The real path to scaling your business in 43 min

Summary

• I have scaled to over $100 million in sales by leveraging other people's skills and not doing everything myself.
• It's important to realize that scaling a business requires understanding who to hire, what processes to use, and how to enact these processes.
• Entrepreneurial success can be hindered by a lack of talent acquisition, which is as critical as client acquisition.
• My personal journey included scaling gym launch, Prestige Labs, and Allen by hiring the right talent and constantly refining our business model.
• I established a talent acquisition funnel to match our client acquisition funnel; a mirrored approach that dramatically increased our capacity and revenue.
• An ideal hiring process involves talent attraction, nurturing applicants, and an effective interview process.
• Job ads that reflect the actual title recognized by the industry attract more suitable candidates; specificity is crucial.
• Utilize multiple channels for talent recruitment (e.g., network, outbound, ads, organic content, recruiters, team referrals) to ensure a diverse pool of applicants.
• Develop a nurturing process for candidates to keep them engaged and informed, similar to how we handle leads in the sales process.
• Implement a multi-step interview process aimed at thoroughly vetting candidates' fit with company culture, role expectations, skill sets, personal alignment, and overall company vision.
• The cost of not conducting a detailed hiring process is actually higher in the long-term due to increased turnover and lost productivity.
• Building the right team is foundational to any business's success as they ultimately drive growth and operational effectiveness.
• Embrace leverage by finding and hiring smart people; overcome fear and potential setbacks for long-term success.

Video

How To Take Action

I would suggest implementing a structured talent acquisition funnel to match your client acquisition funnel. Focus on these low-cost, high-value strategies:

1. Craft specific, industry-recognized job titles for your ads to attract suitable candidates. Avoid fancy terms that might down-regulate your job post visibility.

2. Utilize various channels for talent recruitment, such as your network, outbound efforts, paid ads, organic content, recruiters, and team referrals. This ensures a diverse pool of applicants without incurring high costs.

3. Develop a candidate nurturing process. Engage with applicants promptly, just like you would with potential clients. A quick, personalized response can set you apart from other employers.

4. Implement a multi-step interview process. Start with a screening call, then assess cultural fit, conduct skill tests, align expectations and visions, and if your company is larger, a final interview with the CEO.

Remember, skipping detailed hiring processes costs more long-term due to turnover and lost productivity. By building the right team, you can scale effectively and increase your business's capacity and revenue.

Leverage your strengths in marketing to attract talent just like you do clients. If you can convert leads to sales, you can surely convert potential hires to team members. Overcome the fear of losing control and the setbacks of hiring the wrong people by focusing on these strategies for long-term success.

Quotes by Leila Hormozi

"Your number one job as a leader is to find the people to help you build your business"

– Leila Hormozi

"One brain cannot build a $100 million business. It takes tons of brains to build that."

– Leila Hormozi

"If you wanted to win the Super Bowl, you're not like, 'I'm gonna go win the Super Bowl alone.'"

– Leila Hormozi

"If you can acquire customers, you can acquire talent."

– Leila Hormozi

"Money, money. I know that's all that anybody cares about. Like, I swear, this will make you more money."

