How to hire great people – and keep your dream team

10 min read

If you want to be a serious entrepreneur and you want to build a commercially profitable enterprise, you must build a strong team around you.

Over the last 20 years, I’ve employed literally thousands of people. Today, I’ve got more than 1,200 staff.

A good team - like the guys at Marsh Farm Animal Adventure Park - is essential for any commercially profitable business. (Credit: Michael Chudley)

You just can’t do it all on your own. You’ve got to learn the art of delegation – but you want to delegate stuff to people who are better than you.

How do you find people better than you?

In this blog, I’ll give you my golden nuggets 💛 which you can swipe and deploy to find profitable teams and help your entrepreneurial journey.

One of the most common questions asked of me when I’m running all these businesses – from hotels to dinosaur parks, ice cream factories to day nurseries – people always ask, “how do you do it?”

The answer is: I don’t.

I’ve built an amazing senior team around me which looks after all my other staff, so we can move forward.

In reality, most entrepreneurs really struggle. Some get it right – they understand they’ve got to delegate, but not so much they abdicate their position from the business. Others just find it hard to let go.

Golden Nugget 💛 #1: You have to kiss a few frogs to find your prince

You don’t marry the first person you meet. Sometimes, you date a little bit.

The same applies to employment.

I have made a tremendous number of mistakes when employing people. We’ve been the wrong for them and they might have been the wrong fit for us.

When it goes wrong, you have to brush yourself off and go back into the marketplace.

There are nearly 70 million people in the UK, and certainly not all of them are useless.

It takes time to find the right one. If it goes wrong, don’t think that everyone is useless.

How do we get better at finding the right people?

Make sure you’ve got a really good job application which tells people exactly what you’re looking for in the marketplace.

So many business owners just look for carbon copies of themselves. You want to buy-in your weaknesses, rather than someone with the same skillset as you.

If you find someone who’s not right for you, don’t think everyone else is like that.

Golden Nugget 💛 #2: Great people want to work for great people

If you’re building a business and you want to attract the very best, you should be the very best.

I’ve worked with loads of entrepreneurs and the ones who get the top people are the ones who upskill themselves.

You’ve got to work harder on yourself than you do your business, to get the best results:

• If I find an average manager, I see an average team.

• If I find a good manager, that same team becomes good.

• If I find a great manager, all of a sudden, the team becomes great.

Imagine going to university to become an accountant. You then leave university and start earning an accountant’s wage. If you want to be in the top echelon of accountants, you’ve got to upskill yourself in your own time.

Maybe you need to learn marketing or business negotiation. Those skills will make you really valuable in the marketplace.

All the other accountants will end up wanting to work with or learn from you. The best clients will want to employ you.

The same applies for all people.

Take Walt Disney, for example. He was the best-known animator at the time, and all the best animation artists in the world wanted to work for him because he was great.

The greater you become, the greater your chance of employing the best people.

Golden Nugget 💛 #3: Share the good, the bad, and the ugly

So many business owners keep the numbers, profit, or loss that the business is making close to their chests.

The Good, the Bad and the Ugly isn’t just for Clint Eastwood.

One of the best things that small business can learn from big business – I’m talking massive FTSE 100 corporations – is that everyone who works for them knows the numbers.

They get access to the profit and loss, the good news that’s come in, and the future. But they also get access to really bad news.

People are scared to share this with their teams, because they may think “wow, the owner’s making so much profit – what about me?”

Actually, I find people are much more intelligent than that. They know if you’re making profits and you’re growing the business, the profits are going into that or insuring the business in case there’s a rainy day ahead.

If you really want to attract and keep good people, you must share the numbers – and the good news, bad news and anything in between. People love communication. It makes them feel part of the tribe.

Golden Nugget 💛 #4: Educate to Motivate

If you really want to motivate a team, you’ve got to educate them. You’ve got to give them more opportunities to learn.

I don’t just mean sending people onto a digital course. Show them stuff.

Maybe you’ve discovered a really good book you can share with them, or you take them to visit other businesses to see what they’re doing well.

Some of the best conversations I’ve had with my team has been when educating them on car and plane journeys. Even taking them to seminars or showing them stuff they don’t quite know yet.

The more they’re educated, the more they’re motivated to be part of your team.

What you don’t want to do with really good team members is make them repeat the same school year. Imagine being in school and doing Year 7, year after year, without learning anything else.

 You want people to progress through the years and keep educating them.

Golden Nugget 💛 #5: Challenge your team

Great people need to be challenged, otherwise they start coasting.

In my experience, you get good people into a position and if they’re doing the same thing for a couple of years, they just get naff. You need to give them more challenges to keep them moving forward.

Why would anyone want to run a marathon or climb Mount Everest? That challenge keeps people going.

They want to find out a way of solving the problem. That can be very powerful in a commercially profitable enterprise.

If you’ve got good people and they’ve been around you for a few years, give them more challenges and you may be pleasantly surprised by the results.

Golden Nugget 💛 #6: Progress

This is absolutely key for a team.

Human beings love being on winning teams and watching winning teams. That’s what sports like football have relied on for so many years.

No one wants to be on a losing team, but you don’t have to have to be winning every single day. You do, however, have to offer some sort of progress – to keep people in the gang.

