We’ve been hiring and onboarding a lot of people this year. Since April we’ve brought on 5 new people to our sales team, transitioned my Executive Assistant into a Sales Coordinator, and hired a Media buyer. That’s 6 new people in the last 90-120 days.While we’re not perfect, I’ve put together a video breaking down how we train and onboard new people so they are making an impact quickly. Check it out here.
Transcript / MP3
What’s good. Everybody, Greg Hickman here. And in this video, I want to break down how to train your team so that you can actually get more things off your plate. Let’s get it going. Welcome back everybody. Like I said, in this video, I want to talk about how to train your team. And if you’re new here, then go ahead and click that subscribe button and that notification bell, because we release a new video each and every week. All right. So here’s the deal. Uh, in the last four to six months, we’ve grown from four to four people to 11 people really, really quickly. Historically, I can honestly say that I’ve had no real onboarding process. We throw people into the fire. It would take a lot of my time to get someone up to speed. And a lot of times it wouldn’t even work out. I don’t know if that’s what you’ve experienced, but if that’s what you’ve experienced, you probably know what it feels like to bring someone on and then feel like you have to spend all of your time trying to get them up to speed. … And you find yourself in this weird position where you might as well have just done it yourself. And so you kind of get into this weird spiral of not wanting to bring people on because it takes too much time, but that’s the very catalyst for you being able to get time back to grow your business. So it’s kind of this catch 22. I get it. I’ve been there now this time around, we’ve been able to go from about four team members to 11 team members really, really quickly. And while yes, it has been a lot of work. It’s actually been a very simple process for, for us as a team to follow. Um, I’ve taken people through this process as well as other team members. Uh, existing team members have taken new new employees and new hires through this process. So it’s not only easy for you, the owner, but it will also be easy for someone on your team to onboard other people, maybe on their team, if you’re moving people up into management. But I’ve also found for our new team members that have been hired and came on board, they’ve grasped, they’ve grasped things a whole lot quicker, thus really getting them up to speed faster, which means they’re taking things off my plate a whole lot quicker than anything I’ve ever tried in the past. So that’s what I want to break down a couple of the key things that we’ve done really simple to help you bring on new team members and train them so that they actually can take stuff off your plate. Now, a couple key assumptions that I’m going to make during this video is first you’ve found the not, um, this is the first step that we take people through is really understanding where, where is the actual bottleneck or the not in your business that is requiring you to hire someone because we only want to hire people that are going to unlock our bottleneck. And now in a previous video, we’ve talked about the core functions of a business lead generation lead, nurture sales, fulfillment, and retention, resell, and upsell, which is kind of the five drivers or the five core functions that I’ve learned from a guy by the name of Alex. Charfen, I’ll link him up below. Now, once we’ve identified the bottleneck, then I can say, okay, well, what is Greg doing? Or what is someone else on the team doing in that area? And what is that role? So we’ve identified the bottleneck, the area of the business that we actually need help in. So maybe say it’s sales, a recent one that I’m going to talk about in this video is we just hired a media buyer, someone to take over for me, the running of our Facebook ads, YouTube ads, et cetera. So we know that it’s in the kind of the marketing and growth acquisition side. Um, then we really do identify the hats that have like the people inside the company that were already playing this role because we’ve been a small lean and mean team. There were pieces that have this role for the media buyer, for example, like I wore the media buyer hat in some ways. And then Lisa on our team also was wearing some of the media buyer hat from a different kind of the ed admin operations side of that role. So we both needed to put our heads together and say, okay, well what actually will come off my plate when we hire a media buyer and then what will come off of her plate or someone else’s plate, if we’ve kind of been combining efforts to make up this role? I think this is really interesting because sometimes I see with our clients, they try to hire this super power person. And what they don’t realize is even if you’re the only person in your business, you are wearing multiple hats. There are certain parts of the day where you’re the sales person. There are certain parts of the day where you’re the marketing manager. There are certain parts of the day where you’re the CEO and you can’t be the sales person, the sales rep while wearing the CEO hat. And it’s really important to really hone in on what are the activities that you’re actually doing while wearing this hat. And this exercise, the three tips I’m about to share with you are the very things that we’ve done to really help scope this out. So those are the two assumptions is first, you got to know where the bottleneck is in your business, so that you’re hiring to actually unlock the bottleneck. And two, you need to make sure