ton of money because you're not bringing in another human being. Number three, this one's important. You fully utilize the team you have and you make sure everybody has enough to do. And then a little bit more just that they're fully utilized so that they feel like they're they're vital, they're in momentum, they're moving things forward. There's so many reasons not to make a hire when you don't have to. And but I covered that in the first part in part one. Now I want to talk about how do you prevent from making a hire you don't want to make or you don't need to make? Now, in the first part of this, this topic in part one of most important hire you can make. I shared why this happens. Entrepreneurs aren't clear. We're trying to stop noise or solve pain, or we're hiring with our ego. Well, one process or one set of processes will stop you from doing this, and we'll help you analyze in a more consistent way, in a more predictable way to make sure that if you're going to hire somebody, you're hiring somebody that actually comes into the business and is massively productive. They're excited to be there to help them move things forward. They're making things happen for 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. The key here is is to when you when you are in a place where you feel like you need to hire is just to have an analysis process to understand what hire you need to make before you do it. And the tool that we use most often is we have what we call a time study, and a time study is two weeks and this is just in general. The time study is taking sheets of paper and for two weeks, you carry them around and you write down everything you're doing in 15 minute increments. And so as an entrepreneur, let's say you have an executive assistant, you're thinking, Man, do I need a second executive assistant or who do I need to hire? Who should I bring in? And here's what entrepreneurs are often do. They'll hire an executive assistant, or they'll hire somebody who's helping them. And this is like that hire you don't need to make. And then they'll still feel overwhelmed. They'll still feel like there's so much going on. They don't analyze what they're doing. They don't do a time study, they don't analyze their time and they say, I'm going to hire a second executive assistant. Then they bring in the second person. And you know what? It's not what they really need, because had they done it two week time study, what they would have realized is they were spending 50 or 60 percent of their time on sales and sales calls and sales communication, and they're hiring an executive assistant who can't do those things. And so the way that you avoid from making the hire you don't need to make or one of the ways is you first do time studies. And when I say time studies with an s, here's why. If you're looking at a department of, say, three people, let's say you have a small three person marketing department and the marketing department saying, Hey, we're overwhelmed, we're overwhelmed. We need insert whatever position they're saying and things have been going well so far. There's, you know, if you haven't added a ton of projects to that department, if there's no reason why they're overwhelmed, time studies will show you why. If all three people do time studies, you can sit down with them and say, OK, who's doing what? How do we move things around and make it more efficient? How do we move things around and make it easier? Or what will happen is the three people do time say anything you say, you know what? You really are overwhelmed. We need to get a copywriter because it looks like two of you're spending a ton of time like trying to do copy. Or we need to get a marketing coordinator because we have a copywriter, we have a designer, we have somebody who does funnels, but we don't have somebody who's who's coordinating everything and who understands where everything is and who is, you know, managing the projects and making them happen, whatever that may be. But the way that you, you, you prevent yourself from making a hire you don't need to make is you analyze before you make that hire. And so there's two parts to this, though. So one is when you analyze the time studies, then the second part is you should have each person around that new hire give you what they're recurring activities are like. What are the things that they do every single week or every day that are repetitive? And if you're in a small business where you have a small team, a lot of times you don't even know what these are or you've hired, you have five or six people around you. You might know you might not. You might no longer have knowledge of what they're doing on a daily basis just to keep the trains running on time. And we're putting more project work on top of them and making any of this even harder. So the second part of analysis to see if you need to make a hire is you take people's time studies and then we call them what are their recurring activities? And I like to see recurring activities from the top down. What are your quarterly return recurring activities like? If you're in leadership on a quarterly basis, you're in quarterly planning, you're preparing your quarterly outcomes, like what are we going to chase for that quarter? I also like to see monthly. So on a monthly basis, if you're in leadership, you are doing self-assessments with each of your team members on a monthly basis. You're planning for the monthly, the monthly strategic plan or waterfall, the way we call it. And then I also like to see weekly and daily so weekly it might be. I'd meet with each of my team members on a weekly basis. I read their weekly reports on a weekly basis daily. If you're a manager, it might be. I hold my teams daily huddle. I check in and make sure there's nothing. There's a critical issue. You know, what are all of those? I checked the following metrics to make sure things are going the right way and with with whatever it is that we're running as a department. And so between time studies and then an analysis or an inventory of someone's recurring activities on a quarterly, monthly, weekly and daily basis, you get a really good idea of what each person on any team is doing and that shows you whether they're overwhelmed or not. And when I say the most important hire you can make is the one that you don't have to. Here's what often happens not just in our company, but in the member companies that we work with, in the companies that we coach, in the companies that Cadey and I are personally involved in. We'll do the analysis of time studies and then we'll look at the recurring and we'll often