Read time: 3 min, 24 secs
Nerd warning. Live screenshots on biz building

Hey there - it's Brian 👋

Hot take:
Managers use dictator controls to avoid awkward conversations.

I saw it this week.

The awkward conversations are setting expectations for the role you hire.

It feels fluffy.

You want to get right to work.

But if this person will be with you for years… take the time to make sure they do the work right every week.

Set expectations right and you…
➟ You spend less time fixing problems
➟ They make you more money by doing the job right the first time
➟ And results compound weekly 52 times a year

THAT’s leverage.

Multiple that across 10 - 20 people? Geez 🤯

I’ll tell you the mistakes people make that break the leverage.

We’ll use a real client example of bad onboarding that happened this week.

We fixed it. I’ll share how.

Let’s get into it:

🚨 Nerd warning

I’ve been getting great feedback from people asking to see tactically how we build our business behind the scenes.

Going forward you’ll get a peak behind the curtain at everything going on at our staffing agency, TalentHQ.

➟ Problems we’re wrestling with
➟ How we fix them
➟ Internal systems
➟ How we’re scaling

etc etc.

Very tactical. Very nerdy. Very real examples.

I’ll share the systems I stole from 6 years in consulting Fortune 500s at Deloitte.

And the tactics we took from my co-founder’s last business. He exited an email marketing agency with 53 employees.

Read on if you’re a current or future business owner / manager and want to learn the weeds of building a business.

When bad results is really bad onboarding

I got this client email this week.

Really smart guy. Very impressed with what he’s built. Excited to be helping him add talent to his business and growing together.

He hired talent to run ads.

But he rushed the onboarding process. Now he’s resorting to “watching” work.

This kills leverage. He’s losing time and missing results.

He assumed talent would know what success looks like. So he covered the basics and got his media buyer right to work.

Here’s what happened:
There’s a misalignment of expectations on speed and communication.

His media buyer is smart. So she can do it.

But because his media buyer is misaligned on what success looks like:

He spends time micromanaging. His media buyer doesn’t deliver as fast as he’d like. Doesn’t communicate as well as he’d like.

This is where leverage comes in.

Imagine if we’d spent an extra 3 hours at the beginning being obnoxiously clear on what success looks like?

In communication. In delivery. In speed etc etc

Then every single day his ads get done right the first time. They don’t lose hours in miscommunication. And there’s less friction so the business owner loves going to work every day.

Every company is different.

So assume that success at your company is NOT the same as success at the talent’s last company.

So how did we fix it?

We “re-onboarded” the media buyer.

How we “re-onboarded” talent

Since I can’t share my client’s onboarding, I’ll just share our own at TalentHQ.

Here’s screenshots from our internal onboarding process covering 4 topics:

1) Values
2) Culture
3) Communication
4) Performance

Here’s the inside look. Steal what works for you:

1) Values

Values explains how you make decisions and work together. Talent needs to be onboard or the business culture falls apart.

2) Culture:

I read this note from Bezos on how you can teach people to expect high quality.

We do that by clearly listing guidelines for our culture.

Quick note on culture: One thing that HAS to be shut down immediately at every company is gossip.

It destroys your company.

In our policies we say point blank:
“We don’t tolerate gossip. If talking about someone else’s work use specific examples. Talk to them directly about it.”

Gossip is against company culture and will be brought up at performance reviews if we see it happening.

3) Communication

Note: our communication guidelines go into detail in each toggle. How frequently. Frameworks for communication etc.

4) Performance

We do 1:1s weekly for the first month or two. Then switch to monthly.

1:1s are an hour to make sure we can go in depth.

Topics covered:

We are obnoxiously clear on what success looks like when it comes to performance. If we talk about something and our team is not improving after 3 conversations they are put on warning.

We call it our PIP (Performance Improvement Plan).

In a PIP we list performance expectations by when. If they still cannot hit performance goals on our performance plan, then they are let go.

No surprises. This is obnoxiously clear from day 1.

Want to see how we onboard our talent?

After I got off the phone with our client I asked our account manager what she thought of her onboarding

She smirked and said “it’s never been this good.”

Anyway if you want our onboarding process reply to this email with “onboard.”

I’ll go into details in the next issue.

Off to filming ads!

Also feel free to reply with any questions. I read every email.

See you next Thursday 👋

Brian
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P.S. For my friends: What’s going on with Brian?

I’m in Cuenca, Ecuador closing a partnership deal to expand our marketing talent pool in Latin America.

We’re also filming ads today for client acquisition.

Check out where we’re filming ads. It’s the view from my co-work.

Cuenca is beautiful.

🙋 Vote: What did you think?