📣 Freelancers 📣 Developers 📣 Early-Stage Agency Owners 

How to hire people for your agency

People are the key to scaling your agency. With this framework, you’ll find rockstar people for your team, even if you don’t have a huge budget to work with.

I don’t want you to ever have to compromise when you’re building your team. I want you to find the right people who have the drive to achieve the same outcomes that you want.

But to achieve those outcomes, you need to define them first.

If you don’t, you might end up hiring people who aren’t a good fit for your agency. And that means you’re spending time and resources on the wrong people.

You want absolute rock stars working on your team.

And with this framework, you’re going to find them so that you can scale your agency faster.

The Problems

Before digging into the principles of this framework, let’s look at the problems that a lot of agency owners have with designing a team.

The first issue is that you’re just not sure who to hire next.

A lot of the time, agency owners hire based on pain. They look at the biggest fire in their business and try to find somebody to put it out. 

That can work out pretty well. It’s not an awful approach.

The problem is that it’s not very strategic.

You’re hiring for one specific thing instead of hiring the person who’s going to provide the biggest uplift for your agency.

Another problem is that you may be the bottleneck. 

A lot of agency owners hold on to too much of the work when they start to scale. They cause the traffic jams that slow everything down for their agencies.

There’s probably some stuff that you’re doing right now that isn’t the highest and best use of your time.

If you can unpack it, you can hire the right people to do it for you.

(If you’d like to learn more letting go of the various jobs you do as an entrepreneur, Ryan Deiss digs into it when I interviewed him for our podcast here.)

Right now, you’re the sad wizard who’s doing everything. You’re burnt out and struggling to grow. 

Finally, you don’t have clear outcomes and accountability built into your hiring process. When you’re missing those core ingredients, you’re going to hire bad fits. You’ll end up with people who don’t have the core skills that you need.

The Opportunities

The first opportunity with this framework is a really simple one.

I want you to be clear on your next hire. I want you to look at an accountability chart and see your name in way too many seats. And when that happens, you’ll be able to see where you need to hire to make things flow smoothly in your agency.

This framework also gives you the opportunity to be in flow. 

Flow is when you’re doing your highest and best activity the majority of the time, whatever that may be.

You want to know what provides the most value to your agency so you can focus on it. And you want to get the less valuable tasks off your plate so that you give yourself more time.

Finally, you’re not going to feel freaked out about hiring people anymore.

You’re not going to be in this mindset of thinking that you’re the only person who can do certain tasks. Instead, you’re going to know what you need to offload and you’re going to feel confident about finding those rock stars to take up the responsibility.

The Five Hot Principles

Do the problems I’ve mentioned resonate with you? Would you like the opportunity to create clarity in your agency so you can build an amazing team?

This is the training that you need to create the team that’s going to help you to scale your agency.

There are five hot principles that you need to know.

Principle #1 – Zoom out 100 Feet

Step back in your mind and examine what needs to get done for your business to function today.

Now, the key to this is to do your best to avoid names and titles.

I want you to think of your agency as though it’s an anthill. Zooming out 100 feet lets you see your business but you can’t really see who the people are. You can just more or less see what they’re doing.

You’re looking down on the anthill.

You can tell that some of the ants work on building the hill. Others go out to get food. You can see all of these key tasks but you can’t really see who’s doing them.

That’s what I mean when I say zoom out 100 feet.

This isn’t a creative exercise. It’s not about figuring out where your business needs to be in 12 months. It’s all about where it is right now so that you can build based on today.

You can get creative later.

Principle #2 – Unpack Your Five Key Functions

There are five key functions within your agency:

  1. Marketing
  2. Selling
  3. Delivering
  4. Invoicing
  5. Bookkeeping and Finance

Each one of these functions needs to have some sense of leadership. You need to have people dotting the i’s and crossing the t’s.

The problem I see in a lot of agencies is that the agency owner hangs out in all of these functions. They’re sitting in every one of these seats, which means they’re acting as a bottleneck.

When you have other people sitting in those seats, you create time to focus on the other areas of the business. 

Plus, you have people in place who dedicate all of their time and effort to each of these functions. For example, you have a marketing manager who spends as many hours a week working as your agency needs. When you managed the function, you gave it only the spare time you had available, maybe just a few hours a week.

When you understand these functions and start to fill the seats with other people, you’re going to scale your agency.

Principle #3 – Accountabilities and Outcomes (Not Titles)

I want you to think about the outcomes and what specifically needs to get done. That’s going to help you to recruit the right people with the right skills into your agency.

Let’s say you’re helping clients to build funnels.

You need to know what “done” looks like for that task. Then, you go and hire somebody who can do that exact thing at the level that you need it done.

The problem with hiring based on titles is that you’re not looking at the outcome. In some cases, that means you end up with somebody who’s a few levels above where your agency is right now. 

That person’s going to get bored because they’re not getting what they want from the role. I’ve had this happen to me where I had somebody hand in their notice after three months.

The problem was that I didn’t make sure the seat was the right size. I didn’t outline the accountabilities and outcomes. That meant I didn’t hire somebody whose literal dream in life was to do that job.

Create a picture of what the outcome looks like. Then, look for somebody who has the skills and desire to paint that picture.

Principle #4 – Organize Your Seats

Once you understand the accountabilities and outcomes, you’re going to start organizing your seats.

You’re going to take these things and group them up. It’s almost like grouping up LEGOs by color or function. 

You have all of your outcomes defined at this point. Now, you’re combining the related outcomes to create a larger job role.

The fun part is that you don’t have to get this right the first time. I’ve gone through about 40 iterations of my accountabilities and outcomes since I started my current business.

As entrepreneurs, it’s what we’re meant to do. We have these bits and pieces that we continue to reorganize and optomize, growing a better business each time.

But by doing this, you develop clarity about the role you need to hire for. And you’ll understand what the person you hire needs to do to help you take your agency to the next level.

Principle #5 – Simplify, Polish, and Share

Once you have a version of accountability, you simplify, polish, and share it with your team.

It’s like going to get a haircut. The barber’s going to put your hair into all of these weird shapes while they’re working. But in the end, they’re going to do the styling part that brings all of it together.

They don’t style it at the beginning.

They only polish the work when they’ve put all of the pieces in place.

When you’re working through these principles, your goal isn’t to get it right from the start. It’s to get all of this junk out of your head and onto paper.

Once you’ve done that, you can simplify and polish everything to get it to a point that it’s ready to share.

It’s Time to Find Your Rock Stars

If you go through these principles, you’ll figure out what your key outcomes and accountabilities look like. That means you know what tasks you need to get off your plate. Plus, you’ll know what skills your new hire needs to excel in their role.

It’s not about hiring based on a title.

It’s about hiring the right person for creating the outcomes that your agency needs to create.

That’s how you design a team of rock stars.

I want to help you to get this right, which is why I’m offering you the opportunity to join UACADEMY.

Apply for your FREE strategy session today to find out if we’re a good fit.

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