find, Hey, we don't need another human being here. We need a contractor that does these two or three things, or we need to balance the load here and and improve efficiencies. You know, here we have somebody like we just had this issue in our company where Abby, who runs our content and coaching, is taking calls for content, coaching and sales, and she doesn't have enough time left on her calendar to get things done. So we looked at it and we adjusted some days in times where now we have restricted coaching calls and sales calls to certain times of day where she's still going to have more than enough time to do coaching calls and sales calls. But now she's going. To have some cleared and restricted time where she will be able to work uninterrupted and get the things that she needs to get done, so we could have said, Oh, we need a second person or we need another person to help Abby. But we really don't. When we did the analysis, when we looked at it, what we needed to do is just change the process we were using. And so when you do analysis, oftentimes you go into it thinking we need to hire another person, you come out of it thinking, maybe you need to hire just a contractor. That's simple. Simply, we can offload a few things. Maybe you just need to change the way somebody is working, like we did with Abby. Maybe you just need to talk to somebody and show them that the way they're doing things right now is haphazard and kind of all over the place. And if they created a process and a structure for their week and they time blocked throughout the week to get things that they needed to get done and start trying to multitask, they'd get even more done. And we use all three of those routinely to avoid hiring people because like I said in part one, the person you don't need, the person you bring into the company who is not the person who does it, who is in fully utilize utilize is the person who just causes challenges. And now, once you've done the analysis of the time study and the recurring activities, here's a question that entrepreneurs barely ever ask. What should we stop doing? What could we stop doing? Is there anything this person is doing that we don't need to do anymore? You know, our company has been around for a few years now, and routinely I'll find out that one of our team members is running a process that we documented a couple of years ago, and they're doing it still. And you know, one that we find in our company often is somebody on our systems team is creating metrics we're no longer looking at. So somewhere on a drive, there's a spreadsheet that they're putting information into or there is there is a place where we're keeping metrics that none of us are actually using and we don't really need anymore. And so the other thing to do before you bring somebody in is to look at the time studies, look at the recurring and then ask, What can we stop doing? And I bring this up specifically because it's not something we usually ask is something that that is not even really intuitive to ask when you're running a business until you've been doing it for a while. So if you're just building your team, if you're just, you know, getting your first few people on board and you're getting to that point where there's five or six of them, this is the place to be really careful with hiring. And this is the place to be really careful with hiring somebody who's not going to be fully utilized. This is the place to be really cautious in and look at the time studies. Look at the analysis of recurring ask the question What can we stop doing? And then if you've looked at those three things and the analysis shows are still stuff to do and there is another person necessary. You take the time, studies and the recurring and you build their job description. What we call a four hour document. You can look up my podcast on four are this the number four are and its roles, responsibilities, results and requirements. So what's the role the person is going to do? What exactly are their responsibilities? We're pulling them right off the time study. We're pulling them right off the recurring what is what are their their results like? What are they going to drive when they come in? I want somebody to be productive fast. And then what are the requirements for the position like? They know how to use a computer, they can work remote, all of those types of things. And when we go through that process of analyzing, of looking at recurring, of understanding what we could stop doing and we still feel like we need someone, and then we write out that that description and it shows that it's a full time job. And by looking at it, it feels like it's a full time job. When we bring somebody in, we have the reassurance that they are going to be fully utilized, that the position is going to be productive, that they're going to be excited to be in that position. And they're going to they're going to be a momentum. They're not trying to figure out what they should do, and they're not a free radical bouncing around the business because we don't want that. I covered that a lot in part one. And so the most important hire you can make is the one that you don't have to before you ever hire another person. Go through the analysis that I discussed here, and it will help you avoid bringing in a person that you don't really need. It's one of the most challenging things you can do on a team. And if you want more information on for our documents or time studies, you can always go to our website Charfen. Dot com is where the podcast is. My last name is Alex Charfen, so Charfen dot com and go to the podcast page and you can search on for R or time study and pull up a bunch of podcasts that I've done on those two topics. And if you're an entrepreneur who's building a team and you want to make sure you build the team right and you prepare your company to scale, you simplify your business so that you can scale and you have an operation system that is going to help you do things. Go to simple operations dot com that is the name of our company, simple operations dot com and fill out a form for my team. You can jump on a call with one of us, and with simple operations, we show entrepreneurs how to install the simple operation system that will help you as an entrepreneur, know what's going on. Communicate with your team consistently. Make sure everyone's fully utilized and get your team out in front of you, giving you the help that you need so that you can scale your business finally as fast. Says you've always wanted to. Simple operations, dot com, we look forward to hearing from you. And thanks for being here with me.