On Building a Team in Your Business

This is where you have to step out of lizard brain, you have to step out of survival brain and you have to be able to give yourself those times each week where you’re really looking at your business clearly.

Welcome to the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Podcast, unconventional business advice for the highly creative, secretly sensitive and wildly ambitious entrepreneur. I’m your host, Christine Kane. Let’s do this.

Greetings my friends and welcome to episode number 61 of The Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Business Podcast. And today we’re going to have a conversation about building a team. And a lot of times I get the inspiration for a podcast topic based on some questions I’ve gotten, some things people have asked me and sometimes the questions I get from people even, you know, pretty hardcore business people who are very successful make me realize that there’s a lot of context and a lot of missing guidance around some of the concepts we kind of take for granted once we get really steeped in our businesses and steeped in the work we do. And I want to kind of bring this topic of team building into just a conversation like I recently had with somebody that started me really thinking about this. And it’s one of the most common questions I get is all about hiring all about building a team when to do it, what to hire first. And so what I did was I just broke this down into five little topics that would spark different conversations, and also help me share with you some of the experiences I’ve had in my team, and hopefully bring you to a level of wisdom and awareness of what you need to do first and maybe where you’ve made a few flub ups and what you most need to work on in terms of getting a team assembled to help you grow in your business.

And where I’m going to start is one of the things that kind of knocked me upside the head, this was back when I was still a musician and I was hearing an entrepreneur talk. I was at a, an event and I was there as a musician. And I heard this person who had a, several companies simply say, during her talk, she said, if you don’t have time, you need a team. And I love that. I really do love that, but I’ve now had a lot, you know, many, many years since then of building a team of growing a business and of taking that, that fearful step into investing in yourself enough to have somebody working for you. And it’s brought that statement into a lot of context for me.

But the first thing I would say, when you hear someone say, if you don’t have time, you need a team. Is that if you don’t have time also can mean, first off before you start throwing money at that particular problem, you kind of always need to take a step back and say, all right, if I don’t have time, the first thing we want to look at is what is falling between the cracks and what am I, what am I doing to contribute to that issue? Because if you don’t have time, it could mean that you have a bit of ADHD. If you don’t have time, it could mean that you’re farting around on Facebook a lot. If you don’t have time, it could mean you’re procrastinating because the work you need to do is a little scary and uncertain to you. If you don’t have time, it could mean so many other things. Too often, you get a statement like that, and we quick starts, we entrepreneurs who are very quick sturdy and very in the moment we love those statements.

It, it just makes us excited like, oh, there’s my problem. I need a team. And so we end up multiplying our problems because we start throwing money at them. And then we haven’t learned how to manage ourselves. We haven’t learned how to think about our business. And next thing we know, we have somebody there to witness that catastrophe that is us trying to run a business, and then we feel more pressure and we, we create so much more complexity. And so if you don’t have time, if you are really, really like struggling with time management, the first place I would start would be to, to look at the kinds of things you do, meaning really looking at how you spend your time each day and go back to the podcast I did on the five energies, use your words, Christine, on The Five Energies of The Entrepreneur, and really see the kind of work you’re doing, because there is so much misinformation and so many misconceptions that we, especially when you’re a solo entrepreneur, that we have about what it takes to build a team and even what a team is.

And so you not having time is not the same as me not having time. It’s not the same as your peer out there who doesn’t have time. Time is this weird thing that we all struggle, we, you know, we make into this big, huge struggle, and we make productivity, our big, huge thing. And you really have to look at what are the kinds of activities that you’re doing. Now when it comes to hiring, and when it comes to building a team, this is where you have to step out of lizard brain. You have to step out of survival brain and you have to be able to give yourself those times, each week where you’re really looking at your business clearly. You’re not coming to this question of hiring from a place of panic, from a place of fear, from a place of, uh, you know, self-loathing and you have to really get yourself to that place of neutral, where you’re thinking very clearly. And so that’s hopefully what I’m helping you do here. So I have, like I said, I have these five areas I want to speak to. And each one of them is going to kind of bring out its own context, hopefully that lets you think about your business and your hiring needs more, with more awareness I would say.

