The E-commerce Leader

That creates a flood of tech talent. It’s really interesting, uh, a flood of tech talent’s hitting the market. And if you are building such business, You’re in a different season now than you were over the last five or 10 years,

and, uh, get good at your plan.

The second big success suggestion for 2023 is, uh, you know, the question is what’s your team? What team are you bringing to serve your plan? And I think that question really, really will help clarify, okay, I have to employ people or find vendors, contractors.

Partners or whatever to get clear on how I implement my plan. And so, you know, this is a great line of thinking and. You know, you can start with the, the ideal team that you don’t have people for and say, who do I need to hire or find? Or you can just say, who do I have that I’m working with, and how can I improve upon it and maybe add some more people.

How would you approach this whole topic of team building a team, finding the right team members, and all of that for 2023? Great question. Now this came up in. The last mastermind meeting a few days ago. So one of the, um, members has got a retail arbitrage business. He’s obviously branching into private label.

Otherwise he wouldn’t have joined our group, but he’s doing, I dunno, um, 70, 80,000 pounds a month or something. So, you know, it’s substantial sized business. He’s got a little, uh, warehouse and he’s employing a few people there, and he’s about to employ. His son and obviously employing family can be interesting that we’ve had a couple of members in the Mastermind have had family members involved.

And um, so I said we, we talked through how to go about that and I said, well, I would, before you start worrying about the who, think about the opposite of not, not who, but what I would say, um, what’s your org structure? I said, you don’t need to be ridiculous about it, but before you confuse your son by chucking him in and saying, do this now, do that unrelated thing.

Now do that unrelated thing. Um, try to structure an org chart. and then start him off at the bottom of that with the very basic mechanical tasks, knowing that that’s not all he’s gonna do. And I said, as well as that, you need to have some basic standard operating procedures. So I think the danger is often getting a person and then building a job around them.

It can be very confusing for that person and you end up also, if it works, you are in worse position. Cuz if they disappear and they do 50 unrelated tasks that are really important, or three of them are uni important, now your business has got a really ragged hole in it that’s harder to plug. So that was my thinking about that.

So that’s how I would try and go about it these days. Having done the opposite myself in the past, it’s not pretty. We, we all do the opposite, man. We all find the people and kind of throw ’em as you know. Here’s a menu of all of the crazy, random things we need accomplish. What would you like to do? List of crazy.

And uh, and, and if they’re gracious and nice and hard workers, they’ll say yes to a lot of it. But you’re right, it turns it into a big mishmash. And then when you add another person afterwards and they come in and you’re like, well, So and so does the following things, and that second person coming in has to think to themselves, how in the world does that job make any sense?

you know, it’s like a compounding problem. If you have a team of generalists that do rando things, that you add more, you have to kind of stay in that lane, but you have to kind of continue to do that because you’ll have no continuity. Activity or effort, you know? And, um, so yeah, I think that’s a, that’s the hard part.

So just defining roles and defining your structure and getting better and better at saying, as you grow, we have this set of duties that are nested together and responsible, uh, you know, roll up to one person or two people, or whatever it is, and have clarity there. I think it’s a vital part of business. I agree.

And by the way, to your investment mindset, I, I think that’s so important. Let’s apply it straight away. I say to people all the time, like if you said to me, for example, this guy who sold a seven figure business and wants to go into a completely different maybe Shopify business in a completely different market.

And I said to him, well, look, this doesn’t mean you have to do this, but let me just put it this way as a thought experiment, would I, knowing you for several years and knowing you’ve sold a seven figure business, um, invest money in you doing. On Shopify, given that you have no experience, no , I would invest in wine market that he was in before, as long as he voice non-compete clauses on Amazon.

And I guess that, um, this is another thing where you gotta look at your business and say, if I came to this absolutely fresh and I’d never worked in it and hadn’t put blood and sweat and, and you know, what do you call it? Um, uh, can’t remember, what do you call it? But the, uh, It’ll come to me in a minute.

Yes. . No, I was gonna say that it’s, it’s that the fact that you put effort in it doesn’t make it valuable. Is that, that thing, the, that trap, which I can’t think of. So, uh, look at it objectively. Would you invest in this? And if it’s a mess, then um, make sure it’s not a mess first. And I think that, yeah, the, the classic era is the thing that’s.

