🏗️ How I like to rapidly scale teams

One of my more recent clients is at a point where we need to rapidly scale his team. He runs a social media agency that guarantees clients 30 million views within 90 days, and needless to say it has been popular. We are getting great results, repeat referrals, and we are growing the business rapidly.

I have explained before why you hiring is the last thing you should do, but eventually we often get to a point where we really do need to hire somebody.

Here is what I like to do:

1. Recognise the risk

   Hiring too fast is one of the most common ways to kill a business. When you hire, your overhead costs basically never go down. You lose the leverage to say no as you feel obligated to take bad projects to pay your people, which hamstrings real growth.

   
   

   Building teams of freelancers is often better in the beginning as it is more flexible (and they usually have more experience and entrepreneurialism!). The extra “cost” in dollars per hour is almost always worth it. Flexibility is business life or death.

   
   

2. Create a tasklistWrite out every task in the business that needs doing. You might think you need to hire one person, but actually you may need to hire for a completely different job when you look at where time, value, and energy goes. Besides, you need to know which tasks the person you hire will need to do.

   
   

3. ESAD, and prioritiseBefore hiring anybody, look through that list and identify areas that you can Eliminate, Simplify/Systematise, Automate, and then Delegate. Ask yourself “what happens if I just didn’t do this anymore?” and “if I couldn’t hire anybody, what would I do to make this more efficient?”. This unlocked a huge operational improvement for my client before we hired anybody. After, prioritise the tasklist by how critical that task is, how long it takes, how it affects your energy.

   
   

4. Identify skills required, and rank by trainabilityTraining takes a long time. When you know which skills are required to complete the prioritised task shortlist, you then identify skills (“soft” and “hard” skills) required to complete the tasks to a high standard and rank them by how critical they are to completion and how easy those skills are to train. Hire people who already have the most critical skills that are hard to train.

   
   

5. Warm outreachAsk your network for recommendations for good people with those skills before posting the jobs anywhere. It is easier and quicker to act on a good recommendation than to hire “cold” via applications.

   
   

6. Add frictionInterviews are expensive, they take multiple people’s time and energy. Add friction earlier in the process to make sure you only interview highly qualified candidates (e.g. add a quick skills assessment, ask for a portfolio, or project). P.s. you get more, and higher quality, applicants if you pay people for their time and effort (e.g. paying people to complete a task. The best people know their worth)

   
   

7. Document, and train

   Whoever is currently completing the tasks that are to be hired for should document what they do. I like asking people to take screen recordings that they explain over. Let the new hire shadow, and be shadowed, and make sure to train them sufficiently. This is where most businesses go wrong.

💡 Quote I'm pondering

"Situations can initially be perceived as zero-sum are actually win-wins when you expand the horizon - talented people are attracted to those who care about them.When you help someone get promoted out of your team, it’s a short-term loss, but it’s a clear long term gain. It’s easier to attract people, because word gets around that your philosophy is to help people” - Chris Granger

This is a good lesson in both business and life more generally, it is worthwhile to zoom out to see the bigger picture. Like a chess game, consider what the future moves will be.

If you treat someone well - an acquaintance, a departing employee, a client you offboard - then the temporary loss can be far outweighed by the tailing opportunity.

Rejecting or firing somebody doesn’t have to be a negative experience, we can help them to move onto something that is a better fit for them and everybody will win. Your reputation precedes you, look after it.

I shared this in my Work Smart Wednesday newsletter. Want the full set of related insights? You can read them here: https://worksmartwednesday.substack.com/p/work-smart-wednesday-may-15-2024

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