Ever feel like your business is running you instead of the other way around? Prepare to break the cycle with Dan Fleisher, our adept guest on the Profitable Painter Podcast, who unveils the game-changing power of robust systems and a rock-solid team. Dan, an expert in service-based business growth, reveals how entrepreneurs can avoid being ensnared by system breakdowns and step back to focus on their core strengths. He shares insights on empowering employees to take ownership and even explores the tantalizing possibility of offering equity to motivate and retain top talent. Equipped with Dan's strategies, you're on track to scale your business without sacrificing personal freedom.
The quest for the ideal hire can seem like seeking a unicorn, but Dan decodes this mystifying process. We compare hiring to marketing, where creating a vast candidate pool is paramount—think of it as casting a wide net to catch the best fish. Discover how crafting magnetic job ads and maintaining a constant recruitment pulse can be your secret weapons. By resonating with potential employees' values and desires, you'll attract individuals who share your vision and are eager to contribute to the company's success.
Finally, imagine having a hiring process so streamlined that it feels like it's running on autopilot. That's the promise of the systems we explore with Dan, where automated forms and behavioral assessments do the heavy lifting, saving you precious time. We share personal triumphs of entrusting roles to those who outshine us, leading to exponential business growth. And if you're keen to delve deeper into optimizing your time as an entrepreneur, we nod to Dan Martell's "Buy Back Your Time" for further wisdom. Tune in for an episode that's all about empowering you to hire smart, grow your business, and reclaim time to invest where you shine brightest.
Job Ad Resource: https://hirebus.com/ai-job-ad/
Link: https://hirebus.com/
Ever feel like your business is running you instead of the other way around? Prepare to break the cycle with Dan Fleisher, our adept guest on the Profitable Painter Podcast, who unveils the game-changing power of robust systems and a rock-solid team. Dan, an expert in service-based business growth, reveals how entrepreneurs can avoid being ensnared by system breakdowns and step back to focus on their core strengths. He shares insights on empowering employees to take ownership and even explores the tantalizing possibility of offering equity to motivate and retain top talent. Equipped with Dan's strategies, you're on track to scale your business without sacrificing personal freedom.
The quest for the ideal hire can seem like seeking a unicorn, but Dan decodes this mystifying process. We compare hiring to marketing, where creating a vast candidate pool is paramount—think of it as casting a wide net to catch the best fish. Discover how crafting magnetic job ads and maintaining a constant recruitment pulse can be your secret weapons. By resonating with potential employees' values and desires, you'll attract individuals who share your vision and are eager to contribute to the company's success.
Finally, imagine having a hiring process so streamlined that it feels like it's running on autopilot. That's the promise of the systems we explore with Dan, where automated forms and behavioral assessments do the heavy lifting, saving you precious time. We share personal triumphs of entrusting roles to those who outshine us, leading to exponential business growth. And if you're keen to delve deeper into optimizing your time as an entrepreneur, we nod to Dan Martell's "Buy Back Your Time" for further wisdom. Tune in for an episode that's all about empowering you to hire smart, grow your business, and reclaim time to invest where you shine brightest.
Job Ad Resource: https://hirebus.com/ai-job-ad/
Link: https://hirebus.com/
Welcome to the Profitable Painter Podcast. The mission of this podcast is simple to help you navigate the financial and tax aspects of starting, running and scaling a professional painting business, from the brushes and ladders to the spreadsheets and balance sheets. We've got you covered. But before we dive in, a quick word of caution While we strive to provide accurate and up-to-date financial and tax information, nothing you hear on this podcast should be considered as financial advice specifically for you or your business. We're here to share general knowledge and experiences, not to replace the tailored advice you get from a professional financial advisor or tax consultant.
