Most businesses screw up with their first hires.
How do we know this? We screwed up with the first hires in our previous business. And we now work with 100s of business owners who have had the same experience.
Here’s how it hurt:
- Our employees did some things well, but made a ton of mistakes
- Supporting these employees ate up 100s of hours
- The mistakes hit our bottom line and prevented us from delegating more
- We ended up working longer hours, and feeling more stressed
- Most of these employees churned within a year
- We worried about making further hires, and wondered if the answer was to only make senior hires or get external support.
It held our business back BY YEARS. And we're the lucky ones — many businesses don’t make it past their first few failed hires. They simply become one of the 96% that struggle to scale and never make it to $1m in revenue.
In this guide, we’re going to share what went wrong for us, and so many other businesses. And we’ll then share practical solutions to make sure you don’t have the same experience.
If you’d like any help, then get in touch!
The first mistake is hiring a junior employee to do tasks that you don’t currently do.
Perhaps you’re good at sales, but you don’t have enough leads. So it seems sensible to hire someone to help you do marketing.
The problem occurs if you haven’t already proven what marketing tasks will result in leads. Because now, you’re not just hiring someone to do content, or a podcast. You’re hiring someone to be your marketing leader — and that requires far more experience and costs 3–10x as much.
Unless you have a lot of funding, you probably don’t have the budget for a leader right now. You could “take a punt” on someone with less experience, but it’s a big gamble, will require a lot of your support, and could cost you months or even years if it doesn’t pay off.
A more reliable approach is to only hire into roles that you have already tested.
So instead of hiring into marketing, you could start by hiring a sales rep. This is an area that you understand and have tested, and can now manage. By delegating your sales tasks, you can free up your time to learn what works with marketing.
As Dan Martell puts it in his book Buy Back Your Time, when you start hiring you should do so to free up your own time.
This is the reliable and (relatively) low-stress way to start scaling your team.
A bad hire will cause you a ton of frustration.
It might be because they’re not strong enough at the core skills required in their role. Perhaps you hire a content writer whose written content is painful to read, or a developer who struggles with the technologies you use.
Or it could be because that they’re a bad fit for your company culture. For example, if you believe it’s essential to sometimes work longer hours to hit a deadline, and they do not, then you can expect some pain.
The mistake is not finding this out during the recruitment process.
Your recruitment process needs to test both their capability to do the job they’re hired for, and their cultural fit. It’s not enough to simply review 10 CVs, interview a few candidates, and hire the best one. While better than hiring the first person you speak to, you’ll up hiring people who have pretty CVs and a good interview technique.
To fix this, we took inspiration from Eric Herrenkohl’s book How to Hire A-Players, and created a process that properly assesses someones ability to do the job, and their cultural fit.
Yes — a process like this takes a little longer to set up, but the impact is huge. A bad hire will typically cost you $100,000+ and 100s of hours. Reducing that risk should be a no-brainer.
To help you get started, we've shared our own recruitment process below, including a free checklist template to use as a starting point.
We've created a free template you can use for your recruitment process.
You can view it here.
Using this checklist will help in a few ways — you will:
- Recruit better employees (— it's based on our own proven process for recruiting A-players!)
- Review every candidate in exactly the same way, creating a fair and unbiased process
- Make great use of everyone's time
- Be able to delegate many of the steps to other team members or a VA (e.g. to review the initial submissions or run the early interviews)
AirManual users can copy this template into their workspace and customize it however needed.
If you're interested in trialling AirManual or learning more about this process, you can schedule a call here.
When someone joins your business, there’s a lot that they need to understand.
At a high level, this includes:
- How your business works
- What your goals are
- How you work together
- What the company policies are
Some of this information you’ll have documented somewhere. A lot of it, you won’t.
The temptation is to share what you can, and then sit them down in a meeting and share all the important details they need to know.
The problem is that there’s so much information. Sharing it will eat up a lot of your time, you’ll miss important details, and your new employee will forget half of it. Then, over the following weeks and months, meetings will get disrupted, you’ll spot alarming holes in their knowledge, the same questions will come up again and again, and they’ll make mistakes that result in lost revenue or rework.
We’ve found an amazing solution to this problem — self-service onboarding.
It’s quicker to set up than the time you’d otherwise need to spend in meetings. As it's documented, it's easy to spot any gaps and fill them in. You can get your new joiner up-to-speed 2–8x faster, and save your team 100s of hours in supporting the new employee in their first year.
You’ll get your time paid back with the first employee, and the impact is even bigger for the second and third employees.
To get started with self-service onboarding, you can use our templates:
AirManual users can copy these templates into their workspace. The checklists are online and interactive, so both the new joiner and their manager can track their progress. They're also easy to customize as needed.
