Hiring Your First Salesperson? Don’t Screw This Up. w/ Asad Zaman

going to go ahead and say it. I think fully nine out of 10 sales people in the sales economy are bozos and like one in 10 is like deeply competent. So if there's a hundred jobs that run off to 10 people, if they're 10 people that can do that job, the one person can probably do it really well and that's the reality. It's a very difficult job. You're listening to the Lean Skaper podcast where land skapers come to grow. If you want the systems, stories and strategies to build a lean mission driven company that your team loves working for, keep listening. Austin, welcome to the show. Welcome back. It's really good to see you again. Thanks for having me, Bang Benji. It's good to see you. So you know, I'm not really big on credentials or long-winded intros, but I do think it's worth you mentioning a little bit about like your work and career and what you spend a lot of time focused on because today we're going to talk about the elusive first sales higher conversation and this is something that you have a very broad and aggregated perspective on. So just maybe share with the audience what you've been up to for the last 10 or 15 years. And I think it's a great place to start. I heard a podcast recently where the host said that he's found a core relation between the length of how long it person tates to introduce themselves and how unimpressive they really are in that episode. So I'll try to keep it short and sweet. I run a company called sales talent agency. This is an 18-year-old organization based out of Canada that focuses on the entire North American market. And we're basically a group of crafts people, our craft is helping companies build out their sales as well as other revenue generating teams. So over the last 18 years we've done this for 1500 companies, companies of all sizes and stages and all sorts of industries ranging from technology to CPG and everything in between. And companies that are hiring their first, their 100th and in some cases their 1000th salesperson. So we've had a lot of experience doing this. One of the things we think about is of all the people we place, if you put their salaries together, what are the total amount of salaries we've facilitated? And that's about a billion dollars. So lots of repetitions that there's something we care about and are passionate about and think about a lot. And it's cited to hopefully help your listeners grapple with what is a really difficult problem, which is hiring your first salesperson. And why is it so difficult? Because I look at it this way, it's like, you know, I run this small but growing landscaping company. I hire my first few technicians, people in the field. I might hire an administrator. And I sort of say that those are perfect and they nail it every time. And for the most part, those are much easier placements. And then sales is always, always the last proverbial hat that the entrepreneur takes off and gives to someone else. And I would almost describe it as this feeling of like, you're almost out of the tunnel as an owner operator. You've handed off a whole bunch of responsibilities, built a bit of an org charter around you. And now you have this last one to do. And what I've seen time and time and time again are a bunch of false starts where they hire one person and it turns out they're a ding dong. They hire a second person. It turns out they don't have the onboarding setup. They hire a third person. The comp plans wrong. And people can get stuck on this hamster wheel, this cycle that extends months, sometimes years where it's like, they're so close to being out of all the core function of their business. And this last one keeps them stuck. So what I say that to just set set you up, what have you observed about this, this first sales person hire that makes it such an obstacle. I think sales people are very unique because there are a lot of functions in every business where the person you hire can learn how to do that thing academically. If you're a technician, you can go to school, you can learn how to be that sort of technician and you come out with a skill set that is pretty relevant and you can deploy it. Sales is one of these things where there's a lot to learn to become a good salesperson, but there's also this level of natural talent that they need to have to be able to be good at this job. If you take 10 people and make them read the same things and go through the same sales training and give them the same pep talk and give them the same star, a same complaint, there'll be a wide distribution in terms of performance and that distribution is because of that talent component being so important in sales. And those are characteristics that I think to some extent you're born with and are nurtured, especially in the early part of your life. And that is a requirement for you to be able to do this job. The other part of this job that I think is interesting is that most salespeople do not make all of their money through their base salary. There is a commission structure that is a pretty significant portion of a salesperson's compensation. In most cases is about 50% of their compensation. I was in landscape in when I was in university. I ran a, I was selling lawn aeration door to door, which is you poke holes and people's lawns to let out the compressed air. And later I ran a small company doing the same thing. And so we would do this by selling door to door. And that was 100% commissions when I was doing that. But in most cases there's a salary that is at least half your compensation is salary. Meaning that half of your compensation is based on selling something that somebody else has developed. If it's a product, somebody else has made the product. If it's a service, somebody else has conceptualized the service. Maybe somebody else has to deliver the service and you're going to create security and stability for yourself and your family by being the one that sells it. And there is a certain risk factor that comes into play with that and requires a certain type of person to say, that's my life. That's how I'm going to make my money. And I think what that means is that there are very few people that can actually do this, that have the talents to be able to do it, that can do something with the training that you might provide them. And I'm willing to live their life by creating security for themselves in a role that has a lot of risk associated with it. Now the reason they take that risk is because there's also a lot of upside, right? Like if you're a good salesperson in the right company, you can make more money than a lot of the executives in that company. That's always been true too. But it is a very hard job. And that's why hiring for it is really hard because everybody needs them. The demand is really high. But the supply of people that can be really, really good at this is actually quite low. And the last thing I'd mention is when it comes to demand and supply, I helpful thing to keep at the back of your mind when you are trying to hire these people to say, if there's a thousand people trying to hire salespeople today, let's say in the landscaping space in Minnesota. And there are a thousand salespeople that can do that job. Those thousand jobs are not targeting the thousand salespeople. They're targeting about a hundred of those salespeople, the top 10%. But those are the people that can actually do the job. I think that you've just clicked in on probably the most interesting piece to me that I'm glad that we sort of stumbled our way into this because I was going to ask you about it later. The supply and demand thing is super interesting. Do you think that owners who are making their first sales hire because they've not had exposure to salespeople, sales org, sales systems, this whole environment, this whole game. Do you think that they perhaps naively believe that a salesperson as a salesperson as a salesperson? If they have some sales experience on the resume, there's going to be some sales competence showing up in reality a few months later when they're onboarded. When in reality, I'm just going to go ahead and say it. I'd love for you to challenge me on if you think these numbers are different. I think fully nine out of 10 salespeople in the sales economy are bozos. And like one in 10 is deeply competent. It's literally that. If there's a thousand