Speaker 2:We strongly recommend you seeking individualized advice before making any significant financial decisions. This is Daniel, the founder of Bookkeeping for Painters and today I'm super excited to have Dan Fleischer today. And Dan Fleischer loves bringing the best tools and technology in the world to entrepreneurs. He started his career as a high school special education teacher. Dan found a passion for educating through systems and wanted to increase the scale of his impact. After earning an MBA from Northwestern University, he worked with a management consultant in Deloitte's growth strategy practice. Helping the largest companies in the world set their strategic plans taught him one thing Every business faces the exact same problems and most of them involve people. With this knowledge and a toolkit of management skills, he has made it his mission to help entrepreneurs achieve freedom in their business through creating great systems and building great teams. Dan knows the best way to create freedom as an entrepreneur is to bring the right people into your business and grow them, and this is why he is so passionate about the power of Hirebus. Welcome to the podcast.
Speaker 3:Dan. Hey, daniel, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
Speaker 2:Absolutely. I'm excited to get into it. I'm really into setting up processes because I feel like processes can really free you as a business owner to focus on what you are best at. So I'm excited to get into this. Can you elaborate on some of the common challenges that folks in the service industry are faced with and some of the solutions that you think they're leaving on the table?
Speaker 3:Yeah. So what's interesting is for a while I operated a coaching business that only coached folks in the trades, called Conquer Coaching. We coached over 20,000 home service business owners specifically, and it was interesting because at first I was like oh, systems you need are marketing systems.
Speaker 3:The systems you need are your production systems, the systems you need. But eventually, after seeing these businesses grow and often hit a plateau, it was around systems tied to people. And often hit a plateau it was around systems tied to people. And so the number one pain point that I know I felt running my businesses I know a lot of our clients at Conqueror felt is when systems break down, what happens? The business owner has to go deal with it.
Speaker 3:If someone's sick or someone doesn't do a good job or there's an angry customer, ultimately we are responsible.
Speaker 3:So if we can bring really, really good people into our business who can own and have that ownership and that responsibility that we feel as business owners, all of a sudden we can create a ton of freedom.
Speaker 3:And if we can set up really good systems for really good people so that they are responsible for functions of the business, that's where I've seen business owners and that's what I felt as a business owner be able to focus on what it is that they really love to do, whether that be building a great team culture. I've seen some business owners who have systems and they're still on one truck and they're running three plus million dollar businesses because they love doing some of the work and they have other people managing. It's pretty rare, but if you can build these great systems and build great, bring great people onto your team, then you can do what you love to do in a way that has a lot of freedom to it. So that's what I've seen and that's what I kind of like strive to help folks do and I strive for myself and my business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, absolutely, when you're talking to reminds me. I just read a biography of Rockefeller and there was this point where Carnegie you know cause he's the big guy in steel and he comes over to Rockefeller's house, rockefeller's house and it's like hey, how do you get your the people that work with you Because they work so hard and they're doing great things for you all the time? How do you get people like that? What are you doing? Are you just incentivizing them with hey? Carnegie asks are you just giving a bunch of money? And Rockefeller is like no, I just basically inspire them and give them the authority to direct themselves and set up the incentives the right way so that they just take the ball and run with it. He said something like that, not an exact quote, but it's what it reminds me of is setting up those systems and putting the framework in place so your people can grow into that, and getting the right people in the right seats and letting them take charge of that role that you're assigning to them.
Speaker 3:It's a really interesting piece, and I'm sure we'll talk about chronologically, of how do you find the right people, how do you bring them on, how do you incent them, how do you manage them. It's a full life cycle to build this and it touches every part of your business. But that specific point is something I see a lot, specifically in home services, where it's like you build your business and you make your first key management, hire a production manager, even a GM, a sales manager. And we see this a lot with our clients where they're like I want to bring on a production manager and I can't find anyone. Because, good, because I can only pay them 90 grand a year. And it's like, okay, well, how else are you compensating them? If you want them to feel ownership of your business in the same way that you do? Can you give them a small ownership stake? Why not give them some equity? Wouldn't that be an amazing outcome of your business if you gave someone a single percent of your company and, instead of it being worth a million dollars because of their efforts, it went to be worth $3 million, even though you gave away a percentage of that. It helped you break through big barriers.