The, um, Michael Gerber thing, isn’t it? The, uh, EMA through visited where Sarah runs her pie shop and she gets this wonderful person in who does lots of random tasks, and then she leaves and Sarah ends up working 16 hour days instead of 12 hour days. Yeah. Uh, because she can’t replace the person. So, yeah, that’s, I guess that’s what not to do.

What are, what are, what are your plans for team this year and how are you gonna make it more elegant than that? Well, there’s organizing what you’ve. You know, your, your team is basically a portfolio of talent and being really good at organizing that team is a vital skill. And, uh, so, so some of that, that we’ll be working on refining who does what and how, and getting better and better at that Now would include in this list any vendors.

That you pay just, you know, third party companies that are serving your, your business needs. Uh, any virtual assistance or international, uh, you know, uh, team members, of course W2 employees, and then informal partners like promotional partners or, uh, legal partners like literal bus business co-owners. And I, I think there’s a blend there of all of it.

And. Mindset should be a portfolio management approach. What do we have and who’s, who’s doing what and are they doing the highest and best use of their time to support the business objectives? And that takes time and thinking. Cuz a lot of times we can neglect, uh, clarifying for people what their duties are.

I mean, I, I’m, I’m happy or not happy, but honest enough to. That I, you know, I look back sometimes and I’ve had people doing stuff for six months or a year that I didn’t even realize they were still doing. It didn’t need to be done, you know, oh wait, you’re doing this. Oh, I thought we stopped that . You know, so just, uh, you know, the, the challenges of incompetent management is a real problem when it comes to having a team.

But then you, the second step is how do you grow the team? Uh, and we have a couple exciting things that we’re working on. You know, for Omni Rocket we do, because it’s a. Uh, so, you know, it’s a toolkit that includes a SaaS, software, um, component as well as e-commerce consulting. Uh, we actually have a really, really interesting dynamic right now, which is many of the tech companies are laying off vast swaths of engineers.

And so, uh, you know, if you’re a SaaS company, software is a service and you’re trying to build a tech, The talent for the last, I would say 10 years has basically been a really incredibly difficult thing to find. And, you know, you had to make people, business partners if they were gonna do any work and, you know, they could get a job as easy as they’d like and a big tech company.

And so the, the, you know, kind of competition for top talent, uh, really was, I guess you could. Unhelpful for the small business SaaS founder, but with the radical numbers of layoffs in Silicon Valley that are happening now. I mean, you know, those companies are retracting, um, you know, their staff sizes to hu in a huge extent.

That creates a flood of tech talent. It’s really interesting, uh, a flood of tech talent’s hitting the market. And if you are building such business, You’re in a different season now than you were over the last five or 10 years, and understanding the times that I’m. as it relates to finding tech talent, I think is very interesting.

So we have a Silicon Valley recruiter, Stanford grad, who is his, his vocational skillset is head hunting and recruiting, uh, engineers, and he’s from the valley. He knows tons of people and he’s, uh, our guy for helping us find top talent. To build our sas, uh, you know, company and, and technology solutions.

That is really interesting. That’s exciting, man. I like it. And again, this goes to show people always think sort of headline economic. Markers like recession is bad news. But I mean that’s a very well generalization to the point of for an entire nation of the entire globe, it’s actually, uh, if you’re gonna be buying talent or materials or advertising space, it’s actually amazingly good news cuz all of those things are more available and cheaper than they were a year ago.

Right. I mean, Facebook’s kind of, I wouldn’t say imploded is going too far, but their stock price halved, I think this year and the advertising space is much more available than it was even six months ago, I think. And, and the engineers is, Step forward, right? Yeah. I mean, if you would’ve said three years ago, Hey, I’m hire from, uh, who used to work at Facebook or wherever, big company you would say in the back of your mind, wow, they probably got fired or were incompetent, or, you know, didn’t wanna work there anymore.

But because, you know, because that, because the, the, the why is people would have stayed on those in those companies. But if you say, well, Silicon Valley just laid off, you know, a third of all, its. Um, you know, workforce, uh, and now we as small business owners can find whatever social media, uh, people, tech in, you know, like engineers, hard, hard, co, you know, coders, tech side of it.

