Good to have you back. Few more points before we go to
SecureWorks and Mike Cote. Ceos ask me all the time, entrepreneurs,
who's the first manager I hire? Let's think about that.
Who would be the first manager you hire? Well, what's it depend on?
Well, the first thing is it depends on your type of your business.
It depends on what your skills and capabilities are.
What are you missing? What is the weakness?
What's your critical need? Do you need more revenue?
Do you need someone for processes? Do you need to hire in large numbers?
Do you need an HR person? Many entrepreneurs, that first hire is
someone with skills to compliment them. What do I not have?
I'm great at sales, I'm not at finance. I better hire finance.
I'm great at finance and process. I'm not great at sales.
I better hire someone in sales. Is it revenue, process or people?
And as I just stated, you try to find out, what's my need, what am I good at?
And how do I meet that need? And usually, usually, usually, you hire
someone that has different capabilities than you, and that creates the challenge
of how you evaluate them. What type of experience?
Do you want someone who has helped scale an entrepreneurial business?
Or do you want someone who's always worked in a larger non-entrepreneurial companies?
Risk both ways. Risk both ways.
Person who's helped scale an entrepreneurial business, why do they want
to come from a $25 million company to a $5 million revenue company?
Why aren't they staying with the $25 million company to take it to 50?
All good questions. All good questions.
If they're at 25, are they going to be happy going back and doing what they have
to do at the 5 million level and do it all over again?
Good question. We talked about a person at a large
company that's done entrepreneurial. Are they going to be able to adapt to the
chaotic, changing, limited resources, limited paper clips, limited money in your
entrepreneurial environment? If you want someone that has grown, been
in companies that have grown, back to what can you afford.
Do you want somebody that's doubled, tripled, five x?
Notice, I couldn't figure out quickly what five x the word was.
I think its quintuple, but I may be wrong. Five x.
That depends how big, and also is the person going to really get back down in
the trenches? Can a large company person adapt and excel
in a chaotic, fast paced resource restrained entrepreneurial environment?
It's hard. It's hard.
You're taking a high risk if you're the first entrepreneurial venture a large
company person tries to work in. If a large company person goes to another
entrepreneurial venture and succeeds and then comes to you, your risk should be
less. The number one lesson from the research,
hire slowly fire quickly. Successful entrepreneurs lament that they
made way too many mistakes by feeling pressured to hire quickly, and therefore
they did it poorly. They lament that they made mistakes by
being slow to fire people who were not working out.
Look at this, I'm going to put stars. I've never had an entrepreneur say to me,
I fired someone too quickly. And as we talked about, firing is also a
process that needs best practices. Hiring is more than selling.
Think about it. When you go to hire somebody, you got a
conversation going on. What are you as the entrepreneur trying to
do? Convince that person, I'm a good place and
a good place to work. I'm a good leader.
This is a good team to join. What's the person on the other side trying
to convince you? They're the best person.
There's a song and dance going on here. Some truth, some smoke.
What you gotta do is get beneath his or her sales marketing pitch to find out, who
is this person? Do they have the capabilities?
Will they fit? And it's hard to do that in one interview.
It's hard to do that by yourself. It's hard to do that unless you basically
put them in fact situations, what's called behavioral interviewing techniques.
And you can Google that, you can read about it on the internet.
We talked a little bit about it. Really cool.
One entrepreneur was so bad at hiring and so many mistakes were made without
cultural fit, he created a cultural scorecard.
What were the key parts of his culture? And he had everybody who interviewed that
potential employee grade them on the cultural score card.
That was a process he put in place. One last quiz, and we move to the case.
We're making good time. Stay with me.