– Leila Hormozi

Full Transcript

digital marketing not going to talk about that today so today what I wanted to talk about was how I scaled to over 100 million in sales uh using other people's skills so I think that a lot of the time we come to these events and I've come to a ton of these events and the speeches are phenomenal but there's one core piece that I want to focus on that I think a lot of people typically Miss which is not having to do everything yourself and I think that a lot of people especially like myself maybe seven years ago when I would go to a conference I would take away so much and I would have this notebook full of paper just all my notes on it and then I'd be like oh my gosh how am I going to do all of this and so if you feel like that my goal with this presentation is that you don't feel that way after listening to this today am I echoing no just me okay cool that's all that matters so what I want to share is really the secret that's been responsible for scaling four of my own businesses and hundreds of others and so if you don't know who I am I'm just going to give a quick 60 second resume um so since the age of 24 I've taken home about 1.2 million dollars a month on average and I'm now 30 and I say that not to boast but to give you a reason to listen to me today because every time that I'm at a speech I'm at a conference the main reason or the main thing I'm asking when someone's talking is why should I listen to you and so if you want to make more money this is how I personally built scaled and sold three businesses so gym launch which was a service business Prestige Labs which was an e-commerce business and then Allen which was a software business and then by the age of 29 I crossed 100 million net worth and by age 30 which is now our portfolio does about 200 million dollars in Revenue per year and is comprised of brick and mortar chains e-commerce B2B SAS B2B Services B2B services and e-learning and so what I've actually learned through not just scaling my own but especially since we started taking on portfolio companies is that independent of Industry typically what entrepreneurs lack in order to scale their businesses is the who the what and the how to scale and at acquisition.com which is our company what we do is we recruit the who we give them the what we show them the how and once the entrepreneur has all three their business will scale by default because the right pieces are in place and that's how we scale businesses from 10 to 100 million but of course it was not always like that right so if we rewind back to 2016. uh this is me and Alex if you know my husband who speaks next um and these are ads that we were running because what we did is in 2016 we started our company gym launch and the way that we started it was essentially we did the marketing for gyms and we would fly out ourselves and we would sit at their front desk and we would sell people into their locations and so we were doing that and we did it for about 11 months as we were living out of the extended staying at like clients houses um we really had no money and it was that was basically like the eating moment right and what we figured out after 11 months is that we couldn't continue to do that nor could we continue to pay other people to do it either because they also hated eating all the time it's like you're basically flying out to people's gyms you're sitting there you're selling people into those gyms and then they're basically telling you to off because they're like I see how much money you just made on my location and so what we realized was like hey maybe that's not the right model of all of our customers paid us and so we switched to what we call as a licensing model okay so the licensing model was essentially uh discovered by accident because we called up all the gyms to tell them hey this we're not doing this anymore and they were like hey no I need your help and so we said okay cool well we will teach you how to do it we're not flying out to your gym to save your ass and they were like cool I'll pay for it and that was Denmark and so we switched to this licensing model and everything fell 10 times easier because you guys know what it's like when you get the right offer which is why Alex's book is about it's like once you get the right offer it feels like things are finally starting to get easier right and we finally started to gain traction after we made that fundamental change but then we hit this point where we couldn't scale and we ended up continuing to bang our heads across the wall across the wall and we couldn't break past four hundred thousand dollars a month and it was extremely frustrating um anyone here ever felt that way you just can't break past certain Revenue sucks and so after two months of setting sales targets and not hitting them something occurred to me which was that the reason that we are missing those targets was not due to the lack of client acquisition right it was actually due to capacity on our sales team we actually couldn't hire fast enough to even contact all the people that were opting in this was back in the day when Facebook ads were so cheap there was such an Arbitrage we had hundreds and hundreds of people contacting us and applying every day and we could not reach out to them fast enough and so just when I thought maybe I figured out what the issue is maybe it's playing with a funnel in sales one of our best reps quit and I was like my life so I called my mentor I'm gonna call Bob today I was like Bob I have no idea what I'm doing I'm 23 I've never managed people I've never built a business I have no effing clue even what I'm looking at I don't even know is this a problem and he was like Layla what does your talent acquisition funnel look like I was like the is that you know like I have no idea and so he explained he said layla it's the mirror of every business see if you want to keep clients coming in the front door then your talent needs to continue coming in the back door and so the reason that we couldn't scale was not due to lack of client acquisition it was actually