Read time: 5 min, 34 secs

Hey there - it's Brian 👋

You know what I hate?

Bad hires.

It feels like they tricked you into hiring them.

You thought they were one person, then after you hired them they turned into someone else.

What happened?

Did you hire a bad person? Or were they set up to fail?

If someone doesn’t do what you want, it feels like there’s 1M things you need to do do to fix them.

But there’s not.

There’s only 5 levers you can pull to finally get what you need done (while spending less time doing it).

Today we’ll cover the 5 things you can do.

So you can win more by doing less.

Let’s make your business an outlier: 👇

For my friends: what’s going on with Brian?

Buenos Aires shocked me.

I didn’t expect such a founder community.

If you run a business, you need such a strong community to support each other.

Rising tide lifts all ships.

So last week I had dinner with a reader who replied to this newsletter.

We went on a mission to find the creepiest lighting in Argentina.

(and I think we nailed it) 👇

Okay let’s get into it:

The only 5 levers you can pull to boost quality

“Quality’ is just others doing something they way you want it done.

This applies to a teammate. Anyone you work together with.

If someone doesn’t do something your way it’s only one of 5 things:

1) They didn’t know they had to (Communicate)
2) They didn’t know how to (Train)
3) They didn’t know by when (Deadline)
4) They didn’t want to (Motivate)
5) They couldn’t (Unblock)

It’s only one of these 5 things.

When you’re frustrated because your talent is “bad” it means there’s too big of a gap in any of these 5 things.

Let’s do an example:

1) Communicate: No updates so you wonder if they actually do anything?
2) Skill gap: You have so much to teach them you might as well do it yourself
3) Deadline: They never get you anything on time
4) Motivate: They work too slow (they just aren’t inspired)
5) Blocked: No internet at home

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:

There’s one gap that’s a fireable offense:

Values.

I’m not including it in this list because there’s no lever to pull with values.

If they don’t share your values, you need new talent.

Okay let’s get into each lever and exactly what you can do to get quality from your talent:

Lever 1: Communicate what quality means.

Managers:
If you’re like me, you get antsy when you don’t know if your work is getting done right.

So you need updates. Often.

But imagine for a sec, you’re the person hired to do the role…
you just want to do the role.

So you need to avoid distractions to do your work.

Meaning you want to send updates… less often.

Paul Graham calls this the Maker vs Manager problem. 👇

Manager needs transparency.
Maker needs focus.

So both have different expectations of what good communication is.

You’re a manager. You’ve hired a maker.

And if you don’t solve this communication problem you’re set up to think you have “bad” talent

So how do we solve this?

Onboarding.

In week 1 you set clear expectations on what good communication means to you.

Every business defines “good communication” differently.

Examples:
➟ How frequent do you do it?
➟ When do you have detailed (vs fast) updates?
➟ Do you want to problem solve with your talent or just bring you solutions?
➟ What questions go in which tools (e.g., Slack vs text vs email vs Asana?)

Write these assumptions down for yourself. And present it to your talent during onboarding.

I won’t go in depth in this issue, but I have templates you can steal 👇

📚 Free resources:

1) Want a free guide to communicate clearly? Go here.
2) Need a template to onboard your team?
Reply “Onboard” and I’ll give you access to our Notion onboarding template.

Onboarding template includes SOPs, training schedule, onboarding activities, etc you’ll love it.

Speaking of training, let’s move to quality lever #2: 👇

Lever 2: Training

Communication = get people to know what you want.
Training = get people to know how to do what you want.

Training is just getting people to do a behavior.

So take a look at the bottlenecks in your business.

Then build a training to fix the behavior.

Here’s real examples from problems I fixed in our business:

Do you spend too much time fixing documents your team makes?
Make a training on how to do it right the first time
(Get our deliverable training here)

People keep sending you problems instead of fixing themselves?
Make a problem solving training.
(Get our problem solving training here)

Losing too much time on poor communication?
Make a training to improve communication.
(Get our comms training here)

I go through a few steps to make the behavior change:

1) Write down guidelines on how to change the behavior (Why? How? What?)
2) Host a live training explaining the change
3) Make a checklist to support the behavior
4) Hold them accountable

Trainings take hours if you do them right. But can 15x how effective your business is.

Spend a few hours now. Get 100s of hours back.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
Accountability is the hardest part.

But if you can’t remember all the things that you asked them to do…
how can you expect them to?

Lever 3: Deadline

Nothing frustrates me more than needing something by end of day…
but getting it end of week.

That happens because people ASSUME a deadline.

And they assume different.

Every task needs an owner and a deadline.

Make this your mantra for every task:
WHO will do WHAT by WHEN?

Tip:
If there’s no deadline, the task goes in the “Parking Lot.”

🚗 Parking lot = you don’t want to lose the idea. But not a priority.

We use Asana for task tracking, but the process matters more than the tool itself.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
Asana = team task tracking.

For personal tasks: I’m obsessed with Things

But it’s only for Mac 🤬

Lever 4: Motivate

Everyone has different ways to light a fire under them.

The big myth:
People assume if they hire the right person they’ll “just be motivated.”

That’s not true.

Figure out what fuels them. Give them fuel.

Money is just one example.

This week, I interviewed 11 people for our sales role.

I love asking this question:
“Why are you leaving your current job? What do you need?”

All of these are real examples of what motivated our sales candidates:
1. Growth
2. Prestige
3. Remote work
4. Flexibility in hours
5. Feeling belonging to a team
6. Solving a problem bigger than themselves

Ask during the interview. Sometimes you can’t give them what they need.

So that’s not a fit.

But you can get creative. Here’s a few tricks we use to motivate our people.

Examples:
They want money?
Build a bonus structure. When they win? You win.

They want growth?
Give them more responsibility. Let them mentor others. Train them

They want prestige?
Let them earn a fancy title.

They want belonging?
Give them visibility to decisions. More live calls with you or peers.

They want their job to have meaning?
Communicate the mission frequently. Improve the clarity of your mission.

Each person gets fired up by different things.

Figure out what that is during your 1:1s.

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
Each incentive has nuances we’re not getting into here.

Higher title? You can’t make everyone a VP or the title loses meaning.

More money? Needs to be an ROI.

More responsibility? Can’t impact current performance.

etc.

This issue is already too long so we don’t get into it, but reply if you’re designing incentive structures and I’ll help.

Lever 5: Unblock

Sometimes it’s not the person’s fault.

It’s some outside force that’s stops the task.

• They need your review / approval on client deliverable

• Need a software vendor to upgrade licenses

• Need client feedback

• Peer is out of the office

• Software has a bug

• Internet is down

Etc

Figure out what that problem is and unblock it.

We track all this in our RAID log in Asana.

RAID is a tool we used with Fortune 500s to track blockers.

RAID stands for:
Risk: Something that COULD be a blocker
Action: Something to remove the block
Issue: Something that became a block
Decision: Choosing how you remove the block

🧔🏻‍♂️ Brian’s nerdy side rant:
You can’t unblock everything.

Don’t try.

Sometimes you need to let little fires burn to focus on the biggest ones that move the needle for your business.

5 levers to get more from your business (in less time)

Pull these 5 levers and you’ll spend less time in your business (& get more done).

Win more by doing less.

See you next week 👋

Brian
[email protected]
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TalentHQ

P.S. Whenever you’re ready there’s two ways I can help:

1) Want me to run your marketing? Over $5M? → Reply “Consulting”
2) Want marketing and admin talent to execute? → Reply “Talent”

🙋 Vote: How did we do?