[2025 Audit] Great Hires Are 10-20X Better, Not 10-20% Better

And this is one of them. And it is: the difference between someone on your team who is good and someone who is great is not 10 to 20% improvement. It's not slightly better. It is more like 10 to 20X in terms of productivity, output, value to the business, impact on the business. And I really mean this.

And this is a relearning. Because fundamentally I know this, right? Like I came from the corporate world where I had big budgets, I had a lot of money, I could go out and hire A-players, I could be very selective, I could offer incredibly competitive comp plans, and that's the world I came from. And so I would look for the A-players.

Now when I went out on my own as a solopreneur and budgets were a lot tighter, I started to develop some bad habits, candidly. Like I was looking for cheap people. Like I had all of this work to get done, right? I had this big vision, I'm like, "All right, this is what I want to build, this is what we're going to do," and I wanted to do it all.

And so I'm like, "I need two, three people. I only have the budget for this, so I would hire cheaper people with the idea of getting it all done." And it's just a bad habit. That the budget constraints and the budget limitations kind of helped me... or I installed because of those constraints.

And the better approach would have been to look at all of those things, do a better job of prioritizing what needs to get done, and then go hire one fucking A-player to really focus on the most important thing, instead of trying to hire several cheaper people to do all of the things that I thought needed to get done at the time.

What it came down to was failed prioritization. And I ended up with mediocre people on the team, which increased the noise in the business, increased the need for oversight from me. So in a lot of cases, most cases candidly, it wasn't even like a source of leverage. It diluted my time more than it did extend or expand the capacity of the business because I was constantly micromanaging and fixing and cleaning up and replacing mediocre people.

And so the business didn't move forward nearly as quickly as it would have if I would have said, "Listen, like we're just going to have to let a lot of fires burn. That's the most important thing, and I'm going to go hire the best fucking person that I can get to attack that thing." The business would have accelerated dramatically faster or more quickly. And this past year has.

Right? Like this past year, it's been a priority of mine to do a better job of prioritizing and only accept A-players into the business. And in many cases, that's limited the things that I want to get done, but it's forced me to do a better job of prioritizing. So I kind of went back to my roots when it comes to talent.

Now, the one thing I will tell you when it comes to hiring A-players, the relearning for me is: you know, if you want to do this in your business, my number one recommendation is to start treating hiring kind of like video production. And so this is kind of like a joint lesson.

The thing that I've learned about video production is that if you spend way more time on pre-production and strategy, you get a far better result and you dramatically reduce the amount of work that you have to do post-production. So from a video standpoint, that means: "Hey, are you really spending time researching topics and getting the hook right and doing the strategic stuff that helps you before you hit record on a video?"

The more time you spend on that, the easier it is to record and the faster you're going to go through post-production because it's all been thought through. Hiring is much the same way. Right? Instead of jumping straight to a job post, getting that sucker published, and then interviewing people, taking the first person that kind of meets like, "Uh, good enough," and expecting them to perform.

And then later realizing: not the right person, have to micromanage, you know, not enough expectations up front, the role's not clear enough... you know, all of these things that then dilute your time and increase the likelihood that that role isn't going to work. And even if that person is pretty decent, like the role is not set up properly and they don't have the right onboarding and training and this and that.

So treat it more like video production. Spend more time on the strategy. Spend more time on the process and the system and the things that you are going to use to find the right person and make sure that they get off to a good start. And you will improve the likelihood that you find the A-player and accelerate the ramp-up time.

So we started spending a lot more time on, "Hey, what does success in this role really look like?" Right? Like beyond a standard job description. Like what are the things... day to day, what does this role look like? If somebody came in and just knocked the fucking cover off the ball, what would that look like? What would they be doing? What would their day look like? What would their week look like? What would the KPIs... how would I know?

And then also thinking about: who would really be the kind of person to do that? And what I mean by that is not just, "Hey, they need three to five years experience, and a bachelor's degree," and a this and that—by the way, degrees are... anyway, different topic. But you know what I mean. Like the standard stuff that you would put in a bullet point format for a job description.

Think beyond that. Like if you're running a remote team, what do they really need to be successful? Well, shit, they need to be proactive. They need to have a strong work ethic. They need to be able to communicate without having to be asked. They need to know... like have they worked in a remote environment before? How did they communicate with their boss before that things were being done without being micromanaged? What were the systems and the processes that were necessary to manage the productivity and the output? What's a good fit for the culture? What's a good fit for that particular team or that particular division?

What are the things beyond the hard requirements that go into the role—which are frankly really easy to develop—who is the kind of person that's going to fucking crush it in that role? And then, what kind of process or system do we need to create to really find that person?

What are some unorthodox questions that we could ask? What are some things that we can do within the process to screen people in or screen people out? How can we get them engaged with the team? How... like what kind of test project can we create?

Like, we spend so much more time on that. And then the hiring is a lot faster. And then the ramp-up is where you really see the exponential returns from the pre-production work, we'll call it for lack of better term. And that change for us, it feels slower on the front end because, man, we're doing all this work. It feels like we're... "Wouldn't it be faster just to put up the job posting, get flooded with applications, and try to pick the best person?"

You think. But it's not the way it works. And if you really measure the amount of time that you invest and the amount of time it takes to get to full output that you really want, that approach versus one where you spend a lot more time on pre-production, there's no comparison. And the caliber of the people that you stack the team with, there's no comparison.

For me, the lesson is a relearning in: the caliber of the people that you bring into your business has such a huge impact on the speed at which you're going to operate, the effectiveness with which you're going to operate, and how much margin you have as a CEO or as a leader in your business to focus on other things versus managing mediocrity and trying to fix mistakes that could have been avoided.