We have two new team members joining us at Single Grain this week, so we’re going to talk about how to properly onboard new team members.
Before new team members even start, we make an onboarding checklist that basically outlines what kind of tools we use, how we communicate and some of the processes we all use internally. For example, we use a tool called 15Five. People fill out how their week went, what they were able to accomplish and give some feedback for the company. We also use Slack to communicate.
We’ll create a new Single Grain email for our new hires and then we’ll subscribe them to an email list that’s specifically geared towards onboarding. If you’re one of our new hires, you’ll get three emails and each email has a couple of notes. It could be how we do goals and OKRs, or it could be another video on how to communicate or how to use a few tools or how to be more efficient.
Learn More: How to Onboard New Hires
This way, every one of our new hires can hit the ground running. If it’s somebody who’s a little more junior that’s starting, I’ll make them a week-by-week plan about what they’re going to do.
Now, if I’m hiring somebody who’s more senior, someone who already has significant marketing experience, I’m going to ask them to craft a 30-, 60- and 90-day plan. Then in response to their plan I’ll craft an agenda for them to get started as fast as possible.
No matter who you’re hiring, you have to realize that onboarding, when done right, takes time. Even for sales people, we’re talking six months sometimes to get them fully prepared, although other people might only need a month or two to get really comfortable.
Whatever the case, it’s on you as the leader of the company to expedite things to reduce the time for onboarding as much as possible without sacrificing quality. Your job is to increase efficiency. We love Google Docs, by the way!
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Aside from Google Drive folders, we also have DropBox Paper and a bunch of checklists in there. For example, if you’re joining a PPC team, there’s a checklist on how we interact with PPC clients. If you’re joining as an operations person, there are some processes around that, too. There’s also a career ladder so you know where you’re going.
Using tools like Zenefits and Gusto for payroll and HR management make my life a lot easier. I might think about switching to a PEO later, which I can talk about in another post. The way things are set up now, Zenefits does the job.
When it comes down to it, onboarding is all about preparing people for your processes. And the only way to effectively do that is to have a process for onboarding, too. If you start new hires off and there’s no process and you’re kind of all over the place, that’s not a good first impression for them. And first impressions are everything. You don’t get multiple chances to make another first impression.
This is especially important to consider with virtual onboarding, where you don’t get an in-person connection (or lunch, or happy hours, etc.) with your new hire.
Learn More: How to Recruit Great People to Your Team
Ultimately, it’s your company. You want it to grow quicker, so it’s in your best interest that you’re investing in great people and onboarding them faster and more efficiently. There are a couple other things that we do, but that’s the gist of it.
Just make sure that people follow processes. Make sure that people follow their goals. Check in with them. See how they’re doing over time.
Sometimes people might view you as the leader and hold back information. Well, in that case, maybe you can have your number two, like an operations person, check in with them to see how they’re really doing, because you want to have a pulse on your company in general.
You want to make your company a great place to work so that you can take care of your customers.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
Let’s talk about scalable processes for growing your business. Like, from zero to $1 million.
The simple truth is that when you’re chasing after seven figures, it all comes down to sales. Closing, closing, closing. Barring extremely good PR coverage or sheer luck, your first 10, 100, and even 1,000 are going to be a grind.
In the early days, when you’re forced to wear multiple hats, you should also be the main salesperson. It will be hard work, but you can get up to a million. Anyone who’s providing a valuable service and who can do a bit of everything fairly well should be able to scale up a consulting business or even freelance service to $1 million per year.
Learn More: How to Market Your Consulting Company When You’re New
Now, when you are trying to to get from $1 million to $10 million or from $10 million to $100 million, things get both easier and tricker.
I spoke with Verne Harnish, the founder of Entrepreneurs’ Organization last week and asked him, “How do you go from $1 million to $10 million, and then onwards towards $100 million?”
Verne says, “$1 to $10 million is all about gross margin. $10 million to 100 is all about profit margin.”
In plain English, going from $1 to $10 million is about focusing on setting up the right processes. You need to focus on putting into writing, video, or any other evergreen format the processes that your people can follow reliably.
If somebody gets sick, you can immediately plug somebody else in with the right resources for success. If somebody leaves all of a sudden, you have these processes ready to go. You also have people sitting on the bench ready to join your team (i.e. your recruiting processes).
I remember reading a tweet that said something like:
95% of problems in a company are the processes and 5% are the people.
Most of the time it’s the processes, and most people don’t know how to set these up the right way, even if they are successful. That’s why I’m constantly thinking about processes and products, and iterating over and over.
Keep in mind that, as a company, where you were a year ago may be completely different from where you are today. A lot of your processes you used to rely on might be broken or not up-to-date, so you should be setting up and testing new ones.
Related Content: 8 Strategic Questions That Will Help You Grow Your Business
In order to grow or even just sustain your current level of success, you need to foolproof your business against turnover. That starts with a process audit at least once a quarter. Talk through it with your team. We like to use 15Five to see what people’s sentiments are, where we can improve in the company, and what things we can fix.
Another process is to just have a pulse on the company. I come into the office three times a week and ask everyone else to do the same. Three days in, two days out, and it works well for us. This is the best way we discovered to check in with each other and make sure that we’re all getting the work done.
