The Hardest Part of Building A Business
The Amplified Impact Podcast
January 4th, 2023
Building and running a business is not easy… nobody said it was.
Here’s the hardest part though… hiring and training.
In this episode, Anthony gives his experiences with hiring and training new employees, along with the challenges that he has faced and the importance of building a team that can thrive indecently.
It’s vital that you have systems in place for attracting, acquiring, and cultivating talents. And these are skills that Anthony has worked on improving over the past few years.
Listen in to learn more about building and maintaining a rockstar team and get practical tips and advice on how to overcome the challenges you’ll along the way.
TWEETABLE QUOTE:
“That’s the dirty truth about this, you can’t outsource culture at the end of the day.” – Anthony Vicino
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Episode Transcript:
Hardest Part of Building a Business
Anthony: [00:00:00] Hey guys. Welcome back to another episode of Amplified Impact. This is the podcast where people just like you, entrepreneurs and investors and high performers come together to figure out, Hey, what are those very few levers that we can hyper focus on to maximize our return on life? Specifically, we talk about the four spheres of influence around here, those being.
Anthony: Health, wealth and your ability to communicate with the world. So if that sounds interesting to you, you’re in the right place. And I want to share something real quickly before we get into the topic of today’s discussion. I’m hungry this morning for the last like two years I’ve been doing this intermittent fasting where, you know, my last meal is around eight or nine, uh, maybe seven or 8:00 PM and then I don’t really eat again until about 11:00 AM or noon the next day.
Anthony: And I’ve been doing that for a while and I liked it for a long time because it kind of felt like it was building the, the habit of discipline and willpower. And being able to say no to the urge of food and sensation [00:01:00] of like overriding that desire. And I think that’s an important skill. I think discipline is a muscle that we develop.
Anthony: But just recently I’ve been working on this book Hyperfocus, just the working title for now. Don’t got much more else to tell you guys other than it’s a book that helps you like cut through all the distractions in life and procrastination and figure out how to laser focus on the things that matter and like get stuff.
Anthony: And in there is talking about, you know, the four spheres of influence not being health, wealth health, wealth, mindset, and, communication and health is so interesting because really at the end of the day, there’s really only three levers within health that you get to pull, you get to pull, what you put into your body, you get to pull, how you move your body, which is exercise, and then how you recover your body-sleeping.
Anthony: And those are really kind of the three macro things. And I was writing a chapter, working on the chapter on eating. And I was just coming back around to the idea of like, man, food is so damn important, right? Like without it, we do not operate at our optimal and like [00:02:00] the quality of the foods that we put into our body is like just so damn important.
Anthony: And this is super common sense and maybe not even going anywhere, but I’m sharing it with you guys because I started to, to turn my mindset like in the mornings, right? Right about now when I record these episodes. It’s during my three to free time period, which is, you know, the first three things that I do for the day.
Anthony: Nobody can get me during this period of time. It’s like the three most important things that I do, and it’s like the three hour chunk of time that I block out every single day to work on the most important things. So it’s like writing the book, recording this podcast, or whatever other random tasks that need to get done for a particular project at that time.
Anthony: And what I’ve been noticing is that during this three to free time, I’m hungry and I’m getting distracted. I’m getting a little bit ornery and as focused as I could be, and so for the last couple weeks I’ve been experimenting with eating a little bit of breakfast, a little bit of yogurt, and some berries.
Anthony: Just generally it’s been making me like, operate way better. I know that seems silly maybe to a lot of people. But I’ve just been, I’ve been working a lot better in the mornings now. My, the quality [00:03:00] of work is, is just at a higher level. So I share all of this because maybe you’re on that same fat or as that same train as I was, which is intermittent fasting, and I don’t know, maybe I’ll go back to it.
Anthony: But right now I’ve, I’ve just really been digging, like actually eating a little bit of breakfast, putting some food into the, into the stove, or into the engine. So you don’t put, yeah, you don’t put fuel into a stove. You do put food into there. But putting fuel in the engine, right at the, uh, right in the beginning of the day, get that metabolism kickstarted, and then.
Anthony: Um, maintain focus. So that’s been helpful for me, which has nothing to do with today’s topic of the conversation, which is that we are still unpacking lessons learned in 2021. If you are new to the podcast, welcome, it’s good to have you here. I would recommend you go back to the beginning of this series where we laid out the 21 lessons learned in 2021.
Anthony: And I’m going to share something guys. I never actually numbered these. I’m going to go back and number these, but as I’m looking at my list, I feel like I have more than 21. So there’s a very high probability that because I’m just so disorganized at times and [00:04:00] like I don’t really care about numbering things, that I’ve been saying that we have 21 lessons here, but this looks more like, it could be 38, could be 42, I don’t know.
