599: Who Should I Hire Next? with Enoch Sears

Enoch Sears42min

Enoch Sears

00:00

One of the biggest pitfalls of hiring in the architecture industry for small firms is hiring someone that you the owner, need to train, and you need to shadow and you need to mentor. Hello architect nation, and welcome back. I'm Enoch Sears, and this is the show where you'll discover tips, strategies and tricks for running an architectural practice that lets you do your best work more often. Today, we're going to be talking about one of the most transcendent, one of the funnest, but also one of the most challenging aspects of running an architectural practice, and that is this, hiring people. Now the topic of today's episode, particularly is this, who should I hire next? And of course, during your growth as a firm owner, going from being perhaps a sole practitioner to growing your practice, the question that may be on your mind is, what's the next person I need to hire for my team? Now likely this question is occasioned by a couple of problems that you may be experiencing. So first of all, we're going to talk about the problems in today's episode. We're going to jump over take a look at what's possible for you. We'll have a look at some of the principles involved when you're thinking about who you need to hire next and last, but not least. We'll go over the path. We'll go over specific steps that you need to take to be able to move yourself and your practice forward powerfully in regards to this question of who should I hire next? So with that, let's jump right in to today's episode. This episode is sponsored by Smart practice, the world's leading step by step business training program that's helped more than 103 architecture firm owners structure their existing practice, so the complexity of business doesn't get in the way of their architecture. Because you see, it's not your architecture or design skills that's holding you back. It's the complexity of running a business, managing projects and people, dealing with clients, contractors and money. So if you're ready to simplify the running of your practice, go to Business of architecture.com. Forward slash smart to discover the proven simple and easy to implement smart practice method for running a practice that doesn't get in the way of doing exceptional architecture. We

Rion Willard

02:14

are looking for architect developer stories for the Business of Architecture podcast. So are you an architect developer with valuable insights to share? We're always on the lookout for passionate voices in the industry to join us on the Business of Architecture podcast. If you're ready to share your journey, lessons, strategies with our global audience, we'd love to hear from you reach out to us to explore being a guest on our show and help inspire other architect developers on their path. We'd be interested in hearing your story, whether you're at the very beginning of your development story, or whether you have $100 million portfolio of projects already in the bag completed. We'd like to hear from you if you're working with the developers, or that you've developed a number of small houses, or you're working at a larger scale, if you're thinking