The first thing I want to talk about is what, what is a team even? Like what is, what does that even mean? And the reason I’m bringing this out is because I was, I have a, um, I’m in different masterminds and I support different people and I get supported by different people, but I was in a group of people, and in that group, there, there is a number one New York Times bestselling author. So this is not somebody who doesn’t know business and who doesn’t have success under her belt. But she, at one point was listening to us, have a conversation, a group of us have a conversation about teams and she just blurted out. She just said, you know, you guys, what is a team like when you say team, what do you even mean? And I loved the question because it’s something that we all just toss around this idea of team. And some people aren’t even sure what it looks like. So when I first started thinking about teams, I was as a musician, really in that mentality of it’s just me against the world, and I just me trying to figure out what to do and calling people up and trying to get gigs. And I never once really considered that, this thing that I did, this art, this service was even worthy of being an entity that would be a business that would have a team that would have anyone supporting me.

And so a team is pretty much anyone around you who supports the work you do or supports you so that you can do the work you do. So to that end, if you have a housekeeper, that person’s on your team. I know it might seem like a, a ridiculous stretch, but if that eliminates you having to do work so that you can focus on your art, your message, your marketing, that person’s on your team. If you have a bookkeeper that person’s on your team, if you have an accountant that person’s on your team, and then we move into things like personal assistants, we move into an executive assistant, a VA, a virtual assistant, whatever that might be, you start building your team.

But I think what’s a really key thing to consider here is your mentality about it. It’s not just, I’m hiring a random, this, and I’m hiring a random that, you really have to step into it and be the core of this thing you call your business and really start to look at your team as everyone is contributing to you, being able to do your genius work in the world. And that’s really key and crucial because too many of us, our genius work is stuff that’s the hardest to sit down and do. You know, I give I’ve given the example here of writing a book and creating marketing messages and all those kinds of things. And there’s such, there’s such kind of, um, a daunting thing that happens when you sit down, like even to create a podcast, there’s always this sort of daunting, how is this going to turn out? How do I even know if it’s good? How do I even know? You know, there’s so many questions about it. And so what can happen is you don’t look at this as genius work. You just look at it as terror work or work I never want to do. And it’s so much easier to sit down and go downstairs or go over to your kitchen or whatever it is, and get lost in the housekeeping stuff or in stuff that can feel like it’s done when it’s done. And so your genius work is really the stuff, the writing of the book, the writing of the songs, in my case, the creating of the podcast, the marketing messages, the strategy, the vision, the getting of clients that is stuff that when you’re freed up from all these other piddly things that you’re not so great at, that’s what your team is supporting you to do is putting your best, your most heartfelt, your most soulful, whatever way you look at it out in the world.

And as you are scaling to use a word that’s overused and probably also misunderstood, but as you are growing this thing, the real investment, the real shift is that you start, you’re not hiring someone just to help you. You’re hiring someone so that you can now focus most on your genius work. And with that said, at that time that I had heard that person say, if you don’t have time, you need a team, I did kind of a brutal assessment of my own, where I was putting my time. And I was, you know, as a musician on the road for some, some years, you know, 250, 265 days a year, and then I would come home and I had, I had a house with a big yard and I would be like mowing my lawn and cleaning my house. And I’ve, I’ve written about this on my blog, but there was a point where one of my first hires was somebody to do my lawn and my yard work.

And I was still very much, and this is why I’m making this episode because some of us, it, it takes such a shift to move out of this lowly solo person sitting there alone, brooding in your room to start saying, I am worthy of hiring. And this was where that big shift was for me. This is why I wrote a blog about it. But when I first hired somebody to do my lawn, I was panicking because you know, for me at the time that was a big investment. And what I made myself do was, while that person was there doing my yard and mowing my lawn, I forced myself to go sit in my writing room and work on songs. And the thing that I often tell people is that one of the songs that I wrote was the song, No Such Thing As Girls Like That, which is, which turned out to be one of my crowd favorites and turned out to be an investment well worth multiple times what I paid someone to do my lawn. And that’s kind of how you have to start looking at this as that your team is doing work that is at one level for you, but it allows you to do the work that brings in the, the returns on the investment of the time that you spend. And of course, when I was writing the song, No Such Thing As Girls Like That, there was no guarantee that that was going to turn into what it turned into. And so oftentimes we want it to be a, you know, an easy, certain payoff. We don’t always know it’s going to be certain. But the key thing to understand is that you have to get those own insights, your own insights on that as well. And know that while somebody is cleaning your house, doing your books, doing your accounting, you are doing what you’re meant to do.