lack of talent acquisition you guys are all familiar with this right funnel lead generation lead nurture sales I would think anyone at this conference probably knows what that is right but what about Talent acquisition why is nobody talking about that application generation application nurture interviewing mirrored funnel and that was the light bulb moment for me when I literally put those two funnels side by side and I was like oh that's my job and so as soon as we paired the talent acquisition with the client acquisition we scaled from 400 000 a month to four million a month in 20 months we didn't change our funnel we didn't change our sales we changed nothing you can ask people who saw gym launch they were like trying to dissect our funnel it looked like the URL was not even right it was because we scaled our talent acquisition and then we lived happily ever after with perfect loss not actually but Talent acquisition is what broke us through that barrier of 400 000 a month and took us to 4 million and what we realized through that process is that we've always been really one hire away from all the growth we wanted all the leverage we needed all the sanity that we thought we lost in building the business and all the lessons that we didn't have time to learn ourselves does anyone feel that way it's like you don't have time to learn all this yourself and so here's a thought experiment for all of you if someone could come in and do everything you did in your business today and you would have to do nothing and the business would grow the same why are you necessary the answer is that you're not necessary I'm not necessary your job is to find the people to do that and so your number one job as a leader is to find the people to help you build your business this is a mindset shift that most people can't make and that's why they never scale they continue to hit their heads against the wall thinking I need to work harder I need to figure this out why can't I one brain cannot build a 100 million dollar business it takes tons of brains to build that and after all if you wanted to win the Super Bowl you're not like I'm gonna go win the Super Bowl alone right you're like I need offense I need defense I need special teams coaches trainers in other words you need marketing you need sales you need product you need customer success teams HR teams it teams Finance you need a team and only us crazy entrepreneurs are the ones that are crazy enough to think that we can do it alone after all Steve Jobs was not the person who built the iPhone right we know that Steve built the team that built the iPhone so I'm sure you're thinking that's great for you and Steve Layla but what about me right that's what we're going to talk about today in the short amount of time that we do have so if you want to get repeatable outcomes then we need repeatable processes we call ours the value acceleration method or the vam acquisition.com and these are the real metrics of businesses in our portfolio who have implemented the van since money is what most people want this is the revenue growth there's the profit growth 2.5 x 1.1 x 2.6 x 1.3 X 2.8 x 9.8 x average in the first year Revenue growth 1.8 x profit growth of 3x average in the second year 2.3 x Revenue 4.7 x profit clearly it works so the van really comes down to three things it's the who it's the what and it's the how okay today we only have time to talk about one and so we're going to talk about The Who so let's Dive In all right if you can acquire customers which I assume many of you can if you're at this digital marketing event you can acquire Talent there are three Key activities in the talent acquisition funnel okay you're familiar with these the applicant generation the applicant nurture and the interview process so we're gonna start with applicant generation what is applicant generation it is lead generation which is getting people to want to work for you not getting people to work for you getting people to want to work for you if you can market and find customers you can market and recruit Talent it is literally the same skill set anytime someone who's a fantastic marketer tells me I just can't find good people I'm like me you just don't see it yet you have both the skill set uses is used on both sides of the funnel and so here's an example for you is that the job title is the equivalent to the headline it is as important in capturing the attention of your applicants as the headline is in capturing the attention of clients and ads okay let me explain so here's an ad from our company gym launch or the one that we sold okay notice how we say gym owners we're not saying personal trainers we're not saying Fitness enthusiasts we're not saying yoga bar owners right we're saying gym owners people who identify with being a gym owner what does the person you are already looking for already call themselves it's the same when you're at putting an ad out for a job people put names out that make no sense but the question is the person that you're looking for the intelligence level they have the work ethic they have what do they call themselves already and so going deeper into that there's two pieces to the lead generation there's the at and then there's where do you put the ad so the ad here's what most people do one is they're unclear on who they're talking to they just like throw out they like Google something and they come up with a job title and they're like that's what I'm gonna call it and the reality is is that they're not really thoroughly thinking like what does this person call themselves where do they live what do they do for fun how do they dress what do they look like like they're not really envisioning it as much as you would for a client and what you want to do is you want to be in a narrow Focus to think what does this employee look like just to the same extent that you would as what does this client look like the second is that people include abbreviations they use Insider language and they use way too many words that doesn't mean much until I tell you what it should look like so here's what