WEBVTT 1 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:04.800 You want to think about, especially for the first five, that they are really just helping you do more. 2 00:00:04.800 --> 00:00:07.280 And so think of them as extensions of yourself. 3 00:00:07.280 --> 00:00:10.240 Welcome to the game where we talk about how to get more customers, how to make more 4 00:00:10.240 --> 00:00:14.080 customers, how to keep them longer, and the many failures and lessons we have learned along the way. 5 00:00:14.080 --> 00:00:15.360 I hope you enjoy and subscribe. 6 00:00:18.080 --> 00:00:22.560 In this video, we're walking through the first five hires that you need to bring on in your 7 00:00:22.560 --> 00:00:26.160 company as you are growing. And as a fundamental framework to think through this, 8 00:00:27.120 --> 00:00:31.120 you want to think about, especially for the first five, that they are really just helping you 9 00:00:31.120 --> 00:00:35.120 do more. And so think of them as extensions of yourself. Over time, we're going to transition 10 00:00:35.120 --> 00:00:40.240 from that philosophy to really building a team in departments. But each of the five will more or 11 00:00:40.240 --> 00:00:45.760 less correspond to being an extension of you and doing the repeated tasks that are time-consuming, 12 00:00:45.760 --> 00:00:50.080 but do not necessarily add as much value as some of the most strategic pieces of each of the roles. 13 00:00:50.080 --> 00:00:53.280 All right? And so if you don't know it, I am, my name's Oxymozzi. I'm an acquisition.com. 14 00:00:53.280 --> 00:00:56.080 It's a portfolio company. This is about $85 million. You're walking to Oxymozzi Nation. 15 00:00:56.080 --> 00:00:59.280 I make these videos because a lot of people broke and I do not want you to be one of them. 16 00:00:59.280 --> 00:01:04.880 So let's rock and roll. So the first of these things, in terms of the order and sequence that 17 00:01:04.880 --> 00:01:08.400 you're going to be hiring them in, is going to be in the reverse order of the value that's being 18 00:01:08.400 --> 00:01:12.880 delivered and or what you can get in the marketplace in terms of dollars per hour. And so the more 19 00:01:12.880 --> 00:01:16.800 valuable the skill, the more it will cost. And so you want to replace the skills that cost at least 20 00:01:16.800 --> 00:01:22.800 amount of money for you, right? Should make sense. And so typically, one of the first two 21 00:01:22.800 --> 00:01:26.560 hires, and this can happen in any order, is going to be one person who's going to be more of an 22 00:01:26.560 --> 00:01:30.400 administrative help to you because as you start a business, especially in the beginning, there's lots 23 00:01:30.400 --> 00:01:34.400 of administrative work that needs to be done. It must be done, but it's not necessarily the high 24 00:01:34.400 --> 00:01:37.920 value work that's going to move the business forward, but it must be done. And so number one, 25 00:01:37.920 --> 00:01:43.600 will typically be someone in that type of role. The second hire will typically be somebody in 26 00:01:43.600 --> 00:01:47.600 the customer success or customer support role. All right. And you're still likely going to be heavily 27 00:01:47.600 --> 00:01:52.560 involved in the success or delivery of the product or service that you have. But this person is going 28 00:01:52.560 --> 00:01:56.800 to help take away some of the repeated tasks that you are doing that are not necessarily value 29 00:01:56.800 --> 00:02:02.000 additive, but must be done. All right. So this is like handling returns, talking to customers about 30 00:02:02.000 --> 00:02:06.160 repeated tasks, you know, switching out billing stuff. And again, you'll see that there's some 31 00:02:06.160 --> 00:02:10.640 crossover between this administrative role and the help with delivery because in the beginning, 32 00:02:10.640 --> 00:02:14.640 that's where a lot of your time is going to start occurring. Note that you're still probably 33 00:02:14.640 --> 00:02:19.440 marketing. You're still probably selling because that's what you need to do at this point in the game. 34 00:02:19.440 --> 00:02:24.240 All right. The third piece will likely be the first salesperson. All right. And that's because, 35 00:02:24.240 --> 00:02:29.680 and again, this will depend based on how good you are at sales. Right. So like if sales is not 36 00:02:29.680 --> 00:02:34.160 necessarily your strong suit, then you might take this earlier. Right. If it is a strong suit of 37 00:02:34.160 --> 00:02:37.840 yours, you're going to take it a little bit later because