that you’re like really honed in on the specific role that you’re hiring for and not expecting someone to come in and have like these seven different hats. So a tip number one or the step number one is to, for our it. Now, again, kudos to Alex Charfen and Alex [inaudible]. These are two people that I’ve learned of this process from, and it’s called the four R document. I’m going to take you through what the four R stands for. Um, prior to following this for our document, um, I utilize this concept called the scorecard, which is from a book called who, um, by, uh, Jeff smart and Randy street. Now the scorecard is really just this one page document that is a scorecard for the person you’re going to be hiring. So it’s a little bit of how you’re going to measure this person. I found that the four R document sort of blends this concept of the scorecard and something that is easy to consume and easy to utilize both in the hiring and call it, you know, measurement process. So what does the four R document stand for are? Number one is role. You need to clearly identify the role. I kind of alluded to this already, but in this case, we would say, you know, we’re looking to hire a junior media buyer and think of this section of this document as like a high level paragraph overview of the role, um, what are they doing? What part of the company are they in? Things like that. So very kind of high level then, and the next part of the document, we go into responsibility. These are the things that they’re going to be responsible for as, you know, as the junior junior media buyer or whatever role you’re hiring for next. And so this will, this could be a bulleted, a bulleted list. This could be a couple paragraphs, um, whatever works for you. I like making a bunch of bullets of, you know, what are they actually responsible for it? The next are his requirements thinking about this as the, you know, the characteristics, the experience, the traits that this person needs, Hey, they need three plus years of buying ads on Facebook, at least two years on Google. Ideally they’ve worked at a digital marketing agency or have digital marketing experience at least two years. Um, you know, how to use Facebook ads manager, you, um, are, you know, okay at copywriting and the ability to do creative as a plus, like this is where you’re kind of looking for, like, what does this person, you know, level of experience skills, um, traits, characteristics, what are the requirements for this role? Lastly, use, you probably would have guessed his results. So think of this as the key performance indicators, like, how are you going to measure this person’s success? And this is great. When you go into the hiring process and you say, Hey, look, here’s the role. Here’s what you’re gonna be responsible for. Um, do you have these skills and look, this is how you’re going to be measured. Like, are you capable of achieving these results? You know, X percent conversion for the media buyer. Um, we’re looking to generate this number of leads, um, with a conversion percentage of this or an opt in percentage of this, um, you know, the, uh, managing and tracking of all of our data. This is where you really start to identify how you’re going to measure someone. So guess what, when they come on board and you hire them, they know what you’re going to be looking at. And you hire looking for someone that has already ideally achieved those results. So the first step is to, for our document it, which is the role. Number two, is to set the communication rhythm. Now, depending upon the role, there’s really two types of communication. There’s external. And there’s internal. If you have a client facing role or a role that has some sort of external communication, um, you know, in this case, a sales representative would be communicating with prospects. Um, maybe you have an event coordinator who is communicating with venues and things like that. If that’s a key part of your business, you could be hiring someone that doesn’t have any, um, you know, external facing responsibilities. In that case, it’s super easy. There is no extra external communication cadence, but internal would be, you know, when are you going to be talking to them? You know, where do you expect them to be? How are you communicating through what medium, what K to what frequency, et cetera. So for the media buyer, you know, we said things like, Hey, every Monday morning we have our team meeting. It’s 30 minutes happens on zoom Monday afternoon. We’re going to have a 60 minute marketing meeting. Here’s what we’re going to cover on Wednesdays and Fridays. We’re going to do a quick 15 minute stand up meeting where you’re going to tell us, you know, what you did yesterday. What’s, you’re working on today today. Um, and where are you stuck? So from a meeting perspective, every week, you can expect to have those four meetings in between. Then we’re going to be communicating on Slack. Here’s how we use Slack. Here’s when we use Slack, here’s what we use it for. And we also use notion to track, you know, which ads are in creative development, copywriting, et cetera. So we’re going to be having asynchronous communication as it relates to specific ad campaigns that we’re launching on these new platforms or existing platforms inside of there. So that’s where we’re going to be communicating how frequently we’re going to be communicating. Um, we expect, you know, reports on these days, that’s where you’re going to tell them, you know, here’s how we’re going to be communicating when we’re going to talk. And when we’re going to figure this all out. So now they, the new hire has a clear idea as to, you know, where do