Scaling Up: The Importance of Hiring the Right People for Your Business

One of the favorite rules I learned from mentors 30 years ago for hiring is from the CEO of American Airlines: “Maybe” means no.

Never regret letting go of the wrong person. In week one, observe their behavior.

If it’s not an easy yes, then you should move on. 

You have to trust your gut. The gut has all that experience.

In your subconscious, you realize I’m guilty of this; I hold onto people too long, or I hire someone out of sympathy like Ray Dalio, who wrote the book about principles and started the world’s largest hedge fund. One of the ten wealthiest people on the planet, he said:

You can help people improve to the next level, but you cannot rehabilitate broken people.

You can’t take people five levels up, but you can take them up one or two more steps. There’s a whole piece of his book where he talked about getting rid of people.

If you have a mission and a vision of helping that one troubled person by paying them and employing them, you do a disservice to your entire team. You’re ruining the morale.

Avoid People That Aren’t a Good Fit.

You’re ruining your company’s culture by keeping even one person around who doesn’t believe in the vision and mission. 

We all need to find an integrator or someone to balance out the stuff we don’t want to do when we’re stuck working in the business.

Get a good integrator for this to move smoothly. Run things by doing five big things a day.

It’s a rule of thumb: have five critical tasks that could be big or small, and have weekly and monthly objectives.

And then it’s the team that goes from there. They create the tasks, the objectives, and the goals.

Integrations of the People

Some people are creative, and some people work hard, and they care, but they’re not creative.

A creative person will work hard for a few months, burn out, need a few weeks of break, and then work hard. They go in pulses and cycles, and that’s the perspective. 

There are people out there who cannot stand not working. They would do something. They would go around and go crazy if they had nothing to do.

There are different styles of leaders. Lift your team, not shout down through the mountain.

Is it that hard to let go or keep your sanity? How do you overcome it?

Both sides are hard. I think it’s just like choosing what you want to do, but you’re compromising your ability to see the higher-level vision if you aren’t letting go.

Accepting that people will never be a hundred percent as good as you, but with the right stack of people, they can be better than you. 

Your team could be better than you at most things now, so even if they’re 80% good, and you hire the right people, they could be 200% good at some things.

And also, on the other end, I want them to do well. I want them to do much better – to have incremental growth. Rewarding people feels so good.

Some of the most successful people found good people, kept them, and cared for them. It’s very hard as a founder. 

If you’re responsible for many things, keep them in check – because the pain of scrambling from task to task is much greater than the pain of something occasionally going wrong.

Letting go should not be hard if you have proper systems and the right people. It’s relieving. 

We often get in our heads and believe this is too complicated for this person. But it’s essential to try.

Sometimes, there is pressure to think you must teach everything when they can learn independently. 

And sometimes you shouldn’t be the one to have all the ideas anyway, because somebody will have some better ideas than you do.

The thought that other people are doing everything, “I’m not going to be productive anymore.” And then, “Will anyone respect me if I’m not working hard?”

The good news is there’s always more to do. There’s always something to do. If you want to be productive, you want to stay productive. You’re going to be able to remain effective.

Surround Yourself With Good People

Always be around the best people and have them rub off onto you.

Just like Jonathan mentioned, he likes to fly first class because the people you meet are different and rub off on your relationships and the deals there. And just the vibe, I suppose.

Jonathan told me he had a thousand dollars in the bank account when he was broke, and the business struggled. 

He booked a room at the Ritz Carlton, and I swear his business started doing well again within a week. It’s something about being around the energy.

You can get coffee at Starbucks or the Ritz Carlton. They cost the same, but you’re paying for the atmosphere. And there is a different energy.