we do one is we're specific we always know exactly who we're talking to the moment that I get on interview with someone I could tell it right away I'm like this is the person who isn't the person even just by the way they dress because I've already decided in my mind what it looks like so I'll give you some examples so we had a company that was searching for an analyst two and a half months in can't find an analyst I'm like guys this is not hard to find this is one of the lower level roles in your company and so I look at the ad and I was like well what kind of analyst are you looking for they're like well we need someone for more experience I was like yes and what kind of analysts they're like well financial and I'm like why is that not in the title the moment that we put in senior financial analyst getting super specific on who that person is literally within a week they hired the person the moment after we changed it the second piece is that typically people get lazy they don't think about this when you're advertising to acquire clients you're not going to abbreviate things yet people do that in job titles the irony of this is that anywhere that you post a job title that's specific for jobs Indeed Glassdoor LinkedIn they down regulate you for abbreviating so you can't actually abbreviate it's just going to show you to less eyeballs the third is using Insider language so this is an example from one of our portfolio companies she came to me the CEO and she was like Layla we need Student happiness lead and I was like is a student happiness lead and she was like you know there's someone to like you know invest in our customers make sure they're succeeding like make sure they like the product make sure they're doing well like you know get the customer journey in place I said that's ahead of customer success and she's like well we don't call them customers we call them students I said that's good once they come in but to advertise for this person nobody knows what student happiness lead is so again the moment that we changed it literally within a week she got her ahead of customer success uh last two which is customer support representative versus customer support Rockstar so this is something that back in 2016 when I was advertising in gym launch to acquire people if you put Superstar Rockstar you know badass people would always apply and you got more applications now it's the opposite which is they actually down regulate you for using those weird words so that's one thing you don't want to do anymore and lastly similar to that is sales representative versus I see this all the time sales rep 100K minimum base again it's going to down regulate you on the platforms you don't want to put the actual uh salary amount in the title and not long ago this actually happened to me and I was reminded of this myself which was I was looking for a customer success executive how many people how many people here in the room have heard of a customer success executive at a PE firm I'm gonna be like one they don't exist really not really okay I got nothing so for the one person who did raise their hand you're a unicorn so I changed it to portfolio operating partner I called him my friend he said Layla what PE firm advertises for a customer success executive and then I realized I was like I'm calling it a title that fits with my old company not my new company a PE firm doesn't use a language right as soon as I changed it before the operating partner I got inundated with resumes and I hired a guy within a week so the bottom line if you see the pattern here is that you have to keep the main thing the main thing you have to remember who you're talking to people get this when it comes to acquiring clients but for some reason it's something that's left out when you're thinking about acquiring employees and so that is how you do the ad now the second question to that is how do you distribute the ad what most people do is they ask their Network we talked about 25 30 businesses a week that are doing anywhere probably usually below 10 million right and the number one way that they acquire employees is that they ask their Network the number one problem they have is they can't scale so here's why it doesn't work one you exhaust this fairly quickly and people get annoyed if you continue to ask them to use their network over and over again two is that you will give someone the role even though they're not qualified because what are you comparing them to maybe one other person that you've gotten through your network you don't have options and then typically you end up hiring a bunch of like-minded people because they come from one group of people rather than having diverse thinkers a lot of people talk about diversity in terms of like how we look at ethnicity and all that I talk about diversity of thinking is what you want a company and so if you wouldn't rely on your network to get clients then why would you rely on it to build your team I don't know so here's what we want to do instead there's six ways that you can get employees the first is your network you can when would you use your network when you are in an industry-specific Niche where you have a network right so say that you're in wholesaling and you need to find someone that it's a very industry specific role maybe for that role then you would reach out to your network to try and find somebody the second way that you can acquire employees is outbound typically you're going to use outbound when you don't have a brand okay if you don't have a brand and you're a small company and you need a special role or a higher level role outbound is typically the way to go the third is paid ads So Paid ads are best used when you have a high volume highly transactional role that you're trying to fill so think about like Molly Maids it makes sense that they run ads to acquire Maids because it's such a hard position to find and fill and that is their strategic Advantage their strategic advantages not even necessarily their marketing it's the fact that they can actually keep and acquire mates the fourth is organic