jobs, they'd run off to 10% or 100. So if there's a hundred jobs that run off to 10 people, if there's 10 jobs that run off to one person, if there are 10 people that can do that job, the one person can probably do it really well. That's the reality. And so very few people can do it really, really well. And if you, Benji, you run a company, and let's say you have a salesperson who's actually really good at hitting numbers, they're doing well, aren't you going to do everything in your power to hold on to them? 100%. You bend over backwards. You actually have somebody that's good enough. And you know how hard it is to get them. And so not only are they few and far between, but they generally well paid, well treated and busy. And so finding them is really, really hard, attracting them is really, really hard. And what happens most of the time is a combination of, you don't know what a good salesperson looks like. You know, you've really sold mostly yourself as the owner operator of that business. You have done most of the selling and now you need to hire a salesperson, but you really don't know how to hire a salesperson, you don't know how to pay a salesperson, you don't know how to train a salesperson. So there's a learning curve that people have to come to terms with. And most of the time there's no real for for owner operators of a small landscaping business where they don't want to learn all this stuff and they themselves are so busy. So do they have the time to sit down and Google a bunch of things and learn it and that ends up materializing and some of the problems that you see. The setting part is let's say they even found them. They don't know how to convince them to join their organization, how to attract them because it's very different when you're dealing with a great salesperson. You have to sell them into your organization and that's kind of different to a lot of the other functions they've had to hire for. And then even when that let's say you figure that out. Now when you hire them, there's you have to manage them and support them and it made sure that they have the resources to be able to do their job really well. And those are blind spots for people that are hiring initially. And so when you're doing it for the first time, you said at the start of this that sometimes this problem exists for years where you're trying to figure out how to go beyond yourself selling everything to having salespeople sell it for you because that's the unlock to you scaling your business. You know you can service a thousand customers. You have a hundred today. You know you can service them. Now you need to go and sell them. And that's a problem for them. Hey everyone, Benji here. If you like the podcast, you're going to love our online community. It's free to join. There are thousands of other landscapers just like you and they're already I post in there multiple times a week. Our content gets released in there early before it hits YouTube Spotify or Apple. There are hundreds and I mean hundreds of ready made tools and resources and we add more every month. You can also schedule a free business assessment with one of our incredible guides. We'll help you find and eliminate waste in your business or you can join the conversation in one of our many forums or groups. It takes less than a minute to sign up. It's free and always will be you can sign up using the link in the description and I'll see you in there. Yeah. And the other thing too that I think is unique the high stakes nature of these roles in the sense that if you hire, there's kind of a few positions in any given business that can do a lot of damage. And then there's other positions that are kind of like yeah, they scrub the make a mistake or they make a sequence of mistakes and it slows down a crew and you exit that person and no big deal. There's a few where it's like a big mistake here is is not necessarily fatal but it can be a quarter ruining year ruining mistake and sales is one of bookkeepers are another one because you can you can you know like people can not do your taxes properly or in worst cases they can embezzle. Sales is like this too where particularly in sales roles and many sales roles in landscaping are like this where they actually not only do they sell, they also estimate and do some like they're involved with the design and the pricing. So it's like there's two levers one if you're a bad salesperson and you are bad sales them for two quarters in a row that pipeline dries up the business contracts that's a massive massive problem. The other thing that people sleep on is the estimation component where if you have people under bidding or frankly does not well trained enough and now you maybe you are selling but you're selling it at a 10% growth profit margin lower than you need to be. There's downstream effects and often you don't find out about those until way too late someone that isn't selling is pretty obvious you see them the CRM that week if they're selling but they're misquoting you don't find out until three sometimes six months later and it's way too late in your screw. So I just I say that to say this if you are listening to this and you are feeling like you're trying to hire a salesperson and it feels like a chain saw you just keep pulling on the cord and you can't get it started. I hope that gives you a little bit of relief to know that this actually is a difficult thing to do and you're not alone in feeling that. Austin what are the biggest misconceptions that small business owners make about what makes a great salesperson? I think when you think of great salespeople you reflect on the salespeople you have met in your life and most of the people out there the majority of your interaction with salespeople is a B2C interaction. It's like it went into a store and you're going to buy some clothes and there's a retail associate or you're going to buy some technology from Best Buy and you kind of it's extrapolate from your own personal experiences of which one do I think was good. You don't even know if they were really good you don't know their numbers but you just think they're like who do I think was good and then there's some pre-tensive notions based on media and culture around what is a salesperson right and what that materializes usually in is this like slick talking fast talking boisterous extroverted person and you try and start looking for that you're like I need a person you almost I've noticed with people hiring their first few people there sometimes will also minimize the difficulty of the job I just need a person who is willing to like go from make 10 of 20 50 calls a day and can say these things that's just as well love it and they kind of minimize how hard it is. This isn't that hard like we do great work this sells itself I just I do it I'm not a salesperson they have some most people others should be able to do this job right you're the founder operator of a business you are able to speak so intelligently about what you do and so passionately about what you do and you have the credibility of saying I own this business and then the credibility you can earn through the eloquence with which you can talk about this thing and you disregard that like people don't realize what an advantage it is and so they say if I could sell them a hundred thousand dollars a month with this being a piece of the thing that I do if I hire a salesperson and this ain't that hard they should be able to do so much more than me and you kind of minimize the difficulty of the problem and if you go out minimizing the difficulty of the problem you don't do under invest in solving that problem right you're not going to go and have somebody it asked for advice from somebody who understands sales management on how do what type of profile should I go after and how do I qualify these things and how do I even find these standards to talk to and how might want to onboard them when I hire them and once I've hired them what material do they need to be able to do their jobs you're not even going to look into those things and then you're just setting yourself up for fairly and what'll happen is you'll do it once you'll hire somebody it doesn't work out and then you'll be like huh interesting and one of two things happens and there's pretty white spectrum but it's it's binary in terms of what happens you have a person who paid a salary initially to