Enoch Sears

03:05

about who you should hire next, it's likely that you're experiencing one of these problems. Number one, you just have too much work. If you have too much going on, it feels like you're always running around. It feels like you're never being able to deliver your deadlines at the timing that you would like to be able to deliver them. So the question here is, how do you know that you actually need to hire someone? And once you know that who's the next person that you need to hire, typically, there are going to be some warning signs that you're experiencing if you need to hire someone like I said, it may feel to you like the ability that you have, your ability to get work out on time is not meeting your expectations. Perhaps it's not meeting your clients expectations, or perhaps it's not meeting your aspirations. Perhaps you're like, you know, I know we could be doing this work faster, but I'm getting so bogged down, because right when I start getting one product on track, we start moving ahead with something. Something else comes in, throws everything off kilter, and then before you know what, we're picking up the pieces, we're reacting to fires instead of taking things proactively. Another, another sign that you might need to hire someone is that you're working too much and you're not getting ahead so you as the firm owner, likely because you take so much responsibility for what's happening in the practice because you care about it, because it's your heart and soul, because it's your future, you're always going to care about your practice more than anyone else will care about it. And so what you might find is that as you're trying to meet these deadlines, as you're trying to meet client expectations, as you're trying to provide an excellent service, as you're trying to do excellent work, as you're trying to make sure that the word of mouth about the projects and that the way you deliver your services are going up, so that the positive worth of mouth, word of mouth spreads. What you may find yourself doing is jumping in to fix the problem, because no one else can do it quite like you. Can and so ultimately, this can lead to you working too much. It can lead to you spending too much time at the office, not taking vacations, eventually even leading to burnout and perhaps even wanting to throw on the towel, which is a terrible, terrible place that we want to help keep you from with this podcast episode. Now, along with this, is a high level of stress. So stress nowadays, doctors are saying that this is one of the this is the new smoking. This is the invisible thing that's attacking our health right now, because as we sit behind computers, as we deal with stress, stress is good to a certain degree. But what scientists and doctors have told us now is that elevated cortisol levels in our blood, which is the stress hormone. This stress hormone when we're under stress, when we feel like we're meet trying to meet a deadline, when we feel like there's an expectation we're not going to meet, when we feel like we're under threat, our body, our brain chemicals, automatically release this cortisol. And what this cortisol does is it puts the blood flow in the areas where it's needed the most. So it puts us into the fight or flight response. Now, typically, what that means is that it's going to when we're under high levels of cortisol, we may be experiencing the freeze response. This is where we feel the inability to make decisions. This is where we're wondering if we should hire, but then we don't hire, and so we keep on spinning our wheels month after month after month after month, because this fear of negative consequences, this cortisol that's pulsing through our system, causes us to get into what I call analysis paralysis. The second thing that can happen with the cortisol dump of this of this fight or flight response, is that we decide to fight. So you may just jump in. You might say, You know what? Forget it. I'm just going to hire the first person. We need to hire someone tomorrow, and so you hire the wrong person for the position. This person doesn't end up fulfilling the job responsibilities, and now you need to work more than you did in the past to be able to get the same amount of work done. You're actually earning less. You're working harder, and now you're stressed out because you have an additional person on the payroll. And then the last thing that can happen is what we call flight, which is, you know, hey, we have too much work going on right now. I'm going to bury my head in the computer. I'm going to ignore that this is happening, and I'm just going to put my short of the wheel, and I'm just going to hope that we can get through this with the minimum amount of chaos, the minimum amount of disaster, the minimum amount of negative consequences. Now, as you're sitting here listening to this podcast, you can probably tell that none of these particular options are very good. These are not good approaches for running a business. It's not good approach, either from a short term solution or a long term solution. Now we're not even talking here about the impacts, the medical impacts of cortisol on your body as a business owner, cortisol, over time, wears down your joints. It elevates your heart rate. It causes pre diabetes. It can contribute to things like elevated heart rate, as I said, heart palpitations. Now, these are things that oftentimes I hear from owners talking about, especially being surprised when they're in their late 40s and suddenly their doctors telling them that they have high blood pressure, they have pre eclampsia, they have something that's impacting their body's ability to function and their longevity. This is real wake up call for a firm owner, and if it hasn't happened to you, then this is a warning call. This is a wake up call to you right now to say, look, it's time to get your business into what we call a flow state. It's time to move away from the dread practice and move over to the smart practice. Because these impacts of stress, these impacts of high blood pressure, these impacts of feeling like you're always on the run, they not only affect your medical physical being, they also impact your relationships with your family, with your children. This is something that I've just been amazed time and time again, how this happens that even right now in my business career with the consulting business that we run here at Business of Architecture, it's easy as a business owner to let the business suddenly, like like a little octopus, put tentacles in any area of my life. For instance, I can be at my son's water polo match, and then there's a little itch inside that says you better check your email, or I can be on vacation, and the little itch says you better check slack and see what the team's up to. Now, if these impulses aren't reined in, if we don't set up boundaries around our life and around our business, then ultimately the business can then end up impacting every single area of our life. And this is what one of our courageous firm owners, who has implemented smart practice found. And I'm going to tell you a quick story about how this was impacting her life, because she indeed, she had a small team for her and her husband Carolina, civerolo and her husband Eric Dias, based out of McAllen, Texas, had a small team, four people at the time. And what Carolina found is that she was just working all the time. As you can imagine, as a small firm owner, she was one that was in charge of the administration, so she handled the finances, she handled the hiring, she handled the HR questions. She was one that oftentimes handled the calendaring and the scheduling of meetings, in addition to her architectural responsibilities, in addition to overseeing the proposal. Processes and making sure that all the numbers were working. So it was a lot, and she was living under the story, and under the idea that, hey, this is just what needs to happen, right? We have this ethos as business owners that, you know, what part of running a business is just being the martyr. We just have to, you know, to build something great. We have to suffer. We have to sacrifice, which is true to a degree, but there becomes a problem when the sacrifice then becomes the purpose, where no longer the liberation, the freedom comes a purpose. We come so addicted to doing. We become so addicted to doing everything ourselves. We come so addicted to the work from the positive endorphins that getting something done actually does for us is that we then become slaves for our business. So Carolina was she has two small boys at the time. This happened. This story that I'm telling you happened about four years ago, and her sons were much younger at the time, and one of them came home from preschool had this beautiful drawing that he had done in a child's handiwork, right? Little krill or crayons with scribbles everywhere. And she looked at this picture as any good mom, what did would and she said, What is this a picture of? And he said, Well, mommy, it's our favorite thing. And she noticed, sure enough, there on the paper was in, you know, in writing, was my mom's favorite thing. And then there was this box on the paper where the the child was then invited to do a drawing and kind of visually represent what their parents favorite thing was. And she said, What is this drawing of? And then her son, it's her son, said the following thing that made her heart sink. Her son said, Mom, it's you working on the computer.

