#1 Entrepreneurial Blind Spot

One of the fastest ways to successfully SCALE your business is by recruiting and hiring the right talent to get you where you want to grow…

Yet 9 out of 10 Entrepreneurs avoid it like the plague.

Sure, most of us already know we need TOP talent to grow and scale our businesses, BUT the majority of Entrepreneurs really struggle “cracking the code” when it comes to successfully attracting, qualifying, hiring, and ultimately RETAINING the right people for their team. 

In all fairness, it’s not like they teach us this in school. And I’ve yet to come across a training program or course that outlines a proven formula and step-by-step process to successfully hiring right-talent for each unique business out there (especially for Entrepreneurial-based businesses). 

It’s our Greatest Entrepreneurial Blind Spot.  

As Entrepreneurs, we eventually come to a pivotal point in our business when our sales and marketing will hit a plateau (or in some cases, take a dive), OR our sales and marketing efforts will far exceed the infrastructure we’ve put in place to support it.  

The quickest, sure-fire way to break through that invisible glass ceiling and SCALE is to add the right talent to your team that possesses the right specialized knowledge and skill set to get you where you want to grow. 

Make no mistake about it. This is truly a defining moment in your business.

You can either help your business: 

• Shift in the RIGHT direction and move in an upwards trajectory (so you can successfully SCALE) 

OR

• Shift in the WRONG direction, and spiral downwards at an accelerated pace. 

Having worked directly with Entrepreneurs over the past 20 plus years (helping them successfully grow and scale their businesses), I know a thing or two about what their mindset is, and what usually happens next. 

Entrepreneurs either avoid hiring, or overlook important steps in the hiring process; resulting in hiring the wrong talent for the right position.  

Does any of this sound familiar?

• You honestly don’t know what or who you really need, therefore you don’t have any idea where to start.
• You’ve hired in the past and it turned out to be a complete disaster so you’ve resigned to the fact that you’re just a “bad picker” and now you don’t touch it with a ten foot pole.
• You experience pretty high turnover (more than 10% a year), so you are constantly trying to “plug the leaks” in an effort to keep the boat afloat–making it nearly impossible to focus on the future needs and hires of the business.
• You procrastinate because you know how terribly time consuming hiring is, and you simply don’t have the time to invest in it.
• You push it off to another team member to “handle” and magically expect this person to know (or learn) the secret formula to hiring the right-fit talent for your unique team and business.
• You’ve never abided by the rule of “Hire slow, fire fast”, so you admit to cutting corners when qualifying, screening and hiring so you could check it off your to-do list and move on to the next thing.
• You decide that you don’t really need a new team member, so you task your current team with new, additional responsibilities and tasks necessary in an effort to push forward. As a result your current team is pulled away from their current responsibilities and they become completely overwhelmed. Now things are falling through the cracks, and you feel like you’re in a worse situation than you were before…so do they.

Any or all of these can lead to some pretty big mistakes when it comes to building a team.  

I know because a majority of our clients ask us for our guidance in this area, so I’m really going to spend some quality time around hiring, and dedicate the next few blog articles to helping you avoid making these same mistakes. 

Mistake #1: Not hiring the right talent to get you where you really want to be. 

It’s vital to have the right key players in place to help you break through that invisible glass ceiling so you can successfully SCALE.  

“Oftentimes the people who got you to where you are, aren’t necessarily the ones that will take you to where you want to grow.”
– David Asarnow

This is not to say you have the wrong people on your team in place… It simply means you need unique talent that possesses the specialized knowledge in said area to get you to the next level in your business. 

Many Entrepreneurs will take the talent they already have and simply give them more responsibilities in an effort to avoid hiring new people. 

Here’s where this backfires…

When you overwhelm your team with other jobs and responsibilities that may not even be in their wheelhouse, you distract them and pull them away from what they are supposed to be doing (and then those tasks and responsibilities are overlooked or not done to the superior level they should be). 

Not only that, but overwhelm, stress and burn out can result within your existing team structure and that’s when businesses start seeing high-turnover within the organization. Which then leads to another set of challenges and problems (I’ll get more into this in the preceding blog articles).  

Keeping your existing team “in their own lane” focused completely on what they do best is where you’ll really gain traction to scale your business. 

Each team member working within their unique talents and coming together to collaborate is the difference between a high-performing team and a mediocre team.  

High-performing teams take you to the next level.  

Here’s how I suggest you start questioning the hiring of key players for your team going forward. 

By asking yourself this:  

Will there be a significant negative impact on the business, your team, or on you if you don’t hire for this position? In other words…

What is the COST to you to NOT hire someone for this specialized position within your organization? 

Sometimes the INACTION of not filling a key role can be just as detrimental as hiring the wrong person for the role.  

Hiring the wrong team members comes with a plethora of challenges which we will dive more into next week. Stay tuned!

To your success, 

David