somebody and hired somebody but didn't do the work to really figure out how to hire them well and it didn't go well and they're like I need somebody hungry I need somebody who's willing focus on the upside I'm going to make this a much higher commission plan maybe it's a 100% commission and on the other side you find people are like this is just impossible this is like it's not it's not possible to hire for this role I need to like think of ways to do this different to like building a sales team out and you get like either fair or you get some type of like irrational perspective on the type of person you want to hire and thinking that there's some heuristic and somebody wanting to work in a 100% commission role with them being good at the job right because if they have a small salary they won't be hungry enough and that is just it's a wrong perspective so I think this is what happens we can talk about what they should look for but this is kind of what plays out when they're going to hire these people I would make one last point I think it is important for business owners to understand that they are in the space that is not most attractive to great salespeople say more about this I want I wanted to talk about it there's a there's a will we say a branding issue I think there's a there's a branding issue that can only be fixed if the economics can it can be of a certain sort so like we're all we're all trying to create good lives for ourselves right and when we go out and work at a company we're trying to create stability and security for ourselves and our families and sales is not equal in every industry in terms of the upside potential within it in terms of the job security offered within it and so if you are going into sales you're going to look for certain you're going to look for industries where your upside potential is greatest and you're going to find technology sales you're going to find financial services you're going to find different industries that are very B to B actually and you're going to gravitate that way B to C industries usually have less upside for salespeople so the really good ones gravitate away from it which means that if you and I are saying that out of 10 salespeople one is good that might be the case for a tech company but if you are in another industry where the upside is not as great and where the brand is not as attractive for you it might be like 0.5 might be worse than that And so the hardest part of this is going to be putting yourself in a position where you have good people to choose from. Because if you have good people to choose from and you still are developing your skills on how to assess them and how to manage them, all of those things will kind of worth themselves out over time because the one way to do well is hire somebody who has great potential. And the one way to hire somebody who has great potential is to have a lot of great people to choose from and that means investing a lot of time and energy and creating a talent pool for yourself. And what that doesn't mean is just post a job on a job board and see what happens. Right, which is what 99% of people when they're hiring their first salesperson do. They just post a job, they get a bunch of applicants and that's how they think you do this. And that is actually the worst way to do it. So I want to get into this talent pool thing in a sec, but before we do, I think there's one more kind of foundation setting question, which is when founders hit this inflection point. And I think that's the right word for it when it's clear to them, they're no longer able to do all the sales themselves. And that's for two reasons one, there's only so much one person can sell to the other operational financial human resources, strategic marketing functions of the business also call on the owner's time. And so there's a ceiling on how much this one person can sell and then there's now demand on this person for all this other stuff and you get to this inflection point where it's like, okay, I might be the best salesperson in this business. But the math ain't math and I need to make this move. And so that's the inflection point. What is the most fundamental mindset shift you you think owners need to make at that stage? They need to come to terms with that when I'm trying to make this transition out of all the problems I'm solving in my business at this point. This is the hardest problem that I'm solving. Is that indeed the case or is that just a mental case? No, that is indeed the case. I think you allocate time and resources in correlation with the difficulty of the problem that you're solving. If the problem is really difficult, if it's your number one problem, number one hardest problem that I'm solving and also the problem that has them is most connected to me scaling this business out. If I can crack this the future is bright and it's a really hard thing to crack. And so now let's give it the time and energy requires to get it right. I think that's some biggest mindset shift you can have, which is then you will do the things you'll create the space for yourself. These owner operators of these sort of businesses are really busy. Right. Like I've been that like I ran a small business doing this. It was really hard because I was like working all day. Right. Like we used to start our day at like 7 8 am. Right. And you're you're working till the sun goes down and then a little bit off that as well. And so you're then done. It's like 9 p.m. The sun is down. This isn't the summer. So the sun grows down a bit later. It's 9 p.m. You're exhausted. And then you're like, well, you let's get some food and they have families. I didn't have a family with a lot of families. Oh, when are you going to work on this thing? Right. Like a lot of times it's really hard if you're that sort of a business. For me, it was impossible to work on the business. I was just working in the business. Now some of them might have infrastructure where they're not like doing the thing. But they're still stretched. They're very busy. And what they have to do is carve out a pretty serious amount of time to address this. Otherwise the probability of them getting this right sits in like the low symbol digits. Yeah, it's it's such a good insight. You know, it's it's it's it's not necessarily a profound realization to say the site the size of the problem dictates the amount of time you should spend on it. But what is helpful to hear from you is you observe from your vantage point. It sounds like people dramatically underestimate the scope of this. Like they're just like, you know what I did. I hide this person. I heard this person. Now it's on the sales. And it's like they're looking at it. And it's like they think it's this big. It's like, no, this project is this big. So don't don't be cavalier about it and take it really, really seriously for all the reasons we've said already. Now you taught me something that I have used. Honestly, like a thousand times from stage because it just was like when you said it. It was it just hit me like a ton of bricks when it comes to recruitment. Which is pretty simple idea. You will always make a bad hire if you have no one good to choose from. And the no one good to choose from problem is the first one to solve. We can get into interviewing tactics and onboarding and complines and metrics. But if we're looking at just like doing this in sequence. Practically speaking, I'm a small business owner. I do two million bucks a year. I can probably afford. I'm guessing I can probably afford to pay someone up to a buck 50 or maybe even a little bit higher if they're selling a lot of like high gross profit work and they're really, really good. But I, you know, this isn't I'm not paying my sales guys half a million bucks a year. Like this is lower six figures and that's what I can offer. What is the playbook for them to start to build up the good people to choose from in the first place. In other words, that talent pool to begin to begin the rest of your interviewing and selection efforts. Should we assume for this that that million to million in revenue that they're doing is pretty much them closing that business themselves. The owner doing all the sales. Yes, 100% that's the situation. Yeah, they might have depending on their business. They may have a project manager that is able to do a few upsells or cross sells. But, but like that