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How to hire employees that fit your organization

by Devin Day 1 Comment

image of a good hiring candidate

How many of you that are responsible for hiring have selected a candidate based on their education, skill, and experience only to find out behaviorally, the hire is a terrible fit for the position?

I have done a lot of hiring as CEO of JellyBarn, Inc. and I can tell you that it is not an easy task. Finding the right fit for a position has been my achilles heel. I can tell you that I have made a lot of expensive mistakes when hiring. It wasn’t from a lack of education, skill, or experience on the new hires part, it was from a lack of the hires behavioral fit (or my lack of a better hiring process). The new hires just didn’t fit the position because their personality behaviors were different from the behaviors required. This can be the case when hiring for any position – developers, sales, marketing, exec staff, etc. 

Most hiring is done based on three criteria, education, experience, and skill.  I knew there had to be a better way. A systematic approach that would give more visibility into wether or not the candidate was a good fit behaviorally for the required role and not just a good hire based on education, experience, and skill. I needed a way to find out if the candidates would be a good fit for both the position and the company culture.

What I found after some detailed research was a behavioral test, called a DISC test. This test (see mine below) will give you a ton of information on the candidates behavioral traits and characteristics. This is indispensable information for hiring. For best results the DISC process is broken into three parts:

  1. An RBA test (Role Behavior Analysis – this lets you define what you need in the required role)
  2. A General characteristics test (this test allows you to profile the candidate)
  3. The third step is a cross reference of the first two tests and spits out a report that allows you to see how well your candidate fits the defined role

This is also a great way to find those future young superstars that would have slipped through the cracks because they don’t have a resume with a lot of experience. I do want to note that this is not a silver bullet for hiring, but a systematic approach that can be incorporated into the hiring process to help reduce employee turnover. 

There are two companies that offer DISC personality tests that I recommend looking at: (each with there own pros and cons)

  1. Target-Teams - target-teams.com
  • Pros – Great detailed information, good for larger orgs
  • Cons – $400 per test
  1. Epic DISC – intesiresources.com
  • Pros – $15-50 per test (cost effective), good information, supplement reports, good for start-ups
  • Cons – A little less detailed than target-teams

In Summary, if your firm is hiring (especially smaller firms) I highly recommend incorporating a fourth behavioral criteria into your hiring process.

Lets take a look at two tests so you can see the granular visibility that is included in a behavioral test. For me they have been spooky accurate. Recently all the executives at JellyBarn took the test to help us further understand our strengths and weaknesses and be even better as a cohesive/progressive/communicating team.

Thanks for viewing this post! Best of luck with all your hiring.

Devin Day Intesiprofile

Will WordPress help kill the newspaper industry?

by Devin Day 2 Comments

WordPress just keeps getting better and better.

Now they are offering HD video streaming  capabilities for your wordpress blog or site via VideoPress.
They also have VideoPress available as an open source framework for large WordPress MU installs (check it out here). This will allow entrepreneurial publishers an own end to end HD video solution. There have been other solutions available for WordPress for a while, but I am excited to see a powerful video solution coming from the creators of WordPress.

The Revenue that can be created as a publishing platform with VideoPress and WordPress MU is huge for those big thinking entrepreneurs. WordPress is such a powerful platform with NO COSTS.

Now for a prediction…

With all the goodness coming from WordPress and the newspaper industry in the toilette, I believe that it’s only a matter of time that some young savvy entrepreneur will use the WPMU platform to create “Newspaper 2.0″ (a type of community news company for a digital generation) with the potential of rivaling a Ginette or McClatchy. Ultimately driving newspapers further into the grave.

Why do I believe WordPress will start replacing the traditional newspaper companies?

  1. Scalability – you can deploy infinite sites from one install (i.e. – sf.new-site.com, ny.news-site.com, etc.).
  2. Cost – Their are no costs for the technology, except for hosting or you hire designers/devs to do major customization (with all the amazing premium themes these days major customization can be greatly reduced).
  3. Automation – you can automate the author process and hire contributors from any city or country in the world.
  4. Features – It up to date with tech trends of our digital generation and almost any kind of plugin can be found for sms, twitter, digg, video, social this and that and so on…
  5. Time to market – with such a huge open source community of contributors you can deploy sites with all the features you could want within hours to days.
  6. Overall mindset – Those who would work with wordpress and develop savvy ideas with the technology tend to be young connected individuals vs. current conglomerate news companies who tend to be old school thinkers who struggle to understand todays pace of trends.
  7. I could continue with more examples, but thats all the time for today.

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Thanks for stopping by! ~ Devin Day

How to achieve your business plan

by Devin Day 5 Comments

Image of a man holding money

Have you ever wondered where you are with achieving your business plan?

Having a plan (desired outcomes with documented strategies, goals, and tasks) and working that plan is in my opinion the cornerstone of a building a good company. The problem is a “good” plan is often the most overlooked area in a new business. To many Entrepreneurs think a ton of words on a paper satisfies the task of creating a business plan. The plan usually ends up a lengthy (and boring) word document that no one wants to read and ends up lost and buried in a filing cabinet. 

Unless your raising money or communicating to your BOD (board of directors) you should not need to a huge document anyway. What you need is a clear internal strategy plan that covers the basic three elements of a business model.

