Hiring and Letting Go: The Process of Building a Great Team

Quick Update

Hey everyone! I hope all is well with you, it's been a while since I posted or even just been online in general. I'm doing good life is smooth, just been putting blueberries and cinnamon in my oats, protein in my smoothies, and getting my car detailed to take long routes home. I needed to step back and just enjoy the fruits of my hard work, isn’t that the point of all this? I’d like to think some of it should be. As long as priorities are straight, take that break. Sometimes we need it in order to get the business back to good standing, can’t pour from an empty glass.

I realized last night that’s it’s time to turn it up again and I want to end Q4 strongly, so here we are. 

Wanted to talk to you about hiring and letting go. I've been seeing horror stories lately and I care about solving things the right way so that's what we talking about today. 

I think when you're new to working with people it's hard to let go and let others do what needs to be done, that's why most have a tough time transitioning into studio founders. They simply don't feel comfortable enough to delegate. It's a part of the process and once money leaves your hands a few times, you get use to it. Learn to do valuable things with your newly found time so it feels worth it, that will help. It's inevitable that people make mistakes and it's easy to think "I can just do all this shit by myself!!" Okay, let's take it easy. Think bigger picture, you may lose a bit of money learning the ins and outs but be patient with yourself. 

Let me see if I can help, here's some of my experiences.

Finding and working with great people

 One thing we’ve been going through is finding a reliable team member so I understand you. It’s been hard to do that, we’ve had majority of the team members for a very long time, most since the first few months. But we’re always rotating around designers, reason why is because we’ve been trying to find someone who is creative, reliable, and is honest about the time they invest into the projects. 

In my experience, you can only build so many systems to streamline processes — especially with creative work. I mean, we’re in a very hands on field. So, labor has to be put in at some point and people need to be held accountable to show up to do it. It doesn’t always happen that way though, we’ve had our share of people disappearing, overselling themselves only to drop the ball, or being dishonest about hours. It’s tough to not turn into someone who’s grumpy or frustrated all the time, but it’s a must to practice keeping your bias and energy clean. People can sense it and it’s not good for the work environment.

With that said, here’s some of the measures we’ve done to help vet and develop team members. 

What I tried (and didn't always work)

• Grab a few read only links

• Ask for references or testimonials that are recent

• Give them a small test project to start with

• Find freelancers who have an advanced skill set and a few years of experience 

• Have a short period “one month” of a lower rate, then up the rate. One thing I didn’t like to do is pay others top dollar for unfinished work or very poorly done work. 

You see how most of this just feels like I was operating from a place of fear? It’s understandable, but I learned that creative businesses will never succeed without some level of equal effort and collaboration to create the best work possible.

What I've learned and did actually work

• Experience doesn't equal great work, finding great dedicated people though, that's what lasts

• Training people who are eager to learn to help up their skills. I learned this investment is priceless and will help reveal who's serious about their craft.

• Investing into education (been doing this since the beginning) courses, lessons, etc.

• Creating an honest and open environment

This is a stark difference than what didn’t always work because it’s rooted in trust and effort from both sides. Anything other than that will create straining relationships in my opinion, and effort will slowly decrease. I think it’s good to look at read onlys though!

What I started to do with our last round of hiring (January this year) is train people up, so from here on into the future new hires will have in depth training on properly designing and developing for the way we launch successful projects for a month. A process isn’t always enough, some need to continue to develop in their craft. Worked out well the first time on the fly as a mentor, now it’s an actual program. 

If you're learning new skills, please take your time. You'll be unstoppable

It seems as if people are rushing to build studios and freelance design businesses, and teaching freelance to others without ever being a successful freelancer themselves. I get that the community is super supportive, but that can be a bad thing if iron can’t sharpen iron anymore and we just never hold each other accountable. 

I told a colleague of mine this very same thing. You have to be on point if you wanna teach others this stuff, it’s no joke. I would like all of you to pace yourself, yes there’s opportunities aplenty out here but there’s also creative workers by the dozen and what separates them from you is going to be putting in the work. 

No other way around it. 

Recap

Hope you got some value from this, I enjoyed writing this also, let me know. Let me know your thoughts if you’ve struggled with hiring or letting others go. It’s not easy, and always a situation where you need to adapt to new people and habits. 

Let me know!

Talk soon, take care

-Dexter

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