Building the Dream Team with Veronica Romney

Veronica Romney joins Pete Mohr to discuss how to create a dream team!

Veronica Romney is a Dream Team Architect helping online entrepreneurs dial in their human resources, develop phenomenal company cultures, and profitable bottom lines. She’s a former Speaker and Trainer for Tony Robbins and Dean Graziosi and the former Chief of Staff of mega-brand BossBabe. She’s no stranger to the stage and has been in the online marketing world for over 13 years, having been featured in places like Forbes, Inc, Huffpost, and more. When she’s not helping her visionary clients scale to 8-figures plus, you can find her wrangling her two-man cubs in the beautiful oak trees of North Carolina.

Here are a few things we chat about:

• Why personality assessments shouldn’t be used a THE decision-making tool when hiring (but how they can be used afterwards)
• The importance of hiring to complement (no need for mini-mes)
• How to align accountability and why it matters.
• The framework around what the costs will be to add team members.

To learn more about Veronica and download her guide simply go to: https://veronicaromney.com/

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Transcript

Veronica Romney: 0:32

I've done all the things I wasn't supposed to do I based hiring off personality assessment results, which I will never do again, I try to hire as if I was a fortune 500 company and everybody was on w two status when I barely was paying myself 40,000. So many things that I did early on when jumping from corporate and being somebody employee as opposed to hiring employees myself, I don't care if you're constructing a dream team of like you and plus one, or you have just two or three, I don't care if the immediate people around you are all part time or contract, and it's a cocktail of different employment statuses. Or you're already 1,000,003 million, 5 million. And you certainly have W twos and things like that. I'm a big believer in Marcus Buckingham and the Strength Finders that like that concept of like, you don't want to hire mini us like there's nothing to be gained by having a mini Veronica in my life. There's enough in my business. But what I need is people to like certainly complement my ambition with strengths I don't currently possess if I seek to do something different.