It's important that the experience is engaging for the new joiner. So we include questions to get the new joiner thinking and sharing their thoughts and questions. We recommend that they have a short daily meeting with a colleague to review how it's going and get any questions answered.
We also have checklists to help your team prepare for and support the new joiner. You’ll see all of these templates available when you create a new page.
For more tips on self-service onboarding, check out episodes 15–22 of our De-stress Your Business podcast. Listen now: Spotify · Apple Podcasts · YouTube
When we talk to business owners about how it’s going with early hires, the response is predictable: It’s frustrating.
The new employees will do some things well, but they’ll also make mistakes. The sales rep will forget to always schedule the next meeting. The software developer will forget some of your clean code rules. The marketer will forget to stay “on brand”.
You’ll give them feedback, and then they won’t make the same mistake the next time. But they’ll make a different mistake. And a few weeks later, the first mistake will repeat itself.
The business owner feels like they’ve given clear guidance and coaching, and doesn’t understand why it’s not getting results. They spend far more time than expected providing support and coaching, and feel uncomfortable delegating anything else. They occasionally wonder if they’ve made a bad hire.
But the fact is, the new employee isn’t getting the support they need.
When you share guidance verbally, you have to expect some of it to be forgotten. This is human nature.
The solution — as explained books such as The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber, SYSTEMology by David Jenyns, Run Like Clockwork by Mike Michalowicz, Buy Back Your Time by Dan Martell, and The Checklist Manifesto by Atul Gawande — is to document how tasks should be done.
We tried a variety of approaches, and by far the simplest, quickest and most effective was what we call “guided checklists”.
These checklists are:
- Quick to create — typically quicker than having a meeting to explain how to do the task
- Easy to use — as you can see in the short video above
- Easy to manage — you can see if tasks have been completed, and if any steps have been missed
- Easy to update — so when you see a mistake happen, you can quickly update the checklist and prevent it from happening again.
Here's an example of a guided checklist for a sales team member to use:
You can create a guided checklist for any kind of recurring task. You can use them in Marketing, Finance, HR, Design, and every other area of your business.
When you hire into a new role, you should think about all of the recurring tasks that the employee will need to do. Then create a guided checklist for each one. The time you invest will pay you back 10x. You’ll be able to handover tasks faster, avoid costly mistakes, provide less support, and delegate more.
Many tasks don’t require much training — particularly if you have guided checklists to support your new employees.
But some tasks require practice and coaching.
One example is doing sales calls — you want to make sure your new team member is taking all the right actions to move a sale forward. You won’t feel confident just handing them the task checklist and leaving them to it!
Larger companies will have training courses for this purpose, with tons of resources and dedicated coaches ready to help. But this is beyond the reach of a young company hiring their first employees.
The solution in most businesses to just to have the new joiner “watch and learn”, which is sometimes called “training by osmosis”.
This is a mistake for a few reasons:
- Like osmosis, it’s a very slow way of transferring knowledge
- You become a bottleneck for their learning — if you don’t have any sales calls that you can bring them to, then they’re stuck
- When observing you, they might not encounter tricky situations that only come up occasionally, like a customer who’s being very difficult
- Supporting the new employee will slow you down, and this gets repeated every time a new employee starts.
We’ve found a really simple solution here — self-service training!
Staying with the example of a discovery call, a self-service training checklist could look like this:
This checklist solves all of our problems. The new joiner can move at their own pace, and you’re not a bottleneck. They can practice tricky situations with their colleague (which will be you for the first salesperson you hire, but you’ll hand this over when you hire the second).
The best bit? It’s super quick to set this up, and it’s going to save you a ton of time.
However well you prepare, the one thing that you can guarantee is that there will be issues.
By issue, we mean anything that comes up that needs some discussion, because you don’t already have a standard way of dealing with it.
Perhaps a customer asks for a discount, or a tool that your team normally relies on isn’t working.
Business owners often make one of two mistakes here:
- Sometimes they jump straight onto the issue. This is called fire-fighting, and causes problems because disrupts whatever else they were working on.
- Sometimes issues get ignored. This causes problems because you're not paying attention to issues that are holding your employees and business back.
In his book Traction, Gino Wickman explains a brilliant approach for making sure issues always get dealt with in.
As part of a regular team meeting, you review a list of all the issues and prioritize 2 or 3 to talk about.
You then discuss and agree how to solve each issue. If you have time, you move onto the second and third issue. If not, you can re-review if they are still the top priority when you have your next meeting.
We use this approach in every team, and it works. Every year, we discuss and solve hundreds of issues. In many cases, these issues result in making an improvement to our guide checklists, training and onboarding.
In your weekly team meetings, you need to:
- Celebrate wins
- Review progress
- Review what’s holding you back
- Agree goals
- Tackle issues
We've found the agenda below to work really well. You can find and copy our template here.
When you hire your first employees, it’s easy to assume that you don’t need 1-2-1s, performance reviews or personal development plans.
This all sounds enterprise-y, and you may have had bad experiences of these activities in companies you used to work for. It also sounds like it’s going to take up a ton of time — time you don’t have!
And yet, in their absence you’ll hit a lot of pain points:
- Without 1-2-1s, you’ll be slow to understand and deal with challenges that won’t come up in team meetings.
- Without performance reviews, you’ll be slow to help your employees grow, and to address issues with poor performance.
- Without personal development, you’ll not get the best out of your employees, and they’ll feel frustrated when they sense a lack of growth
We slowly (and grudgingly) introduced each of these tools to our own business. And each time we did, we were amazed by the positive impact, and never looked back.
We recommend that you set-up 1-2-1s when a new joiner starts. These are weekly 30 minute meetings between a line manager and each employee they support. When done well, you'll quickly see that the time invested gets paid back many times over.
You won’t need to set up the other tools on day one, but should look to set these up within the first year. Without them, you and your employee will both have frustrations that don’t get resolved, and some employees will start looking for new jobs.
The cost of losing a great employee and having to rehire could easily be $100,000+. The cost of not supporting a poor performer to address their challenges or remove them from the company could be even higher.
We’ve created a checklist to help managers run great 1-2-1 meetings with their direct reports.
You can find it here, and AirManual users can copy it to their own workspace (and customize if desired!).
It’s hard to describe just how big the impact can be.
There’s a great quote from the business classic The E-Myth by Michael E. Gerber:
If your business depends on you, you don’t own a business—you have a job. And it’s the worst job in the world because you’re working for a lunatic!”
If you get this right, you can go from having a business that depends on you, to having a robust and scalable business. Because it doesn’t depend on you for the day-to-day operations, you can spend your time on improving the business and helping it to grow faster.
This will have a huge impact — for your bottom line, long term wealth, and mental wellbeing.
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Before we sorted this
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After we sorted this
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❌ We made bad hires
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✅ We haven’t made a bad hire in over 5 years
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❌ Mistakes and rework were common
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✅ Costly mistakes and rework are extremely rare
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❌ We held back from delegating more
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✅ We look to delegate every recurring task
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❌ We were working evenings and weekends
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✅ We rarely work evenings and weekends
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❌ We were too busy to work on the business
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✅ We spend almost 100% of our time working on improving the business
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❌ We wondered if it was the employees fault
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✅ We blame processes, not people
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❌ New joiners felt held back
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✅ New joiners feel incredibly well supported
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❌ Employees churned within a year
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✅ Employees rarely churn — and when they do it’s for good reason
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❌ We thought we needed experienced hires that cost 2x as much
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✅ We’re confident hiring people for their skills and culture fit
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❌ The business depended on us
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✅ The business doesn’t depend on us
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❌ Taking holidays was painful
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✅ Both founders take 4–6 week holidays in the summer, and the business runs itself
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❌ We didn’t have a business we could sell
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✅ We have a robust business that’s a dream for an acquirer to take over
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When we started our new business (AirManual), we took the lessons that we’d learned and have shared with you in this guide.
Our first hires have been incredible. We hired a mid-level developer who is comfortable managing our entire engineering operation. We hired two process consultants without backgrounds in either processes or consulting — they have both excelled in their roles, and amaze our customers.
As a small company, we’ve asked these early hires to wear multiple hats, and they’ve taken on tasks in sales, marketing, customer success, support, development, devops, data security, finance and HR. They’ve done this without feeling overly stressed, or needing to work excessive hours. They’ve felt well supported and motivated to grow.
Our founders both have young families, and want to have great experiences with their children while they’re young. They’ve both been able to take 4+ week holidays at the same time, without issues or a mountain of work awaiting their return.
Every day, we help our customers to achieve the same kind of results. We take what they thought not to be possible, and show them a way to achieve it within months.
Our hope is that this guide will help you on the same journey!
With so much that can wrong, how do you avoid all of these problems?
Fundamentally, you need to accept that part of your job is now to recruit and support employees. This requires some investment of time, but if you do it well, you’ll free up more time by delegating tasks to your new employees.
Before you start recruiting, you need to:
As you get to closer to their start date, you’ll also need to:
- Set up self-service onboarding
- Create task checklists
- Create self-service training (if needed)
- Schedule team meetings
- Schedule 1-2-1s
After a new joiner has started, you’ll want to keep improving your systems. This can be done by identifying and tackling issues in the team meetings and 1-2-1s.
When you repeat this process with a second new joiner, it’ll feel like magic. Most of your systems will already be in place. You’ll get to the point where you can hire and onboard new team members with almost no disruption to your other priorities.