Enoch Sears

11:38

Now this was obviously an innocent comment, a truthful comment from a young child that didn't know any different. But as you can imagine, as a parent, as someone who went through a lot to bring a little human being into the world to at an early age, hear that this little child was telling her that his vision of what mommy liked most was to see her working on the computer was heart wrenching. And having kids myself, I can tell you that would be heart wrenching for a mother or a father to think that this is the future that I'm charting for my child. Now it may sound dramatic, but let's face it, you probably know growing up as I did, that there were times in your life when you felt like your parents weren't there, and there may have even been traumatic scars. Maybe you're not like that. Maybe you, in your childhood, grew up with parents who were wonderfully attentive, if you felt like they were the center of your world, and then, if that's the case, good for you. However, a lot of people don't have that situation. So Carolina, what she knew is that she didn't want to set that precedent for her child. So this was a wake up call for Carolina. This is when she did a little search on the internet to find out strategies for how she could manage her business better. She came across Business of Architecture, and the rest is history. Recently, she posted on our internal network a beautiful picture of her and her two boys going home early from work at 3pm so she could take them out for ice cream and a trip to the park. So you can see that what we do in our business, it's not just about stress. It's not just about our expectations of our clients. It actually has a major impact on the ones, the people that we care about most, our children, our family members, our friends, and most importantly, the person who we end up neglecting the most is usually ourselves. Now I myself know that this has happened as well. I remember a couple of Christmases ago, we had a bunch of family in town, and as a business owner, I had things come up where I felt like I needed to work when everyone else was going up to the snow. And you know, when I was a kid, my mom died, when I was 16 years old, and left a family behind. When my mom, my mom died, I was 16, and I had eight younger siblings, and my dad, as you can imagine, just let that sit with you for a second. Here's my dad. He's a school teacher. His wife dies, and his oldest son. That's me, 16 years old and my youngest my youngest sister was three years old at the time. So we went from in my household. We went from a family that felt where I felt very nurtured. I felt like very well taken care of. Our mom was just a great mother, just very involved in our life, making sure she was there for us to suddenly having that ripped away from me, and then turning our house into like this chaotic mess where everyone was just trying to survive and scramble for themselves. Now, in your own childhood, you may have had anything along the spectrum. You could have had parents that were completely not there. You just kind of raise yourself, or you may have grown up in a very nurturing environment where you felt everything was provided for, and you're very grateful for that relationship. But here's the thing, what I what I got from that experience, was that in my future life, in my professional life, I didn't want to sacrifice my family for my business. I didn't want to sacrifice my relationships for money. I didn't want to sacrifice these things that were so important to me, that were of lasting value for something that was more short term. This is what can happen, and this is a warning sign to us as business owners when we're in a situation where we know we need to. Hire. So in summary, these are some of the problems that you may be experiencing when you're asking yourself this question, who should I hire next? You're working too much. You're finding that the projects are not getting out the door quickly enough. You're finding that you're doing rework. You're finding there's inefficiencies in the practice. You're finding that perhaps you're having to tell clients that you're going to miss a deadline that you're going to get the work to them later, or you're just not happy about how quickly the work is moving through the office, or perhaps you find yourself doing a lot of things that you know someone else could be doing. So let's jump over to the possibility here. Let's say that you you figure out who is the next person to hire. You get this person into place. Here's what it looks like. Very simply, the work gets done quickly and efficiently. The possibility is word spreads about your excellent work and the service that you provide. Now, it's one thing to have great work and it's another thing to have great service. As a matter of fact, I was just my wife and I were in France at Ryan Willards wedding recently, and we went to a fantastic restaurant that had really great food, but the service was horrible. Now it didn't help that I didn't speak French, but what I can tell you is that the service wasn't great. Now this is not the standard. Most of the time when we were over there in France and Europe, we find that the the service is top notch as par excellence is absolutely amazing. But what I found with this experience is that the good food did not make up for the poor service. Now, I've been in the opposite situation as well. I've been in