content so I would consider this brand or inbound so if you actually are already putting out content think about how you can use that to your advantage to acquire employees not just clients the fifth is recruiters so again if you're small and you have a lot of cash flow I don't see a problem spending on recruiters to get a couple high level rules because they will edify you before you can edify yourself and then the last is team referrals because people who are referred by a teammate are five times more likely to stay the reason that I say that there are six ways to acquire employees is because I lived through only getting them through my network so when we first build gym launch amazing team but it wasn't the right team to scale the business because what I didn't realize is I was just picking from whatever I had there which was my network so for example that sales team the first sales team that we ever had that flew out to all these different locations to launch these gyms they were my friends from college and then they brought more of my friends from college who brought more of their cousins and aunts and uncle and then it just turned out to be this whole network of people who all thought the same they all acted the same and we continued to feel like we were the smartest people in the room and so I had to learn it the hard way by having to do a lot of self-reflection on what makes a good culture on how to actually inquire the right kind of employees and how to build a really strong Talent acquisition art and as soon as I did start using all those six methods we tend Endless Options and that is what I tell people I'm like you want Endless Options because think about if you had endless lead flow in terms of clients and you also had endless lead flow in terms of employees and talent how much better would your business be and so the bottom line is we want to use every method available to get the right person cast a wide net and create Endless Options Endless Options and that's the distribution so if we do those two things then we get lots of qualified applicants right that is applicant generation now the second piece to this is applicant nurture okay what is applicant nurture it is getting them bought in before they buy right just like you wouldn't just have someone opt in and then immediately take a sales call there's a nurture process in between we do the same with employees and so get this 68 of candidates state that the hiring experience has the largest influence on whether or not they take the job I see this for myself all the time we recruit for R we have 12 portfolio companies that we're constantly recruiting for I see the ones that have a great experience they get the best candidates the ones that don't one of our companies has the highest revenue has the hardest time acquiring candidates because they still haven't locked this in and it's obvious that if you generate clients you must have a solid lead nurture process to get them and get the hardest our highest Roi however most people don't actually acquire or apply this to applicants so the average hiring process takes about 23 days the top candidates find a job in eight so speed is King and most people believe that the experience itself is the interview but that's like thinking that a sales process is nothing but the sales call itself and so to get the lead nurture process what you have to understand is there's really two sides to this okay there's the sorting and then there's the communication so sorting here's what most people do wrong okay one they don't really read the resumes because that sounds boring as right they don't really look at the past experience and check to make sure they actually work there because again that would be time consuming and boring as they don't really look at the length that somebody's at a job because they're just skimming the resume because again it's boring as they don't look at the fact that they hop jobs they ignore the lack of progression and they ignore literally all the red flags you're so focused on relieving the pain you feel because you want to fill this role that you accommodate here's what we do we read every resume which is boring as we take out everybody who has unmatched experience who job hops who's never moved up who hasn't done in a long time had a business similar to ours it's a ton of work but How likely do you think it is you could find a winner if you did that very and so just so you know if I get a hundred applicants for a role I'm typically going to screen seven to nine and then maybe move two to three passes screening so that means 100 people that have applied for a role that I'm only going to move two to three to a full interview these are average stats too and so the bottom line is that this is a volume game and if you don't have Endless Options you can't play it and so that leads us to how do we get in touch with them so we've got the Sorting we understand that we have to do the boring work now what about the communication what do we say here's what most people think because I have thought of myself too which is if they really want this job they're going to do these 27 steps in order to get it right they should respond to me after one attempt of reaching out I emailed them well didn't email me back I don't need to follow up they should follow up with me and they should already know about us because we're a big deal right and then I'm not going to give any communication on next steps because they should understand this because it's not complicated I'm gonna go really slow and not get back to them because I'm really important and busy and I'm going to make it extra complicated it's only get the Smart Ones right how many people do this it's like we think this should I think this should sometimes always be doing it and I'm like I'm doing it again right here's why this doesn't work one ego thinking people even know who you are right like I think that people know who we are and like then I'll hire someone they come in and I'm like oh we're at the store and like someone came up and said they're like people know