Speaker 3:I was just at Sales Boost recently and Tommy Mello was there, brandon Vaughn was there and all of them were talking about what they've unlocked and learned as they've grown and scaled businesses is that you need to give people the incentive to be part owners, because if you have really smart, really talented people that are smarter than you who own some of it, that's when they work hard, that's when they push, and even though you might own a little bit less, the net result at the end is more, and so that's kind of far down the line in like the hiring process, that incentive process. But it's something that we all need to think about, and I've seen this be a really big unlock for a lot of folks. How can you incent people to operate your business for you and care about it in the same way you do? Well, part of that is having them own some of it in the same way that you own the business.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's huge. That's what I've seen as well. Folks that have the incentives right in their business. It just saves them a whole bunch of headache and a whole bunch of time. I know Charlie Munger's famous for saying if you get the incentives right, that's a superpower that you can exploit is if you get your incentives right in your business. So let's walk through the process of finding those right people and getting them in the right seats and evaluating them, retaining them. Let's start from the beginning. So what should the painting businesses be doing to finding the right person? Should they be having them take certain tests or personality assessments, and then what sort of personality should be be working in and what seats? Like you mentioned project management. So what does that process look like to actually make sure you're bringing the right people onto your team?
Speaker 3:Yeah, that's a really good question, daniel, and I know in the painting world is really, I think, far and pretty advanced in the belief of assessments. But even before that, before you get to the point where you're assessing someone, there's a higher level view that we all need to take of hiring, which is that good hiring is good marketing and sales. It's the exact same process, and so I like to teach and think about it in kind of three parts, similar to how any business would run their marketing and sales function, their customer acquisition functions. Often it's called it's this idea of okay, step one, top of funnel, or marketing, how do you bring a lot of qualified customers into your universe, into knowing about your business? And it's the same thing with hiring. How do you get a huge bunch of candidates to be interested in a role? Because at that point it's simple math If you get a ton of people interested, there's going to be more qualified, quality people somewhere in there. So, step one get a bunch of people, and we'll talk about how to do that. Step two is qualify those people. So you want to whittle those people down to only the best, and this is where you want to do this with systems and not your time.
Speaker 3:I think a lot of us have felt the pain of oh great, I got to read 100 plus resumes, or I got to hold 25 interviews to find one person. Well, no, there's a lot of good ways and good technology that we can use that can take those hundreds of people and whittle it down to five or 10, so that you're only spending your time on the best. And then the third piece, similar to any sales and marketing function, is you always want to keep it on. I think as business centers we've all felt it where we're like, sweet, we're booked out five weeks. I got the guys busy, now it's time to go. Do you wake up four weeks later and you look at your calendar and you're like, oh, we've only got a week of work on the books, now I got to start marketing and spending and that seesaw of marketing and production is off kilter.
Speaker 3:We always want to keep our hiring systems on, in the same way that we're always marketing, even if we're booked out a while, because we know eventually that that calendar is going to open up and we need to make sure that that work is filled so we don't get upside down. Same with hiring. We want to make sure that we're still recruiting for those ongoing roles crew members, sales reps, project managers, whatever it may be for your business. We might not spend on ads, we might not pull as many interviews, we might not engage quite as much, but that funnel is always on. So those are kind of the three points. Big top of funnel qualify with systems, not your time. So you're only spending time on the right people and then always keep the funnel on. Those are the three main teaching points and I'm happy to dive into each of those, but that's kind of the framework that we like to talk about to build really good hiring systems. That never stop.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I think that's really powerful. Basically, you need to treat your marketing for your customers Well. You treat hiring for a new person for your business. Treat that just like your marketing. You always have it on. You're always getting top funnel, get a bunch of candidates in qualifying. It's the same process, it's just applied to a different problem set. So that's awesome. Let's start with the first one. You said top of funnel. What have you seen folks do? That's most successful in making sure that there's always fresh candidates coming into that candidate pool.
