"I Keep Switching Between Marketing and Operations"

0:00Um, so my name is Jack. I run a Tik Tok shop agency helping brands sell their products. >> Your Tik Tok shop sounds so posh. You got >> appreciate that. Thank you. >> Um, so I feel like I have a people problem, but I don't know where to start with it. Um, and [clears throat] I find myself literally regularly going back and something resonated with what you said, but I keep going back and forth between operation and service provision, then marketing, then one gets dropped, then one gets dropped, then back marketing and the service is [ __ ] basically. Um, and it might be because I change things too much. Um, and that's what kind of resonated with what you said.

0:33>> Um, and I don't know which or where to hire or or kind of which way to go about it. >> Which one are you better at? >> This this I I don't know. >> Are you better at marketing or are you better at talking to people? >> I'm better at marketing. Smart. Yeah. Smart marketing. >> Then you need to find somebody who likes people. It's HR people. like not necessarily HR, but you need somebody who likes people. And so this is this is the big Okay, I'm gonna I'm gonna nail this one for a lot of you guys. So, a lot of you guys need to find operators.

1:01A lot of you identify as the entrepreneur. Hopefully, you're here. Um, and so you usually need some sort of right hand. You need somebody who's your first follower. You need someone who can do the stuff. I am actually incredibly useless in a business. I have I mean, I could show you guys my calendar. It's empty. There's nothing on. And so, today I had nothing besides this and then I will go and continue to do nothing. And so the thing is is like Leila's calendar is like a whole whole day through because she loves talking to people and she loves leading. And so what you need is you don't need an opportunity, you need a leader. And so if your employees don't naturally want to go to this person rather than you, then you don't have the right person.

1:38>> And so typically in the small business world, I would say like sub 3 million, maybe sub 10 million, you've got these people who consider themselves operators. They're like, I can put in systems and technology and process and all they do is just make everyone's lives harder. >> And so that's not what you need. You need someone who leads the business because fundamentally you're trying to lead two components of the business. You need someone else who can lead for you so that you can go do you need to do to market the business. >> Does that make sense?

2:05>> Makes sense. Yeah. >> And so what you what I would do is you write down the activities that are associated with the role that you don't want to do. And then when you're advertising to get that person, because it's advertising the same way you do to get customers, you just advertise to get roles. So you either run ads, you do outreach or you, you know, hit affiliate pulls up or you hire head hunters. Like there's a number of ways you can get get talent, but then you'll have a very clear list of activities of what this want this person to do. So there's a lot of clarity around the role and the right person will tell you all the things that's on top of that list that you're not doing that you should be doing. And so my recommendation is talk to like 10 to 20 people. I know it sounds like, oh my god, 10 to 20. Welcome to hiring good people. Uh, [laughter] it's like it's funny. It's like, um, man, I I hate I can't find a good girl. It's like, how many dates you been on? Three. And you're dating one of them. Yeah. It's like, all right, so you just picked one out of three that like showed up. It's like, why are we surprised that this person sucks? It's like just expand the pool a little bit. Um, and you'll get cuz you only need to pick one, right?

3:01And the thing is is that in the interview process, this is a hack for everybody, especially in roles that you're not as good at, is that you'll learn more about the role from interviewing 20 people. So don't think of it even as interviews. Think about as you're just getting free education from people who are good at the thing. And the thing is is that if you talk to 20 people, you'll very quickly see the difference in skill sets. You'll be like, "Oh, wow. She was sharp or he was sharp or that guy was an idiot or oh my god." The thing is, you get 20, you're like, "Okay, now I know what I'm looking for." And if and the really good ones will already have found a job. Like if it takes you that long, that's okay. Now you know what to look for. And then on the 21st and the 22nd, you now have a filter. And believe it or not, if you're really classy on the interview, you can reach back out to people. And a lot of people if they liked you will come back and work for you.

3:42>> And how would you make it attractive enough for them? So this this would obviously probably be a number two in my business um out of like eight but a lot donkey work at the moment. Um >> so how how would I make it attractive enough? Like I'm thinking shares. I'm thinking profit share. >> What's revenue is profit? >> Uh about 360k. Um we're over 6 months old so about 360k. Um profit on that is about 75%. M >> it's a risk for someone looking for that.

4:10>> Yeah, it is. It is a risk. So the thing is in the beginning it's really expensive to bring people on because they take risk on too. And so if you don't have capital you have to give up the thing that you have that's valuable which is upside. If you have money then you can pay them with money rather than upside so that you can have more of the upside. Like that's the trade. And so either you have to gut your way through this which is what you're currently doing. A, B, you can see if there's anybody on the eight person team that you have that you think you could upskill into that role rather than you doing it or C you can bring someone in.

4:38Now, it just takes more interviews to get somebody who's really skilled and will accept lower comp. >> Yeah. >> Right. It's like you might be able to go in 10 days to find a beautiful girl, but might have to go on 100 to find a beautiful girl that wants to date a poor guy. >> But there are ones. They exist. There's just fewer of them. >> Does that make sense? Makes sense. >> If you're a business owner and you're not growing as fast as you'd like, I'd like to give you a free gift. So, my team and I put together the $100 million scaling roadmap, which is basically 200 hours of us looking over all the portfolio companies we've had and what stages of growth they went through and more importantly where they got stuck and how they got past it. And so we broke it in these 10 stages and we made this little kind of quiz thing where if you put in your business information, it'll tell you where you're at and the most important part for you, what to do for each of functions of the business across product, marketing, sales, customer success, recruiting, IT, human resources, and finance. And so no matter what you're struggling with, someone else has already struggled with it and solved it. And so I'd like to give you this thing absolutely free. free. You can go to acquisition.com/roadmap, plug in your business information, and if you want us to actually help you deconrain the business and you're trying to scale, we'd love to help you out on the thank you page. You can just book a call with my team and we will look at the business, see if we can help, and if we can, we'll invite you out to Vegas and we'll do this in person live.