Anthony: So this series, like every day we’re just unpacking another lesson and going deeper. And that’s what we’re doing here today. So whether there’s 21 or 48, it doesn’t really matter. There’s a lot of lessons to be learned. And again, these are not lessons that are new under the sun. There’s no new concepts, right?
Anthony: There’s this is stuff that you’ve probably experienced before. A lot of its common sense. And I think so often in our lives, the most important lessons are not things that we learn for the first time. They’re just things that we remember. We’ve experienced them before and for whatever reason where we are at this moment in our life, they just hit differently.
Anthony: They’re more relevant for whatever reason, we’re in a different position to, to take a different negative wisdom from it, and that was the case for me. As I look back on 2021, all these lessons learned, I’m like, I’ve learned these so many times in over the decade, last decade, two decades, three decades.
Anthony: Nothing about this is new and extraordinary. It’s just for whatever reason last [00:05:00] year, these were things that meant a lot to me and helped me make progress. So today’s lesson is actually one of the most tactical from a business entrepreneurship perspective. And everything else has been largely up to this point, very mental, a lot of mindset related lessons because I think as you escalate through, you know, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, you going from having your physical needs, social needs, and then getting up to self-actualization.
Anthony: as you move up through that, through the echelon of life, whether that’s entrepreneurship or your w2. Like as you’re getting to higher and higher levels of existence, you spend more and more of your time thinking about mindset and philosophy in these things. More about the strategy, less about the tactics.
Anthony: Today is actually fairly tactical in the, in its lesson. Because I get asked this question all the time on podcasts all the time. Like, Hey, what’s the hardest thing about building a business? And my answer’s always the same. Or like, what’s the biggest struggle that you have in your business right now? And I’m like, it doesn’t matter when you say if you say right now, or just period.
Anthony: [00:06:00] Like the struggle is always exactly the same. And the lesson today is that hiring and training are the hardest parts of running a business, period. Full stop. It’s the people, I always say like, people are the hardest part about a business because whether it’s. Just a solo run endeavor, You still have customers, you still have vendors and suppliers and other people that you’re working with and relying on to deliver a result.
Anthony: Or the customer who, like if you never had a products business or a service business, like customers are hard. Customers are hard. They, they have a lot of desires, a lot of needs, and they’re not always the ones that you can service. So this lesson though, came to top of mind for me in 2021 because at Invictus we’ve been growing a lot, been trying to do a lot of hiring.
Anthony: We, we have a staff of around seven people. We’d like to double that and finding good talent. Granted, we are in the midst of the great resignation and people just don’t want to go back to work for whatever reason. Okay. That’s awesome. So finding people is [00:07:00] hard period, but it’s always been hard.
Anthony: Finding good, good help. Finding good help is hard these days, right? Like you’ve heard that before. Your dad probably told you that when you were little and you couldn’t hold the flashlight straight when he was working on a car. Like, thanks dad. Maybe it’s a training, and that’s the other part of this is that like, yeah, hiring is hard.
Anthony: Finding the people, but then actually getting them into the, the culture and you know, indoctrinated, for lack of a better word, and trained to be rock stars. That’s the other hard part. Something I realized that I’m not very good at, and this was back when I was building, escape climbing the manufacturing company that I was involved with for a number of years is that, and there we hired and trained
Anthony: God probably close to 50 or 60 employees. And every single time I was like, man, training is hard. Like, why can’t we just hire rock stars from the beginning? And then they just run out into the pasture and dominate. Right? Like, it doesn’t make any sense. I had this unrealistic expectation that people could just be planted into the system.
Anthony: You give them the handbook and they [00:08:00] just run and dominate, right? Like it, but it doesn’t work that way. You have to have a system for, you know, not just attracting and acquiring talent, but then for actually cultivating and helping get the most out of those. And that’s coaching, that’s training, that’s one-on-one time.
Anthony: And for me, It’s something that I’ve not gotten the most enjoyment out of. Cause I like creating, I like writing, I like creating videos. I like creating products. I like, uh, thinking about marketing campaigns and all that stuff. Training has always felt to me like it’s, it’s a lateral move. It’s something that’s taking me away from working on the things that are the highest and best use of my time.
Anthony: But as I really stop to reflect about like our ability to go far in this life is predicated on the people that we surround ourselves with the, the quality of our team. It became clear to me that like the business does not grow because I’m the, the rockstar. Like the type of businesses that I try to build are the ones that scale beyond me, that I’m not required to [00:09:00] work daily in the business.
Anthony: So when I go to start a new business, I try to take the stance of, okay, how can I build this from day one in a way where it’s not, it doesn’t need me. I can pull out any given point. And of course, in the early days, that’s not realistic because you have limited finances and generally speaking, you’re bootstrapping to a large degree because you don’t know yet if there’s a proof of concept of you don’t want to like porch tons of money into the thing, so you’re going to be doing a lot of the work yourself, at least in the early days.
Anthony: So all this is the same if you’re an entrepreneur, if you’re struggling, one to acquire talent, then two, to cultivate and retain that talent. Those are skills. Those are skills that can be developed, and I want you to look at it through that lens. I don’t want you to use language like I was kind of like petering on that line of saying like, hiring sucks or I’m not good at training.
Anthony: Like those are limiting beliefs that are not going to serve you and where you’re going in your business, regardless of you know what you’re trying to scale. You’re going to need to, to be able to work with people, preferably [00:10:00] on the team, even if you just want to be a solopreneur. Like there comes a point when you still need to have a bookkeeper and a lawyer and like all these other people that you’re going to need to work with.
Anthony: So, That’s the hardest part. Hiring and training. How do you train your CPA? How do you train your lawyer to deliver exceptional results to you? How do you train that new person that just came in in customer service or in product development or the branding expert? Like how do you train these people
Anthony: so that they can do things to your expectation. And then they have the, the ability, the resources to go out there and really thrive. And that was the mistake that I made a lot in the early days, is I would hire people who I’d recognize this person has extraordinary ability, and then I would just leave them to their own devices, trusting that they would figure it out.
Anthony: Inevitably, they don’t live up to the expectation, they, to my expectation, because I didn’t, well, I didn’t accurately articulate what the expectation was and then I failed to give them the resources to actually go and run towards it. The thing that I always talk [00:11:00] about, if you’re struggling with an employee right now and you’re like, I don’t know if this is the right person for this job.
Anthony: Here’s a framework that I find really helpful is ask yourself it’s either slack or lack. Are they slacking in that they lack the motivation or the internal drive, or for whatever reason they just don’t love what they do? Do they, are they slacking? And a lot of times when we look at an employee who’s not living up to our expectations, we default to saying they’re slacking.
Anthony: They’re not doing everything they could because they’re a lazy, no good yellow belly crocodile. I don’t know, but I encourage you to first think about lack. Think about, okay, what have I failed to give them? What are they lacking in order to do this job? Are they lacking the skills? Are they lacking the training? Are they lacking the resources, the confidence, the clarity?
Anthony: Those are all things that you can provide. You can help provide that. Right? Have you not been clear on what the goal is? Have you not given them the training and set the expectation? Have you not given them the resources to actually accomplish [00:12:00] the task that you’ve set for them. And if you’ve done that, if you’ve done everything that you can and you’ve identified, here’s all the things that they were lacking and here’s all the things that we shore up and they are seriously not lacking any of these things anymore.
Anthony: I’ve done everything that I can, then you’re left to default back to, okay, well then they’re slacking. They’re just not doing what they could with those resources and those skills that you clearly know that they have because you’ve given them, then you can have the conversation about, okay, what are we going to do here?
Anthony: This isn’t going to work out. And that’s when you have to let people go. But before you get to that point, before you get to the point of letting people go, always first work through the list of what are they lacking and do what you can to tackle that first. So hopefully that’s an interesting framework that maybe you’ve never considered before, slacking or lacking.
Anthony: And generally, almost 80% of the time, it’s a lack. It’s a lack of leadership, a lack of clarity, a lack of resources. You, shore that up a lot of times and it’s going to take a lot of your time and energy. That’s the, that’s the dirty truth about this, is that you can’t. Outsource. [00:13:00] Um, you can’t outsource culture at the end of the day.
Anthony: You can’t outsource that most important thing. So hopefully you got a little bit of value out of this. If you’re an entrepreneur and you’ve been struggling to get good people in and can’t figure out like, man, this person seemed like a rockstar, but now they’re sucking, you know, look in the mirror and figure out what, what are they lacking that you have not given them?
Anthony: And then go give it to them. And maybe that changes it, maybe not. But at the end of the day, the hardest part about building a business is always hiring and training. Full stop a hundred percent. So if you got some value out of this guys, I appreciate you taking some time to listen. Go Do me a favor. Listen, do me a favor, do me this one solid.
Anthony: Just go leave a review over on iTunes. That’s all I’m asking. Not a big, not a big ask. It’ll take you like 15, 20 seconds. Go leave that. It’ll help a ton in the algorithm spreads to word more people can get the message and hopefully. Together we can amplify our impact by helping other people maximize their return on life.
Anthony: So that’s going to do it for me. If you don’t know who I am again, guys. I’m Anthony Vicino. I’m a bestselling author, serial entrepreneur, and an investor with over 40 million [00:14:00] of assets under management currently. And if you have any questions, if you want to connect, I would love to hear from you.
Anthony: Go share this episode with somebody that you think would get some value out of it. Leave it a comment because this is a two-way conversation right now. It’s just a me monologuing at you, and I don’t want that. I want to be able to have a conversation with you guys. What are you liking? What are you disliking?
Anthony: What’s on the top of your mind? What are you struggling with? Let me know and we’ll see you tomorrow.
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