you guys it's cool I'm like you work for me and you don't even care right second is laziness which is making a good process is hard saying people are stupid is easy think about how many times someone builds like a software for example I saw this all the time in SAS and they'd be like these stupid customers can't even figure out how to click the button I was like I can't click figure out how to click your button it's so complicated right terrible ux the third is assumptions which is assuming that all these people think about is you right and working for you they're thinking about finding their dream job they don't know if it's you especially nowadays there's so many options out there and listen you're not just competing against the competitor or the similar business you're competing against side hustles side gigs you know opportunities they could pursue on their own starting their own business and lastly is Distortion which is assuming they don't have other options let me tell you if somebody doesn't have another option you should not hire them and so what we want to do and what we want to understand is that's not just customer experience that we need in the business it's candidate experience so there's four aspects of the communication that if you can embody these you can get the best candidates okay so this is the applicant nurture quadrant the first is speed same day next day would you leave a lead in your pipeline say it's a two hundred thousand dollar per year deal would you just let it sit there for 24 hours they opted in they said they want what you've got two hundred thousand dollars would you just let it sit there for a day what would you say to your salesperson if you're like follow up the now right yet we're trying to get employees that were maybe paying a hundred thousand dollars a hundred fifty thousand dollars two hundred thousand dollars a year and we won't even call them for three days we're like I'll get to that on Friday the second is volume which is understanding that you need to have a hard choice at the end of the day the reason that you want volume is because you are more likely to make the correct decision if you have two to three candidates to choose from if you don't then you're just going to pick whatever seems right it's like the same as dating right it's like if you live in a small town a girl who's like you know maybe a six-son in Newport is like a 10 when you're in like Oklahoma or something but you go to Newport and you're like I got all these tens over here the third is personalization right and so again if you had an Enterprise client worth two hundred thousand dollars per year opt-in are you going to send them an automated text message no so if you have somebody apply to be say your CFO who's gonna get paid 300 000 a year why wouldn't you send them a personal text a personal email but people don't they just like Oh indeed in LinkedIn they send these great little templated things I'm like that looks like you know they're like you really want me to work for you and you send me this template people can tell and then the last piece to it is that you have to take an omnichannel approach okay who hears had a sales guy who's been like I mean I emailed him and you know they didn't email me back right and you're like dude call them it's like we do the same with candidates but we don't see it we're like I emailed him and he didn't email me back I'm like call him get him on LinkedIn get him on Instagram like you see his Twitter right like they have options if they're good employees they have Endless Options too and so when you do both you can actually get a hold of the best candidates fast and actually hire the people that you need to grow your business and here's what happened when we did this with one of our companies we implemented an applicant nurture process it was a course business they were on decline the revenue is down about 60 percent they were doing 1.8 million a month when we started with them everything was on fire they had no brand no brand awareness nothing to work with in terms of acquiring Talent and we had five missing roles we had a CFO we had a VP of sales we had a head of customer success we had a head of Tech and then we had a CEO so over the next six months we kicked off the recruiting process implemented the candidate nurture for all the five roles with heavy nurture we filled those slots within six months the CEO felt immense relief and by the way the CEO is a world-class marketer because he wasn't putting out fires all the time because he actually had a team that business is now doing 12 million dollars a month 18 months later team by the way didn't change anything about the sales and marketing weird so not everyone's going to explode like he explodes but if you could even have a tenth of that maybe go from 1.8 to 2.8 I feel like that would be worth doing this so that is applicant nurture now the third piece to the funnel is the interview process okay so this is selling them on the company and the vision and the impact of their role so just like you sell customers on life after they buy your product you also sell employees on life after they take a job with you and so as you level up in your company people always say like oh you know I stopped selling Etc I'm like you never stop selling you just change who you're selling to you sold to your clients now you sell it to your employees so who here has actually sold a client but you did like a really shitty sale like they weren't sold well and so they just were like a client for forever anyone yeah so right that's what you get when you don't sell an employee the same not bought in not engaged not loyal and so the question is what does the ideal sale actually look like there's again two elements to this there's the process and there's the scripting so we're first going to talk about the process here's what most people do might sound familiar one overestimate your ability to judge character what I like to say is that everyone thinks they're really good at judging character until they have to hire people because what you find