Speaker 3:Yeah. So there's a lot of strategy here, and then there's a handful of tactical things that just work really well that not a lot of people know. Strategically, we've seen when you go in, if you were to log into, let's say Indeed right now, and just go look for, pretend you were looking for a role as a crew member, and not many business owners have looked for jobs in a while. So it's something that they need to empathize with a little bit. We need to empathize with these. Job descriptions are painful. It's like you know. No one would want to do this. Must be able to be up on ladders, not afraid of heights. Must, must lift like 70 pounds overhead, must, must, must, must, must. I think a lot of people view hosting a job as people should want me. I'm giving them something, I'm giving them a job. No, you are recruiting and you're advertising the best people. Think about all the ads out there on billboards as you drive by. Coca-cola is not having an ad that says contains 125 milligrams of caffeine, 36 grams of sugar, is 16 ounces or 12. No, they're saying when you have this Coke, you're going to feel nostalgia and comfort. And so when we're making a job ad, the objective of a job ad is not to share all the details of the job. You'll get to that later.
Speaker 3:The objective of the job ad is to get good applicants to click apply. And so what do you need to do? Well, you need to share. Who are we looking for. Who are you? You're hardworking, you're creative, you like solving problems. You like working on a growing team. Who we are? We're a growing team that values its people first. We know that if we can do a good job for our customers, that our business will grow and will be fulfilled. We know that we're only as strong as our team, and so we invest in our team. What you'll do each day? You'll work outside, you'll make beautiful things, you'll help make people smile. That doesn't include getting on a ladder, but now that paints a picture of how the candidate will feel when they're with you and they start to put themselves in the shoes of being in the role.
Speaker 3:So number one is just job ads need to be actual advertisements. First, job descriptions, and I think people get that a little bit wrong. You have time to share the qualification details and in fact you can do that automatically, and we'll probably get to that in a second. The second piece here is just like where are you finding people? Um, there's Indeed is great for a high volume, but there's a lot of people on Indeed that are not great candidates, so you need to make sure you're whittling them out.
Speaker 3:Handshake we've seen a lot of success specifically with painters recruiting on. Handshake Started as kind of like a marketplace for folks graduating from college, so it's pretty good for seasonal. They're moving into a little bit more of a tech space, but Handshake has worked out well. Facebook your community printing business cards that say you're awesome with a QR code that goes to your careers page, is a fantastic way to find great talent. If you're at a gas station, there's an attendant there that's always smiling, really engaging. They might want to not be near fumes all day. They might want to work for a smaller business that has different types of perks. Hey, daniel, you know I've seen you a few times here. It seems like you're you're a really great person. I just want to share this opportunity that we have at at uh, you know X, y, at AV painting and uh, like you're awesome, so I figured I'd give you this. That guy probably hasn't gotten a compliment from an employer in months.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's really powerful. That's a good idea. I have a little business cards with a hierarchy that goes to your careers page. Just give that out to the people who are killing it, in whatever capacity in life. That's awesome. That's a really good idea. Cool, so, bringing in a lot of candidates. I like the idea of making it emphasize job ad, not job description. You're actually trying to attract people to you. It's not just like a list of things like I need this, I need this, I need this. It's actually trying to make it a little bit appealing to get as many applicants and good applicants attracting the right people so they're coming into your funnel. Okay, so now that we have all these one, thing that might help people.
Speaker 3:We we we have like hundreds of clients and part of what we do is we write job ads for them via AI. So we get a bunch of info on their business and then we built a really good prompt that spits out customized job ads and these job ads are working top of market on Indeed. We just keep tweaking the prompt until it's working. We do have a free resource that I don't know.
Speaker 3:I don't know your audience super well, I've never been on the podcast before but we have a resource at hirebuscom slash AI, dash job, dash ad, and I don't know if you could link it, but it's just that prompt for free. Folks just enter their information about the role etc. And out will spit a job ad that performs top of market or has historically. So maybe that's something that I always like to give people resource. Instead of spending an hour writing a really good job ad, here's a resource that you can use. It'll take you five minutes and you just have a recurring list of job ads and every time you need to refresh it you can just go in and type write me another one, boop, and it's programmed to know hey, here's another version that's slightly different, so it's pretty useful. So hirebuscom slash AI, dash job, dash ad.