I need to be at? And when, um, and how, you know, especially in this time where a lot of people are virtual, we’ve always been virtual and remote work coordinating at different time zones. You know, my media buyer is two hours ahead of me. I have people that are an hour behind me, three hours ahead of me. So we need to be able to have an asynchronous communication. So the new hire needs to know what that’s going to look like. So we’ve talked about the four R document. We’ve talked about communication cadence. Now the last part is to predesign there days. It’s very simply, if you just take every day of the week and break down into three parts, beginning, middle, and end, and identify what are the things that you want this person doing at each parts of the day? I just basically looked at what I was doing when I was wearing the media buyer hat. What did I do? First thing in the morning? Well, I, uh, I reviewed our ads. I optimize the ones that were working. I turned off the ones that weren’t increased budgets. I did some audience research. I, um, explored some new advertising hooks and creative ideas. So that was my morning, middle of the day, you know, checked reporting, um, you know, tested some new things at the end of the day. Um, you know, did one last over on reporting. And then I would plan what I was going to launch the next day and I would send my daily report. So I really just looked at what I was doing while wearing that hat and broke it up into when I did it throughout the day and kind of how long I was spending doing it for some of these roles, you can easily give someone a checklist like, Hey, in the morning, I need you to do these five things. Then the afternoon, these two, two things, a role like a sales rep might be not need to be so checklist, like have a checklist for it because they’re probably just going to be on calls, um, enrollment and clients. But if it is as an operations role or a fulfillment role, you might want to say, Hey, in the mornings, I want you to, you know, dedicated to, um, you know, responding to client support tickets in the afternoon. I want you working proactively on reaching out to clients with their reports, whatever that might look like. So real quick recap, three things that you need to do. We’ve done this and a little bonus tip here at the end. Uh, first the recap is create your forearm document or your scorecard. If you’ve read the book who this is going to break out the entire role into really easy to consume pieces that are going to allow the new hire to understand how they’re getting measured and also help you realize, you know, who you’re looking for and make sure you found the right fit. So that’s the role, responsibility, the requirements and the results. Then you’re going to set the communication rhythm. When are they having external communication? When are they having internal communication? Who are they talking to? When are they talking to them? Where are they talking to them for how long, how frequently pretty simple labs asleep predesigned, their days, they should roll into their first day and know what they’re going to be working on. Just like on their 10th day, they should wake up and know what they’re going to do in the morning, middle of day. And end of day, if you can document all of that for your new hire before you bring them on, they’re going, we do hit the ground running a whole lot faster. You’ll have thought through what they’re going to be doing, which is going to answer a lot of the questions that they’re going to have in that first, you know, first week or two of, of being hired and getting onboarded. The next thing kind of the bonus tip here is I can run court videos, walking through each of these documents and checklists and have them watch them as a part of that onboarding. If this is a, the role that you’re going to have multiple people sitting in, for example, a sales rep or, you know, fulfillment piece, um, things like that. You’re going to hire multiple people for this role. So now you’ve kind of moved, removed yourself from having to have a one on one call with every single person. And you’ve created a mini training program for each new role that you come on. At some point, I’m going to have another media buyer. That means I can have the media buyer, the video walkthroughs of these documents and know exactly where they need to be when and what they’re going to be doing each day, middle, beginning, middle, and end, and know how they’re going to be measured. So all you need to do is a quick screen capture walking. You’re walking this person or yourself for the future person through this document. And that becomes a piece of their onboarding training to get them up to speed. So I hope you found this helpful. Um, we’ve done this again, went from four people to about 11 in four to six months, and it’s the fastest we’ve ever brought people on and really the most effective. And it’s been kind of the biggest weight off of my shoulders because now we just say, okay, well, who do we need to hire next? And we’d go through these, these three steps and boom, we’re ready to rock and roll. And thankfully we have this in place and thanks to people like Alex Charfen and Alex mosey, who I’ve learned this from in the book who, so I hope you found this helpful if you’ve been stuck in the weeds trying to hire. And, um, because it’s so time consuming, you’ve held off, but that’s just putting more stuff on your plate. Go ahead and try these three steps and leave a comment as to which one is going to be, uh, or which one you’re most excited about and, or chat with you. Take care. [inaudible].
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