03/15/2016
Hawks and Hens: How To Hire The Perfect Personal Assistant
Not long ago at one of my Roundtable meetings, a new member introduced himself and said:
"I hired a couple of people to help me with customer support, but I'm still running in a dozen different directions every day. What's the first step to building a team so I'm not spinning all these plates?"
Without a doubt the most liberating step you can take in this situation is to find a highly competent personal assistant. If you don't already have one, that's the very next task on your list—before you hire an operations manager, president or general manager.
An assistant who knows your business as well as you do can give you an easy 50-70% productivity gain. You'll appreciate this the first time you realize that you don't have to play patty cake with 5 people to figure out the best time to have lunch.
Right now you probably don't even realize how many $10 an hour tasks you're doing all day, and you'll be amazed when you develop the habit of starting each day looking for chores to delegate to your PA.
When I said this, another member piped up with a cautionary tale:
Three years ago he hired a promising young person to handle his busywork. And after he invested a lot of time and money to train his new assistant, the person whisked off to start their own consulting practice.
So he hired another one—and got left in the lurch again.
And again.
And AGAIN.
So now he's helped launch 4 consultants (who let's be honest are probably competing with him) and he STILL doesn't have an assistant. He's out all the time to train them—and he's stuck without an assistant.
That's when Nancy weighed in. Nancy's a longtime Roundtable veteran who's built the premier talent selection agency in the UK. Nancy's entire business revolves around putting the right job candidates in the right positions.
And her insight was golden. It boiled down to this:
You're attracting the wrong people, because you're hiring for skills and ignoring temperament.
When you hire an assistant because they already understand Infusionsoft, there's a high likelihood that they are more interested in Infusionsoft than they are in your business.
And someday soon they're going to fly from the nest.
In Planet Perry parlance, you're hiring wild wolverines and hoping they'll behave like pampered poodles.
Nancy's advice for avoiding this mistake is to look for an assistant who lives to care for other people. More of a "mother hen" than a sharp-eyed hawk.
You want someone who will walk into your biz, take one look around and say, "Tsk, tsk, what a mess. PLEASE let me help you."
On the Marketing DNA test, this person will probably rate high in Producer. On the DiSC assessment, they'll have generous amounts of S and C.
This type of person will be more likely to thrive while herding all the cats to keep them off YOUR desk.
And they're not going to drop you on the floor the instant a potential consulting client saunters by and flutters their 5-figure eyelashes at them.
Carpe Diem,
Perry Marshall