restaurants where they may have excellent service, where they're very attentive to your needs, but the food's mediocre. Who wants to go to a restaurant like that? The same thing can apply to your architectural practice. Do you want to have a practice where the work is really great but the service sucks? Do you want to have a practice where the service is great but the work really isn't that good. No, my imagination tells me, my hallucination tells me that if you listen to the Business of Architecture podcast, you don't want to settle for a mediocre practice. You want to have a practice that does great work and provides great service. So that's the possibility with getting the right next person in place. The third possibility that opens up for us here is that you have less stress and you get more freedom as a business owner. Very, very simple. So let's move over to the principles here. Principle number one is that hiring is an investment now as business owners who are perhaps untrained in the art and science of business. Oftentimes we can get this wrong. Oftentimes we look at hiring as a cost. And how do you know if this is the case for you? Well, if you think about hiring and it makes you nervous because of the salary you're going to have to pay, you're likely looking at that hire as a cost. So what is the difference between an investment and a cost. An investment is something that is carefully calculated out and you're betting on, and not even betting, because betting connotes kind of gambling, but you're making an educated and well intentioned estimation that you will get a return on that investment. That's what investment is. An investment is something that brings back dividends. It brings back more money than you put into it. A cost is simply money out the door. It's simply like, you know, one of the best examples would be, any the consumer guy goods that we have, typically a boat. I mean, I would call that investment, because I'm investing in my family experiences. But if you have a boat, you know that a boat is no is a cost. It is not an investment. You're not going to make more money on most boat investments because they have a lot of upkeep. They have a lot of maintenance, etc. So you're pouring money into them. They are a liability on your balance sheet. So what you should consider instead is that an employee, the right team member for your business, is one of the best investments that you can make, and that you know you're certain that when you invest this money in this person's salary, when you invest this money in this person's benefits, when you invest the time, energy and effort to find, to recruit and to vet the right person, that this will pay back enormous dividends to you as a Business Owner, both in free time as well as in money and finances. So principle number one is to really understand at a deep level that hiring is an investment, not a cost when you do it wrong. Yes, it can be a cost when you do it right. It's an investment. Number two focus on who, not how. Business Consultant, Dan Sullivan wrote a book on this, and we don't need to talk about the book, but we can focus just on the title, because it's such a powerful principle. Oftentimes, as business owners, when we need to get something done, for instance, we need to improve the efficiencies in our practice. Or, you know, we have too much work. We're working too much, and we want to work less. We want to have more freedom. We want to spend more time doing certain tasks, like, perhaps design or things that you enjoy the most. Oftentimes, what we focus on is, well, how do I need to do that? Right? What's the what's the 123, steps that I need to do to go from where I'm at right now to where I want to get to? Well, Dan Sullivan, in his great book, offers up the one. Wonderful wisdom that, as a business owner, one of the most powerful things you can do is adopt the mindset of who, not how. In other words, instead of trying to figure out how to do something, hire the person that already knows how to do that thing. So you're focused on the who, not the how. Principle number three is to hire for complete delegation, not training. This is a mistake that we see so many architectural practice owners make, because we're not trained. HR professionals. We're not people who have hired hundreds and hundreds of people. So oftentimes in the architectural industry, we have a track record, we have a pattern. We have a tradition of hiring people who need to be trained, and probably because you've seen that happen in the practices that you've worked before, you've just assumed that this is the way to do it. Well, what I can tell you is this is a way to make sure that you're spending a lot more time in your practice that you need to. It's a way to make sure that your pro that your profits are depressed. It's a way to make sure that you have a lot more extra stress in your life as a business owner than you need to have. Now it's one thing to have to bring in an employee and have them learn some of your processes, some of your systems. There's always going to be some training that happens when you bring an employee on board. But the training I'm talking about is like, we're actually going to have to train them on how to do architecture, right? So we get in this delicate dance and architecture where, by its very nature, people coming out of school, they they don't possess the skills and knowledge base to be able to