Unknown: 1:33

Are you making every decision in your business maybe feeling a little overworked and overwhelmed? Do you ever wish you had someone to go over the big decisions and entrepreneurial choices you had to make? Well, maybe this sounds familiar. Your partner at home doesn't want to hear about business anymore. And your friends don't know what the heck you're talking about. And maybe your team at work well, even though you have an open door policy, they're not always as open as you'd like them to be? Well, there's good news. I have room for two more one on one coaching clients next quarter. And, you know, here's how it works. We'll get together on Zoom either every week, or every second week to discuss the strategies and frameworks that will clarify your thinking and advance your business and entrepreneurial life. It's all about the five P's, your promise your product, your process, your people and your profit. Once they're better aligned, you'll enjoy a better life and business. Remember, you own your business and it shouldn't own you. It's time to reduce the frustrations and increase the freedoms. So if this sounds interesting, go to simplifying entrepreneurship.com forward slash Call to book a freedom call with me and we'll see if we're right fit. Hey, it's Pete and welcome to another edition of the simplifying entrepreneurship podcast. And today I have Veronica Romney joining me. And you know, this podcast, as always, it's here to help you cut through the chaos of running a business and transforming your frustrations into freedoms. And, you know, in my five P model that we've talked about in the past, the one big one that often causes entrepreneurs issues, his people. And today we're going to talk to Veronica all around that and creating the Dream Team. And she's done it. I mean, she's worked with Tony Robbins, she's worked with Dean grazioso, Z, she's worked with Pete Vargas. She's here to help you set up virtual teams and work through the best things to create your dream team, for your business. And when we have a dream team, boy, do things really start to happen. And do things really start to look good. And do we free ourselves up of some of the frustrations? We sure do. And I'm really excited here to chat with Ronica. about building a Dream Team. We'll dig right into it with Veronica Romney. Veronica, it's a pleasure to have you here today on the simplifying entrepreneurship podcast. Super excited to be here. Thank you. It's nice to have you here today. And I'm excited to learn a little bit more about some of the things that you've done along the way and your business and all of the stuff around creating dream teams. And I know that's something that's always on on the minds of entrepreneurs, I've got a framework called the five P's. And one of those pieces people and of course, that is a big one for every entrepreneur and every leader of business these days. So excited for that conversation. Yeah, no, for me, the work that like inspires me is I mean, we're calling it a dream team. But essentially, it's people. It's like exactly what you're talking about. It's just growing beyond yourself yourself. And I was already lonely to be an entrepreneur, so why not do it people that you enjoy doing it with? And that you can take back with? Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, that's, you know, it is lonely. And a lot of times with when entrepreneurship, you know, it's kind of our partners at home, don't necessarily want to hear about it anymore. Our friends don't know what the heck we're talking about, because maybe they're not entrepreneurs. And our team at work as much as we have an open door policy don't always tell us the whole truth, at least how they see it, because they're concerned that there's might be repercussions and things like that. And so who do we talk to and who who are we getting on board and how do we get through all of this stuff. And that's one of the reasons for having these podcast chats. So one of the things that we had talked about just prior to hopping on was this idea of when you're feeling frustrated and overwhelmed as an artist To printer, and you're spending more time as the operator than the owner, constantly being sucked back into the weeds of the business. You know, what does that mean? And how do we get through that, Veronica, I was actually preparing some slides for something I'm doing tomorrow for my Rainmaker residency program, there's a whole slide talking about the stages of delegation. And it's interesting, because I think a lot of especially owners, I swear to you, in my best intentions, I really truly believe that I'm actually 100%, delegating, and come to find out, I'm actually not really delegating what I think I'm delegating, I'm certainly delegating a task. So it's not in my Asana board, or my project management system are on my list, it's on yours. But what I haven't properly delegated is a decision or an outcome. And that's when, as you scale and as you invite more people to the table, all you're really doing is delegating things off your list to their list, but you still feel responsible for what's on their list, and you're not delegating out the decisions to be made on that task behalf. So like, I've gone through many chapters of my career leading different sized teams, and certainly as a Dream Team architect, being a fractional CIO staff for a lot of my clients. But it's a common thing that I see us fall into is, is not delegating decisions. And then as a consequence, burning out so badly, because of the amount of decision fatigue that we've caused ourselves. There are only so many decisions to make in your day. And my feeling around that. And what I speak to a lot of times is you don't want to be making decisions as a leader of your organization, on the lowest level of your business, you want to make them on the highest level, yes, save your decisions for the things that truly don't have a process wrapped around them. Right. And, and accountability wrapped around them. Like why are you making a decision for something that already has an accountability assigned for it? Yeah. And to your point, I think he said, it was really nice, because it's like, sometimes being a leader isn't because you have a laundry list of 45 things. It's actually just two or three things on your list. But they're incredibly important, because a lot of decisions that you're making are almost like pioneer decisions, like do we cross this frozen river? No, don't? Are we losing like a cart? Are we losing Pete like, these are these are frontier type of pioneering type of decisions that have radically significant consequences for everybody else. And so to bombard your list with 45, lower tier decisions, clouds, your judgment on the three big ones that are necessary for you, and only you can make Yeah, one of the things I know you started your career in corporate and tell us a little bit more about what you did. And the moment you knew that you wanted to transform into remote work and build this sort of Dream Team architect business