would be, you know, those are pennies on the dollar. I think this person that you can you can look at them assume that they're absolutely the main driver of all new revenue. So my thinking on this keeps evolving. And where I am right now with it is the way to think about this is start with the smallest sales problem you can solve. And the easiest sales problem you can solve when you're trying to get out of this situation of I'm kind of closing almost everything. Maybe the project manager is doing some of some of the I'm like the brunt of this is on my back the pressures too much the workloads too much. I know we can do 10 million because I know we can service 10 million isn't that like the most interesting to an undrum I can do 10 million dollars worth of work. I just don't have it, but I know it's out there. Yeah, okay, I need to do get this. So the first thing I would do is find a person who can help you generate more qualified leads that you have to close. Because that is if if I'm a founder operator, I want all of my time that I'm dedicating towards sales to be focused on high quality opportunities that are that I need to go and close into business. And I'm essentially looking for lead generation lead qualification. That's like the first problem you need to solve in your business is like you need pipeline. Right. And and this by the way is the case for if I'm talking to a technology company that is trying to transition out of fund to let sales it's the same advice I give them is that how much better would your life be if all the sales meetings you had were sales meetings that were qualified accounts they had a need they had the budget they wanted to talk to you they were ready to meet you and you're growing in there and doing your stylish eloquent stuff to close them like wouldn't that be great like I'm like 70 80% percent SR on super high ticket stuff and like perfect ICP all the time all the time now that is definitely not how most founder founder led sales people in that situation do not think about it that way do they just go my calendar's full I'm busy someone else do this. This is actually a very very interesting insight where it's like the easier thing to do is not like for the clone yourself and replicate the person to do the same meetings that you would be otherwise the first thing to do is actually increase the quality of meetings that you're already doing yes. And what that and that is actually a way to think about you scaling your business even beyond sales is look at your calendar and look at where's my time growing and what is like the lowest value, the lowest value thing that I'm spending my time on that I can get somebody else to handle for me for low pay right like I don't have a pay 150,000 dollars for somebody to do this job let's give that off because that's an easier problem for me to solve. So let me solve like the low hanging fruit easy problems let me make sure I'm being deployed in the most effective way possible and most owner operators industry at no stage spend a lot of their time in places that are highly inefficient so I think you can find all you can find a lot of growth and an organization if an owner operator who is commercially minded has their time 100% deployed in the best way possible across the various responsibilities they have I think of like I think of the kind of like I think of that for myself as well is like am I deploying my hours in the most efficient way possible so when it comes to the sales conversation it is saying how much nicer would it be that every meeting you took was right in your ICP had budget had neat and they want to buy something now you have convince them to buy your whole thing. Great. So let's hire that person first. What is that person? That's a more junior person. That's a person that's maybe coming out of university right now, or is coming out of a trade school. Or maybe like not and didn't even go to school, university is just somebody who has potential. Because at that point, what you're hiring for is the potential not the experience. And so you pain a lot less, your risk is lower, you're hiring somebody much earlier on in their career. And what they're doing is not this whole full spectrum of final lead, closer lead, manage the account, do the price it all out. None of that. They're just saying you would have some companies, there are some people that call us, qualify them, and then call a bunch of people to set up meetings. Right. And so that job is a much narrower job. And it's much easier for somebody that is high potential to master a small piece of the puzzle, then give them all of this the entire thing to master. Because if you're trying to give everything off, then you need to hire somebody with talent and experience because it's more complicated. But because we've simplified the problem, you can forget the experience for now, you can focus on talent and you can put them in this job where there's already going to be so many repetitions. You know, when you're doing lead generation, it's a high repetition job. So you get so many repetitions in a quarter or two that you yourself start developing skills out. And what happens with this person? This person as they're developing skills can now start transitioning to more pieces of the puzzle. You can say, okay, you're master at the lead gen stuff. How about the lowest ticket item? I teach you how to close it. And now you're not doing any of the low ticket items. Now this person's doing all the low ticket items and you're only doing the highly qualified with budget and need deals that are higher ticket items. That makes a huge difference, right? That's a great unlock for a founder. Like for founder, operator to go within three quarters of hiring this person to only talking to high ticket items is a far better outcome than what you and I have seen happen most of the time is the higher sales person doesn't work the higher second and you're two years in and you're nowhere further than where you were before your business hasn't moved your job starts, you're doing all the hard stuff in three quarters, you can be so far ahead. And so I would stock there. And this gives you as a founder operator a little bit more understanding of how to think about sales management, how to think about the sales function. It frees up some of your time to go and talk to people who can help you around how to create a sales strategy for your company. And then you can say now let me go out and maybe hire somebody with a little bit more experience, but you know what now you have, you know how we said earlier that to hire somebody good, you need good people to choose from. The good people that you want to choose, you know what's most attractive to them is that we can give you leads. Your sales person, I'll give you 50% of the leads. You just have to source your own pipeline 50% of the time. Now you have a competitive advantage against other companies that are trying to hire that person, right? Now you're attractive to that great person because you've solved the problem that's the most nauseating part of their job and is the arristiest part of their job. They have come into your business and then create pipeline. And if I'm doing all of that, why not just create my own business? Whereas now it's like, hey, I'm giving you some stuff and then you bring your skill. And so it's a better Faro deal for the more experienced person as well. So I think sequencing, we can click into any of this, but sequencing it this way is probably the most risk-managed way of doing it. There's so much I can pick up on here. So you're basically making the case that when people get to this inflection point, consider for a second hiring what a tech company would call an SDR or a BDR or an inside salesperson, something akin to that kind of role. They're a little bit more junior. They're not quote unquote a closer, but what they're doing is they're working inside the sales system as a kind of a setter. They're probably working with marketing to help dial in some messaging or work on a few projects with them. They're probably working on the qualification process. They're probably setting up the appointments and you use this person who is lower risk, lower pay, more junior to essentially increase the efficiency of your time first. This is very much in line with Dan Martell's buyback your time principle, which I think, I mean, this is an