You’re doing the work that builds your business, serves your clients, serves your company to the end that you, you know, the goals and ends that you want it to reach. That’s what a team is. And for those of you who have been at any of my events, you know, that we have the tool that’s called the reverse engineering tool, where you lay out your whole year, you set up all your packages and you do all the math and you, you basically lay out the game plan for what you have to do to reach certain numbers in your business. And the one of the first things you do on that reverse engineering tool is you, there’s a little area where you write down everyone who is on your team, and that includes your coach. It includes anyone who is serving the you, and, and filling you up and helping you and supporting you in any way so that you can grow this business of yours.

That’s how I look at a team. And I know that’s not as simple definition, but when I’m doing a podcast like this, and I don’t know each and every person’s business, I have to give the full picture of it so that you know how to go off and define it for yourself. And so I would ask you, I would put this right back at you. What is your team? Who is your team? And write it down like as, as we’re starting to prepare for a new year, really look at that as a part of the entity that is your business. And that’s very, very important.

The second point I want to go to is, okay, so I’m new here. I don’t, you know, I don’t have a team where I have not really thought about having a team. You know, what, what roles do I hire first? What is the first thing that I want to get off my plate? And the reason I’m addressing this one is that one of my very first coaching experiences, um, that I don’t think this person, this was an entrepreneur. I don’t think she had the best perspective on, uh, what to hire first. But I want to give her perspective because maybe for some of you this will work, and her thing was hire someone who can make money for you so you don’t have to do that. Like in other words, hire a salesperson.

And I find that this is so completely not helpful because a lot of the entrepreneurs I work with don’t even see themselves as entrepreneurs right off the bat. They still kind of see themselves as self-employed, it’s just them. And they start going, oh yeah, I could get a sales person and they would make all the money and then I could just sit here and do my thing. And I, I find that unless you are very good at training a sales team, unless, you know, sales inside and out, and you know how to train somebody to do that, then I don’t think that’s very good advice. I think it might work in the corporate world to get a sales team rolling. I think it might work once you’ve grown yourself to where, uh, you have a team and you’ve been doing the work and you can get a sales team. We’ve done that at Uplevel. Um, I don’t do it anymore cause I, I, it’s just not where we’re at, but we have had a sales team of three different people, but they came trained and they were costly for that very reason. And they knew what they were doing.

But I actually, in terms of what role to hire first, especially since many of my listeners are, you know, whether or not they have a team or whether or not they have a company or whether or not they’re just getting started. This is something that they still struggle with. And in terms of what to offload first, I really do think it’s as basic as look, when you say, you know, when you don’t have time, look at the ways you putter away at your time, meaning all the things that you do like raking your leaves, or I guess everyone blows their leaves now, but no one rakes anymore damn it, um, doing your leaves, doing your lawn, doing the cleaning, the kitchen, cleaning your whole house. Those are things that we all can do, but we tend to use as procrastination. And so we end up not doing the work we’re really, really meant to do, to share with the world and their delay tactics. And so I would start with all of the little menial things that you are doing, get those off your plate. And I think it’s an easy way to begin because you’re not looking at the option of hiring a full-time person at that point.