around? Sure. Yeah, I mean, I grew up my parents were Cuban immigrants that came to this country. And so from a very young age, they instilled in me that, like education was the means to which you could change your outcome and your star, so to speak. So I really, I mean, I like just knowing my personality and my nature and all the assessments, they'll tell you that I'm a proven, and certainly on paper and overachiever. So I was very, like, almost aggressive with my educational studies. And so I went to school graduated in a shorter amount of time than the most and like, jumped into the corporate world at 20 years old, and thought that that was the only means in which I could really have the future life that I desired and wanted and certainly that my family, my parents wanted for me to that they didn't have growing up for themselves. But it's interesting, because as much as my parents were, were instilling upon their children, the importance of formal education, they also were entrepreneurs, they came to this country with nothing, as most do right and start an air conditioning company in very hot South Florida, and still own that business to this day, like 30 something years later, right. And so even though I was going about the corporate route, and I was going about A, B, C, D, like everything's laid out before me, I don't know if it's like very Disney esque of me to say, but I kind of felt like Molana where I still have like that still small voice inside of me, that was like calling me to the wild, so to speak, and watching my parents kind of carve their own core, certainly out of necessity, but I couldn't help but like, be impressed and inspired. And suddenly, it became a fascination on my part where like, maybe I could do this for myself, too. I just didn't know when. And then it really I think for a lot of female working females, it's not until you have kids where you're like, Okay, I really want to change my life. And I want to be in more control of my life because I don't want work to be my only life. And so it wasn't until I had my first son where I was like, alright, let's let's change this up. So that work isn't the center of my universe, but my family is the center of my universe, but I still wanted to find space for my ambition. And that's really kind of the cocktail that led me to entrepreneurship. Yeah, I think we're, we're just in such alignment. Veronica. Yeah, you know, my, my feeling around this. And one of my lines that I also use quite often is the idea of you own your business and it shouldn't own you. And from that perspective, it's like you You look at your health, you look at your wealth, you look at your mission, you look at all of these different things that you want out of your life as the entrepreneur, and how are we actually structuring our business? To give that back to us? Yeah, one of the ways of doing that is having the right team and you made this decision, you're going to be an entrepreneur, the next step is having some help, right? hiring great people is such an issue these days with so many businesses, and that's why I came up with a new one page sheet around hiring, and it's called the candidate evaluation. And it kind of goes through your particular candidate with the lens of capability, capacity, confidence, and culture. If you'd like to download a copy of the one page candidate evaluation, just go to simplifying entrepreneurship.com forward slash candidate. This episode of the simplifying entrepreneurship podcast is brought to you by shoe topia.ca. I've owned Utopia now for over 12 years, and we're always looking to ensure our clients look great and feel fantastic. Like when you look in the mirror, and you say, Ooh, I look pretty good. And when you close your eyes, and you say, Ah, those feel fantastic. That's when you know, you've found the perfect pair. Whether you come for a visit in person or visit us online@utopia.ca. Our goal is always to make you feel like family and provide an experience you'll remember, our clients are at the very heart of Utopia, visit us@utopia.ca. Currently, we're only shipping to Canadian addresses. What's your process for hiring and building an amazing team and working through all the stuff you've done? Goodness, I'm, I've done all the mistakes. While you see I don't have much hair on my head, I've pulled it all out. I've done all the things I wasn't supposed to do I based hiring off personality assessment results, which I will never do again, I tried to hire as if I was a fortune 500 company and everybody was on WTO status when I barely was paying myself 40,000. So like, I did a lot of things that I think in the pursuit of trying to emulate what others were doing well, others are doing personality assessments or others are, you know, they believe in employment status as opposed to contract. It's I mean, so many things that I did early on when jumping from corporate and being somebody employee as opposed to hiring employees myself. And then what I've kind of like come down to fast forward all these years, it's it's way more simple than that, like, way cleaner than that. For me in I don't care if you're constructing a dream team of like you and plus one or you just two or three, I don't care if the immediate people around you are all part time or contract, and it's a cocktail of different employment statuses. Or you're already 1,000,003 million, 5 million. And you certainly have W twos and things like that. I think the most important thing about constructing a Dream Team is constructing a team of strengths that are not like there's no redundancy in strengths, but there's complementary strengths. I'm a big believer in Marcus Buckingham and the Strength Finders, but like that concept of like you don't want to hire many use. Like there's nothing to be gained by having a mini Veronica in my life. Like there's enough Veronica for the world like in might like for me, there's enough in my home. There's enough in my business. But what I need is people to like certainly complement my ambition with strengths I don't currently possess if I seek to do something different. Yeah, I love strengths finders, and I like Colby for that reason, too. That's a good one to use one of my favorite ones for those I mean, I think I think those tools are great tools to consider and look at, but they certainly shouldn't be sort of the end all and be all right. Yeah, it's funny is I actually use assessment after hiring more than I do for hiring. I actually use them more to learn how to work with somebody best and how to give constructive feedback or how to, I mean, the love languages, right, like just to love on them in the way in the way they deserve and feel love and things like that. So I find myself using the assessments after hiring more so than in the decision to hire somebody, because I've taken all of the assessments. Yeah, me too. And it doesn't actually tell you what I am like we are way more diverse than what an assessment can actually drill down to. So I think that's also important. Like I've been in a job where like, more