Dave Braun
00:00:02
Hello friends. Welcome to the HireMyVA Team and Business Building Podcast brought to you by Yoogozi.com. In this podcast and at HireMyVA, we help you to reclaim your freedom through hiring and thriving with virtual assistants without breaking the bank, of course that means your bank. I’m Dave Braun, and as usual, I’m here with Larry Broughton, my fantastic friend and mentor, you know, Larry, you’re traveling through life with me. I love it. It’s fun, challenging in so many ways, but we’re both growing and have our struggles, but we’re moving forward. And Larry, you know, you’ve coached so many people. I just can’t mean we just can’t even, you know, keep count. So it’s an honor to work with you my friend.
Larry Broughton
00:00:47
Thank you, handsome David. It’s good to see you. You haven’t even commented like I’m in a unique place. This is my mobile office, as it turns out I’ve been kicked out of my office. And so I’m recording from the car. So my friends, I apologize if the audio is not great, or if the video is not great, but we’re, we’re going with the flow. Entrepreneurship it never ends right? You do what you have to do to get things done?
Dave Braun
00:01:16
So the important thing is the content, correct. Right? You guys get, if you get hung up on the audio sometimes you’re going to miss out on a lot of stuff in life.
Larry Broughton
00:01:26
It’s been interesting to see how many people actually even noticed.
Dave Braun
00:01:30
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. All right. Well, we have, we’ve got a cool topic today. All right. What is it? All right. So this is episode 123. And our question is how to hire someone where you don’t have the expertise, or you know nothing about the position?
Larry Broughton
00:01:50
Well, gosh, this is a really good question.
Dave Braun
00:01:54
And guess what we are going to, if you’re growing your business, you are going to face that we are all going to face that.
Larry Broughton
00:02:00
That’s where I was going with this. Because as businesses grow, we have to take on more responsibilities and you know, you and I were just talking to about a, somebody who’s in one of our programs and their businesses growing, and they’ve got to switch up roles and it’s outside of their skill set to actually not just interview, but manage someone who’s in their stable of team members. Yeah. So this is a really good question. This is why masterminds are so darn important. You know, one of the things is if you’re in a strong mastermind of say 88 or 10 or 15 other business owners, they can help you with this kind of stuff. I remember the first time I hired a CFO; it was way outside my skill set. Right. And so I had a other CFOs that I knew first, I went to referrals for them.
Larry Broughton
00:03:07
If there’s people that, you know, love and trust, start there with referrals. There’s nothing wrong with either bringing in someone into the interview process date or having them do the initial few interviews. And then you do the final kind of find out, do they fit the core values? Do they understand the vision and mission? And how do you work with personality wise? So those are a couple of three recommendations, right? There are masterminds tap into the power of your mastermind. If you’re not in a mastermind program or you don’t have a mentor coach, you’re wrong, let’s start there. You got to do that. The other thing is, as I mentioned, just to recap where we are so far, have somebody who is an expert in this area, do the interviews for you until a certain point. And then you do the kind of final interviews to make sure that they put the core values and the vision in the mission. But I’m going to hand this over to you while I take a drink here, but they had this crazy thing out there. It’s kind of a new invention. The worldwide web.
Dave Braun
00:04:14
Yeah. Well guess what? Yeah. I think this is kind of your friend in this case, right?
Dave Braun
00:04:22
And I think that even when you take recommendations from people, even when you hire somebody to help you or have somebody help you, you’ve got to at least know a little bit. Larry, I think it’s in a way it’s kind of the, like, if you have an issue that you’re going to go to a lawyer and have them work with you to resolve a case, you should be, you should know a little bit enough about the law and your case, and what’s going to happen so that you are sure that this lawyer is not going to steer you down the wrong road. Even if that lawyer has been recommended by somebody else.
Larry Broughton
00:05:01
Yeah. Clearly you need to rely on experts, Dave. I think that’s what you’re saying. But this is just one of the responsibilities of an entrepreneur leader, business owner. You have to be dedicated to lifelong learning. If you don’t know more about different business functions in your business today than you did five years ago, I hate to say it again. That’s the second you’re wrong. You need to be that you constantly need to be learning. I know a lot more about the CFO finance accounting space today than I did when I hired my first CFO. I know how to structure deals now. I know I can, I know how to read financial statements like insight. Now you’ve seen me do it, right? So you have to continue to learn. I, but Larry, I’m running my business. Well, sorry. That’d be so passionate about this, that in your downtime, this is your hobby.
