Speaker #0We've talked a lot about how to identify struggling or leaders in your business, what the causes of that are. But one thing I've never talked to you about is how to develop or create a new role within your business that compensates for those weaknesses or constraints within your business. So today we're going to talk about how do you develop a new or operated role within your company. Welcome to the Key Hire Small Business Podcast, where we cover the issues that help owners scale their small businesses. I'm Corey Harlock, creator of Key Hire Solutions, and I will be your host. So today we want to talk about upgrading or creating a new role in your business. So let's talk first of all about why would you do that? In your business, when you start a business, you could be six months in, 12 months in, you could be six years in. But there will come a point when you cobble together your initial leadership team. And that's the absolute right thing to do. Cobble it together. That means you hire your neighbor, you hire your neighbor's cousin, you hire your friend, and everyone jumps in and does whatever they need to do to make the business go. And if you do a good job, inevitably, the requirements and the demands of your business will outgrow the capabilities of the people leading the business. And what I mean by that is everyone's jumping in and doing whatever they can do. I might be in charge of sales, but if we have too much stuff to produce, I'll jump in production. I might be in charge of marketing, but if you need me to help in sales, I'll help in sales. I might be the president, but I'm also doing the books. So we're all helping out. and ebbing and flowing with the demands of the business. And at a point, your business will hit that critical point where we need to start creating a proper organizational chart or in EOS, they call it the accountability chart, whatever it is. And people need to be specialized in their role and they need to be at the top of that chart. And really, there are only three categories on that operational chart or organizational chart. There's operations or sales or there is administration. Most every role in your business will fall under one of one of those categories. And you might, as a business owner, try to tell your your leadership team that you've built this business with. OK, now I need you to stop playing in every all the other sandboxes. I need you to focus on sales. I need you to focus on operations. I need you, person C, to focus on administration. And me as the owner president, I'm going to try to manage this and help you where you need it. That's the evolution. And when you do that, oftentimes you'll start seeing cracks. in the abilities of these people that have gotten you where you are, which is being successful. And you'll start kind of seeing leaders or a leader who isn't able to keep up. They start missing deadlines. They start making excuses. They start pointing fingers at everyone else. Well, I can't sell because operations can't produce or. We can't keep up with production because sales is promising unrealistic delivery dates or accounting. It's not this business isn't like any other business. And I have to use an abacus instead of using Excel because this job is so crazy. And you'll you'll start you'll those people will start micromanaging potentially or they'll go the other way and they'll check out. Maybe they're not around as much as they were. They're not working as long as they were. They're not hitting deadlines is really, really a key one. And as a business owner and the key hire lexicon, we call that the unsure business owner. You know, we have those five key owner stages and they go from being the overwhelmed business owner to an unsure business owner, to a curious business owner, to a growing business owner, to a strategic business owner. And this is kind of that wheel of evolution. in that that growing in strategic business owners where you have your org chart and we're just kind of filling spots um and that overwhelmed business owners is that business owner is doing everything and they're missing every dinner and they're not able to take weekends off But that unsure business owner in our world is that person who starts asking questions like, why is so-and-so struggling? What are my options? If I need to make a change, this is a long-term loyal person. How do I do that? What are my options with the individual? How, if they can't succeed, how can I find someone who will be successful? So if you're kind of asking yourself these questions, you have someone in your business who used to be your right-hand person, left-hand person, whatever, and you now are kind of consistently wondering what's going on with them. You fall into our curious business owner world, and I want to help you get out of that. So all of that to say... Today we want to talk about how do we create a job profile or a job description or hire the right person to upgrade or fulfill a new role in our business. And there's three elements to what we want to talk about and how we're going to do that today. The first thing is we need to hire to culture always. If you do that old nine box and you have... skill or culture fit across the bottom. And then on the 90 degree axis, you have experience. You would, you never want to hire the person who is a three in experience and a one in culture fit. Simon Sinek calls those people high-performing assholes. They just are going to go out. They could do a bang up job, but they're going to be a wrecking ball within your business. And they're going to just spread. discontent and we don't ever want those people. We don't want to hire the three on culture and the one on experience unless we understand we're hiring for potential and that would not be a leader in your business. We never want to hire a leader on potential because there's a chance you're going to immediately be overwhelmed by the situation. So ideally we want to be a three on culture and a two or a three on experience as well. Attention business owners, are you tired of wasting valuable time hiring for associate level positions only to have them not work out or show up? Let me introduce you to CareerSpring. CareerSpring connects first generation and low-income college students with employers like you for those crucial early career roles. Many of these graduates had to balance a full-time job and a full-time course load to achieve their college dreams. They understand