your dollars per hour in that role continues 38 00:02:37.840 --> 00:02:41.360 to grow. And so I don't want you to take these as hard and fast rules. These are just general 39 00:02:41.360 --> 00:02:46.400 rules of thumb that the the corresponding framework that you need to be thinking this through is 40 00:02:46.400 --> 00:02:52.800 how much value am I making per dollar, start per hour, and then how much would it cost me to replace 41 00:02:52.800 --> 00:02:56.560 that dollar per hour. So it's like, if I do not generate a lot of dollars per hour and it doesn't 42 00:02:56.560 --> 00:03:01.120 cost a lot of money, then that will be the first thing. Now, if I'm generating a lot of money, 43 00:03:01.120 --> 00:03:04.880 and I can replace it for a medium amount of money, then it's like, well, I'm the it's the 44 00:03:04.880 --> 00:03:08.240 net difference. Right. And that's what we're looking at in terms of how we're replacing each of 45 00:03:08.240 --> 00:03:12.400 these roles. Right. And so right off the bat, you're going to have some sort of administrative help. 46 00:03:12.400 --> 00:03:15.600 Then you're going to have some sort of customer support help. Then you're going to probably 47 00:03:15.600 --> 00:03:20.800 hire some sort of sales role. Right. From there, now kind of depends a little bit on the role. You 48 00:03:20.800 --> 00:03:25.760 probably have someone who starts assisting you with the promotion or marketing of your business. 49 00:03:25.760 --> 00:03:31.360 So this is oftentimes somebody who's doing setting or doing prospecting for you or if you generate 50 00:03:31.360 --> 00:03:35.760 a customer's based off content, this is probably somebody who's being a videographer of some sort 51 00:03:35.760 --> 00:03:40.720 or helping you create the content in some way, some of the more laborious parts that are not as 52 00:03:40.720 --> 00:03:46.000 value additive. That would be kind of that fourth looking hire. And again, that can flip with the 53 00:03:46.000 --> 00:03:49.920 sales role. So like if, for example, you're a killer salesman, then you might have somebody who's 54 00:03:49.920 --> 00:03:54.320 prospecting and doing some of the intro calls for you so that the majority of your time is spent 55 00:03:54.320 --> 00:03:58.160 just closing, which is the higher value task. So hopefully this common theme is working out and 56 00:03:58.160 --> 00:04:01.520 making sense to you because it's like the number one question I get or one of among the top 57 00:04:01.520 --> 00:04:05.040 questions I get is like, what order should I hire people in when I'm starting my business? 58 00:04:05.040 --> 00:04:10.640 Right. The next one is, again, all of these roles can be, some of these things can be fractional 59 00:04:10.640 --> 00:04:13.280 right in the beginning. So you'll probably have some sort of fractional bookkeeper, 60 00:04:13.280 --> 00:04:18.080 which is really filling the gap for the finance hole. So they're just doing basic level of accounting 61 00:04:18.080 --> 00:04:21.200 for you to get. So you just know how much money you're making at that time. They can help you take 62 00:04:21.200 --> 00:04:25.360 control of your expenses, et cetera. Over time, that role will probably come in house, but much 63 00:04:25.360 --> 00:04:29.920 a little bit later, right? So like, before you're at $100,000 a month, you really, you probably 64 00:04:29.920 --> 00:04:35.120 don't have a ton that's going on. So just having a fractional bookkeeper is sufficient. Same thing 65 00:04:35.120 --> 00:04:38.320 with a, you know, somebody who's helping you with your taxes, somebody who's helping you with 66 00:04:39.920 --> 00:04:43.920 legal stuff, like you'll have a lawyer, but it's not going to be in house, right? And so as you're 67 00:04:43.920 --> 00:04:49.360 moving up this value ladder in terms of the value per hour and the cost per hour that you can get this, 68 00:04:50.000 --> 00:04:54.560 the process of entrepreneurship, if you think from a big picture perspective, it's always just 69 00:04:54.560 --> 00:04:59.600 buying back your time, right? So that you can level up the amount of time you're spending on high 70 00:04:59.600 --> 00:05:06.480 leverage activities. Now, here's a key point. Hey guys, real quick for those of you guys who are 71 00:05:06.480 --> 00:05:12.640 $100 million offer of funds. I love you. I added in a lost chapter that has never been released. I'm 72 00:05:12.640 --> 00:05:17.680 releasing it now. Transparently, I'm doing that to build hype for $100 million leads, but you will 73 00:05:17.680 --> 00:05:22.000 have the unreleased