Larry Broughton
00:05:54
Learning more about your business, right? Larry, I want work-life balance. You’re in the wrong space then. No such thing as work-life balance, I was at an event this past weekend, Dave, just this get sidetracked for a second. And they were talking about work-life balance. Like no high achiever has ever said, I’m going to spend 40 hours doing this and 40 hours doing that. And this there’s no such thing. You’re if you want to be an be excellent in anything, you need to be obsessed with it. It’s just the way it is. What you need to be searching for is not life balance, but boundaries. Correct.
Dave Braun
00:06:35
Okay. We did a whole podcast on that.
Larry Broughton
00:06:37
Sure did, and I was going to mention that. So go search for that one day. Maybe you can do a quick search or at some point we can put a link to that podcast, but yeah, it’s going to take some extra effort, Dave, for you to get up to speed on whatever area it is that you don’t know about. But the internet, YouTube is great at finding the basics on it. Right? So you can say, Hey, let’s say that you’re hiring. I talked about the CFOs You’re trying to hire an accountant, you know, best questions to ask accountants. That’s a quick internet search.
Dave Braun
00:07:12
Yeah. Let’s demonstrate that. Okay. I’m going to share my screen.
Larry Broughton
00:07:17
All right. So share your screen, David
Dave Braun
00:07:19
Let me share my screen and all right, so let’s do this.
Larry Broughton
00:07:25
You’re going to prove me wrong.
Dave Braun
00:07:28
No, no, no, no, no. I got my notes here. So you may see my notes from the episode. So let’s do this. Let’s search for accountant interview questions. Okay. We kind of did this and ahead of time, but you can see one of the things you want to do is when you mean that you’ll some of the first results would be great, but you go to a site like this and of course there’s lots of fluff ahead of time and all that. But what you want to, sorry,
Larry Broughton
00:08:04
Just show me the questions.
Dave Braun
00:08:05
Yeah. Let’s get down to the questions. So here’s my question, for example, one of the biggest challenges. Well, one of the things that you want to make sure that you do is, and this site is kind of good, is that you want to see an example answer or have an understanding of what you are looking for in the answer. If you ask a question of somebody like this and you have no idea how they might answer, then you can still get fooled.
Larry Broughton
00:08:37
Alright. I hope, I hope he’s got better questions. Cause that’s a pretty, if you don’t know, they can tap dance around it.
Dave Braun
00:08:42
Prior experience with this, right. That’s a little bit soft. I don’t know about this question, but you get, here’s a bunch here. What skills do you think are essential for?
Larry Broughton
00:08:56
Now? We’re getting there now we’re getting somewhere, right?
Dave Braun
00:08:59
Yeah. Can you describe an accounting process that you helped develop or improve? Okay. Now there should be. At some point when you’re coming up with these questions or where you’re looking at these, you should have a little bit of an idea. Like I said, about what the answer might be.
Larry Broughton
00:09:17
Yeah. Yeah. Well, let’s not forget as well, Dave, your mastermind is a great resource. Just your business network. If you’re not in the mastermind, start asking folks your tax accountant or your CPA might have some recommendations for you. Yeah.
Dave Braun
00:09:42
Yeah. And then another search you can do is you can search for mistakes. That blank position makes where you go and search for that. And then you can, even one of your questions could be, Hey, I’ve read that. Here’s one of the biggest mistakes that blank make is that true? Or you can ask them what they think are the biggest mistakes. If they don’t have an idea of what some of those mistakes are, then they probably don’t know the position very well, because if they’ve been in it for a while, then they probably have made those mistakes.
Larry Broughton
01:10:13
Yeah. And good interview questions are going to flush all this kind of stuff out. Right? One of the questions I always like to ask is to talk, if we are to line up all of your performance appraisals that you’ve ever had. Tell me about those areas that you really excelled that, okay. There’s probably a theme also of areas that people wish that you were a little better. Tell me about those and dive into that area. right? Now, don’t forget reference checks. I don’t know why I was doing a kind of informal survey a few years ago with business owners who were interviewing people and ask them, do you actually do reference checks? And so many people don’t do reference checks right now. I know there are some states where it’s very difficult to do reference checks because most people are so afraid of the litigiousness of the work environment right now that they just, all they’ll do is confirm dates.
Larry Broughton
01:11:02
And whether they’re eligible for rehire or not. But you know, you get to the right person in the organization like that’s, if you’re calling HR, if you actually call other people, some people are willing to give up, give up the goods, you know? So don’t discount reference shacks, but also once you start doing the interview, not the interview, the research that you were talking about, like what was, what are some best interview questions? What are common mistakes? And you can tap into your mastermind or your network, maybe to blow up a quick quiz that you could pose to everyone. I’m surprised we’re talking about accountants, but how many accountants don’t know basic math, or they can’t do it very fast. So you can, you can always come up with some kind of quiz for it.