I also think any of the admin kind of stuff, that’s just tedious for you, that would be a great place to start. But what I say to, I would say 90% of my clients when they first begin with me, the first question I have for them is, do you have an accountant? And do you have, the second question is, do you have a bookkeeper? And even when I work with clients who, you know, maybe they’re consultants now, but they’ve been an accountant or they’re very good at accounting, or they’re good at bookkeeping. They know how to do it. What I find is that when we probe deeper, it tends to be this thing that weighs on them. They dread it, they don’t do it, and they’re probably not the best person to do it and it’s not their genius work. And so in terms of hiring first, the places I really encourage people to start are the things that you are, find tedious, the things that you use to procrastinate and the things that would ease up on your time so that you could then fill that slot, maybe two hours, three hours, even if it’s three hours a week and you force yourself, well not force, we don’t like that term, but you actually sit down with your genius work during that time and see what kind of return you can get on that investment and really challenge yourself to do that.

Okay. So that brings us to our third point, which is another thing that people like to say over and over again, but it doesn’t mean anything until you really look at it for yourself deeply. And that is you hire slow and you fire fast. And I’m going to make two points about this. Hiring slow, a lot of times people think it means you interview someone 17 times and that, that means that you’ve done your due diligence, but hiring slow begins with an, if you’re in Uplevel cafe, go to Uplevelcafe.com. You know that one of the jumpstarts has called the Pre Hiring Clarity Process, meaning it’s, the whole tool that I fill out that I filled out for time after time, whenever I’ve hired somebody.

And it’s all about getting you the entrepreneur clear on what exactly you need and who exactly you need and getting over all of those parts of you that say, that’s not possible that person doesn’t exist. I’m too picky. Hiring slow means that you have to spend some very deep time getting clear understanding what this role is, who is the best person to hire for that role, because you’re not hiring a person you’re hiring for a position. And those are specific skills, specific mindsets, specific ways they need to be how they need to work. And so the hiring slow. I want them that my main point of that is that you want to be able to be clear as a bell before you even write the ad or start reaching out to your network, whatever it might be. You’re not just like, oh man, I heard a virtual assistant is the cool way to go. Okay. I’m just going to hire a virtual assistant, which is what too many people do and then this poor virtual assistant is now working for someone who’s clueless and you, the clueless one are wasting your money. So you want to know exactly what you need done.

Then in that process, try to understand, I know I’m cramming a lot into this episode, but it’s just stuff I think that’s worthy of understanding, is that I I’ve worked with people who will bring me their pre hiring clarity process, and they want someone to do their bookkeeping and to do their marketing. And it’s like, no, these are two different roles. And I actually had one of my clients say to me, something like, well, there’s that, sit-com where that person does all those things. And, and she was basing this role on someone she saw in a TV show she liked. And I was like, well, that’s a TV show. That’s not a real person. And so skillset, somebody who’s going to be really great at bookkeeping is not going to be really great at marketing and too often, we take our overwhelm with all of the things that we’re trying to get done, and we try to apply it into one person and just say, maybe I can just dump all this shit on them and then they’ll take it and run with it. And it just doesn’t work that way.

Part of becoming an entrepreneur and really taking your business at a level like taking it seriously is that you have to really think about the different roles and like the Five Energies of The Entrepreneur and all the different things they get done and understand they are a different type. They are different skillset. There are different Colby and sometimes there are different Enneagram. And so you, you really have to know what it is you’re looking for and what would most support you. And the second part of that, that little tenant hire slow fire fast. I, I have honestly, never worked with an entrepreneur who’s ever said, boy, I wish I’d waited longer before I’d hired that person, too many of us, we, we just hold on and we think, oh, but they were good at one point or oh, but, uh, they, they they’re nice people or, oh, they’re having a hard time right now.

Firing fast means you, you have to understand the importance of endings and the importance of what got you here won’t get you there. And that sometimes the most amazing person, isn’t the most amazing person for where the company needs to go next and firing fast, I don’t have a specific, um, I don’t have any ways to make it easier. Those of us who are sensitive, we hate firing. We hate letting people go. We don’t want to hurt people, but you really have to look at it as more often than not, when you do choose to let someone go, you’re serving them because they aren’t filling the role well, and they’re not doing their job well and they need to go find somewhere else to, to make their future brighter. And you need to move on and let go of people once reveal to you that they’re not the right person for that role. And I could do an entire episode just on that because I can think of a million different, not a million, but several different times where firing just literally landed me on my knees and the vitriol and the bad energy and Juju that gets created. I know nobody who does it perfectly, but I do know that, um, it does strengthen your character every time you do it because you start to realize it probably was the right choice even though that person didn’t agree with me. And there’s a lot of different ways of firing and doing it well and doing it fairly, but I’m not going to go into that here. For now, what most people need to know is that they tend to hold on way too long to the wrong person in that role.

