Should You Hire Employees Right Away?
In this video, Matt reacts to a video telling business owners they need to hire out and stop doing the work themselves. While it can and should be done, should it be what you do right off the bat?
There are tons of people out on social media giving business advice. Some of it is good advice, but most of it isn’t good. In this new series watch CapForge’s owner react to different advice videos. He’s an expert in all things business and has 20+ years of experience under his belt. Some of the things he reacts to might even surprise you!
Video Transcript:
Advice Video:
Stop doing the work yourself. That is the best piece of advice I was ever given in business. The way people own businesses today is if they have a construction business they’re the one hammering the nail. If they have a taxi business they’re the ones that are driving the taxi. And if they have a video production business they’re the one holding the camera. It is a big mistake. That’s the way to stay an employee. What you should be doing is hiring people to nail on the nails. Hiring people to drive your taxis or hiring people to hold or video cameras for you. So that you could go out and build your business and bring new contracts and find new talent. That’s the way to build a true business that will work for you even when you’re sleeping.
Matt’s Reaction:
Okay so, yes sort of. If you wanna run a business that is just you, depending on what kind of business it is, you can do very well. And you may not be someone who wants to bring in help and manage employees and grow the business that way. I run into lots of people who have that mindset and if that’s where you’re at and you got a high-margin business or a valuable service that you’re selling that you can do on your own without needing help that is certainly a way to go.
On the other hand if you do wanna grow your business then yes you’re gonna have to scale beyond the size of what you can personally do and bring people in to help you. And that is generally how a business, a bigger business, gets made by having help because a one-person business is always gonna be limited by whatever that owner can actually deliver themselves. But I think a quick way to not have a business workout is to go immediately into business hiring people to do things for you that you don’t necessarily know how to do yourself. If you wanna have a videography business if you don’t know how to shoot video you’re gonna have a hard time hiring someone to shoot video just cause you won’t know if they’re any good or not. Or if they tell you it takes 10 hours to edit something and really it could be edited in an hour. And you would know that if you knew how to edit but you were just relying on them to tell you how long stuff should take and how hard it is and how much it should cost then you’re really at the mercy of the people you bring on to be the ones that are telling you what things should how things should work in your business.
So yes, if you wanna grow your business the best way to do that is not to be the on-the-ground person but to build your team to support whatever the business is. But I think the best way to do that is to know how to do each of the roles that you’re hiring. You don’t have to be the best at it or an expert but you have to know enough to be able to hire effectively and be able to grow your business by bringing on people who can do what you don’t any longer have time to do. But you still know how to do and you know how to manage and you know how to be effective at leading that team. So generally the advice is good but the caveat to me is you don’t wanna start just by hiring people to do something you don’t know how to do. You wanna start by learning the business and then build the team around you to help you do more and more of it.