Speaker 2:And I can send you the link, daniel too. Yeah, I'll include that in this show notes. That's awesome. So now that we have all these candidates, what do we next we need to qualify? How do we actually qualify this in a streamlined way? That's not going to be spending hours.
Speaker 3:I feel like this is one of those things that I always chuckle about, because sometimes I end the day with my business now and my prior service businesses where it's like, oh man, I did so good at something that now I have a new problem. It's like, oh great, I sold a bunch of work. And then you're like how am I going to do the work? I only have three trucks. I sold a big job, but I don't quite know how to do that big of a job. Yet I sold a big job, but I don't quite know how to do that big of a job yet. This is kind of one of those chuckle to yourself as an entrepreneur moments where you're like, wow, I wrote a really good job ad and now I have 400 candidates. How am I going to like I don't have time to review all these people, and so this is where it's really. This is where the systems come in big time. You need to build systems that qualify people for you versus your time qualifying people for you. So in the past, if we got 400 candidates coming in, be like all right, can't wait to stay up tonight at 8 pm and read a bunch of resumes or look at their application forms and then try my best to decipher out of those 400, which 40 people, 25 people, to invite to interviews. Now, with systems, we could have that stuff happen automatically for us and that's that's. I'd say that's one of our main things that we've done for small business owners and entrepreneurs to save them time is we've built that system, but I can just tell you how it works.
Speaker 3:So step one we have everyone who applies fill out a very short form and when I've seen these application forms on folks' careers pages, those aren't short forms. I've seen people ask for social security numbers, multiple references to answer long form questions. You're going to lose all these candidates. What you're trying to figure out is how do I contact this person and what are the core? No more than four, three to four requirements that they must, must, must have to work with me. So these forms, these applications, are basically go back to marketing sales, a lead form with a few qualifying questions what's your name, email, phone number so I can contact you, and then what are the non-negotiables that you need to have them work for you? Do they have a valid driver's license? Do they live within X miles of the shop? Will they pass a criminal background check, if that's important to you. There's, you know, are they proficient in both English and Spanish? Are they? I don't? I don't know what they are for every company, but those are some examples. If they say yes, yes, yes, and they could lie, but they probably won't, yes, yes, yes, yes, now you know that they meet your core requirements and you've taken that 400 and you've whittled it down to 250 or 300 is what we typically see. We see about two-thirds make it through that.
Speaker 3:A really important note, daniel, is and this is a hard truth is some folks and not all by any means, but some folks out there apply to jobs to maintain getting benefits. And so what we found is that when you have these very simple qualification forms, folks that apply to jobs on job boards to prove that they are actively looking for work will intentionally answer no to some of these qualifying questions because they don't want to waste their time either interviewing. And so it's a pretty difficult truth, but it's an important truth for us to know, as business owners, that just by having the simple form with a simple automation where, if you don't say answer yes, these four questions, a third of folks that are going to no show you on interviews or you know right away when you get to the interview that you're not going to want to hire them. They're gone and you've spent no time. We've saved you a ton of time right there from that simple automation Step two. So now you know they meet your core requirements and you've taken 400 to 250. Good, now you said earlier well, should I have them take an assessment of some sort? Yes, and so that's like the core value prop of Hirebus is.
Speaker 3:We've taken a behavioral assessment that Fortune 500 companies used for decades to figure out who's a good executive, who's a good manager, who's a good laborer.
Speaker 3:And what we did is we took all that back in data and applied it to the trades.
Speaker 3:So we took all those algorithms.