The fourth thing I want to bring to the forefront here in terms of building a team is the entire mantra that my book, the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Entrepreneur is based on. And that is simply I’m in. And why that, why I’m in is so important when it comes to building a team is that most people think I’m going to just get this shit off my plate and you go do it and I don’t have to deal with you. And a team, what a team means is that you honor your business by hiring the best people to serve you and the end goals of the business so that you can do the work that really serves the world. And what I’m in has to do with it, it means you aren’t just offloading and dumping and turning away. Delegating is not avoiding. Delegating is not drive by delegating. Really having a team requires engagement from you. So I have had so many people say to me, or even I’ve had clients even tried out a hire people from my team and even some successfully. And they look at it like, oh, I want that person. I want a person on my team like your person. What they don’t realize is the amount of training that goes on. Like a lot of times the people who came to my team didn’t come wired up to be that person. It required my engagement.

So I, I have this sort of, when I first hire people, I really do believe that it’s great to, that’s when you be the micromanager and it takes an enormous amount of your energy to train them on who you are on what this company is about, what your values are. And like, if you have programs or any kind of trainings, make them do it, pay them to do it, give them books to read. I don’t necessarily think you need to pay people to read books, but hopefully the people you hire want to read those books and want to serve the end results of your company. And so I’m in means you’re going to have to be prepared to be very engaged with the people you hire.

I’ve trained, Um, when we had nine people on our team, I sent them all off to learn the Colbys. I sent them off for team trainings. I invested a lot of money in the people who were on my team because I wanted them to be able to grow. And I wanted them to have worked for me and learn a lot, both, you know, about themselves and also about what it means to be on a team and what it means to serve a company and, and feel seen. And, and, you know, I didn’t do it great, but I do know that I was super and am super engaged. Our team is much smaller now because we’ve moved more to contractors versus employees. But anytime you have someone on your team, what I’m in means is that what I would plan on is seeing your team, seeing the people who are in your team as if they are your customer. Only, these are internal customers and internal customers, meaning, you have to educate them on what you’re all about and what you, what you believe in and what your values are and things that you don’t do and things that you do do.

And like, if, if you have somebody helping you out with social media, you don’t just say, Hey, do my social media and then get off because they post something you don’t like, you have to really engage with them, have meetings with them, have them show you the things they came up with. And this can be tiring for you, especially if you’re already serving clients and customers and dealing with, um, I.T. Issues or whatever else might come up. And this is why having a business really requires that mantra, I’m in. And it’s what I based the entire Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Entrepreneur on is what it looks like to really own a company and to really engage even as a sensitive person. And so having a team means you being super engaged with them. And you looking at your team as somebody who is almost like a customer and as valuable as a customer, because that makes them better at serving your customers.

And the thing that I love, like with my team, we had so many, we had regular meetings. We, uh, I had, I made everybody on my team read the Five Dysfunctions of A Team by Patrick Lencioni. Um, I made them read Death by Meeting with, by Patrick Lencioni. Um, those are two really great books and we had a whole meeting sequence and we set up so that everybody started to understand what marketing looked like. Anytime we had a customer breakthrough, the whole team heard about it. It wasn’t just, I shared it with my coaches. It, you know, my I.T. Person heard about it. And so what started to happen is everybody became a contributor because I made sure the whole team was engaged, and it’s, and it’s a lot, I will tell you, it takes a lot out of you now, if it’s just you and a bookkeeper and an accountant, I’m not saying that you’re going to be having team meetings with them necessarily, but I do think it’s important.

