I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Do this next time you train a new hire…
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Hi Reader, One of the biggest mistakes I made early on is training the person I hired. Now that probably sounds strange, because why wouldn’t you want to train the person you hired? The problem was, I was thinking about training the person I hired when I should have been thinking in terms of training the next 10 hires. If you’re just thinking about training this one person, you might sit down with them, map everything out, show them how you think, and maybe how to write in your voice. But then when you bring on your next hire, you have to start over. Instead, you should record yourself training the new hire. Not all of what you train them on will be relevant to the next hire, but some of it will be. Especially if you end up hiring more people for that role or need to replace your first hire. You never want to be in a position where you have to start from scratch or repeat yourself unnecessarily. Once you finish training your new hire, edit the recording into separate videos. You don’t need to spend a ton of time editing to the level you might with a YouTube video that’s going to be viewed by thousands of people. Just focus on cutting anything that isn’t relevant and separating the recordings by topic and task. Why does this matter? The idea is to create leverage at every opportunity. When you are no longer the bottleneck, and fewer and fewer things require your time, you’re able to create leverage. Leverage lets you scale your impact, do more, and enjoy greater freedom. Eventually, when you have a team that handles hiring for you, have them follow this process as well. Do the same thing with them: train your hiring manager on how to hire and how to record themselves training new hires so they can save time and create leverage within their department. In time, you’ll have a sophisticated and streamlined hiring and onboarding process. Here’s a summary of the steps:
PODCAST6 Keys to Building a $40M Business (Live Mastermind)While in Cabo for a mastermind, I recorded a roundtable with a lineup of exceptional entrepreneurs: Nick Huber, Matt Schnuck, Sieva Kozinsky, Xavier Helgesen, and Kurtis Lin. We cover:
Learn about finding your competitive advantage and how to stack the cards in your favor: Watch or listen to episode » CONVERTKIT FEATUREEmail editor: Shortcuts, custom CSS, deliverability alertsIn case you missed it, we made some simple but powerful updates to our email editor to improve your writing experience and email marketing efforts. My favorite is the Slash menu: Easily add in blocks by typing in the slash / character to search and add the block you need as you’re writing your email. No need to stop and hover over the + button. Just type “/image” to insert an image.
Just type “/timer” to insert a countdown timer.
Just type “/snippet” to insert a content snippet.
etc.
You don’t even have to type the full thing. Just type “/im” and it will autocomplete. Then just hit [enter] to add your image.
(By the way, here is a list of keyboard shortcuts we released last year that you may not know about.) We’ve also added Custom CSS and Deliverability alert options you may find useful. ARTICLEDo literally anythingDo you ever feel like this? “Sometimes, it all gets to be too much. There are too many things to do! I need to figure out where to start! I get paralyzed by the sheer enormity of it all.” Check out this post by Aaron Francis: Have a great week! —Nathan P.S. I’ll be in Portland, Oregon on May 16th for TravelCon and planning to record a few in-person episodes of my podcast while I’m there. Let me know if you have any good guest suggestions! |
Nathan Barry
I'm a designer who turned into a writer who turned into a startup CEO. My mission is to help creators earn a living. Subscribe for essays on building an audience and earning a living as a creator.
Hey Reader, If I could solve only one thing in my business, that would have the biggest impact, what would that be? This is the question every great entrepreneur obsesses over. Rather than trying to do everything at once, you look for the bottleneck and focus on solving that. There’s a book called The Goal by an Israeli physicist named Eliyahu Goldratt. It’s a 1984 business novel that business systems nerds love. However if you’re not a business systems nerd you probably… won’t love it. It’s...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent money on something and immediately felt guilty afterward? Will Guidara spends his money foolishly on purpose. And he thinks you should too. He once bought an entire barrel of whiskey and put it in his basement. He also put a skee-ball machine in the office. Is he going to get a monetary return on either of these things? No. But that’s kind of the point. He calls it the 95/5 rule: Manage your money and time like a maniac 95% of the time (no expense is too...
Hey Reader, Have you ever spent a whole day on something almost nobody saw? It's painful when the whole reason you worked hard was because you wanted to reach people. If you teach a workshop in person, you reach the 20 people in that room. But if you record that same workshop once, you can keep teaching for years on autopilot. This is the concept of leverage, and it's something I talk about in my upcoming book, The Ladders of Wealth (you can pre-order it now). A lot of people will look back...