Growing And Hiring Trainers To Work For You #81

Mar 4, 2021

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In this episode, we discuss when to hire trainers to work for you and how to build systems into your business that will allow it to keep thriving if you need to replace anybody.

The Episode: Growing And Hiring Trainers To Work For You

As your coaching business scales, it will require different strategies when it reaches different sizes, and an important one is how you go about hiring staff. At first, you will be able to handle things alone, but then, having an assistant becomes necessary, and after that, one or more full-blown coaches become necessary. Once you reach this stage, you need to make sure that your system is resilient enough to cope if you need to replace anybody. This is all about building redundancy into your roles, which can be done easily if you standardize your curriculum as well as hire people with the intangible personality traits that your program requires.

In This Episode

1. Different approaches for different stages of growing your business. [0:04:24]
2. The stage of your business’s growth where hires become necessary. [0:06:05]
3. How employees affect profit margins and new expenses they add. [0:10:05]
4. Avoiding becoming dependent on a coach you hired by building in redundancy. [0:14:00]
5. Standardizing your intellectual property and curriculum [0:17:00]
6. Intangible qualities to look for in new hires. [0:18:36]
7. How to find people with the right qualities to fill new positions in your business. [0:19:35]
8. Hiring people who are graduates of your program. [0:22:07]
9. Working around small problems with a new hire who is perfect for the role. [0:24:30]
10. Building a system that selects for people’s individual skill sets. [0:27:20]
11. Going back to first principles; restructuring a business operationally as it grows. [0:29:13]

“You can’t build a business where you are over-reliant on one person. It cripples you.” — Jonathan Goodman

Start Your Business From A Place of Self Awareness

Before implementing any of the strategies discussed today, and before even starting your business, you must know what you want to get out of it. There are so many gurus out there these days who sell a certain image of what your coaching business should look like, but you don’t need to follow a particular model, and you should not try to implement them all at once either. Whether you want to be the sole provider of a service to your clients or grow your business until it has over a hundred employees, each of those models is totally perfect. Drilling down on what your mission is will give you clarity and purpose as you take the first steps. If you do get to the point where you need to hire though, this concept of honing in and narrowing down becomes applicable again. There is a misconception that one trainer you hire has to be good at everything so they can contribute to all sides of your business. Inevitably though, each person you hire will have a different strength, so leverage these strengths to optimize different sides of your business!

Different Strategies For Different Stages of Your Business’s Growth

At each stage in the growth of your business, you will need to implement a new set of strategies. Taking your business from zero to one requires a completely different approach than from one to five, five to 20, and 20 to 100. The zero to one phase is all about landing some work and not following any system, but rather trying things out and laying the foundation for some systems to be built at the following stage. From there, once you have an idea of what your systems need to manage, you can begin to implement them. Then it is all about keeping the flywheel running. But as you do scale, you will reach different ceilings where your entire operational structure will need to be rebuilt. This has been measured and a general rule of thumb is that this needs to occur after you hit three, 10, 30, and 100 employees respectively. Bear in mind that your profit margins will go down as you start to take on more staff. Another thing to remember is that the process of hiring the right staff can also either make or break your business.

Building Redundancy Into Your Roles

When you have reached the point where you will have to start hiring coaches to serve the audience you have grown, it is essential not to fall into a space where you have hired somebody who is so good that they become irreplaceable because your business relies on them. This is why you have to build systems that can cope if somebody leaves and you have to fill their place. The first way to do this is by standardizing your intellectual property and curriculum. Having a curriculum that drives the business rather than a person means that if that person leaves, their replacement simply has to be taught the curriculum for the wheel to keep turning. The second way of building in redundancy is by isolating the intangible personality traits your coaches require and hiring people who possess them. An easy way to do this is by hiring people who have already done your course because they already know your curriculum. Now all you need to find out is if they possess the personality traits you require, and you are good to go!

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