out if you're like me and you've interviewed literally thousands of people and hired thousands of people in your life is that nobody's that good at judging character nobody's going to be a time out of time the second is that most people conduct one to two interviews because again it takes a lot of time you just need to get someone in you're in a lot of pain I get it third is that utilize usually only one person which is usually yourself to make the decision didn't mean to click fourth is that you delegate it to someone who doesn't know the role because oftentimes we're like well this I'm so busy running this business somebody else can go hire these people which leads to number five which is thinking that is a waste of time to do hiring as a CEO and leader and so here's why that doesn't work one is there's a reason that the top companies have robust interview selection processes in fact the top 26 identify with having robust interview selection processes two is that companies that are reactive and fragmenting with their hiring process are in the bottom 14 of company performance overall I don't think that's a coincidence three is that 63 of candidates reject a job due to lack of information during the hiring process I see that all the time and lastly is 85 percent of people lie on their resumes I checked that like six times I was like seriously so here's what we do we do a five-step sale essentially the first is the screening what you can think of in terms of the screening is you can think of this which is if you had an Enterprise client are you going to schedule a 90-minute call with them without doing a pre-screen no you're going to make sure they actually have the money that they can actually pay and then you're going to push them to the next call it's the same with the interview process that is the purpose of the screening make sure they're not a crazy person I'm gonna blow up your business the second is the expectations and culture interview okay expectations culture it's literally aligning expectations making sure the pay is right all that and making sure the culture is there third is the skill test interview skill test interview is making sure they can actually do the job this is again one that most people Skip and we're going to get to what you can actually do tactically so that you can actually make sure you don't skip this part fourth is the alignment interview which is like is what you want is what I want same thing and lastly if you are a big enough company if you have over 30 people typically then it's a CEO interview and so after implementing this process in my last company gym launch we doubled our acceptance rate we had a 50 reduction turnover and we had a hundred percent time to productivity increase time to productivity is like time until that person's actually producing the role has taken it over that's pretty good because what all that means is that you save money and so the bottom line is it actually is going to cost you more not to do this than it does to do this but in the short term a lot of people think the opposite though this is going to take my time this is so many interviews Jesus this on stage but like in reality in the long term it's going to save you money which brings us to the last element right which is like okay I get the process now Layla but what do you actually ask them scripting screening call first thing and you guys just screenshot this if you want it because I don't want to read all these out to you that'll be boring first is you want to clarify the role in the company right what you're going to see is that this is going to be in every step of the way clarify the role clarify the company right why do you want this job what attracts you to this company are you flexible when could you start non-negotiables that's what you want to hit on there so you can just weed people out immediately make sure I'm not a psycho the second is the expectations and culture interview okay so for this one this is understanding are they a right culture fit for the role a good example of this might be you know what do you consider your ideal day to look like they're like you know wake up around nine maybe work for an hour or two then like go do Sports this I'm like dude you're not gonna work at this company like we're working at six right so these are where you want to ask questions to understand does your ideal see in this dare ideal scene align and that's gonna be different every company I might just said that for some of you that might make sense that's fine the third is the skill test interview this is the one where most people go wrong because they're like well Layla how am I going to test skill on a COO it's an operator role I'm like what were the problems that you had last quarter that if this person was there they would have solved ask them those questions so what you want to do is present the problem you had last quarter ask them how they would solve it literally you could do that with any role and I have hacked this because I came up with so many different tests over and over and over again that were like tactical and I would like send them out little papers and all this I was like this this takes way too long what's the problem that I had last quarter that this person would have solved give it to them right there the fourth is Clarity or is the alignment interview which I look at this one as basically saying are we aligned on what the future looks like you wouldn't get married to somebody if your vision of what marriage looks like and their vision of what marriage looks like we're different would you so if you want to retain someone for a long time and not incur the cost of turnover then you've got to do the same with your employees which is understanding what they want for your future what they want for their future and what you want for yours and are they aligned and then the last one if you are a big enough companies to say you have over 30 people I find this helpful which is the CEO interview right which is edifying the importance of this role helping with a personal career pack aligning the