Transcript:

Key components are- don't expect one person to do it right the first time, make sure that you're very clear on the output that you want, ask questions when you interview that even seem hard and be sure to communicate a lot.

Hello, happy Tuesday, November 27th, 2018. It's Monica and I am so happy to be here with you live today. So I want to talk about hiring today. I actually did add someone to my team today and I'm pretty excited about it and it is always interesting to have people come onto your team because you really never know if it's gonna work. I remember we interviewed this one guy at wedding channel and he just seemed like brilliant. He was so perfect for the role and he came there and he worked for three days and then he left. And that actually happened to me more than once, especially with nannies. I had one nanny show up for a day and then she was like, “I can't do this.” I was like, “Oh my toddler is too much for you.” But she just disappeared.

And so I have a very specific way of trying to weed through those people because the wedding channel experience was the first time we'd heard somebody was like out in two weeks. It was crazy because in a bigger company, you have to actually hire people usually with a full time job offer and things like that. But as an entrepreneur and somebody who has a small company, you don't have to do that, you can actually try things to see if they work. And so what I like to do is, a couple of things, if it's a referral, somebody that you know is saying, “Hey, this person is good,” then I like to test them out with a small project and that's what's happening today. So one of the people I'm working with right now, one of my clients, she's like, “This person is amazing.”

I saw a little bit of her work and it was good and so I was like, “Okay, let me talk to her. ” So I talked to her and she seems just fabulous. So I'm paying her for one project and we're going to get that done. We're going to see how well we work together. And normally what I would do for these kinds of things is I would actually go to upwork.com or mad skills depending on which one I need, what skill set I need. If it's one off projects, I tend to go to Upwork, if it's like a longer term thing, I'll go to madskills. That's upwork.com and hiremadskills.com. And then I work with people on a trial basis. So mad skills were a little bit different than Upwork. Upwork is, you're probably familiar with Upwork.

You go in, you post your job, you ask question. So two things, first of all, make sure that you ask questions and one of those questions should be, “What about this job description seems difficult or what experience have you had doing it?” So you'll be surprised at how people answered this question. And then it's easy to sort of weed people out because you can sort of tell like, “Oh, that person's not good or this person's great or oh hey, they actually read what I asked and answered it”, because you'd be surprised when people don't do that. And then, I also, I just ask a couple of general general questions about their background of history. So the thing that's really important to think about too, when you're hiring is what exactly you want the outcome to be. So if you don't really know the outcome of what you want, you're probably going to be disappointed in the results.

So really give yourself some time to think about what you want them to deliver to you. And the more detailed you can be, the better. So then for madskills, they work a little differently. They bring in candidates for you to interview and you can work with them and it's not a longterm contract. So if it doesn't work out, they can replace that person for you. But I've had so much luck. They just know great people. So because they, madskills, actually helps military spouses find remote work and that's amazing, right? Because, I mean they have to move all the time, so I really enjoy supporting that community and it doesn't hurt that the company was started by my best friend. So, there's that, but those are my resources for hiring, like word of mouth and upwork and mad skills and I have one more I'm testing out and if it works really well then I will let you know. It's where I got my va and she's been amazing so far. So that is how all that's working because I can't do everything myself. And I think as an entrepreneur you shouldn't try to do everything yourself. You need to be the general contractor or the orchestrator. Like you just need to make sure everything is working in harmony to get built what you would have built. Now obviously we all have budget constraints, so do what you can and hire what you can't. Personally, I hate video editing, like I hate it passionately. So, that's one of the reasons I do live because there's no editing, but for my courses and things like that, I have a video editor that does it for me and I found him on upwork.

And Oh, something else I do on upwork is that sometimes I will hire three people for the same job. So I actually did this with my first video edit and it was a 10 minute video. I think it wasn't very long and I hired three people and it was like, “Hey, edit this video.” One guy came back and just flaked on me, just disappeared. Another guy came back with all this fancy stuff that I did not ask for. And he was pretty expensive. And then there was the guy that I use, he came back with exactly what I asked for and the budget was perfectly great and his hourly rate is great. And so he now has been working for me for awhile. I've also referred him other clients because he's so good. So those are the kind of people that you want the relationship with. So hire three, and if that sounds expensive, I hear you. I get it. You can start with one if you have a longer time window.

So usually when I'm hiring somebody to do something I needed done relatively quick, but if you've got more time you can try one person at a time, but I'm here to tell you that the magic is three. Every time I've hired, it's three people and normally that's how it works. Like one person just doesn't deliver and then one person does something weird that you didn't really like and one person actually does what you want, which is very interesting because to say that's happened several times and I don't know why, but that's how I hire. And I'm happy to talk about this subject for days. I actually really love hiring people to do things but to do that you also need system processes. So and standard operating procedures, sop, which are really great for your business.

So I'm actually working on developing those for my new business because I've got a little bit of a different model than we had, but I'm pretty excited about it. So. All right, if you have any questions about this, either pm me or put them in the questions and I really hope that you got something out of this, but the key components are don't expect one person to do it right the first time, make sure that you're very clear on the output that you want, ask questions when you interview that even seem hard and be sure to communicate a lot. That would be another good one. All right. I hope that was helpful. Bye