older principle. He's just doing an amazing job speaking about it and branding it and writing a book about it and I've read it multiple times for that reason. If you were to ask Dan Martell with the right thing, he would say what you just said. He would say, no, no, no, no, no, you stay the main driver as long as humanly possible, but let's make sure your motor. It's almost like a, let's make sure that motor is plugged into the right transmission and as getting as much leverage for its time as possible first. And then you can go higher the person to fully, fully take your time. But what I like about what you said is the lower risk function. The other thing too that I, I said this on a conversation earlier this week with another guest. I can't remember who entrepreneurs dramatically underestimate how much they need to know, how much nuance they need to have and how refined and understanding the need to have of a role or a function before they can hire it effectively. And the reason that is is we're all told to be visionaries and delegate everything and it all works so easily. And that's sort of true, but we miss half the picture, which is like, you actually need to know quite a bit about a sales system and a sales process and sales infrastructure and comp plans and setups and and and qualification like this to people. I say, I wouldn't hire you as a sales leader. You built a $3 million business. I won't even consider you as a sales leader for a $3 million business. Right. Right. And it's like because you have nothing that a sales leader should have for a $3 million business. You know that, right? Like you're a good salesperson and you, you have the advantage of saying, I won this business and you can say all these things. Right. Right. You have all of that and you did this. Great. Kudos. You've built a good business. You're a good business person. You're a sales leader. And so keep that in mind because right now what you're trying to do is what a sales leader does is build a great sales machine. Well, that's my point. Is there started to cut you off? I said, there's a, there's a learn along the way factor that I think is really important for people. And this is more broad than sales guys. When you are looking at a decision to be made, particularly around personnel, I think a really useful heuristic or really useful mental framework is which of these situations is lower risk for sure. But which one allows me to learn along the way shoulder to shoulder with this person so that as they develop, I develop and then together we get to a point where we can make a decision. It's like, Hey, have you person that I hired grown enough that I could slot you into this closer role? No, maybe you haven't yet. But okay, well, maybe I've grown enough as a sales leader that I feel more confident that I would have 18 months ago and making this decision. And it's exactly. It's a much more, it's an easier pathway to excellence than assuming that you're going to sort of middle of the bullseye on your first try. Like, you know how I don't know, North American sports that well. But I see these videos of Boston ball games where in between the, I don't know if you call them rounds or what you call them quarters. Quoters. You get the somebody from the crowd to come in and take these half court short. Yes, right. And it's such a ridiculous thing to try and get right. And once in a million times somebody does and it's really inspiring. But that's kind of what they're trying to do. It's really that. It's like you're trying to get a half court short ride and you ain't a possible player. And even they can't get it right all the time. And so you need to give yourself the space and time to develop some skills in this area. And so that's why we say, just start by buying some time back for yourself. As Dan says, give this part of the job that you're doing that somebody super junior can do. That's not very expensive to hire. That's not a very complicated job. So you can't teach them and train them how to call and pitch your service and how to take goals and qualify leads. You can do that. We think you can do that part really well. And that gives you some more time back in your calendar. Because if I say to a founder operator at two, three million who's just stretched and busy, you know, we've all we know how busy that role is at that point. You say, Hey, before you go solve the sales problem, go learn all these things. I'm like, well, I don't know. And that's why I'm wearing the sales person. So I get some time to do it. It like, well, now you're on a cash 22. Because if you don't do this, you will hire badly. And if you hire badly, you just want to stay stock. But if you don't, so you need to be able to do this. This is a, this is a requirement. And if it's a requirement, you need to first buy some time to do it. Then once you do it, now, and you're in a better position, you're more attractive. Like, think of sales people as a sports, let's, let's use this sports analogy a bit more. If you're a great boss, your ball player, you will not join a team where the coach is coaching a boss, your ball team for the first time, right? This is the first time I'm ever coaching. And I'm a great athlete. I don't want to, I don't want to work under that person. I want to work under a person who's really good at coaching boss, your ball players, because I want to get good and I want to be supported and I want, and so you as an owner, owner operator need to be able to attract this person over, which requires more than just saying, now I've done it now when somebody else to do. that seems very selfish right you're looking at it from your lens and you have to look at it from the other person's lens and The other person put yourself in the shoes of saying if by chance I feel you're how to talk to somebody who is a top one or five percent sales person who's actually somebody who can do this job really well What will it take for me to get them to want to partner with me because they're gonna make my life 10,000 times easy I'm literally saying solving this problem is the difference between me doing two and ten million dollars and am I giving it that type of energy If there's an eight million dollar delta that's solving this problem gets me have I invested in getting that eight million Have I really given it that energy and that attention and if a person is that type of an unlock for me is the first of many people that will get me to this And eight more million dollars in revenue What do they need from me and I'm telling you most people do not ask what do they need from me They think it's a privilege for somebody to work in their organization and to some extent it is But also it's a privilege for you to be able to work with them and you need to think about it from that lens and 99 percent of people don't I If that last comment is so well said I think one of the biggest just mindset shifts for me over the in my careers is understanding that I Am privileged and blessed to get to work with the people who Happened to choose to work with me and they could choose to work with someone else when you're at a certain level of competence the reality is everyone's in business for themselves and you're lucky to get the opportunity to work with talented people because the economy is a huge place And there's a million other companies that would want them, but I want to That was an awesome awesome tangent there. I want to come back to this idea of sort of talent pool So let's just say and like let's be sort of role agnostic like I'm looking for a more junior person Maybe I'm in a situation where I'm looking for a more senior person something It's a bona fide account executive or someone that's out there actually closing on revenue on my behalf I'm in the small business space. I'm in the blue collar economy And you said this earlier what not to do is just post one ad and kind of sit there and pray that that your dream candidate shows up What ought to smart proactive motivated business owner do to build up the roster build up the the Choices build up the pool to make some good choices out of I think that's a really good question and It the answer is actually it's not state to role and seniority. So you can use this For a junior role a senior role a middle-level role pretty much across every function This way of thinking about talent pools, which is that there are three