the value of hard work and overcoming obstacles. And here's the best part. CareerSpring is free for employers. Yes, you heard that right. As a nonprofit organization, CareerSpring offers their services at no cost to you, making it easy to find and hire these incredible future leaders. They work with students all across the United States, from trade programs to Ivy League schools and everything. in between. If you're ready to make a real difference and connect first generation potential with future opportunities, click the link in the show notes below and learn how you can transform your business and support these exceptional students. So culture, how do we identify what culture is? And so what I always try to do and what I suggest you do is if you have core values, and you live your core values. We've done episodes on core values as well, not just words on a page stuck on a wall. Ultimately, they come down to what you, the business owner, believe in. And every culture is right for someone. Let's not lie about it. Let's be honest about it. But every culture is right for someone. So understanding your core values, let's list those out. And the core values to me are always kind of... How do we deal with our client? How do we deal with people outside the four walls? And culture for me is how do we deal with people inside the four walls? So we want to understand our core values, but also we want to understand our culture. And if you don't understand what your culture is, the best thing to do is talk to, you know, have a meeting with some folks and or interview your people and just say, how do you? how would you describe working here? What do you like about it? What don't you like about it? And you want to come up with four or five words within your culture. And you want to come up with your core values kind of on the other side. And you want to make sure people hit those. That is number one priority. The second thing we want to do is understand the right experience we need for this role. And this gets really important. I hate job descriptions. I haven't used the job description in nine years, 10 years, 11 years. I don't know. A long, long time. And when people ask me because Most of the work we do is helping business owners identify and develop new roles for their company and going out and finding the right people. And people will often say, can you send me a job description? And my standard answer is, I'd love to, but I can't. We don't have a job description for this. We're hoping to hire the right person who can come in and create that job description and tell us what they should be doing. But we have a couple key responsibilities or pieces of experience. experience we require from any individual that we would hire in this role. And these are really granular. And oftentimes they're the tip of the pyramid when we start looking at roles and responsibilities. So an example of that might be people would say, well, we need someone who's organized. That would go under culture or personality, right? When we're hiring for culture, that's a personality trait. So it's an interesting distinction to make, but personality traits aren't part of a job description. We want key skills. So let's say we want someone who can go in and organize our production facility. So we might say we want someone who's got some safety, maybe someone who knows some 5S, someone who has been a part of some projects, efficiency projects, someone who has can detail ways that they have improved efficiency within their business. So when I look at that, I would say, okay, well, maybe we need someone who's got some lean or Six Sigma behind them. That is the tip. If they have lean or Six Sigma, they probably have all that other stuff because safety is included in there. 5S is not, but if they've done that, if they're working on that level, 5 or 6S now is probably a part of that. So when you're creating a new role, you don't want to get down in the nitty gritty. We always want to understand what is that key non-negotiable piece of experience they have. Having said that, we can have negotiables and non-negotiables, but your key 3, 4, 5, 6 pieces of experience should be non-negotiable. So if we're looking at production, we would want to have lean. If we're looking at production, we probably want them to have some health and safety training. If we're looking at production, we want to have things that are specific to our facility. So one of my clients does a lot. They do electrical and mechanical. They do remote power. And it's very intricate. And it's very hard to find people for them because not only do they wire up all their own boxes, they make all their own boxes from scratch. They cut the metal, they bend it, they weld it, they do everything. And so there, right, to have someone working in that facility, they have to have a knowledge of mechanical and electrical. And oftentimes we'll say, well, if they've worked in a facility, a facility like ours, that should be good enough, but we don't drill down. If someone's worked in food manufacturing, they probably aren't going to understand remote power with battery and solar arrays. It's probably not going to happen. So we want to find a key piece of experience would be manufacturing facility. And then another within that, you would want to have electrical and mechanical, ideally. So we can start to understand what key pieces of experience look like. They're very detailed. A big mistake people will make is they'll throw away. what I would consider a key piece of experience. So if you're looking for someone in administration and you're keeping all of your notes and information in a HubSpot or a Salesforce or an Epicor, often clients will say, yeah, if they've worked with a CRM, that's great. No, that's a required. If we're looking for a planner or a buyer or someone, and they're coming from a mom and pop shop where they're doing everything manually, the time it's going to take for them to ramp up on a piece of software. puts them in the category of hiring for potential. They're not going to understand or be a super user of that software in a week or two, not a month, not three months. They're still going to be making mistakes after three, maybe even six months. So let's dial in and understand if you're a manufacturing facility and you're working on whatever software that is, we want to understand that software and what are... similar softwares to it. And we want to make that a