Earn More $ with a Throughput Management System - 3 of 3

November 13, 2013

Step 4 – Deciding who to hire.

I break people to hire into 3 categories. Expensive high value people, support people and outsourced people.

Lets start with outsourced people. This would entail people like house cleaners and personal shoppers. Not going to talk about this one much. But what I suggest here is get referrals and if you can’t do that put and ad on craigslist. Then test at least 3-5 different people. For example if we were hiring a house keeper I’d let them know that you’re testing out 3-5 different house keepers to see who does the best work. Then at the end of the trial period hire the one you like the most. I know this is a little time/labor intensive but typically you only have to do it once this way.

High Value People. When I first started hiring all I focused on was hiring as cheap as possible. Because I looked at employees as an expense rather then an investment.

Employees should be thought of as an investment, not an expense!

This behavior led to me having limited roles/jobs within the company and trying to make everyone the same level/role.

What you really want to do is hire the very best person you can find for the job and then surround them with the systems and staff in order to get the most throughput out of them as possible. Does this sound familiar? Essentially you’re doing for them the same thing you’re doing for yourself. As the business owner you’re the first high value employee of your company.

High value people cost a lot and are worth it if you hire right. Because they bring experience and connections. What you will find is that you will start learning from them how to be even better. I always believed you couldn’t hire anyone amazing because they’d just start their own company. Well this is really only partially true. There’s a large percentage of the population that really don’t want to start their own company. Owning a company is doing a lot of what you don’t love like finance, legal, etc. It’s also very risky, if you pay them very well and they see a future they’re more then happy to help be part of something great and help build the organization.

Lastly there’s the Support People. I’m guessing in you mind these are often the hardest to justify without building the plan like we did above. But now that we have this plan we can see where their real value will come in. They allow you to free up time and create more throughput. For anything admin I like to hire book keepers/accounting people. Even if they’re not going to be doing a financial role their attention to detail is usually strong and they’re used to doing repetitive tasks. Always try and hire smart people.

Roundup

I hope this gives you a solid plan for increasing your throughput and in turn revenue.

In short

  • Make a list of things you do
  • Value their Time and Revenue quantifiers then sort
  • Build a plan & systems
  • Hire people

In my next post I’ll talk about how I go about building plans and systems.

One last thought. I highly suggest giving no 1 person all the keys to the kingdom. Hire into roles and positions with limited scope. You don’t want to hire someone and have them do everything or be able to do everything. If they’re an artist to make creatives, don’t have them manage the servers and/or the campaigns. Another thing I highly suggest against is hiring anyone that knows what affiliate marketing is. Present to them that you’re an agency and that you have clients that you work with, then leave it at that. They don’t need to know there’s a whole echo system where they can go pull the link and get the offers easily. This will create a bit of a barrier because they’ll think “well I can’t just go get Lending Tree as a client”

Thanks for reading and sorry this got so long.

As always your questions & comments are greatly appreciated.

If your business is big and scaling A4D is always here to help you grow your business. We help people build long term, media buying, affiliate businesses. Not just try and make a couple bucks.

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