How To Build A World-class Team
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Today’s issue is sponsored by CEOfriend.
The hardest part about entrepreneurship is decision making. It is up to you to make the right call, and making the wrong choices costs money, jobs, and an emotional toll.
That is why I love CEOfriend. This platform acts as your business advisor to help you make the right choices, think through tough decisions, and operate with an analytical mind.
CEOfriend gives you a team of AI powered advisors across finance, marketing, strategy, and growth. Everything is personalized to your business, updated with your own data, and available on demand.
Hiring is one of the most important aspects of building a business. If you want to build real wealth, you need a team. You can only get so far on your own.
Without a team, you end up doing every job yourself. A well run business requires departments, departments require systems, and systems allow you to scale.
If you play that sequence in reverse, scaling requires a team. Period.
Today, I want to share key tips on hiring that completely changed how I run my company. Real entrepreneurs will take these lessons seriously.
LFG. 🔥
1. Hire Before You’re Ready
Here is a hard truth: you are most likely a freelancer, not an entrepreneur.
Freelancers like doing the work, which is great. If that is what you want, keep doing it. But if your goal is to build a scalable business, your focus must shift from doing the actual work to hiring the people who do it.
This is where the freelancer trap gets dangerous. Before you know it, you are working 60 hours a week while being constantly available to multiple demanding clients. It gets overwhelming fast.
Worst of all, being overloaded makes finding the time to hire even harder.
You have to hire before you think you need to. If you wait until you are drowning and desperately NEED to hire, it is already too late.
Hiring your first few employees is scary. You are sacrificing short term profits without a guarantee that the person will work out. But unless you get ahead of the workload, you will remain trapped in the operator seat forever.
2. Obsess With Teaching And Training Your Team
Most of my day is spent teaching. My main priority is showing my team how to run the business without me.
My job is to train them to be the best in the world at what they do. I view myself as a coach rather than a boss.
I spend my time recording Loom videos, reviewing output, fixing mistakes, and meeting with department heads to work through bottlenecks.
This is an ongoing process. As a business owner, your job is to keep training and document those lessons into SOPs so you only have to teach a specific system once.
3. Stick It Out With Your People
Sometimes you have to fire people, and that sucks. But assuming you interview for culture fit, most people are hard working, want to do well, and are eager to improve.
Remember that progress takes time. Even when you find someone with the perfect skill set, it will still take them time to learn your specific systems, nuances, and business operations.
Don’t get frustrated. Stick it out with them and give them the time they need to adapt.
I am not advocating keeping people on payroll if they are clearly a bad fit. However, initial failure usually falls on leadership, not the employee. If someone is punctual, competent, hungry, and eager to learn, it is your responsibility to train them properly.
Give people the benefit of the doubt. Investing in your team takes longer than expected, but the payoff is worth it.
4. Make Them Do Things They’re Not Ready To Do
For your team to grow, they need to tackle tasks they do not know how to do yet. You have to push them to do it anyway.
“Use your brain” is a phrase we use constantly at Quantum. Trust your people to figure things out.
Just yesterday, I had to drop out of a client meeting because my son had a kindergarten event I accidentally double booked.
Gerald, my head of accounts, had to step in and cover material he was not completely comfortable with yet. I threw him to the wolves, and he figured it out.
This week, Julie had to set up over a dozen APIs to connect data sources to our new reporting system. She had never done that before, but she figured it out too.
Your employees are smart. Give them the space to solve problems, and they will surprise you.
5. Hire For Competence, Not Experience
Throwing people into the deep end only works if you hire smart people in the first place.
Some people are simply sharper than others. When you find talented people, bring them on board and do whatever you can to keep them. A top tier employee will be 10X more productive than an average one because they figure things out independently, freeing up your time for sales and strategy.
Sometimes you will find candidates with exact industry experience who fit right in, which is great.
But raw intelligence beats experience every time. Having truly sharp people on your team is a superpower. Most of my success comes from surrounding myself with people who are smarter than I am.
6. Your Team Is An Asset
Shift your mindset: your team is not just a group of employees taking orders. They are an asset that creates massive leverage for your business.
Treat building a team as an investment that opens up opportunities far beyond day to day operations.
For example, I have negotiated equity in multiple healthcare companies simply because I had a solid team behind me. When CEOs bring me on as a partner, it is not because of my individual technical skills. It is because leveraging my existing team is easier than building one from scratch.
Team building is a distinct skill set. I was brought into two nationwide healthcare organizations specifically to build their in house marketing teams. In many ways, my capability as a team builder is more valuable than my skill as a business builder.
7. It’s Cheaper To Reward Your Teammates Than Always Finding New Ones
Once you build a great team, you need to protect that asset. In short: pay your people.
This does not always mean constant salary raises. Unexpected performance bonuses go a long way. Payroll is usually a company’s largest expense, so staying mindful of costs is necessary.
However, when employees feel appreciated, supported, and connected to a larger mission, they stay.
High employee churn will destroy your momentum. You want a loyal, committed team, not because they follow you blindly, but because they are properly incentivized to stay.
People align with their incentives. Structure your compensation to encourage long term loyalty.
In Conclusion: Always Be Replacing Yourself
Your ultimate goal as a business owner is to make yourself obsolete.
You want to be the least technically skilled person on the team for specific daily operations. Every person on my team handles their specific role better than I could, and that is by design.
If someone is not better than me at a task yet, my job is to train them until they are.
That allows me to focus exclusively on what I do best: generating leads, closing deals, and driving new growth opportunities.
I spent years hustling. Now I want to prosper while helping the people around me prosper too.
You cannot achieve scalable profits, passive income, and low stress workdays without a reliable team helping you get there.
If you want to go fast, go alone. If you want to go far, go together.
Love you guys. Talk to you next week.
Tim
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