So for instance, I meet with my bookkeeper and she knows my values. Like she understands how I think as a business owner and that I’m not for scaling for scaling sake and that my heart is very into it. And that Uplevel has some, some key values that it lives by. And so everybody I meet with understands that I that’s part of honoring your business and honoring that person as part of your team. And the last thing I want to bring up is a common question I get is, do I have, do you know, do I go with full-time people or do I do contractor people? And this completely depends on you. And I’m just going to do sort of my own experience share and let you know where, where I’ve landed with it, but give you some things to think about in terms of your choices with that.

When I first started, I could not hire a full-time employee. I was not at a point where I had the, um, ability to invest that much. And of course that was when I was a musician. So I had a part-time person. Her main role was working for me and it was not a good, I was not great at this then. I had to learn about hiring. And I think this is one thing I would add on as a little bonus point, is that the skill of being a team manager, even if you can ultimately offload to someone who is a good manager, the skillset of management, the skill sets we’re talking here are stuff you have to learn. None of us are born understanding this. It really does take some communication skills. It takes self-awareness of you, and it takes understanding your business and honoring, I think really honoring yourself as a business owner, as a service provider. And in that way, you have to know that this is a learned kind of a thing.

So back to full-time versus contractor. When I had employees, when I started, it was always part-time and they weren’t contractors at that point, I did, I did have a little payroll going and they did the payroll work. Like my first assistant had to do her own payroll and learn the steps of doing that. One of the common things that any entrepreneur will tell you is that when you have a team that is full-time and everybody is fully engaged, you have a lot more buy-in and you, you have, you know, we had a whole, well, we still do a 401k plan. We, you know, I’ve my director of operations set everything up so that there were a lot of benefits and a lot of, you know, uh, reasons why someone would not just be engaged, but also financially engaged because we’re, we’re really serving them and we’re supporting them in their lives and their lifestyles. And so you become like your own little economy when you, when you start hiring full time, but there is a lot of administrative extra to do with that. Which again, I think if you start to get to that point, it should be that person or an executive assistant or an operations person who is setting all that up. I don’t want you to be spending all your time figuring out payroll and how to do, how to break all that down. That would be where your bookkeeper gets involved, but it is, it starts to create overhead.

And so when you have full-time employees, it starts to mean that now you have overhead and that your sales goals have to match that overhead. And this can be a little tricky because now there’s that added pressure. If I’m going to keep this team here, I have to make a certain amount. And some people find that like an ugly reality that they don’t want to have to do, but some businesses start to become so successful, It’s not that, it’s not a difficult task, but you do have times where cashflow can be an issue. The easy thing about contractor services are that you can, you know, say, okay, we’re shutting down this, you’re not needed anymore. You can, you know, let them go at any time without any big, huge, you know, feedback from them or any big problem. Contractors can work a certain number of hours. You have a lot more leniency and a lot more freedom when you have a contractor. What often happens, however, is that you don’t have as much buy-in or that’s what a lot of people say. But I think that is really up to who you hire when it comes to a contractor.

And again, that goes back to your pre hiring clarity, the kind of person that you want, and that person’s, uh, I would call it their batteries included factor. How, how in are they, how in are you, how much are you willing to train them? And when you have a contractor, I think it’s very important that you pay them to come to a regular meeting with you, and that you show up fully prepared, or you have them show up fully prepared and you lay out your expectations for what the meeting is all about. And that way you’re staying in tune and staying on track. And the, you can have an entire team of contractors and have weekly, a weekly cadence of meetings where you all meet, you all know what is expected of them that week. At the end of the week, you all report in, you use a tool like slack to stay in touch and stay on track with each other.

And again, hopefully at some point you can offload and delegate that, that level of management to someone else. But for those of you who are just starting off, I do think that having a team of contractors is a perfectly viable option. And I think it actually makes it much easier on you to grow your team. What I can say is that when I did decide, I made a conscious decision that I wanted to have a team of full-time people. This was way back in 2011, 2012. And when I hired my first full-time operations director, I had to make the shift of being me and some contractor VA types to me and a full-time employee. And I was her, her ask of what her, um, I was, I flew her here and she worked for me. She came from LA and she was a director of operation. She had a salary requirement and her salary when I first paid her was more than I, some of the years that I made my, you know, what I paid myself for the year in music. And so it was really scary to make that investment. And it really required me to step in and say, I believe in this business and I believe in myself and I believe in what I’m doing enough, that I’m going to make this investment. And it kind of was like throwing your hat over the fence. And then diving after it, I had learned from working with coaches and investing in myself before that’s really what motivated me. Like it was like, okay, I’m going to do this. And it required my full engagement.