requirement, a must have. You must be a user of an ERP or a CRM, the very one we have, or these two or three different variations that are compatible that indicate to us, you'll be able to pick ours up quickly. Something... Simple, you know, an engineering company, if you're doing all your drawings in CAD and you interview someone, have you used CAD? No, I do everything freehand. It's going to take them a long time to use CAD. And you're not hiring someone who's going to be able to have an instant impact. And that's what we want to do when we're hiring a leader. We want to make sure when they walk in on day one, they will be able to do the majority of their job. and they'll... They'll have to learn the nuances and maybe if it's a different software, but they're very good on another one. They'll have to learn that software a bit. They can sign up, take some courses. I'm sure you have people that are happy to jump online and teach them to do that. So when it comes to experience, we're not looking for a job description with personality traits and can you lift 30 pounds? And that's not what we're hiring for. The personality traits we are, but that's not in the experience. What we're looking for are those key. four, six, eight, it might only be four key pieces, depending on the role. It could be six, eight, 10 pieces of key experience, high level tip of the pyramid type stuff that we're going for. And we have to be, we're going to put that on our scorecard. And if they don't check enough boxes, we're not going to hire them because you're going to be disappointed. And I'm going to back up here just a little bit. I've worked with a lot of small business owners who have started our conversation by saying, look, I hired a GM or I hired a director of sales or I hired someone and gave them a really important high level role in my company. And it was a waste of money they didn't work at. And the reason they didn't work out was we didn't clearly define the job, right? The three big mistakes we make when we hire for a new role. or hire a leader in our business is a number one we don't clearly define the job which is what i'm helping you do right now clearly define the role number two is we uh don't run them through a proper hiring process and we talk about hiring process all the time making sure it's consistent and the third piece is and which leads into my final topic is we hire for today's revenue and not future revenue. This episode is brought to you by KeyHire Solutions, where we work exclusively with small business owners who need the right team to scale and grow their business. Are you struggling to find the right talent for your business? As a small business owner, your time is precious, and sifting through unqualified candidates can be frustrating and costly. At KeyHire, we can eliminate time-consuming and disruptive DIY hiring by leveraging our market expertise and our proven process to ensure you get a custom hiring solution that fits your culture, your needs, and your budget. We take the hassle out of hiring by delivering the perfect candidate for your business, guaranteed. Let us handle the heavy lifting so you can stay focused on what matters most, growing your business. With KeyHire Solutions, you'll secure the right talent without the stress or guesswork. Stop settling for the best of the worst candidates. It's time to build the team your business deserves. Click the link in the liner notes below to schedule a call and start your journey to success today. So when business owners go out and hire these big ticket guys or people, they're generally a referral from a friend or they're a neighbor who's out of work or they haven't gone through a rigorous... acquisition process to identify the correct person. Someone has landed in their lap and they've thought, oh, wow, this person's got some amazing experience. How can we shoehorn them into my company and how can I leverage their experience? That's generally the wrong way to look at it. And it doesn't work. So when I work with business owners, we often have to overcome that hurdle. You know, raise your hand if you've done it. If I could see the other side of this, who I was talking to, I'm sure I would see a lot of hands in the air. But we hire people because we haven't clearly defined the role. We haven't clearly defined what that experience is. And the threshold is 80%. We always want to make sure they meet 80% of all of our criteria to even take them to the next step. If they don't hit 80%, they don't meet the threshold. It's a, hey, man, I've really enjoyed talking to you. I don't think it's fit. You have great experience. It's just not great for this role. But I'd love to keep in touch. But I don't think this one's going to work out for us today. If they're not at 80%, don't hire them. So we've talked about the culture and the core values. We always want to make sure we're hitting all those. Number two is the key pieces of experience. Four, six, eight, 10 key pieces, tip of the pyramid type stuff, not general statements. And they need to have those. Now, there might be a couple on there that would be a nice to have. And we'll score those a little differently, right? We won't weight those if they don't have a nice to have. We're not going to eliminate them if they have everything else we're looking for. But if they have a nice to have and they're missing key pieces of experience, we will eliminate. The final piece is capacity. So I said the three big mistakes small business owners make when they hire is they don't clearly define the role. They have an ad hoc process. And number three is they hire for current revenues, not future revenues. I want you to remember this phrase. When you hire a leader, you're not hiring them to run your 10 million or whatever revenue you have. So I'm going to leave some blanks in here or I'm going to fill them in. But I want you to put your current revenue and your your your goal, your stretch goal, where you hope to be in three to five years. So when you hire a leader, if you're a 10 million dollar a year company, you're not hiring them to run your 10 million dollar a year company. You're hiring them to run your 30 million dollar a year company. currently doing 10. And that is a huge transformation for you because they're going to have more horsepower than you think you need. You're going to say, man, this person, why would they want to work here? They're going to be expensive. Yes, they're going to be