Episode description

Are you good at managing people? Hiring? Dealing with day-to-day stuff? Do you find it interesting or fun?
 I don’t. I suck at it.
 
 It’s REALLY important as an entrepreneur that you have the right team to support you. You CAN’T do everything on your own … even though I know you may want to (I’m talking to you, perfectionists … I see you!). That’s the quickest way to BURN OUT and experience failure.
 
 Dan posed an interesting question during our talk: “Regardless of what business, service, or marketplace you were in, what kinds of people would you want around you? Who would you hire?”
 
 Here are my 4 non-negotiable, must-have employees:
 
 * A GREAT Executive Assistant: one who’s super resourceful, understands the value of your time, protects it at all costs, and knows how to solve problems. Ideally, someone who has a value system to make themselves available when critical things break, meaning they understand that emergencies happen.
 * An Integrator: someone who can take over your operations competently. They’re watching the “back end” of your business—the details—and know how to deal with a visionary.
 * A Project Manager: someone who can manage hiring and finding talent and resources to get important tasks done, whether it's in-house, contract, or vendors.
 * A Communications Director/Brand Manager: someone who understands the branding, the messaging, and what the company and YOU stand for. Someone who can take ideas, flesh them out, and turn them into content so that you’re ready for prime time, whether it's on social media, emails, messaging, articles, or proposals.
 
 Dan agrees and feels that your Executive Assistant is probably the MOST crucial hire you can make as an entrepreneur. We live in a world where everyone wants to get to you, and you NEED a gatekeeper—someone who can sort out requests for your time and make judgment calls. They know what your vision of the future is and are confidently judgmental.
 
 In Dan’s world, it was also very important for him to hire an artist. The reason for that is because communication through graphics is 100 times faster than communication through words. We are in a conceptual world, a world of ideas, and ideas spoken lend themselves to 100 different interpretations. But if you can take an idea and put it into a graphic, it's almost binary. People either get it or they don't get it, so he takes a graphic approach to everything he does.
 
 We break down our hiring process into a few simple steps:
 
 * Place an ad that’s HONEST, personal, and detailed about what your expectations are. Make it funny if that’s you! Differentiate yourself. Be CREATIVE! Here’s a little blurb from the ad I placed when I was looking for my EA 13 years ago (and, by the way, people have asked me to copy it many, MANY times!): “Agent M seeks Mr. or Mrs. Moneypenny, aka an executive assistant who is a workaholic and obsessive compulsive codependent, extremely detail oriented with impeccable organization and communication skills to help manage serial entrepreneur’s business.”
 * Hire people for a single focus job. In other words, hire people who are uniquely good at one thing and give them one really extraordinary thing to do.
 * When you're hiring people, put in your messaging, “I am an entrepreneur whose business is to be a hero to ________ kinds of people in the marketplace. We uniquely help them do _________ and I want to devote all my energies to being a hero in this way.” Whoever this resonates with is a GREAT candidate.
 
 I like to say, “You attract exactly who you deserve, depending on your own self worth, and who you're aspiring to be.” The more open you allow yourself to be without experiencing fear, the faster you ELEVATE and ESCALATE your business and LIFE!
 
 As usual, there’s always MORE.