of the visionary said, we'll never hire an anagram eight again. I'm like, What in the actual like, what does that even mean? See what I'm saying? Like that just is such finite thinking and that I just think that people are more colorful than just what a number or letter will tell you. You know, when you're looking at building these teams, so for many of our listeners, they've got a team and you're trying to grow and there may be hit hit some sort of platform or whatever the case is some sort of ceiling. And when you're at that stage, and maybe you're worried about adding your next staff member and you're worried But the profitability of it and the finance of it and the structure of it and things like that, guide us through how you would take somebody through that level. It's like, okay, we're at this stage. I know we need somebody, but kind of worried about a few of these things. How do I get through that? Yeah, it's interesting, because a lot of the power hours that I do when I'm first like initiating with a new person in my in my ecosystem, where my life is, we do kind of an org chart audit. And this is something that comes up in almost every single one of them. Also, in a conversation that I have with recruiters on their behalf, I work a lot with recruiters will, they'll recommend me as the first step before they engage, because the visionary or the CEO will go to him like, I think I want a director of marketing, or I really think that I need an Operations Director, I really feel like I need an integrator. And then the recruiter smart enough to know I don't, I think you should talk to Veronica first and pat her assess your org chart. What happens a lot of the time is the person that you think that you need, is really what you're doing is you're throwing a person at a problem. And that is the worst way to solve a problem. Right? So that's where a lot of people get in a lot of trouble in their books, a lot of trouble in their business, is that their answer their immediate go to answer when the business hits a plateau, or there's operational inefficiencies is just to throw a body at a problem because they don't know how to personally fix it. So they can't throw their own body at it. Right. But that's actually not the answer is it's not always right to throw a person at a problem. So like, we go through that process of like, what's the actual underlying problem? Is it a person or a software or process or an SOP that is required, and not really just another human being that you have to manage? Well, Veronica, we're coming up to the end of our time here together, I appreciate you giving us lots to think about here today. And I want to have everybody have the opportunity to know where to find out more about you and all that sort of stuff. So why don't you tell everybody how to get ahold of you. And I know you've got a free guide that maybe you want to suggest here. Everything's under just Veronica romney.com. And certainly on social media, it's just v Romila. For a lot of my friends and colleagues call me v. So the Romney on social media, and yeah, you are correct. On my website, I do have a free download, which is basically the perfect executive dream team and how I would go about constructing it and the roles in which I would construct it in. And like you said, it's free to download. And so you can take a look and see how I how I differentiate the difference between a task delegator, a doer, an hour communicator, a strategic thinker, because those might be different titles than you're used to, besides CEO and president and this and that. Yeah, exactly. I'm going to download it soon as we get off the call here, too. So thanks so much for spending some time with me. And I'm so glad we had the opportunity to connect after not been able to do it a couple of months back. But it's been wonderful. And I appreciate your time here today. Thanks, Pete. Hey, thanks so much for spending some time with Veronica and I today and think about how you can build your dream team. One of the things I've loved and I mentioned it in podcasts was we don't make decisions just based on Enneagram, or Strength Finders, or Colby, or MBTI, or any of these different ones. They're just tools that help us along the way. And when we're creating, I think the better conversation around that was the idea that we're always creating other people around us like creating these spaces to fill these positions to fill the voids where we're lacking as leaders. Because we don't want a little MINI MES running around all the time, we want to be able to complement all of the things that we bring to the table with all of the other people around us so that we're really building all of the boxes in our business to provide all of the insight that we can possibly provide, so that we can deliver our promise to our clients. That's the biggest thing. We're always trying to align everything, our product, our process and our people to the promise so that we can do that. And this big piece of building a dream team so important. I am so grateful for my dream team at utopia, they really helped enable me to have these podcasts, for example. I mean, without having them do a lot of that sort of stuff that I'm either don't want to do or I'm not good at doing doesn't mean that it doesn't get done. It means that I've got other accountabilities in place that are allowing that to happen. And they love doing some of the stuff that I don't and I'll just use bookkeeping as one of the examples. I'm actually a pretty good bookkeeper. But it's not something that I love to do. It's something that I'm good at, but I don't love it. But Michelle, who's on our team loves bookkeeping, she loves bouncing things. And so in that place, I'm actually assigning an accountability to her and she's working in her love it zone. So think about that, whether using personality things or whether you're aligning your accountability chart, all of these things around developing your dream team. So important today, and I really enjoyed the conversation with Veronica hope you did too. So if you like the podcast, share it with one of your friends. If you think that might help as well. That would be great. You can check it out on YouTube at the simplifying entrepreneurship YouTube channel as well. I'm always interested in answering questions over there. It's one of the places that you can actually write questions and of course you can reach out to me anytime at Pete at more coach as well and just send me an email that's an easy way to get your questions answered. You can also helped me out by subscribing to the podcast on Spotify or Apple and reading and reviewing the show on Apple or Spotify to with up to a five star review. Connect with me on LinkedIn, Instagram or Facebook. The links are in the show notes as well. And lastly, you can check out my website at mortgage coach that's mo HR dot CEO ACH to learn more about my programs and my systems at simplifying entrepreneurship and until next time, make it a great day and ironic media production visit us at iro M IC K media.com.