Enoch Sears

21:37

completely fulfill what's required of a licensed professional architect or landscape architect or engineer or interior designer, even right? You know that this is the case. And so built into our careers, we have this kind of training that happens along with it. Now, because of that, a lot of times what happens in small firms is small firm owners. I've been one myself. We have a heart to give. We have a heart to mentor. We have a heart to coach. And so for us, it there's a bit of reward that we get, a bit of satisfaction we get bringing someone who's young and inexperienced and training them up in the way so that they can learn the ropes about how to be a great architect. And usually, we also get the benefit of their salaries aren't as high. We're hiring young people, so we have to pay less for them, and so in our mind, it seems like an excellent decision. However, after having consulted with hundreds of architecture firm owners, trained so many firm owners through our smart practice program, worked with the leaders of larger firms, and produced the smart practice curriculum, what we know without a shadow of a doubt right now is that your best return on investment is going to be hiring the right fit for the role hire for what I call complete delegation. What does complete delegation look like when you're thinking about the next person you need to hire? And we'll get to some specific steps later, but think about exactly okay, what are the things that I completely want to take off my plate? So for instance, if I'm hiring a project architect, I might say, okay, as the firm owner right now, I conduct the marketing, I do the selling, I do all the proposals. But what I would like to have is, I'd like to have a team, or someone on my team that I could hand a schematic design to. I could say, Hey, here's the program, here's the scope, here's the initial design, here's the constraints. Take this work with the client and develop a finished product that is going to knock their socks off, that is going to have them sing your praises. Okay? So that is the idea of complete delegation. So it may be something as simple as, you know, I need someone to handle my cash flow forecast. That means that, hey, look, I need someone. You're just going to tell your admin, your administrator. Look, what I need from you is every single week I need to get a piece of paper that shows our cash flow for the next 13 weeks with all of our projected income and all of our expenses put into that statement so I can see where we're at with our expected cash flow over the next the next 13 weeks, right, which would be three months. That's complete delegation, as opposed to, you know, I'm going to have to look over your shoulder. I'm going to have to correct it all the time. I'm going to have to teach you how to do it. This is what I call incomplete delegation. So principle number three is, hire for complete delegation. Don't hire for training. Figure out what you need to take completely off your plate and make sure that this person has the capability and ability to do that. Now I want to tell you a quick story. This. This happens all the time in smart practice, because we do predominantly work with small firm owners, people who are either starting out their practices up to firms of about 25 people. And I was talking with the firm owner that at the time, had had eight people on his staff. His name's Rick, and Rick had this little light bulb that went off in one of the calls we were on as we were looking at his team makeup, because he was just finding that he was having to put so much time and effort into supervising his people. He wasn't able to do the marketing that he knew he needed to do to create the relationships that he knew he needed to create. Because. Be able to bring in the work. Then he knew he wanted to do. And so he he looked at me on this call, and he said, because we were on Zoom, and he said, Enoch, you know what I just realized, and this is like, I'm in quite a tight position here. He's like, I've basically hired a team of people who are inexperienced that I need to babysit. I was like, yeah. He's like, Well, what do I do now? I said, Well, the first thing is, you know, you should have come to us five years ago, before you started hiring people, so we could give you the proper roadmap to building the kind of practice that represents the freedom that you would like to have. But now that we have this situation, well, we got to work with it the way that it is. And what I know is that Rick is not the only architect out there who has a team of people that he is now tied to because he chose to hire inexperienced as opposed to hiring for complete delegation. So in summary, the principles when you're thinking about who to hire next is, number one, remember that hiring is an investment. Number two, focus on the who, not the how. Number three, hire for complete delegation, not training the person. And number four, remember, and this is just an anecdote, don't hire a group of people who are inexperienced or having to train that, because if you do, you will then be a slave to them. They will be your boss, instead of vice versa. So what do we do now? How do we implement these principles? How do we go from the problems that we talked about, which is too much work, too much stress, not meeting deadlines, not being able to get the work done in an adequate