chapter. It talks about your first avatar and how to segment customers to make 74 00:05:22.000 --> 00:05:26.640 more money. You can get it by going to acquisition.com forward slash leads. It's 75 00:05:26.640 --> 00:05:31.600 so free in exchange for email so that I can email you when we launch $100 million leads and so that 76 00:05:31.600 --> 00:05:35.680 you can not miss out on it because last time I sold out for like eight straight weeks, really fast. 77 00:05:35.680 --> 00:05:38.480 So that is my way of making sure that y'all get first dips. 78 00:05:41.120 --> 00:05:45.280 I see this happen all the time. I'll see entrepreneurs replace all of their time and then they don't 79 00:05:45.280 --> 00:05:50.400 do anything with that added time to add more value. And so in that case, your profit margins will 80 00:05:50.560 --> 00:05:55.040 go down because you are not continuing to add and do the things that generate the income, right? 81 00:05:55.760 --> 00:06:02.160 Now, as you progress, each of these roles become more solidified and these people, ideally, 82 00:06:02.160 --> 00:06:07.040 in a perfect world, actually can ascend up and then have teams underneath of them. The person 83 00:06:07.040 --> 00:06:10.560 who is helping you originally now has a team of people helping them. The administrative 84 00:06:10.560 --> 00:06:15.280 person originally, you might have to ascend them into a director of operations who's really 85 00:06:15.280 --> 00:06:19.120 pushing each of the tasks and projects forward. They end up being a mini project manager for you 86 00:06:19.120 --> 00:06:25.120 if done properly, right? The salesperson might become a sales director or a sales manager who's 87 00:06:25.120 --> 00:06:30.160 actually leading and training a series of salespeople. Now, I will tell you that a lot of times people 88 00:06:30.160 --> 00:06:34.480 have the difficulty of going from an individual contributor at a high level to a manager. It's 89 00:06:34.480 --> 00:06:39.760 one of the hardest transitions in business and it's commonly messed up by most people. All right, 90 00:06:39.760 --> 00:06:43.200 and so one of the things that comes with experience in entrepreneurship is you recognize the people 91 00:06:43.200 --> 00:06:48.160 who have the talent to do the thing that is required later so you can hire those people earlier on. 92 00:06:48.160 --> 00:06:52.640 Now, you can't take, you know, a COO of a billion dollar company and put them in as your operator 93 00:06:52.640 --> 00:06:56.400 one because you can probably get afforded and do the problem without that. Interesting the 94 00:06:56.400 --> 00:07:03.120 opportunity yet. Unless you have funding or some sort of vehicle that you can acquire that talent 95 00:07:03.120 --> 00:07:08.160 earlier. And so as a final concept that I want to introduce to you is that whenever you were 96 00:07:08.160 --> 00:07:11.760 starting a business, you are incurring debt. All right, and this is something that I know very, 97 00:07:11.760 --> 00:07:16.480 very convinced of. And so you are incurring lots of types of debt. You are incurring life debt. 98 00:07:16.480 --> 00:07:21.920 You are incurring management debt. You are incurring financial debt. You're encouraging technological 99 00:07:21.920 --> 00:07:27.120 debt, right? So that a technological debt, which by the way is probably the the if you had another 100 00:07:27.120 --> 00:07:31.680 next full-time hire, it's usually a tech person who's helping you manage the CRM build outsides 101 00:07:31.680 --> 00:07:35.040 and kind of make all the things that you want to have happen or know should be happening the 102 00:07:35.040 --> 00:07:38.560 background actually happened in the role world. They're helping manage passwords on brand new 103 00:07:38.560 --> 00:07:43.440 new people in terms of getting them logins all the kind of jazz, right? And so in terms of the 104 00:07:43.440 --> 00:07:48.240 debt that you're incurring, if you don't have a good CRM that's in place, you will incur that debt 105 00:07:48.240 --> 00:07:51.680 and then you'll have to pay it back with interest later when the company's bigger. If you don't have 106 00:07:51.680 --> 00:07:56.160 a good bookkeeper in place, you'll have your finances will be a mess. And as you scale, you'll have to 107 00:07:56.160 --> 00:08:00.880 fix and pay back that debt later. If you have not the best people or the values are not there, 108 00:08:00.880 --> 00:08:04.960 then you're encouraging management debt, which means you'll have cultural debt, which means you'll 109 00:08:04.960 --> 00:08:09.840 have to pay that back