At Single Grain, we have a ton of processes set up for Google Drive, which I copied this from a company called Guava Box. They have all their agency processes clearly documented inside Google Drive, and everyone can see them.
For example, we have a single Google Drive account with folders for everything, from client onboarding to vacation policies. We have content ideation, growth experiments, KPIs and dashboards, and it’s all easy to navigate.
The best thing to do is download all this structural knowledge to one person, ideally an ops person or executive assistant, who will not only “own” this library of info, but also take the lead in getting people together to document new processes as they arise.
This type of process documentation has especially helped with sales calls. When we want our sales reps to take a look at past sales calls we’ve done, all they have to do is go find them in Google Drive. They can even watch screencast. That way, we don’t have to keep reinventing the same wheel. No one has to babysit anyone at work.
Google Drive is absolutely great for keeping educational resources for your teams in one place. We have videos, certifications, work-for-hire agreements, standard operating procedures, content promotion, etc.
Learn More: Jared Fuller On How He Skyrocketed PandaDoc from $1M ARR to $5M ARR in a Year (5X Growth!)
Of course, the thing about free libraries is that most people don’t take advantage of them. Your job as a leader who is focused on scaling your company into 8 figures is to keep people accountable, maintain budgets, and hold your profit margin to a certain standard.
Keeping all these things in place will help you stay organized, because if it’s all over the place it’s an inefficient, hectic free-for-all. You’re not going to be able to grow because your processes are such a mess, and people are going to get frustrated all the time.
You need to have these guardrails in place to help you get to the next level.
This post was adapted from Eric’s Facebook Live videos: Growth 90 – DAILY live broadcasts with Eric Siu on marketing and entrepreneurship. Watch the video version of this post:
5 Useful Tools for Remote Teams
Today I’m sharing five different tools for remote teams that have proven very effective for me. You might hear some overlap from past episodes where I’ve recommended tools for different things, but that’s just a reflection of how well they work.
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One of the challenges that people face with growing a company is keeping a pulse on the team. Sure, there’s operations, finance, sales, marketing, etc. to worry about – but what about seeing how people generally feel? Team members are generally so head down or ‘busy‘ that they often don’t have time to come up for air.
Standard procedures for collecting feedback for companies might be quarterly or yearly, but waiting that long is often too late – especially for more urgent problems that need to be dealt with quickly.
I wanted to create an ongoing feedback process where there’s more of a ‘learn as we go’ approach. To be honest, I find waiting 90 to 365 days to give people a review can hurt a company because there’s just way too much going on. Keeping an ongoing dialogue helps facilitate information that can in turn spurt growth.
Here’s what we do to keep a pulse on things. Keep in mind that we also have distributed team members so keeping the dialogue going is even more important because some of us don’t see each other often.
1 on 1’s
Weekly 1-on-1’s help me gauge where my managers are. Is there a specific problem they’re facing? Perhaps it’s a disaster? Is there something I can help them with? What other ideas can we discuss?
It’s very important to treat these seriously. As in not cancel unless you absolutely have to.
There’s a lot of literature on 1-on-1 meetings so I’ll just keep this simple. Here’s the only thing you need to read on how to do 1-on-1’s.
Onto the tools.
15Five
We use a tool called 15Five and it sends people a list of questions each week to be answered. Think of it as 1-on-1’s that the leaders of the team can see. As CEO, I get the benefit of seeing every report within the company. That means it’s like I get to do 1-on-1’s with everyone in the company.
Here are some of the questions we ask each week:
Here’s an example of the valuable feedback we gather each week:
So even though 15Five is great, there’s a problem with it – all answers are tied to a name. Sometimes, people aren’t keen on speaking their mind because they feel like it might create negative feelings and affect their future within the company.
TINYPulse
So how do we get people to speak candidly without having to worry about that? We use TINYPulse.
Team members are sent one question a week. Just one. And it’s completely anonymous. No need to worry about your manager reprimanding you.
Example questions might be:
But that’s not all, people can provide anonymous praise for other team members. We share these tidbits of praise with the entire team on our Monday all hands meetings to kick the week off on a positive note.
Learning where we stand on the happiness scale gets me thinking about how we can improve the overall work experience for my team. Perhaps the next step would be interviewing individuals (not just my managers) to see where the holes are. Perhaps I can dive back into 15Five and see if there are any areas where I need to investigate further. Lots of possibilities here.
Having some kind of measurement at least points me in the right direction as opposed to just going off of my gut and ‘estimating’ that ‘things are going better than ever’.
What gets measured gets managed.
Conclusion
Having weekly all hands meetings, 1-on-1’s and layering on helpful tools like 15Five and TINYpulse gives me a pulse on how the company is feeling. Looking at the financial statements tells me how the company is doing. Combine the two and you have a winning recipe for long term growth.
Image credit: Sebastiaan ter Burg
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Today’s interview is with David Hassell of 15five. He’s been labeled as the ‘Most Connected Man You Don’t Know In Silicon Valley’ by Forbes and he tells us how he got there. David is a serial entrepreneur and shares some tips for keeping himself sharp.
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15Five’s history:
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