fundamental talent pools you can hire from the first one is what we touched on which is People that are actively and aggressively looking for a job that are frequenting job boards and You don't post a job there So that if the person is looking of the sort that you want they see your job and they apply to it Now the challenge the each pool will have a set of trade-offs. So what's the trade-off here? The trade-off is that we earlier said that if you have an amazing salesperson in your team Benji You're doing everything in your power to hold on to that person right you pain them well you treat them well um You are doing anything and everything not to lose that salesperson. So what that means is Great sales people are few in form between and they well paid well treated and busy So they don't frequent job boards all that much they don't But once in a while they do and because it's so easy to post a job Post it because you might get lucky But relying on that pool is assuming that Lock is a strategy and lock isn't strategy. It's a lot try to get lucky But don't rely on it So then you have to care about the other two talent pools the other two talent pools all of the following sort the first one is your network and your network is your friends your family your employees and their friends and their families And the smaller the company the smaller the network the bigger the company the bigger the network I believe that You can hire great people out of a network which is you have an unfair advantage over other people Which is you might have more information about that talent and about them than the average person might have right like Every now and then we meet people that we're like This person's got something this this university student who's my nephew I think he can do this job. I just I've seen him. I've seen him talk to people. I've seen him Socialized with all it's tended family and he had the room laughing like he's got something And so if that's what can be really helpful is you have some type of an edge in terms of information on that individual either yourself or through People that work in your organization etc. So the second thing you want to do is I'm hiring somebody And make sure that everybody that you can tell in your friends family and employee base and their friends and families Um you you how you telling them that is really really important now again you can't rely on this because you're a small company And maybe something comes out of it maybe not But You do need to try to tap into this pool the third talent pool are people that are out there that can do this job really really well They have no idea who you are They're not actively looking for a job and they're not in your network Which means that Somebody has to approach them somebody has to find them and reach out to them This is where this is what we call head hunting somebody has to identify them and somebody has to reach out to them and get them into the loop This is at the place where you can optimize for quality the most Because you can only you can make it so that you're only reaching out to people that look really really good right So if out of the three pools this has the highest probability of you being able to make a great hire The difficulty with this pool is that a it requires a lot of heavy lifting to do this right It's much easier to post a job and check the applicants once in a while than it is to Head hunt. I'm already so busy. I'm hiring a salesperson so that I'm not this busy now you're telling me to go do this And I don't even have a salesperson. I'm doing all that Now I need to do this like what are you saying? Yeah, like that's hard I'm but This is really important thing to do because if you get the sales higher wrong you're screwed and this if this is the place where you can Maximize the probability of success Then not giving it any attention is is lunacy it really is you you have to care about this talent pool and This is where the other tradeoff with this talent pool is that this is where the candidate has the most leverage Yeah, and they're probably the most expensive that is what it means if they have more leverage They can ask you for more things right they can because you're reaching out to them They're kind of happy and they're happy enough where they are They'll only move if it's the right net step in their career and it's an exciting net step and it all lines up really well And so if you play this out the person that's applying to your job is actively looking for a job And depending on how good they are and what type of market you're in They might have some options they might not and you might be able to get them for a good price because of that The middle pool you know you can you're not able to pay them the way you can an active applicant But you still have a little bit of leverage there. This is where you have the least It's some it's a really useful breakdown to look at these three areas have you Going back to this this kind of archetypal Landscape business owner let's say around two million bucks a year. Do you have a sense for You know, which of these three buckets is statistically going to be the most fruitful or is it just a total mixed bag And it really depends on seasonality and market and business or or is there one of these that maybe it's like Hey, you should maybe look at this one more than the others the third one is where you should spend most of your time and energy by far by far because You can easily see That probability of success is highest in the third pool because your ability to create a talent pool of great people to choose from His highest and the third pool right is in the third bucket and that's the it's the simplest way to not screw this up Is just if you have five people to choose from and four of them are good You have a much higher shot and making a good choice than if you have five people to choose from and five of them Is and so what would that look like is it is it hiring a recruiter? Is it is it hiring a talent agency? Is it is it doing it yourself driving around your competition and sort of popping on the Jobsites and say hey come work for me like what does that actually look like in this environment? I think the first thing is For the way I would do this if if I have a landscaping business today the first thing I would do is I would say I'm a two million I'm doing all these things. Let's go back to our earlier thing I'm going to hand off this easier simpler part of the job. Yep Right I'm going to go and look at my friends and family and see who's a young person with a good personality and a good work ethic That's looking to make some extra money Maybe it's the summertime maybe they're looking for a part-time job But I'm trying to like tap into my network to find that person. That's what I'm doing That's where I'm going for that person Once I've hired that person I bought myself some time And then what I'm doing is I'm learning I'm learning how to be a sales leader. I'm reading I'm listening I'm talking working to people, I'm developing my taste, intuition, judgment, expertise in this area. Once I have that, and along the way, I'm trying to get these people to take on some of the low ticket items as well, so I'm buying more and more time for myself. Once I have done this, and I have spent some time developing skills for myself, then what I'm doing is I'm either myself or having somebody in my organization, pull a list of candidates together, you can do it using LinkedIn, you can do it using your knowledge of your competitors. However you want to do it, but I'm trying to find 20, 30 people, and I'm trying to reach out to them. If I have their phone numbers, I'm calling them, if I have the email, I'm emailing them, if they're on LinkedIn, I'm messaging them, like if they're on Facebook, I'm Facebooking them, like I'm just going wherever they are, wherever I can find them that I know if I send this message to them, it'll reach out to them. I'm not being too precious about this. I'm not being like, I'm not gaining my head about it. I'm just trying to get messages out there. I'm trying to do this internally because I think at 2 million, you might not want to spend a bunch of money on an agency, but we have a lot of clients at 2 million that do want to spend because it might cost 20,000 to hire that person, but you're hiring a more experienced person at this point. If you're paying them $150,000 total, let's say it's a $70,000-80,000-based salary, it'll cost you about 15,000-20,000 to work with an agency to hire that person and half the people will be willing to make that investment in which in which case you don't have to do the heavy lifting. The reason I would do the heavy lifting if I was them is I believe with important aspects of your company, you want to wrestle with the problem yourself a little bit. Yes, thank you. Dude, it's providence. You have to, when stuff matters, you have to out-effort it. I sound kind of like spiritual when I say this, but when you really want to fix a problem in your business, you need to be at the helm of it. I'm not saying you can't summon help of a recruiter or call in your network for some support, but I think that if something matters to you, act like it. The thing that drives me crazy, especially on this recruitment thing, you would know better than anyone, is the level of complaining that goes on about the talent market, Gen Z, TikTok, pick your culprit. There's a thousand. The level and volume and consistency of complaining that goes on does not line up with the actual effort level that these people are putting into solving problems in the first place. Shut the fuck up, you guys. I'm so tired of this conversation. It's been happening for so long where elders will always look at a younger generation. Be like, "This younger generation is that I can tell you something," which is really fascinating. This is a story from the technology world, but I think it's an interesting tell, which is that a few years ago, there were these trends that were playing out called "Belly Their Mondays" and "Belly Their Monday" was one. That quitting was the other trend where you basically had youngsters who on social media were talking about not working hard in their jobs. "Belly Their Monday" was basically, "I don't want to work that hard on a Monday. I'm at standard weekend by default." Quiet quitting was like, "I'm just not going to do the work." Let's see where this goes. It was the younger generation and they were doing this on social media and everybody was really frustrated with them. They don't work hard enough and it was a fair criticism at the time. Now what's happened is you've got this AI shift that's happening and a lot of these AI companies are being built by youngsters in their 20s. These are companies that are all in office, that are working in office six to seven days a week, that are working 12 balls a day. I have never seen people work this hard and now the elders are saying, "But I have kids, but I can't grow to the office every day. I can't work 12 balls a day. I can't be online since days a week. These companies are not inclusive enough for us. They're closing the door to us. Now the elders are complaining about the youngsters working too hard." Isn't that amazing? When somebody these days says that this generation doesn't work hard enough, I think you're just not talking to the right people, which is mostly always the case. Whenever we made generalizations across large groups of people based on a handful of interactions, we should question ourselves because that's really dangerous where to think. The youngsters are just fine. You're not talking to the right ones. Is it the better way to think about it? At the end of the day, if you want to become a $10 million business, we're talking about services businesses here. You have to master your service, which you've done at $2 million. Now the entire game is commercialization. All of it is this. It's like figuring out how to build a sales machine. The difference between the two million stock at two, then three, and then kind of stop there. Somebody who gets to $20, $30 million, maybe 50, maybe even more, is that they figured the spot out. They don't figure the spot out by posting a job on some indeed, getting, and then somehow the universe presents them with this inbound solution to their biggest problem. That's as rare as winning the lottery. And winning the lottery is fucking rare. I love this whole section. I'm glad we hit it. I just took rapid up before I move on to something else. If this is something that you want to do, take it seriously and be involved. And yes, calling the help of experts and agencies and recruiters and your network and all that. But this is not a side quest for someone else in your business to go do. This is like the, this is table stakes, man. So this is in the fried ques. Treat it that way. I wonder if you have any perspective, just to linger on like what works for this industry, maybe what doesn't work for this industry. You said something earlier, there are different types of sales people. And of course, there are. What kinds of profiles would you suspect tends to fail in their first year or two in an environment like this? And when I say an environment like this, I mean, scrapier, more blue collar. It's in home selling. It is. You know, you're selling a service that is in many ways optional. You're not selling an HVAC system where their house kind of falls apart. They don't have it. You're selling what is discretionary spending. What types of people would you think would really kind of face plant in this scrapier, more blue collar environment or this blue collar sales world? Lucky for you. I started my sales career selling door to door, lawneration, right? And that company was essentially a sales machine that what they had built was you were on a 100% commission job. Your training was here's how you turn this machine on. Here's what it does. And literally was 15 minutes and then sit in the car and just go learn on the field. And in the field, you were dropped on a on a street with the machine. You would try to sell and then you would do the service. And what was really interesting was that they had operations across Ontario. And every week you would have 20, 30 new people like the whole the warehouse that I worked in, which was only one part of Toronto was like 150 sellers. Wow. And they had multiple of these across, right? And there was a huge distribution between and you had managers who were driving these cars. And the cars you could fit 10 people into each car, right? And so as you'd walk closer to the GM, the GM's call was the best sellers. And then like as you went back, junior managers had the worst sellers, the newer sellers, etc. And what would happen is you would have a handful of these people that would hit crazy numbers that day. And then a bunch of people that would make no money and some people in between. And so you saw a lot of what works, what doesn't work when you're selling home services door to door is what I got to see. I can tell you my experience. I only did well in very rich neighborhoods. I on the second day of selling ever and in this company, I brought every record that company had because we were selling in mansions. And these mansions, they took us there because they thought all these houses have contracts already. So no one's going to buy anything. So these youngsters will get a lot of repetitions of being told no and they'll develop a backbone. I remember getting driven then being like, lucky as person on earth, look at this. Like these are golf courses behind every house. Like I remember making a killing and I made a killing. But the day after they took me to Mrs. Sardir or Richmond Hill or something and I hit that whole day. And that was a friend of mine. Sardir was a tough turf for you. Who was f***ing hard? Who was like, I didn't make any money that I'm a very low on money, I'm on the money. And so I noticed I'm only good when the income level is really high in an neighborhood. That's when I can sell really well. There were others who couldn't do well with the richer houses and could do well with a middle income house. And so one thing I've realized is it's not just the service. It is who is your ideal customer because you need to match the type of person with that ideal customer. Somebody who's going to speak with a little bit more eloquence, who's going to be a little bit more is going to turn off the middle income person or the blue collar neighborhood. And he's going to be attractive to the mansion. And somebody who can speak blue collar is going to be great for a blue collar buyer. So that actually is the big unlock in my mind is match the personality to the person of the people that you're selling to. Over time, you will develop skills. Like, over time, I realized when you take me to Vaughan, and I'm selling to like Italian-Fonstruction people, I learned how to like change my body language and the way I spoke to be able to connect with them. And I did better than I used to do before. I never did as well as I would do in really rich neighborhoods. And so, that's, I think, one thing you want to keep in mind is, who are we selling to? And what type of personality will do well with them? The other thing I would keep in mind is, this is kind of blue collar, right? And so, you need somebody who's kind of excited about that. Like, at that time, I was at the stage of my career, I was excited to kind of roll up my sleeves and get on the field, and it was a fun job, and I really enjoyed it. You need people that aren't going to be excited about that, that are not going to look at that as a downgrade on their life. And so, maybe they come from a family of blue collar workers. Maybe they have done some type of blue collar job in high school, and you can see that they're not going to look down on this job. This isn't a stepping stone to something else. This is something that this person can get excited about long term. And so, A, match it to the buyer and B, make sure the person does, is excited about what you're doing. And know that there are people that are excited about it, but there are also people that will not be excited about what you do. I, in my business, I help companies hire, go to salespeople. They're people that love what we do. And once in a while, we hire somebody who's like, "I can't do this. It's enough for me." And that's okay. That's life. Yeah, it's such an amazing. I think I was expecting you to say, "Well, it's like you want this profile, not that profile, but it's a much more nuanced point." The point about the ICP is, I think, worth repeating, key in on that buyer that you already sell to the best, that you already, that loves your services. They give you referrals. They write you testimonials. And think about what it is about your sales game, as the owner, as the founder-led salesperson. What do they, what about you do they buy? And then, and then, sort of look for those traits in the next person. I think that that's a much more useful way to do it than a certain disc profile, or a certain buyer's breaks way back. Yeah, yeah. Because it needs, it needs to be a custom fit. And, and I love that insight. Listen, I wanted to hit on-boarding comp, all this stuff. Maybe we need to do a part two. I think we wrap it here for time. I'll give you, I love if you just maybe gave one last answer to a question, which is, if people do this right, when this is done well, and they find the person, and they nail it on the hire, and they nail it on the on-boarding, what is pleasantly surprising about this new role? What have you noticed, owners, sort of, what's the sigh of relief? And what do they say? What do you think is kind of like unexpectedly pleasant about getting your first salesperson in place for the first time? I don't think it's unexpectedly pleasant, but you can see that there's this relief in their minds, that their dreams are possible now. Because whenever you become, listen, we all have different levels of ambition, but I find that the bar keeps rising for entrepreneurs in terms of what they want to reach. So when you start your business, if I can do a million, wouldn't that be great? And then you kind of get to 500,000, you're like, if I can do two million, that's the best thing ever. You get to like a million in revenue, if I can be like five million, like, whoa, what is this? And so I think you keep just raising the bar, and that's human nature, and that's fine. That's good. And I think when you're at that like one, two million mark, you start thinking about 10. You really, the 10 becomes the big number at that point. It will change when you get closer to 10, a little bit from first year, but at two, one, two, you start thinking of 10. And it's really exciting, because at 10, it is a different life, right? Like it is a different life. The amount of profit you can generate in the life you can create for yourself is significantly different at 10 million, then what you can do at a million or two. And so now you have this dream and this ambition, but you are really constrained in a way that you haven't been constrained so far. Up till about a million or two, you can kind of do it yourself. You can kind of steamroll your way through to two million, but you realize it's, I can't do it alone. And that's a very vulnerable feeling for a founder operator. Shit, I can't do this alone. This number that I really want, I know we can do it, because I know we can service it. Like I can hire the technicians, I can, we can do this, but I can't do this myself. I can't steamroll my way through it. I need these sales, we need to figure this thing out. And the ones who figure it out, the higher the first one or two people, and it's going decently even, not even like amazingly, even if it's going decently, you just see this like sigh of relief that I think not only is 10 now possible, I can get better at this. I can hire more of them. I can get better at hiring them. I can get better at training them. I can retain them. Maybe I can do 20. And so you see this sigh of relief, and you see the bar getting even higher. And I think that's a beautiful thing. A thing I'm a, I'm a capitalist. I think people wanting to build great businesses and create jobs and prosperity is a beautiful thing. And I love seeing people find the little signals along the way that make them understand that the future is possible. And then make them feel a little bit more ambitious beyond that. I think your first few sales reps growing decently, makes you more ambitious and makes those ambitions more realistic as well. That's beautiful. It's, it is as there's a scientific term is like it's proof of concept. And you get this tailwind, all of a sudden, this boost of confidence because you now have line of sight on something that conceptually was very abstract before. And then now it's just a numbers game for the first time. You're just like, whoa, okay, the math is mathing a little bit. And if I could stack two and then three and then maybe get a sales manager in business, there's this moment where you land up doing something and you're, you go from like I need to figure something new out to I'm in the more and better phase. Yes, I need to do more of this and I need to do it. Yes, I think somebody I watched it on a YouTube flip. I think it was that Alex, a mostly guy who sometimes I find great and sometimes I find off putting bit. This was a really smart observation that he made. He was spot on and he's undeniable. He's built a brilliant business. And so he's a great entrepreneur. This is a really, really important way to think is like am I in that phase now? And when you're in the more and better phase is when you feel the best. It's fun. Yeah, that's the best. You're this, you've come over the top of the roller coaster and you're going down and just like things are starting to feel a little bit better. And I think that that's why I wanted to have this conversation is because I feel like people get stuck here and I want more of our listeners to have this unlock moment and get as you say into the more and better phase. So listen, you are a great LinkedIn follow. Is there anything else that people, if people like this conversation, where should they track you down? I don't know if you have kind of a digital footprint, a few URLs you can share. We'll put it in the show notes, but where can people find you? I think LinkedIn is the best place to find me and all the other things I do. I don't, I'm not as good at putting this on LinkedIn as I should be, but I will be a lot better about it. So you'll find all the other things over there, but let's keep it simple for people. If you want to find me, I'm on LinkedIn. And I do a podcast, I write a newsletter and I do all sorts of things. Those are heavily focused on the technology industry. So if somebody is interested in that space, then it's worth a follow. If not, it's probably a bit too in the weeds for somebody who's just not into it to follow. But LinkedIn is where I am and I look forward to connecting with people. Thank you so much, Asid. Well, the wisdom is always take care. Thank you, Benji.