And then I had lessons to go roll on because it turns out she wasn’t the best person for that role. When I, I realized that about a year later and I had to make a shift, but that was my first step. But just know you’re not going to do it perfectly. There is, as many people want to say that there is one key way to do this and that if you do it this one way, you’ll never make mistakes. We’re talking about humans here, people, and that means you’re going to mess up. Other people are going to mess up. You’re going to have people you hire that you fire like a month later. And hopefully you’re clear enough that you can do that. And you’re going to be learning as long as there are people, there’s an X factor. But I do think that honoring your business enough to be really present to this process will pay off in multiples. Like, it’ll just be huge for you if you, if you learn and you do it well.

Okay. So to close out this very long and long-winded podcast conversation, I’m going to recommend, I’m going to recommend, I already recommended the two books by Patrick Lencioni. Those are for more for when you do have a team and when you’ve got your team rolling. But one book that I do think is very good. That will just give you a bit of perspective on what it takes to hire well is a book by Geoff Smart. And Geoff is spelled G E O F F. Uh, Geoff smart and Randy Street wrote a book called Who – The A Method For Hiring. And I was lucky enough to work with Geoff Smart at, um, when I was in a program up in, uh, it was held at MIT, but it was called the, um, Entrepreneurial Masters Program and Geoff was one of the teachers there, and he’s just a phenomenal teacher If you ever get to see him talk, but he teaches a method for hiring, which I necessarily think it is the number one you have to follow it and, you know, it’ll make you millions and all that kind of stuff. But what I like about it is that it shows you the amount of thought that goes into the hiring process when you do it well. It doesn’t mean I’m saying follow every last little instruction in that book, but I do think it’s a good book for looking at wow, there’s a lot that goes into hiring.

But there’s a lot of great books on hiring. I do like that one, for those of you who are in Uplevel Cafe, or want to be an Uplevel Cafe, I really do. And I’m not trying to like, get all pushy with my own stuff, but the pre hiring clarity tool, there’s a jumpstart in the strategy track. I can’t recommend that enough. I think it’s the part of the process that most, most people ignore is their own clarity on what exactly they’re hiring. And this will get you very, very clear about what you’re hiring and how to get ready to write the ad and how to write the ad based on that. And it’s a very, very good training. And then for those of you who do have teams who really need to get more engaged in their teams, I think that Patrick Lencioni’s, all of his books on team are very, very good. They’re super simple. And they’re, they’re easy to read and not saying they’re literature, but they’re, they make their point super well. And I think they’ve been very helpful for my team to read. And I think they are also good things to have your team to to start reading and get them engaged and start understanding how to set your business up so that your team building starts to feel like something you’re getting really good at, and that you continue to learn from each and every hire and fire you make, knowing that you’re never going to get it a hundred percent, right. And there’s always going to be mis-hires, and there’s always going to be great things that you learn, but your being open and you’re being in is a really great place to start.

And then lastly, honoring your business by really understanding that you have to own this thing and really stand fully in it. And to that end, I would recommend the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Entrepreneur, um, which is my book, which is on Amazon. And thank you for those of you who have bought it. And for those of you who reviewed it, and that would be my ask today, if you have not decided to go over there to Amazon to leave a review, I would so love it If even one of you today would go and leave a review of the Soul-Sourcedâ„¢ Entrepreneur, if you read it and got a lot out of it. And thanks for listening today, and, um, I will see you on the next episode, we were dividing these up a little bit, by the way, I might be spacing them out a little bit more. And, um, as we close out this year, but you’ll be getting another episode soon and I will see you then. Thanks for listening.