expensive because they have a lot of experience. But the idea of hiring a leader with a ton of horsepower, a ton of capacity is they're going to walk into your business. They're not going to be overwhelmed. They will be able to identify the low-hanging fruit, the low-hanging constraints immediately. They'll be able to fix those low-hanging constraints immediately. And then they'll slowly progress. And you'll notice in short order, a lot of improvements. Things that you've been asking to get done for a long time will just start getting done. The long tail benefit of this. is not only will they be fixing immediate needs and taking care of those, but if they have the capacity and horsepower that we've identified, if we've identified the capacity and horsepower and they actually have it, they'll fix immediate needs, but they'll fix them with an eye to the future and they'll be putting process and procedure in place that can accommodate the growth of your business. Meaning as you grow, you won't have to worry about, oh my goodness, what are we going to do about this? Because the process and procedure that they've developed and implemented into your business should be able to accommodate it. And of course, you know, if you hit 30 million from 10, those process and procedures may need to be tweaked, adjusted. They might need to be broken and rebuilt, but... 10 to 30 is a pretty good run. You're not going to build a process or procedure in your business that allows you to go from 10 million to a billion without hitting some road bumps and having to make some adjustments. Here's the hard thing as a business owner that you will face. You might not understand what they're doing. You might think they're working on the wrong stuff because that's not what you would do or the person who is in charge would do. You might think, well, no one's even complaining about that. Why are we spending so much time on it? But the reality is if we have the right person, they know that part of the business better than we do. And I'll share an example with you. I have a longtime client and we brought in a director of operations and it's a warehouse distribution company. And when we brought the individual in, I talked to the owner and said, you know, how is our new director of ops doing? He said he's doing OK, but I'm not. I think he's working on the wrong stuff. I said, oh, really? So I went out into the warehouse and talked to the director of ops and said, hey, man, you know, how's it going? He goes, oh, it's going really good. And I go, what have you been working on? He goes, oh, I'll show you. And he walked me through the operation and he pointed out all the health and safety violations that had existed for a while and said, you know, if we ever got an audit or inspector through here, they could have shut us down. And so I've taken care of all of these. in my first kind of four weeks here. So now if anyone comes, we're good. We can keep operating. And so I went back to the owner and he said, so what do you think? And I said, he's working on the exact right stuff. That's what these big thinkers, these high capacity, high horsepower individuals, they're looking into the future for you where you're seeing what you need today. And you might not understand why or what they do. But in short order, you will see improvements. You're going to see some upset people too, because they're going to rattle some cages and not in a mean, malicious way, but people hate change. And when these new leaders come in, some people, the people that say, well, this is how we've always done it. Why are we changing it? Those people are going to get upset. the people who are saying. I'm tired of banging my head against the wall. We got to fix this. They're going to be happy and they're going to be more productive. And then that gives you a whole new issue with stuff you got to deal with because now you have these long-term employees who have been good soldiers for you, who are upset with this new leader who's doing great work, but they're trying to sabotage. That's a whole other episode. But if you find yourself in that curious mindset, if you have a leader or a leadership team, And you're wondering what happened? Why aren't they delivering? What's changed? How come they can't get things done? It's not their fault. They just don't have the experience or the capacity. They don't have that tool in their tool belt, right? They have one tool and it got you where you are. Now you're in a situation where you need a suite of tools and they don't understand. A, they don't know what tools they need. And B, if they had them, they wouldn't understand how to use them and implement them. Very few people can grow that capacity on the fly in the chaos of a small business. So it's not that your people are bad. It's just that they're overwhelmed and they need help. And sometimes we need to upgrade a role or create a new role to put in over top of that person who got you where you are to help coach and mentor them. But more importantly, to start implementing processes and procedures. into your business so you can continue to grow, hopefully with less pain and turmoil. But if you do it correctly and you have the humility to trust, the humility to sit back and the ability to trust them to do what they do. you will be very pleased with the changes that happen within your business. I'd love to know what your thoughts are about that. If you have any comments on it, drop them in the comment section below, or you can send me an email or hit me up on the website. But this is a common thing we do at KeyHire, working with small business owners to kind of identify that leadership constraint, build out that new role, and then go and find the person. to fill that role we're actually really good at it i think we have about a 90 success rate doing it so um love to talk to you a little more about that there's a there's a link on the website so i'd like to uh thank you for tuning into the key higher small business podcast we got value out of today's episode one keep up to date on our new content make sure you leave comment below let us know what you thought of the episode or and make sure you subscribe to the youtube channel If you prefer to listen to your podcast, you can find us on Apple, Spotify, whatever your favorite platform is. Just search up the Hire Small Business Podcast. Thank you for listening. I'm Corey Harlock. And until next time, stop grinding. God bless you.