way, to the possibility of getting the work done efficiently and quickly, having the word spread about what you do in a positive way, having less stress and more freedom as a firm owner. So I'm going to give you four specific steps right here, and we're going to talk about these. Talk about these. Step number one is to verify your pipeline. What I do know is that one of the things that's going to keep you from hiring, of course, is worry about incoming work in the future. And so one of the most important things that you need to do is understand historically, what is our pipeline? How long out can we project that we'll have work. Are we heading for a giant dip? Because if you're heading for a dip, the first thing you need to do is take preventative measures to keep that dip from happening. But if you don't foresee a dip, if you can say, You know what, for the next four to six months, I am confident that we're going to have a solid amount of work. And you can check that off your checklist, and you can say, let's move ahead to step number two. Step number two is to create the job role for this position. Now, so many people do the job role wrong, and I used to do it wrong myself when I first started out in business, because I used to think that the way to create a job role was to figure out, you know, here's the person, and I'm going to give them all these tasks to do, right? The job role itself should be person independent, meaning it shouldn't be related to a particular kind of person, like, for instance, in your office, especially if you're running a small firm, you may be looking for a product architect, but this product architect may have other responsibilities outside of the product architect title. That's why sometimes these titles aren't super useful for smaller firms, because you need someone that has someone who may be taking on various job roles. Maybe you need someone to take on a little bit of the marketing job role. Maybe you need someone to take on some of the project management job role. Maybe you need someone to take on what would typically be a principal job role. So what you do is you identify all these different things that you know that you want to get off your plate, that your firm has need of. Then you you create a master document, and you create the overall job role that you're going to use to hire and vet the right person. Now we have a tool in smart practice that's been very successful, very effective in this it's called the delegation roadmap. And what this tool allows you to do is allows you to look at number one, what are the things that you like doing? What are the things that drain your energy? What are the things that you're spending a lot of time doing, or what are the things that you're spending a little bit of time doing? What are the things that require your direct involvement, and what are things that you could possibly delegate? So we rank the different tasks that you're currently working on in a little matrix with these different data points, and then, based upon that, you develop a list of the things that mostly you don't like doing, that you could delegate to someone else with relative efficiency, and they could do them just as well or better than you do them. Now, as I mentioned, we have a tool for this called the delegation roadmap, and if you'd like to get that for free, along with the little training about how to use it, then you can go to Business of architecture.com, forward slash delegate, this will come with a video training that walks you through exactly how to figure out, what are the things that you know you need to get off of your plate. It's a highly valuable exercise. You can get that by going to Business of architecture.com, forward slash delegate. Step number three, after you've done your delegation roadmap, after you've figured out, what are the things right now that either you need to delegate off your plate or some of your other team members need to delegate off your plate, now you have created your job. Role number three is to do your financial projections. You're going to want to figure out how much money do we want to pay this person? And what I recommend you do is you look at generally, what these people are paid in the marketplace, and you plan on paying that or higher. You. What we want to do is we want to pay for quality. We want to pay for experience. Your people are your most valuable asset in your architectural practice, outside of the work that you've done in the past. So the people you have right now in the present are such a valuable asset, you want to make sure that you are investing into them. They are your highest and best investment. So after you've determined what you might need to pay someone like this. Then do your financial projections right. Plug those into a spreadsheet showing the amount of work that you plan to bill for the next X number of months. Typically, a 13 week time frame would be good the next 90 days or so. And then you figure out, okay, we're going to have this additional salary. But here's the thing that most people miss out on. If you have an additional person producing work that person has billable time that they are then contributing to the office. So right off the bat, you're going to be consuming the work more quickly, meaning that you're going to be invoicing more, meaning that your revenue is going to go up. So see, oftentimes,