trajectory and then setting expectations if you don't have a company of over 30 people I don't think you need that one the bottom line is that we want to have a script and objective for every interview okay when you say the right things and you have a clear objective you're going to push the wrong people out and pull the right people in if you can script and choreograph the sales process to acquire clients then you can script and choreograph the interview process to acquire Talent it's funny because a lot of people like they would never let their sales person get on the phone without having a clear script and yet they let their employees and themselves get on the phone all the time with future employees with no script if you don't have a script and you don't have a process you would not get reliable outcomes and so I love this quote by Mark Cuban which is learning to sell because you're always selling in business and so just like I said in the beginning just because you're not selling new clients doesn't mean you're not selling to your employees and I think as we continue to build our businesses if we want to build a business that we can truly sell we can scale it doesn't rely on us then this is the skill that we have to learn and so here's what happened we did this with one of our portfolio companies we had a niche certification business it was stuck at like 400k a month notice that number a lot of businesses were stuck at that point it was a charismatic founder he was like a genius with a thousand helpers really good guy but like couldn't take his hands out like very controlling um kind of like one of those like if you want to get it done do it yourself type person he had like an operator in there who was one of his like best friends and nobody had scaled the company past that point and so what we did was we kicked out the old operator we kicked off the recruiting process we found a new operator who had scaled a business past that point we gave the what and the how and we scaled that business to 1.2 million dollars a month within six months didn't change the marketing didn't change the sales in fact they literally had the same ad in the beginning and a year later and I found that out later I was like you've been running the same ad on Facebook right they changed nothing they got a different person in there and so that is the interview process which is the third piece so what we covered is really why Talent acquisition is the missing funnel in your business and how every problem you have can be solved by the right person how to attract the right applicants using the right ads and the six ways to get Talent how to nurture the right applicants using the sorting and decision-making processes and how to sell the right people using the interview process and the five steps and Scripts so here's a quick reminder of why this actually works money money I know that's all that anybody cares about like I swear this will make you more money this is the boring that will make you more money in the long term before any tactic and it pains me the amount of people that come to these conferences and they're such genius marketing and sales people but they won't do this and so forever they'll build a business to maybe five or maybe 10 million and then that business eventually Capps because they can't hire people and then they go do it again I see it all the time so the reminder is that you don't build the business if you build the people the people build the business Zig Ziglar so If we're honest actually is going to do this a few psychos the reason I know that a lot of people won't do this is because my own CEOs who I'm invested in their companies I can't get them to do it it is easier for most of us to continue to do the work rather than to find other people to help us see what happens in the beginning we build a business what we typically do is we train ourselves to work very very hard but we do not train ourselves to create insane Leverage and the question is really like why do most CEOs never actually create leverage why are they constantly bottlenecked by themselves they refuse to give up control they believe the lies that their brain tells them to keep them safe from imaginary threats that don't even exist anywhere about their brain right what if I hire them and they're actually worse than me that'll happen what if I hire them and then we make less money and I can't afford them sometimes happens too what if I hire them my current team hates them because they're better than my current team definitely will happen what if I hire them and they see them not even as smart as I've seen happens to me all the time what if I hire them and they steal from me some people will do that so here's a thought experiment that I would ask all of you to really think through which is what if you let your fear prevent you from implementing this process and hiring smart people seriously like what if you never do any of this what does your business look like in five years if you never do this best case in my opinion is you become the genius with a thousand helpers which what does that look like typically mediocre success is like people like wow this person is really coming up blah blah blah and then like eventually they like stagnate Plateau de Quan right because you can only get so far with one brain worst case you aren't here in five years seriously like I say this because I'm like I'm not lying I see so many people go out because imagine if you have to carry the weight of your business for five years by yourself because you can't hire people one brain cannot grow a hundred million dollar business I stand up here talking about how to build one I didn't do it myself half the time I'm like I feel like a fraud because it's all these people on my team so the choice is really yours that I would give you today which is you can remain comfortable get mediocre or you can face fear and succeed to learn more about how we grow companies you can go to acquisition.com or you can search Layla hermosi on platforms there's stuff that's all let's give it up guys [Music]