Speaker 3:We said, okay, instead of focusing on Fortune 500 companies, let's run this data and algorithm through really good folks in every position in a home service business. So and we built benchmarks, like we built a painting specific sales benchmark for the sale that we call it inside sales for painting companies. We have crew member benchmarks for painting companies. We have project manager benchmarks, we have general manager benchmarks, so that, no matter what role you're having, you take those 250 people that passed the initial application and you have them, take an assessment and our assessment will give them a fit score one through 10, so that you can prioritize by only interviewing first folks that are a 10, and then a nine and then an eight. Now can there be someone who scores a five, who's great at the role? Sure, but you are trying to be efficient and build a system with your time, and so we've now taken 250 people and now you're gonna interview five, and those five have the right behaviors for the role, and you've saved hours of time with systems, not you reading resumes.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's super powerful. So it sounds like this assessment. It's kind of like something like DISC or the big five personality, but you've actually customized it for the trade industry specifically, so it has basically what kind of person this is, but what role do they actually fit in? You know whether that's a production manager or a salesperson, and so it's kind of giving you that answer like, yeah, this person generally, based off the benchmark, probably a good fit for sales or production management, whatever the case is. So that sounds like a huge time saver and an amazing tool for a painting business.
Speaker 3:It's incredibly valuable and a lot of our current clients are running pretty large painting businesses and love it, and our data continually gets better. I know most folks are listening, but I'll just share a quick visual for some folks that might be viewing this and I'll try to describe it. But this is our platform. I did it for me with some dummy data but, as you can see, everyone that takes it gets scored on these 21 behavioral scales and it's a little bit different than DISC or Big Five, because those are personality assessments. This is a behavioral assessment. You might say, okay, same difference, the slight difference there is.
Speaker 3:This shows how you often behave. Behaviors change Personality. Like I kind of am who I am, my personality hasn't shifted much over the last decade, but I behave differently now than I did when I was 10 years old and I probably will behave differently in 20 years when I'm much older. You and I are behaving differently on this podcast than we would say if we were at a wedding, right, right. So what's powerful about this is this you can see how people often behave, to figure out if, if in a role, they would be fighting against their core behaviors. But what's super powerful about this is this is me say. You know this is for an outside sales benchmark. The gray is what the data suggests are the right behaviors for someone in sales High productivity, high aggression, lower self-control, higher creativity and higher criticality. And if you look at me, I score a little bit lower in productivity. That's how I often behave, but if you brought me on the team, you could help me and develop me to say hey, dan, when you're selling, you need to be highly proactive, which means you need to be really goal-oriented and just do a lot of action. Sales is predicated on activity, so you need to knock 150 doors a day if you're going to hit your number, and if I hit 75, dan, you need to change how you behave here in order to reach your goals. So now it turns into a really cool coaching tool.
Speaker 3:What's powerful, though, is right off the bat. You haven't spent any time with me, you haven't even looked at my resume, you haven't interviewed me, and now you know that chances are I'd be a pretty good fit, and you know okay. Well, what questions should I ask? Because this person's low in productivity? Tell me about a time that you undertook a project that demanded a lot of initiative? That's a pretty specific question, based on who I am and how I behave, that you can use as a business owner to figure out if they're a right fit, and you've spent no time. You've spent no time on this somebody to figure out if they're a right fit, and you've. You've spent no time. You spent no time on this, so I don't want to. I've now for folks that are listening, I've. I'm not sharing the screen anymore, but, um, I just want to show you how simple it is and how custom it is to the trays. All we do is serve those in the trays. We don't serve anyone else yeah, that's huge.
Speaker 2:I mean, you're having them, so the you qualify them with that short form, getting some key information, some three or four qualifying questions. Then you have them take this assessment that's going to basically tell them, based on their behavior, are they going to be a good fit for what you need to be done in whatever role that you have that you're hiring for. And then on top of that, it's going to give you some recommended interview questions, especially if they're not ideal not ideal in a certain behavioral trait, like you gave proactivity as an example to. To have them demonstrate or give some examples of sometime in the past where they've actually were proactive or whatever. So this is like this is not only saving time but saving you money, because making a wrong hire is anybody who's run a business before I'm sure knows making an incorrect hire costs you tens of thousands of dollars, if not more.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, it's like um, you know I don't often like to like hit too hard on this because we've all just like this. This is painful. Even this is painful for me to think about, just thinking about some of the bad hires, some of the bad decisions I've made. But I guess that's how we learn the best and I know, I know most folks running a business. I would, I would love to meet the business owner who's not made a bad hire but the pain of a bad hire. I, you know, you've, we've all seen the studies. It's 60% of annual, 60 to 150% of annual salary. It's blah, blah, blah.