We could find project managers with, you know, top tier a list, uh, resume. And that is very interesting for small business owners. So anyway, so that’s one of the ways in which we’re thinking about team. Uh, we’re also, you know, approaching a few other parts of our business with different strategies that we haven’t done before.

On, you know, kind of the working with partners and that kind of thing. So I think the big question for the listeners here is, uh, what’s your team approach or strategy in support of your big plan for 2023? And, you know, how can you find the right people? And then as needed, how can you rearrange the people you have?

And then, worst case scenario, how can you, uh, end working with people who just. You know, serving the plan well or unfortunately aren’t, you know, contributing. And those are hard parts of management, but I think it’s a vital, uh, part of having success, you know, for the year. And you’re clear in your mind now at the beginning of the year, why not do it now?

Why not make changes so that you’ve got a whole 12 months of the year to say, Hey, we, made this change in January and, and, and Wow. You know, we have a whole year’s results now that we can look back and say, here’s what happened because we added this person, or rearrange duties or, you know, eliminated roles or whatever had to be done.

Just a couple of thoughts of that. I mean, first of all, there’s a. If you like, more intangible, biological thing. The, the days are short. Energy’s quite low in, in some ways. I remember a, a business coach of mine saying, um, I’m not a big fan of January being a sort new year, new energy time of year because it’s hard to do now.

That depends on the person, right? But, um, I think it, cutting things is, is a natural thing to do at this point. And so it’s something to, is the grasp in the nettle time, isn’t it? The second point is, um, Ken Burke, who went through a couple of massive recessions, so he was on the podcast recently, somebody I’m wanting to create much closer relationship with this year, Tokyo Partnerships, um, in terms of helping train, uh, entrepreneurs to think in more business-like bigger way.

Um, but he said, look, we’ve been through two recessions. We went through 2001 and 2008. He said, if you’re gonna cut, cut early and cut once, because otherwise it’s very bad for, for, um, morale if people think the ax is still, you know, hanging over people’s heads. And, and I think that makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. It’s, it’s always ugly. Nobody likes to do it. Um, the other thing that strikes me is, That a lot of the time the people we need are in our network somewhere. And I’ve realized it’s particularly true for me and I’ve got incredible, luckily from the podcast, incredible network, have some super smart people who have specialisms in different areas that all relate, uh, around the sort of circle, around the e-commerce space.

And so that’s something that I could. You know, with the same exact people with, with a change to the relationship, really leveraged to huge amount. And that’s true for me. And I suspect that’s true for a lot of people out there, that, that they have incredible power lurking in their existing relationships.

Um, which doesn’t mean you don’t have to go out and hire, but I think it’s always good to look at who you know first before you go really far outside of your, your existing network. . Yeah, totally agree. I think that, you know, the question is what are you, what’s in your hand? What are you stewarding? And, you know, how can you optimize those relationships and really get good at, uh, working with people and having people work for you and with you.

And that’s the hard work of, you know, managing resources, but it’s vital to success. I mean, you, you could, you could have a big plan for 2023 and really just optimize the team that you’re manag. Not add anything different and probably, you know, get close to the goal. Uh, you know, depending on how outta whack things are.

And I know, at least for me, I could see that being true in my system of, you know, just the, the team that I work with. Um, so this is great. Any other thoughts on, uh, what team are you bringing to 2023 before we move? Just one final thing, which is just to a plea. And we both admitted, you know, hiring people and then working out what their role is, just a plea to everyone to do the opposite, which is, um, mm-hmm , clarify what needs doing, bundle that stuff together into roles, and then look for a role.

Or if you’ve got somebody in a role and they’re doing 10 different roles, really then be honest and try and cut it down. In my case, that’s one tweak I should make with my va. Um, uh, Von, who’s a great guy and, and really. , lots of lovely characteristics, but he does get confused and I look at what’s going on.

I think that’s cuz I’m giving him five or six different roles and I need to just focus in on making him the, the sort of, um, content marketing person. So the, the podcast and, um, show notes is quite, um, complex enough and stop trying to make him a sort of part-time PA because that’s a different skill set and it doesn’t seem to sit with him.

And so I need to get somebody else to handle my, um, email triage at some point or just accept I’m gonna do it myself for now. Um, so yeah, there’s an example of where I need to clean it up, but if you haven’t done it before, I promise you it’s really, really worth clarifying before you talk to people. Yeah, absolutely.