Enoch Sears

30:58

sometimes firm owners, they think that, you know, when I hire someone, I'm going to take a big loss for a long time, until I get up to speed. If you hire right, this should not be the case. Yes, there may be a dip in efficiency, because the person's learning your process. They're learning they're learning about your templates, they're learning about your office standards, but that should be a very short period, no more than a month and a half, where they finally get up to speed and they should be profitable after just a couple weeks. There's no reason why someone who's a new employee in your firm should cause you to lose money. So having considered that, do the financial projections that include their new salary, all the benefits, whatever you're going to pay for them, including the startup costs of getting a new computer and any other expenses, and then factor that into the incoming work, but also factor in the fact that you're going to have another person producing billable work, so you're going to be able to invoice more that will be the basis of your financial projection. This will do a couple of things for you. Number one, it will help you feel more confident about making this hire. It'll help you feel more confident about the amount of money you're going to be investing in this position. And it will also tell you if perhaps you're not at the right moment where you need to hire someone at this time. Step number four here on our list is very simple. It is to recruit, get out there and recruit, and in a different podcast episode, we're going to go over how to some tips for how to do that, and the towel that episode will be help I can't hire. So if you're seeing this video and you want to find the other video that talks about actually how to hire, just search for Business of Architecture help I can't hire. We're going to go over that specific question. So to review quickly the path here. Number one, verify your pipeline. See how many projects you have coming in. See what your current your receivables will be for the next several weeks, for the next several months. Number two, use a tool like the delegation roadmap to create the job role. Number three, do the financial projections based upon what you know you need to hire a quality candidate for this position, and also including the fact that this person will allow you to increase your revenues. And number four, get out there and recruit now this just as a as a simple caveat, this goes far beyond just posting a job ad on the AI job board or on some of the online things like monster.com there's a whole lot more that goes into it. We'll be talking about that in that other podcast episode. Now, last but not least, let's get very specific here about who should I hire next? And we'll give you some tips after you've you know, let's say you've gone through the path, but I can give you a couple guiding principles above and beyond this about who you should hire, who you should hire, is going to very specifically based upon the current place that you find yourself in with your architectural practice. So there's a rule called the rules of threes and 10s, and this relates to how the growth trajectory of your architectural practice and the specific processes, tools and systems that are appropriate for a specific size. So as you can imagine, a solution for a solo practitioner who's looking to make their first hire is going to be very different than someone who's running a 30 person firm and is looking to make a hire. So at these multiples of 10 and three, the logic and the rationale behind how these things work changes dramatically. Okay, so the very first 10 is what we might say. We might generalize and say 100,000 so $100,000 in or euros or whatever currency, or 100,000 revenue over the course of 12 months is, you know, we're gonna say that's a sole practitioner anywhere from 100,000 to 300,000 that's the amount of work that you could reasonably do just by yourself or with a part time administrative assistant. When you hit that 300 mark, this is when you're going to need to change the way that you operate. You're gonna have to hire some people that you can delegate directly to the next thing that you're going to hit up is after you pass that 300,000 mark, because you're going to hit the million mark again, there's going to need to be a changing of the way that you operate, in the way of your systems, in the way of your hiring, in the way of your structure. After that, you're going to get 3 million. And then after that 10 million, and after that 30 million, you see they go in multiples that kind of like flip flops, back and forth between the three. And the 10. So having said that, let's jump over to you know, if you're watching or listening to this podcast episode, it's likely I'm going to speak directly to you if you are a sole practitioner and you're wanting to make your first hire, like, who should I hire next? Because if you're a team of five or six, you probably know who you need to hire Next, you're gonna have a better idea than someone who's first starting out. A lot of times. When you're smaller, you're gonna be there's a lot more at stake, and so you're a lot more hesitant and wanting to make sure you're doing the right decision. Okay, so if you're a sole practitioner, you're currently solely started up your practice, and you're looking to hire someone, one of the very first things that you could do, of course, is hire part time help. Let's say you've already done that, and now is the stage where you know you need someone full time to help you out. Okay, there's two paths that we recommend that you take. The first path is getting an administrative assistant that could be your most powerful first hire. Or, number two, getting a full fledged project architect. You can delegate the architectural to and they can take them soup to nuts and done. Now, out of these two possibilities, I can't really recommend anything without knowing you and having a sit down conversation, but what I can say is that the most likely one of these two that would be beneficial for you is hiring an administrative assistant. This is someone who can categorize your emails. This is someone who can manage your calendar. This is someone who can do all the low level tasks that don't require your level of expertise. When I first started my business, this was the first hire I made, and because of this hire, I was able to triple my income over the course of three months, simply because I had this person in place. Now this shocked me, because I thought when I was going to hire that I know this was an investment. I was going to be losing money again. I was approaching it from a cost perspective, instead of realizing that hiring this person was going to be a huge win. Now, it may be that you don't have enough administrative work for someone like this to do. What I would say is most likely you do. You're just not aware of it, right? There's financials that need to be taken care of and run administrative assistant can do this. There's answering phone calls and initial client consultations, not the actual consultations themselves, but scheduling them that someone like this can do. There's a whole lot of administrative work that can be taken off your plate. As a solo architect that would be excellent for an administrative assistant or an office manager type. Think about this person as your right hand man or woman. Okay? And that you and this other person gonna run together to get to $300,000 in revenue and passed so you can then hire your first architectural employee. Now let's say, for instance, maybe you have a lot of repeat work. You know what? You don't have that much admin. You know your clients, maybe they, they pay very easily, so there's not a lot of trying to collect from them. Your administrative burden is maybe just a month, one day every single month, you're like, you know, I don't, I couldn't really, I don't really need an administrative assistant. In that case, the likely recommendation is going to be to hire a qualified architectural professional, not a low level intern that you have to supervise, but someone who can come in and take a lot of the high level stuff off of your plate. This is going to be the best move for your next hire.