  1. Value Proposition (Great idea that will help our clients more affordably and effectively do a job they are trying to get done.)
  2. Profit Formula (A formula that allows you to keep costs minimal and margins at a maximum)
  3. Business Systems (Standardization for the our habitual ways of getting things done)

The simplest way to get your business plan started is this:

  1. Summarize in a few paragraphs the overall concept and identify your desired outcome.
  2. Write a series of strategies for each basic category and keep it simple – a short overview paragraph followed by bullet points is perfect. Your general strategy categories are – Sales, Marketing, Operations, Business processes, Staffing, Funding, Target market, etc. (for more on business processes view my post here)
  3. For each strategy category write out the goals needed to achieve each strategy and then write out the tasks needed to achieve each goal.

Let’s recap – you have identified your desired outcome (where you want to be financially in a desired amount of time), and created strategies to achieve that desired outcome and you have your list of your goals and tasks to achieve your strategies. What your left with in it’s simplest form is a checklist of action items to achieve your business plan.

(NOTE: There will always be continual planning and prioritizing as you chew through your list. Be sure you stay on top of prioritization because not knowing where your at at any given moment will breed procrastination.)

A final recommendation is to find an SAAS (software as a service) platform to manage all your action items and strategies in your business plan. This will allow you to share/delegate tasks with other team members. Keep track of who’s where and doing what and it will keep everyone in sync. I use (and highly recommend) a service called PlanHQ

planHQ is structured for the very format that I have outlined above and is so easy to use. It’s quite powerful and has allowed our business plan to be a living breathing entity that again keeps the team in sync. Your plan for world domination will quickly take hold if you can document your plan, communicate your plan and execute your plan. Now go and achieve your business plan!

Photo of planhq.com dashboard

Capabilities-driven strategies: Thriving in a tough economy

by Devin Day 4 Comments

Last week my company held it’s kick-off meeting for the 2009 season and one of our big topics was innovating our capabilities. Processes, standardization, skills, tools, etc. are necessary if we are to outpace our competition. A few days after our meeting I came across an article from Strategy+Business that discussed the topic in depth (see article here or click here for PDF). To me there are so many reasons that focusing on your capabilities-driven strategy is far more important than focusing on better improving your product to the nth degree (most companies that are built and run by “technician minded” people tend to focus on continually improving the product vs. delivering the product, thus their companies tend to remain a “ma and pa” shop.)

Let me give you an example of capabilities-driven strategy from a great book (E-myth Revisited) that sums it up so well. “Most of us could build a better hamburger than McDonalds, but few (if any) of us could build a better system for delivering those hamburgers than McDonald’s.”

McDonald’s capabilities and skills in process, marketing, standardization and so forth are what makes it such an efficient company. A better capabilities strategy is also why so many companies thrive and others don’t. If a company can outpace its competition through greater understanding and clarity of their capabilities-driven strategies then they are likely to be able to thrive even in a tough economy!

Have a peak at the article, it’s a great resource for learning and improving your capabilities-driven strategies and getting a jump on outpacing your competition in 2009.

An Entrepreneur’s review: The Art of the Start by Guy Kawasaki

by Devin Day Leave a Comment

frontcover-1

Let me preface this review by saying that I realize I am the nth person to comment on this book. I am also what many would consider a “practicing serial entrepreneur.” While I make no claims to be a start-up expert, I have founded four businesses in the past 10 years and have experienced everything from pitching business ideas to major brands and strategic partners to raising large sums of investor capital. All this to say that I hope you find my review useful coming from one who has significant experience starting things.

While The Art of the Start did not (and didn’t intend to) present any new or revolutionary concepts, it did something for me that other start-up books haven’t done. Kawasaki focuses on one of the great challenges entrepreneurs face (starting something) and compiles all of the essential concepts for success in one concise, easy-to-read handbook. He not only covers the basics of business (such as how to pitch, how to hire staff, etc.), but he also addresses such ideals as character and integrity, topics that are difficult to teach but are some of the most crucial elements for success in any business environment. Many startup business books address topics such as raising capital and writing your business plan, but few zero in on the importance of human relationships and emotional intelligence in the entrepreneurial process. The problem is that, by neglecting such issues early on, we risk being too oriented on the forest to see the trees and our business and leadership suffers as a result.

I consider this book a manual for start-up success that combines the human relationship skills of Dale Carnegie (link) and the business savvy skills of Jack Welch (link) from the perspective of a guy (no pun intended – link) who might understand the entrepreneurial process better than anyone.

The book’s chapters are as follows:

  1. “Starting”
  2. Positioning
  3. Pitching (great information)
  4. Business Plan (great information)
  5. “Bootstrapping”
  6. Recruiting (great chapter)
  7. Finding investors
  8. Partnerships
  9. Branding
  10. Rainmaking
  11. Being a good person, or a “Mensch”

Key excerpts from the book

  • “There are few tasks that face an entrepreneur that are more enjoyable than recruiting employees to a hot start-up.”
  • “Organizations are successful because of good implementation, not good business plans.”
  • “If you don’t terminate people who aren’t working out, you increase the probability of having to lay off people who are.”
  • “Like the Holy Grail, the business plan remains largely unattainable and mythological.”
  • “If you ever want to understand what God thinks of money, look at who He gives it to.”

These points make it crystal clear that Guy Kawasaki gets it. Each idea is one that I have learned through first hand experience over the years and is the reason the book resonates with me so much. I plan to continually revisit and review this book as an integral part of my business library. You should have it as well (most of you probably do).

DDay Rating – 5 out of 5 stars (for nailing all the topics that matter when starting anything)