later. And so the idea in terms of moving quickly in the game of entrepreneurship 110 00:08:09.840 --> 00:08:16.400 is recognizing which debt I want to incur in what order. And so I used to poo poo the idea of 111 00:08:17.200 --> 00:08:22.000 investors and venture capital and things like that who gave people money to start because I was 112 00:08:22.000 --> 00:08:26.160 like, that's not a real entrepreneurship. And I think as I've, you know, weathered or aged in the game, 113 00:08:26.880 --> 00:08:31.040 I don't see it that way anymore. I just see it as just fundamentally an advantage is that they're 114 00:08:31.040 --> 00:08:37.280 choosing financial debt to incur fewer other debts. Incure fewer operational debt, incur less 115 00:08:37.280 --> 00:08:41.680 talent debt, management debt, CRM debt, like you might have to have a bigger CRM that's better for 116 00:08:41.680 --> 00:08:46.800 you so that you can scale and have it having to switch platforms, which is common. But it would 117 00:08:46.800 --> 00:08:50.480 cost more money up front. So if you're bootstrapped, you might not be willing or able to do that. 118 00:08:50.480 --> 00:08:53.680 But if you have funding or you have money that you're willing to invest in the business upfront, 119 00:08:53.680 --> 00:08:58.320 then sometimes you can do that. And so one of the things that is difficult with people who go 120 00:08:58.320 --> 00:09:03.600 bigger companies faster is that they skip through the earlier stages because they know how to do it. 121 00:09:03.600 --> 00:09:06.720 And so it's the reason that each of the companies that we've had subsequently have grown bigger 122 00:09:06.720 --> 00:09:12.080 faster, stronger than the companies that preceded them because we are willing to incur less of the 123 00:09:12.080 --> 00:09:17.840 other types of debt rather than financial debt because we have the finances, right? And so we can 124 00:09:17.840 --> 00:09:22.560 skip steps in the growth process that would normally off-rail a quarter's worth of growth by 125 00:09:22.560 --> 00:09:26.960 implementing a new CRM or offload a quarter, you know, or set me back another quarter because I have 126 00:09:26.960 --> 00:09:31.520 to fix my financials or set me back another, you know, year because I have a whole bunch of 127 00:09:31.520 --> 00:09:35.760 management team in place for inexperienced. And I need to get more bin there done that's on the team 128 00:09:35.760 --> 00:09:40.240 and fewer I'll learn as I go, right? And so as we're thinking through this and you're hiring your 129 00:09:40.240 --> 00:09:44.320 team, the two major frameworks that I'd like you to take away with this is number one, you're 130 00:09:44.320 --> 00:09:50.000 hiring the reverse order of value that you are providing and cost to the marketplace that you can 131 00:09:50.000 --> 00:09:55.440 use to replace it. And so typically you will one gets customer support, two, some sort of administrative 132 00:09:55.440 --> 00:10:00.640 role, three, some sort of sales or a center role, four, some sort of marketing assist, five, 133 00:10:00.640 --> 00:10:06.800 some sort of fractional bookkeeper and and or a sixth, which would be your IT person or tech person. 134 00:10:06.800 --> 00:10:11.920 That is usually the beginning of the core team. And then it Christmas trees down, so each of them, 135 00:10:11.920 --> 00:10:16.800 right? Now have five people hanging off of them. Let me see as this doesn't freeze, there we go. 136 00:10:16.800 --> 00:10:20.800 You'll have five people hanging off of each of these, not necessarily five IT people, but hopefully 137 00:10:20.800 --> 00:10:24.720 you can understand, especially on the marketing the sales and on the delivery, those are the teams 138 00:10:24.720 --> 00:10:31.200 that tend to grow as the companies grow and the IT and and finance departments and HR departments 139 00:10:31.200 --> 00:10:36.560 would which end up getting built over time. There's a ratio that is a higher ratio as in you need 140 00:10:36.560 --> 00:10:41.040 fewer of them per amount of customers or employees that you have in the company, all right? And so 141 00:10:41.040 --> 00:10:45.200 as you scale, that is frame number one. And then frame number two is be mindful of the type of 142 00:10:45.200 --> 00:10:50.160 debt that you are incurring and make sure it is the type of debt that you would prefer to incur 143 00:10:50.160 --> 00:10:54.480 if you have the choice. And so if you are new to the channel, welcome to Mosy Nation. 144 00:10:54.480 --> 00:11:02.880 I have nothing to sell you and enjoy the next video. Bye!