Share the progress you’re making. Make it obvious. Make it cultural within the organisation.

I’ve been doing this for years, telling little stories of how we’ve progressed from where we were 10 years ago to where we are now – and how my team has been instrumental in that progress. Thank your people for being part of that progress.

Share the wins and the progress, and you’ll grow the business.

Golden Nugget 💛 #7: Purpose

I appreciate it’s harder to have purpose in some industries than others but if you can get that into your business, teams just flipping love it.

Human beings love having a purpose, like working in education.

I love our day nursery sector, because our team can see kids go from not even being able to write their own names to writing, counting, and learning new social skills.

That can be really rewarding for teams.

I love making these blogs for the same reason. I’m so proud of the stuff we’re making to help business owners. That gives us a purpose.

My team and I really feel we’re helping to grow our entrepreneurial economy in this country and around the world. We’re sharing valuable stuff that helps people.

I’ll be doing that in-person at a special two-day event in London this September. Check out my Business Masterclass for more information.

Golden Nugget 💛 #8: People

Those you surround yourself with are at the core of all this.

No one wants to work for a mood hoover or a toxic person, or be surrounded by those people.

If you’re a great leader, that is going to influence the rest of the team in the best possible way. We don’t want to infect teams with toxicity.

If you bring an outsider into your business and find that person is negative and could destroy your culture, it’s your job to get them out as soon as possible.

There are a couple of things I’ve learned over my years of being an entrepreneur and employing so many people:

• One of the most crucial is: “If you can’t change the people, change the people.” Do give people a chance to change, but if they’re not the right fit for you, they’ve got to go.

• Another phrase I live by is: “Hire slow, fire fast.” Slowly choose the people who are going to be the leaders and managers within your business.

In a business, you’ve got technicians, managers, senior managers, directors, shareholders, and owners. The people at the bottom – the technicians – are really cultivated and made who they are by the management.

My focus here is on getting really good managers that can help you run the business.

You’re the entrepreneur, you should be growing the business and not operating it.

Think of your business as a film set. You’re the producer, so you need a director and editors. The actors are brilliant if the director is the best possible – they want to work for the best.

Sometimes, you get an actor who’s a real pain in the arse and annoys all the other actors, meaning you don’t get the best performance.

If you do get someone bad in your business, the biggest thing I’ve learned is you’ve got to rip that plaster off as soon as you possibly can.

But if you’re too compassionate like me, you’ll be too slow to make those decisions.

Bonus golden nuggets 💛

I’ve got a couple more lessons I’ve learned over the years that I want to share with you.

Wherever possible, try to promote within. When you do, it sends a cultural ripple around the team that “if you stick around, there’s a massive chance of promotion”. Make sure you tell those stories in your business.

• Katie started as a party host and is now the managing director of my childcare business.

• Janequi started out just working Saturdays and is now my Group Commercial Director.

• Aaron helped me manage the party business and is now my Group Managing Director.

• Leah worked for me part-time as a qualified accountant and is now my finance director. She’s worked with me for the last 18 months. We’ve been doing acquisitions and buying stuff, and she’s learned all these new skills that are giving her superhero powers to help us as a business. She’s no longer just an accountant, she’s a flipping finance director. In the next five or ten years, she could be the most powerful CFO in entrepreneurship in this country.

I love telling these stories publicly because I want my team to know that if they’re happy and hard-working, there is a chance to go far within our organisation.

On that point, that is the basis of anything for employing people for a good culture in our business. We want people to be happy and hard-working.

Always recruit on attitude over skillset. If you’ve got a hard-working person who’s got the right attitude, you should take the time to upskill them.

Don’t think education is just sending someone to a course, it’s actually spending time with them and showing them the stuff you’ve learned along the way.

The Four-Interview Process

If you do have to recruit people from outside your business, try to use a process I use called “The Four-Interview Process”.

Entrepreneurs are busy people. They just want to get problems solved and move on to the next fire they need to put out. That’s why they sometimes panic-employ. You’ve got to hire slow and fire fast.

1. Group Interview

For example, to get a new finance director into your business, do a group interview. Get a recruitment company to find you 10 candidates. Get them all in a room, where you stand up and give a presentation about your business.

In essence, you’re going through an elimination process rather than a selection process. They’re listening to your pitch about where you want to take your business, and deciding whether they want to work for you.

2. One-to-One Interview

Once the group interview is done, move onto a one-to-one interview with the candidate. They now know what you want as a business owner. Always have someone from your team sitting with you.

3. Colleague-led one-to-one

Interview number three is where someone else from your team leads it. They’ll ask all the questions while you listen in. There have been times when I’ve been really sure about a candidate after my one-to-one interview, but seeing someone else ask the questions has changed my mind.

4. Presentation

Say that interview does really well, the fourth interview is a presentation from them to you on how they’re going to do their job. How are they going to fulfil your business dreams?

All these points apply to the senior people in your business – the managers who you are going to delegate key tasks to, to help grow your business.

That’s how I’ve done it for the last 20 years. It’s served me really well.

You spend a lot of time with the people you work with. If you don’t enjoy their company, you’re missing out on a big chunk of your life.

Build a fantastic team and you’ll have a fantastic life.

WATCH my full video on how you can build a dream team that will last: