The first 5 hires EVERY entrepreneur should make...or go broke...

In this video, I'm going to walk you through the first five hires that you need to bring on in your company as you are growing. And as a fundamental framework to think through this, you want to think about, especially for the first five, that they are really just helping you do more. And so, think of them as extensions of yourself. Over time, we're going to transition from that philosophy to really building a team and departments. But each of the five will more or less correspond to being an extension of you and doing the repeated tasks that are timeconuming but do not necessarily add as much value as some of the more strategic pieces of each of the roles. All right. And so if you don't know I am, my name is Oximozi. I own an ownacquisition. com. It's a portfolio company does about $85 million a year. I make these videos because a lot of people are broke and I do not want you to be one of them. So let's rock and roll. So the first of these things in terms of the order and sequence that you're going to be hiring them in is going to be in the reverse order of the value that's being delivered andor what you can get in the marketplace in terms of dollars per hour. And so the more valuable the skill, the more it will cost. And so you want to replace the skills that cost the least amount of money for you, right? Should make sense. And so typically one of the first two hires, and this can happen in any order, is going to be one person who's going to be more of an administrative help to you because as you start a business, especially in the

beginning, there's lots of administrative work that needs to be done. It must be done, but it's not necessarily the high value work that's going to move the business forward, but it must be done. And so number one will typically be someone in that type of role. The second hire will typically be uh somebody in the customer success or customer support role. All right? and you are still likely going to be heavily

involved in the success or delivery of the product or service that you have, but this person is going to help take away some of the repeated tasks that you are doing that are not necessarily value additive, but must be done. All right, so this is like handling returns, talking to customers about repeated tasks, uh you know, switching out billing stuff. And again, you'll see that there's some crossover between this administrative role and the uh help with delivery because in the beginning, that's where a lot of your time is going to start occurring. note that you're still probably marketing, you're still probably selling because that's what you need to do at this point in the game. The third piece will likely be the first salesperson. All right? And that's because, and again, this will depend

based on how good you are at sales, right? So, like if sales is not necessarily your strong suit, then you might take this earlier. If it is a strong suit of yours, you're going to take it a little bit later because your dollars per hour in that role continues to grow. And so, I don't want you to take these as hard and fast rules. These are just general rules of thumb that the corresponding framework that you need to be thinking this through is how much value am I making per dollar and then how much would it cost me to replace that dollar per hour. So it's like if I do not generate a lot of dollars per hour and it doesn't cost a lot of money then that would be the first thing. Now if I'm generating a lot of money and I can replace it for a medium amount of money then it's like well I'm it's the net difference right and that's what we're looking at in terms of how we're replacing each of these roles. And so right off the bat you're going to have some sort of administrative help. Then customer support help. then you're going to probably hire some sort of sales role from there. Now, it kind of depends a little bit on the role. You'll probably have someone who starts assisting you with the promotion or marketing of your business. So, this is often times somebody who's doing setting or doing prospecting for you or if you uh generate customers based off content. This is probably somebody who's being a videographer of some sort or helping you create the content in some way. Some of the more laborious parts that are not as value additive, that would be kind of that fourth looking hire. And again, that can flip with the sales role. So like if for example you're a killer salesman then you might have somebody who's prospecting and doing some of the intro calls for you so that the majority of your time is spent just closing which is the higher value task. So hopefully this common theme is working out and making sense to you because it's like the number one question I get or one of among the top questions I get is like what order should I hire people in when I'm starting my business. The next one is and again all of these roles can be some of these things can be fractional right in the beginning. So you'll probably have some sort of fractional bookkeeper which is really filling the

gap for the finance hole. So they're just doing basic level of accounting for you to get so you just know how much money you're making at that time. They can help you take control of your expenses, etc. Over time, that rule will probably come inhouse, but much a little bit later. So like before you're at $100,000 a month, you probably don't have a ton uh that's going on. So just having a fractional bookkeeper is sufficient. Same thing with, you know, somebody who's helping you with your taxes, uh legal stuff. Like you'll have a lawyer, but it's not going to be in-house. And so as you're moving up this value ladder in terms of the value per hour and the cost per hour that you can get this the process of entrepreneurship if you think from a big picture perspective it's always just buying back your time so that you can level up the amount of time that you're spending on high leverage activities. Now here's a key point. I see this happen all the time. I'll see entrepreneurs replace all of their time and then they don't do anything with that added time to add more value. And so in that case your profit margins will go down because you are not continuing to add and do the things that generate the income. Now, as you progress, each of these roles become more solidified. And these people, ideally, in a perfect world, actually can ascend up and then have teams underneath of them. The person who was helping you originally now has a team of people helping them. The administrative person originally, you might have to ascend them into a director of operations who's really pushing each of the tasks and projects forward. They end up being a mini project manager for you if done properly. Right? The salesperson might become a sales director or a sales manager who's actually leading and training uh a series of sales people. Now, I will tell you that a lot of times people have the difficulty of going from an individual contributor at a high level to a manager. It's one of the hardest transitions in business and it's commonly messed up by most people. All right? And so, one of the things that comes with experience in entrepreneurship is you recognize the people who have the talent to do the thing that is required later so you can hire those people earlier on. Now, you can't take, you know, a COO of a billion dollar company and put them in as your operator. one because they pro you probably can't afford it and two they're probably not that interested in the opportunity yet unless you have funding or some sort of vehicle that you can acquire that talent earlier and so as a final concept that I want to introduce to you is that whenever you are starting a business you are incurring debt and this is something that I'm now very convinced of and so you were incurring lots of types of debt you were incurring life management debt you were incurring financial debt you're encouraging technological debt right so that a technological debt which by the way is probably if you had another next full-time hire it's usually a tech person who's helping you manage the CRM, build out sites, and kind of make all the things that you want to have happen or know should be happening in the background actually happen in the real world. They're helping manage passwords, onboard new people in terms of getting them login, all that kind of jazz. And so, in terms of the debt that you're incurring, if you don't have a good CRM that's in place, you will incur that debt and then you'll have to pay it back with interest later when the company's bigger. If you don't have a good bookkeeper in place, you'll have your finances will be a mess and as you scale, you'll have to fix and pay back that debt later. If you have not the best people and the values are not there, then you're encouraging management debt, which means you'll have cultural to pay that back later. And so the idea in terms of moving quickly in the game of entrepreneurship is recognizing which debt I want to incur in what order. And so I used to poo the idea of investors and venture capital and things like that who gave people money to start because I was like, that's not real entrepreneurship. And I think as I've, you know, weathered or aged in the game, I don't see it that way anymore. or I just see it as just fundamentally an advantage is that they're choosing financial debt to incur fewer other debts. Incur fewer operational debt, incur less talent debt, management debt, CRM debt. Like you might have to have a bigger CRM that's better for you so that you can scale having to switch platforms, which is common, but it would cost more money up front. And so if you're bootstrapped, you might not be willing or able to do that, but if you have funding or you have money that you're willing to invest in the business up front, then sometimes you can do that. And so one of the things that is difficult with people who grow bigger companies faster is that they skip through the earlier stages because they know how to do it. And so it's the reason that each of the companies that we've had subsequently have grown bigger, faster, stronger than the companies that preceded them because we are willing to incur less of the other types of debt rather than financial debt because we have the finances. And so we can skip steps in the growth process that would normally offrail a quarter's worth of growth by implementing a new CRM or offload a quarter, you know, or set me back another quarter because I have to fix my financials or set me back another year because I have a whole bunch of management team in place for inexperienced and I need to get more been there done that on the team and fewer I'll learn as I go. And so as we're thinking through this and you're hiring your team, the two major frameworks that I'd like you to take away with this is number one, you're hiring in reverse order of value that you are providing and cost to the marketplace that you can use to replace it. And so typically you will one gets customer support, two some sort of administrative role, three some sort of sales or setter role, four some sort of marketing assist, five some sort of fractional bookkeeper and or a sixth which would be your IT person or tech person. That is usually the beginning of the core team and then it Christmas trees down. So each of them right now have five people hanging off of them. Let me see as this that doesn't freeze. There we go. You'll have five people hanging off of each of these. Not necessarily five IT people, but hopefully you can understand it. Especially on the marketing, the sales and on the delivery. Those are the teams that tend to grow as the companies grow. And the you know IT and finance departments and HR departments which end up getting built over time. There's a ratio that is a higher ratio as in you need fewer of them per amount of customers or employees that you have in the company. And so as you scale that is framework number one. And then framework number two is be mindful of the type of debt that you are incurring and make sure it is the type of debt that you would prefer to incur if you have the choice. And so if you are new to the channel, welcome to Mosy Nation and enjoy the next video. But