Enoch Sears

38:08

Now for those of you who are listening that maybe have two to three, maybe even up to 10, people at that stage when you're looking to hire, what you really want to hire is the highest quality person you can while getting these tax off of your plate. This is why you need to go through an exercise like the delegation roadmap to determine what are the things that you're best suited to do. What are the things that you want to do? Do you want to take design off of your plate, or do you want to get the project management off of your plate? Okay, based upon that, you're going to develop, again, the job role, and then the process that I've outlined in this podcast episode is going to work for you. So if you'd like to get access to this free tool, the delegation roadmap. You can go to Business of architecture.com, forward, slash delegate, and you get access to that. Other than that, I just want to remind you that smart practice. If you're out there trying to figure out how to run your architectural practice by yourself, it doesn't need to be that way. We've developed smart practice over the past 10 years, and we've helped hundreds of architecture firm owners find more freedom, more fulfillment, more profit, more financial reward, by implementing a proven system for the way they manage and run their practice, including how to grow, who to hire, when to hire, how to vet, how to manage finances, how to conduct sales conversations, the best marketing avenues for your particular kind of firm, all of these questions, yes, You could spend the next 20 years trying to figure years trying to figure them out, or you could use a proven system like smart practice to help you on your way. If that's the case, you know what to do next. Go to smartpractice method.com, and I will see you on the other side of that training while you'll discover how to run an architectural practice so that the business doesn't get in the way of the architecture. Hey, Enoch Sears here and I have a request, since you are a listener here of the Business of Architecture podcast, Ryan and I, we love putting this podcast together. We love sharing information as much as we can glean from all the other industries that we're a part of, to bring it back to empower you as an architect and a designer. You. One thing that helps us in our mission is the growth of this podcast, simply because it helps other architects stand for more their value spreads the business information that we're sharing to empower architects together, so architects, designers, engineers, can really step into their greatness, whatever that looks like for each individual. And so here my my simple ask is for you to join us and be part of our community by doing the following, heading over to iTunes and leaving a review of the podcast. And as an expression of our sincere thanks, we would like to give you a free CEU course that can get you one professional development unit. But more importantly, we'll give you a very solid and firm foundation on your journey to becoming a profitable and thriving architect. So here's the process for that. After you leave us review, send an email to support at Business of architecture.com let us know the username that you use to leave the review, and we will send you that free training. On the training, you'll discover what 99% of architecture firm owners wished they would have known 20 years ago, and the other 1% well, they just didn't even know that. They didn't know. Head over to iTunes and leave us a review. Now.

Rion Willard

41:23

Hello, listeners. We hope you're enjoying our show. We love bringing you these insightful conversations, but we couldn't do it about the support of our amazing sponsors. If you're a business owner or know someone who would be an excellent fit for our audience, we'd love to hear from you. Partnering with us means your brand will reach over 40,000 engaged listeners each month, interested in becoming a sponsor, please send us an email at support. At Business of architecture.com the

Enoch Sears

41:47

views expressed on the show by my guests do not represent those of the hosts and I make no representation. Promise, guarantee, pledge, warranty, contract, bond or commitment, except to help you conquer the world. Carpe, Diem, you.

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