Speaker 3:But there's also, just like I felt this a little bit of a like it's rocked my confidence a little bit. It's rocked how much I trust the next hire, and that can really limit how we grow our businesses If we start to say, oh, I can't have anyone else do this but me, because that right, there is a huge limiting belief on how we can grow and scale our business. Cause the truth is, the truth is like we are all not the best person to do everything in our business. There's better, smarter people at different functions than all of us. And as soon as we can trust and learn that and have the humility to share that that's. That's when growth happens.
Speaker 3:Like I don't know, the first really good salesperson I hired shout out to kyle changed my business and changed my philosophy. Um, I thought that I didn't think that a single person sales could drastically change the business. And when I looked six months later and we were doing, uh, five times more, you know, sales a month with very little change in marketing, very little change in our processes, it's like, hmm, maybe it counts better than me. You know like, huh, what other parts of the business would benefit from not having me do it? Probably a lot.
Speaker 2:Yeah, that's a. I can relate experiences in my business giving away pieces and be like now it's flourishing, now that I'm not in it anymore. It's a common trap, a psychological tendency to think that oh, this is my business, so I'm the best at all the different roles, because you were doing all the roles at one point, you know, when you started the business, and that was definitely needed. But to really grow and you want to bring on people that are better than you and to take it to the next level and, believe it or not, you are not the best at everything and that's something that I've had to learn as well that giving it, giving it to somebody else, can make a huge positive difference.
Speaker 3:Yeah, it's to go back to the higher bus. This actually isn't my. This is like a dummy results. I'll actually pull up my exact results so you can see. So these are my higher bus results.
Speaker 3:For me, dan, this is the overall line chart. But if we look here, I'm in charge of sales. Is that good? Probably not. And so where is my unique genius? It's definitely not here. It's probably not in marketing either. Here, it's probably not in marketing either. It's probably not in production either. Maybe it's in like overall management. But it's really sobering and humbling to see this and see.
Speaker 3:Okay, the playbook for building a business is you know, you grow you. You first hire for production, then admin, then sales, then marketing. Well, for me, maybe I should hire for sales right away because I stink at it, and maybe I should do admin because I seem to be pretty good at that. You, as a business owner, need to know what are your strengths and what gives you energy, and that's where you need to focus on bringing people. There's a really good book by Dan Martell called buy back your time, which I think flips a lot of the paradigms of how to, of entrepreneurship and how to hire on your head. Highly recommend it's. It's. It's targeted towards, like software company um business owners, but I think it's even more applicable for us in the trades um because of some of the messages and learnings that it shares. So buy back your time. By Dan Martell is a is a quick plug for some good content for folks to read.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and for folks that are between like seven, 50 in revenue and 1.2 million, I would say they have that, that decision on how much or was their first big hire. So this, either the salesperson or the production manager. And I sometimes get the question like which one should I, should I hire first? And having a tool like this where you know yourself and you can kind of see plotted out against the benchmarks you know, are you naturally a good salesperson or naturally good production manager, that could, that could even help you know, assessing yourself, so that that's that's pretty powerful tool. So you can make that, that decision on that first big hire Like, is it going to be the production manager or the salesperson we have we have a franchise where we have a number of franchises but one that's a.