Larry Broughton
01:12:01
But this is sometimes where it’s even more important. Dave, not to forget the thing that we, the MIC thing or MIC thing. However, you want to define it, right? Where we ask questions around three different areas that are very important, their motivation, their integrity and their capacity. If there’s somebody who’s highly motivated and they have lots of integrity, then they should have some capacity and their capacity to grow up and they can, they have capacity to learn, So let’s say you get along really well with this person. They’ve got a lot of integrity, you know, you can send them to a, there are tons of what, what’s the online learning platform skills to the skill set, where you can go to conferences and small seminars and those kinds of things to get people up to up to speed. So there’s a lot of ways that you can, you can do with this.
Dave Braun
01:13:01
I agree. And for some of these positions, you’ve also got to make sure that you have a in the back of your mind, you’ve got to have a, an idea of how much training you’re willing to let them take. Do they have to come in and totally hit the ground running? Do they have to be an A-plus expert or can they be high in MIC and take a little bit of time to get up to speed.
Larry Broughton
01:13:27
Yeah. Yeah. So I guess as we wrap this thing up, Dave, don’t be afraid to, to do some research, reach out to your mastermind members. It’s going to take some extra time. I know that this is probably, if you’re a new business, maybe you’ve been outsourcing this. So maybe use your outsource as a resource. Talk to your whenever scale, we’ve been using the example of an accountant for, for this purpose. You talk to your CPA or your, your tax accountant, but it was a marketing thing. Talk to anybody in the marketing arena that you know if it’s a developer type of person, talk to all the developers that you know, you’re going to have to get out of your comfort zone, I guess, is what I’m trying to say, Dave. And you’re going to have to humble yourself a little bit. I think the worst thing, Dave, not the worst thing among the worst things I’ve seen people do is to pretend that they know what they don’t really know because experts will snip it out and it will just undermine your credibility.
Larry Broughton
01:14:38
Yeah. I think when you say is, I’ve been pushing this for a while. I want to bring this in-house, I’m not an expert at it. And so I’m looking for an expert and you can say, I know enough to be dangerous, to be honest, but no enough where you can ask them questions where they can’t snow. You and I can’t tell you early in my career, I had experts outside my company interview folks. And then just to say, I’m going to say that again. I, to hit people over the head with this, if you’re not in a mastermind, this is one of the great reasons why you should be in a mastermind because they can help you out. They can come in and interview people with you or for you.
Dave Braun
01:15:18
Yeah, we’ve done it. Remember that one time for our client, they were searching for a COO position. And we interviewed a few folks for them.
Larry Broughton
01:15:28
Right? Yeah. Rank them in order that we thought that they either be hiring them. And yeah, absolutely. I just want to agree. This is not like out of the ordinary. You’re not alone on this. It happened all the time. And so if you were to recharge your mastermind members or your coach or mentor and say, Hey, I need help on this. They’re not going to be surprised by this. It’s part of our growing process. But somebody who was Dave, we get wrapped up. Oh, I’m the only one who’s insufficient in this area. We are all, not all many of us are faking it till we make it, you know, or did at one point in our career until we’ve learned lessons along the way.
Dave Braun
01:16:12
Absolutely. Absolutely. Well, those are some great, great tips. And I think with all of these different tips, especially Larry, especially the mastermind, having a network of folks that you can rely on. I mean, that’s just good for your life and your business, irrespective of this particular question.
Larry Broughton
01:16:30
For sure.
Dave Braun
01:16:31
All right. Well, so let’s wrap this up. Thank you folks for joining us and being with us today. Remember building a team is the way to reclaim your freedom. And you’ve got to do some of these tips we talked about if you’re going to build a quality team. But if you need some help, we are here to help you with our course and community and our White Glove Service, where we find a rockstar VA for you. So three things we’d love for you to do, and we’d really appreciate it. Number one, subscribe to this podcast. If you haven’t already been. So either on your iPhone or Android phone and on YouTube at the little subscribe button and the bell next to it, hopefully you’ll get reminders for that. Number two, give us a rating course. We’d love for you to do that. We’ll leave some kind of a comment below the video- Anything. Ask us a question we’ll get in there and we’ll comment and answer that question for you. This will also help us to get the word out. And then number three, go to Hiremyva.com for more information on our course and community and our White Glove service. Because remember even without experience, you’ll learn how to prepare for hire and thrive with virtual assistants. Larry and I have helped a lot of folks. We want to help you too. So just go to Hiremyva.com for more information.
Larry Broughton
01:17:47
Well, that’s right. Hey my friends, do something significant today, the world is begging for that. All right. God bless you. God keep you and God hold you. All right. We’ll catch you on the flip side. See you later. Bye everybody.
