Why Your First Hire Isn't Who You Think It Is

Nick [00:00:00] if you're just in a place where you haven't got anyone in the team yet and you're starting to get too busy. You're starting to get busy. Don't wait for it to be at a point where it's too late and you are bumping over yourself and dropping the ball for clients. If you're gonna grow you're gonna have someone in your team you're gonna have a team, you're gonna grow through it CONTENT

Nick If you are going from established producer to business owner, you really gotta start thinking about what's the org chart I'm trying to build for my business, not from the frame of, oh. I'm busy, I need help. and that in certain, in itself is a, first way to think about it. I mean, if you are producing, you've got delivery to clients and, and you've been a planner and advisor for a number of years, you're starting to, starting to roll and you're still doing all the stuff yourself, that's gonna be the limiting factor.

Nick You someone onto the team. Then you're gonna be able to reinvent your time. A couple of things, we fall down on the way from a psychological perspective that we [00:01:00] always tend to think about in our app. We've got it all. We haven't got any. And so if we are like, oh man, we need that. And I got, I wish I some more time, but I can't afford that first assistant or man, I, it's gonna cost.

Nick First of all, the cost mindset's gonna get you. So you wanna think about the investment mindset. How can you get your time back, which is worth much more than it would be for someone to come do some of that service work. And also, it's not an in or out. It's not, okay, well suddenly I've got no cost in terms of salary and now I've got six figures, something like that.

Nick It's not like that. We've gotta think about how might you transition it through, right? It's not a. On an off switch, it's more like a dimmer switch. Okay. So what, what do you actually need if you're gonna go down that road when, think about what's the thing that actually bothers you the most? my director of operations has been with me for a couple of years, and it took me a while to realize the thing that actually she would be doing that gave me the most relief in the start, which was [00:02:00] quite simply understanding my scheduling.

Nick Understanding what am I doing with my day and thinking out and being proactive with my advisors going forward and even though she's working on other things, which was super valuable for the business, it wasn't the right thing at the right time, the right thing at the wrong time, probably the wrong thing.

Nick So if you're just in a place where you haven't got anyone in the team yet. And you're starting to get too busy. You're starting to get busy. Don't wait for it to be at a point where it's too late and you are bumping over yourself and dropping the ball for clients. If you're gonna grow, you're gonna have someone in your team, you're gonna have a team, you're gonna grow through it.

Nick And so soon as you realize that, as soon as the, the opportunity is to, to have someone. Do that because the sooner you do that, the sooner you'll benefit from them being in the team and you'll be able to buy some time back to reinvest into activities that only you can do, which is gonna grow the business even more as well.

Nick not necessarily do you have someone full-time or on a big salary or any sort of salary. I would think about always how do we create owners in our [00:03:00] business as well? I think if they're coming in to do your calendar, it doesn't matter what they're doing in terms of like their overall task, but I think about that in function, not just in task activity.

Nick Having that someone come in and say, okay, I need you to do this, and this is how much I've got to pay for that, or the what's available for right now, does this fit with you? And I wanna think about this, my long-term perspective as well. This immediate part is how do you buy back your time and as soon as you can, buy back your time, let's just say for argument's sake that it's $30 an hour, $40 an hour, $50 an hour for round, for a round number that you are paying someone, uh, in order to do your scheduling.

Nick And maybe that gives you five, 10 hours a week back. Those 10 hours a week when you invest them back into your business, are they worth more than 50, $50 an hour? They're, and that's the starting point in order you can start to buy that back as well. And so think about the structure of bringing the right people in the team.

Nick Now, you're not gonna always hit out the park. We wanna think about playing long-term [00:04:00] games with long-term people. I love that quote. If you can't work with someone for 30 minutes, 30 years, rather, don't work with 'em for 30 minutes. And the point of that is that you wanna be thinking long term and not just a quick, what company do for me right now position.

Nick And so if as you're hiring a team, that's the perspective you wanna take. And so even if that person's coming to do a relatively, low level activity, super valuable in the business, but someone that can, can get trained on that pretty quick, that's okay. You wanna think about it long term perspective as well.

Nick At least how that person could grow in the role, what they could do going forward. Also, you're gonna get a real feel and idea if they wanna be with you long time. and sometimes it might be okay if you know, for for sure that they only wanna be there for a year or two at least That would be part of the plan to where you wanna get to as well.

Nick So first things first will be to understand and that next, first person in to your business. And think of it like you are the business owner, not just the advisor who needs help. First things first. That's the person you need to hire. And ideally you'd hire that person with a COO or a chief of [00:05:00] staff or objective operations thought process in mind.

Nick As they grow, they can start to think about the function. The key piece here in set that up is as you build that person, and of course there's a training perspective for you to think about. The more that you invest in that person on the front end, the more that will pay back you on the on the back end.

Nick Me and my wife decided to start playing tennis a couple years ago. And in the health club that we were close to, we could go an hour or two a week. and it was fun and, we made some progress, but it wasn't significant us for really to hook us and to have something, which we must go back to when we moved.

Nick we didn't go back to go and play tennis, but if we'd played intensely and did a, a one week, two hours a day, 10 hours. Intensive training would've got at that point, enough momentum in us in order to keep us coming back. 'cause we'd, we'd approved and got much better in a short amount of time, and then the spaced repetition of an hour a week afterwards would've been much more powerful.

Nick So think about the same way the people in your team, if you [00:06:00] haven't come and go, oh, just do that. I'll come back to you later, they're not gonna be effective, and you're gonna get self-fulfilling prophecy because they're not gonna be able to deliver the level you want them to deliver. Super powerful because again, you wanna play long term game as long term people.

Nick If you are building something that is your legacy, you're building something that you really want to feel like you are proud of, and I believe that you do. And you gotta think it from that perspective, and it might sound a bit grandiose. It's like, I don't not even need that yet. I just need someone help with my calendar.

Nick I need to do some service work. I've got clients that call me. I've got like emails that's going on. I just need someone help with that. Great. Give yourself the space, zoom out. Hold a higher standard to make sure you're thinking about it from a biggest perspective. And from that point, we can start to build the team almost from there.