Speaker 3:It's a coatings franchise. It's pretty big and when it comes time for that first key hire, that's exactly what we have them do. Daniel, we say, okay, there's a playbook. But uh, let's think about sports teams, like, if you have a really good if it's football and you're really good at running the ball, run the ball. If you're really good at throwing the ball, row the ball. If you're really good at defense, rely on your defense and play conservative on offense. It's the same thing with these businesses. Every time they get to that stage where it's time to hire that first, what we call management layer. Let's look at this Do you agree with it? Do you disagree with it? Great, now are you going to bring on a salesperson? Are you going to bring on that project manager is what we call it for those businesses but kind of like a production lead? Great, that's your first hire. Then you can fill the rest. But you are unique. You got to build a plan for you, a strategy for you, not for what John down the road is doing.
Speaker 2:It's not going to work if you do it for someone else. It also seems like having an understanding of the folks you're working or you're going to work with you know you're assessing them in the beginning would help, and you kind of mentioned it as well, like help, coach them to get better and to prove in that, in that role, and also just to retain them in general, cause you kind of know, you know what their strengths are, what their weaknesses are or opportunities, so you can kind of develop them and know how they're, how they're wired and how they're driven.
Speaker 3:100 um, when we have folks join hire bus. So one thing for us is we price it and I don't want to get into like a pitch about hire bus, but this is important to understand. Like the structure is. We were, we were running business. We're using like disk and other assessments that you pay, you know whatever. It was like 20 bucks per, which became pretty tough and we couldn't then have those 250 people take it. So we price it just flat. It's just a monthly 90 bucks a month. If you do annual, 149 a month. If you do month to month no contracts, you get unlimited assessments.
Speaker 3:But when people sign up, we're like they people sign up. We're like they usually sign up because they're hiring someone, but right away we're like have everyone on your team take it. Because then all of a sudden you see the universe and what's powerful when you see the universe of your team is you're like, oh, daniel, who's one of my best crew members, is actually like really good at sales. Huh, if days are slow, maybe we should have Dan go knock on some doors. Huh, this person you know they're, they're in the office, but they, or this person who's in sales is actually really good at customer service. So maybe their prior jobs.
Speaker 3:There's so many inbound leads that all they had to do is be smiley and friendly and they'd close them. Are they aggressive enough for our sales cycle? So you now can understand what your team is, what people's behaviors are, and there's coaching documents so that you can help develop them or put them in the right seat. And what we find is folks often come in like, hey, I need to hire a new person, and then, when they have their whole team take it, they're like, oh my gosh, it unlocked, I need to put this person here, this person here, this person here, and they can restructure their org in a way that fits people better and makes people happier. That's awesome.
Speaker 2:So maybe you already have the person. You just didn't realize it.
Speaker 3:Yeah, yeah, we see that a lot with like sales, customer service there's often those rules are flipped.
Speaker 2:Well, how? How can folks learn more about Hirebus or get a get ahold of you?
Speaker 3:Yeah, so, um, you can email me, dan, at hirebuscom, but I think the best way to learn more is just to try it out. Try the assessment out for yourself. So, whenever we do like teaching sessions, we offer a free assessment. So if you go to hirebuscom slash free, you can go and you can take the assessment yourself. You can see how easy it is. It's like five to 10 minutes and then you can see the results, which is pretty cool, um, so that you can, um, uh, see how accurate it is. So, like before we folks join or become clients, we like them to see the assessment and say, huh, does this feel right to me? If so, it's probably a pretty good assessment of other folks. So, hirebuscom, slash free, you'll learn more about us as well as get a free assessment so you can see if this is something that you need in your business, for your existing team or to bring more people on.
Speaker 2:Awesome, highly recommend it. Check out hirebuscom and I'll put the links that you mentioned for the tools and everything so folks can check it out. And yeah, if you need to like this is so important, like getting the right team in place. You're not going to be able to grow your business very much if you don't have the right team in place. So having this piece of your business figured out is super important. So I'm super happy that you came on the podcast today, dan, and gave us some strategies and tactics.
Speaker 3:But it's been totally awesome to be on here. It's something I'm passionate about. I'm glad that we're so aligned on. Like this is the big blocker in our businesses at a certain stage. So, yeah, thanks for giving me space to blab and share what we've learned and supporting a bunch of our clients.
Speaker 2:Absolutely, and with that we will see you all next week.