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Matt Green 0 Comments

Hiring at a Start-up: Best for the Position or Best Available?

Hiring is hard. See Ryan Leaf

One the many hats I wear in my position is that of hiring manager. We are a small but growing start-up, and so we are hire on a fairly constant basis. Before having this role I had never hired anyone, but now it has become critical that I make the right personnel choices. After all, when there are eight people in the entire company, one person can have a massive impact. As a hiring manager, I have found myself faced with one particular question time after time:

Do I hire the person who seems best given the nature of the role, or do I hire the person who has the most talent overall?

Ideally, these two things overlap, but usually they don’t. While there are TONS of intangibles present in a great employee that lie outside of pure talent, here I want to focus on only that trait.

For Your Consideration…a NFL Draft Metaphor

I liken this decision to that of a general manager of a NFL team choosing who to pick first in the draft. Each year around draft time the talking heads debate whether the team in question should choose a player which best fills a particular need (so, if the primary tight end is horrible, should they draft a tight end), or whether they should just take the best player available, regardless of position.

For start-ups in particular, I say take the best player available, regardless of her specific skill set. Here’s why:

The start-up environment is a fluid one, where adaptations must be made quickly. Hiring a person to fill a specific role may end up biting you when that role doesn’t exist a month down the road.

The start-up environment is also one where every single employee can have an impact on the direction of the company as a whole. The talented person you hire may end up creating her own role that is far more valuable then what you were hiring for in the first place.

A mind is a terrible thing to waste, and when you’re a start-up you face stiff competition for those great minds. Scoop them up when you can, even if they may not seem like the perfect fit for the position.

I’d love to get some feedback in the comments below from folks who have faced this very dilemma.

 

Matt Green 0 Comments

An Idea for Adopting Good Habits

adopt good habits

I think that most humans struggle with successfully adopting good habits, and because I was recently able to adopt a (rare) good habit, I thought I’d share how I was finally able to do it.

The prevailing thought is that it takes about 3 weeks of performing an action for that action to become “habit”. So the question becomes, how do we do the action for 3 weeks? I’m proposing that, in order to consistently do the action we want to do, we need to look at the habit as finish line, rather than the practice. Allow me to explain with an example.

The finish line (good habit):

Floss twice a day, every day.

The natural practice:

Floss twice every day…just do it!

The practice I propose:

Make changes that will enable me to floss twice each day.

The idea here is that if we have a goal, we must take steps to enable ourselves to reach that goal. If we say we want to make $100,000, our practice cannot be “go make $100,000″. Instead we are going to form a plan and make changes that allow us to reach our goal. For example, we will look at careers that typically earn individuals $100,000, determine the education / experience / connections we will need to obtain one of those careers, and then go about obtaining those things. The same holds true for something as seemingly simple as flossing twice every day.

What does this look like in practice?

Because we know that we will not naturally floss twice every day, just the same as we know that we will not naturally make $100,000, we need to determine what changes will allow us to reach our goal. In the case of flossing, some examples of those changes may include:

  • Waking up 5 minutes earlier in the morning to allow ourselves time to floss
  • Keeping the floss visible on that counter rather than in a drawer so that we will remember to floss
  • Putting a T.V. in the bathroom so that we won’t be bored while flossing (extreme, but same idea)

By thinking of the habit as the finish line rather than the practice, we are able to make the necessary changes which will allow us to do that which will not naturally occur.

 

Matt Green 2 Comments

How I’ve Spent Less Time on Emails Without Sacrificing Customer Service

It's true, I do

 

It's true, I do

The Problem

I manage the SEO projects of 10 clients. Some are small clients, others are big, but one thing they all have in common is that when they have a question, request, or concern, it is my job to reply promptly with an email that effectively addresses their concerns. This level of customer service is critical to our business model, as we rely on residual income from clients who stick with us, and keep paying us, because they are happy. There are two things that make our clients, and all clients happy; results, and accountability. Results in the form of increased traffic and more business, and accountability in us doing what we say we’ll do. This is where the challenge of balancing customer service with email time-sucking comes in.

A few months back I identified that I was spending far too much time throughout the day responding to emails from clients. As a result, their overall project progress suffered. My decline in productivity was not  a result of the overall amount of time I was spending addressing emails, but rather the distraction from my work (real SEO work) that checking and addressing the emails was causing. If you spend 1.5 hours on emails throughout a given day, you would expect that whether that time was spent between 9am and 10:30am or spread throughout the day, would make little difference. In my case, this expectation was incorrect. Taking 5 minutes while in the middle of another project to respond to an email was costing me far more time, because I was being distracted from real work. Here is what I did to fix it, without sacrificing customer service.

1. Make a Rule

My rule is this: Every morning when I get into work I will address every email that is in my inbox, regardless of how much time it takes. When my inbox is clear of those messages, I am done addressing emails for the rest of the day. By addressing emails in this fashion, not only am I able to do it faster because my focus is on one task, I am also not being distracted from far more productive tasks.

2. Make an Exception

If there are urgent messages from clients that come in later in the day, I will respond to those messages.

3. Make a Email Checking Schedule

My inbox does not stay open on my monitor. I have an alarm set on my phone to go off twice between 12pm and 4pm. When that alarm goes off, I check my email for any urgent messages.

So far, I have had zero complaints from my clients, and my ability to “get shit done” has improved drastically. Being that our business model is centered around customer satisfaction, and ultimately customer retention, this simple method has been a perfect solution for me.

Bonus Tips for Reducing Email Time-Wastage

  • Take an hour or so one day, and audit all of the sites who regularly send you emails that you delete without reading. Figure out how to unsubscribe, and do so.
  • Turn off email push notifications on your smart phone.
  • DO NOT keep your inbox permanently open on your browser.

 

Matt Green 0 Comments

New Direction

It turns out that most of the time I feel like writing it’s on a SEO/ search marketing/ link building topic. Alternately, when ever I feel like writing about the Rockies, I just drink heavily instead.

This post will be the last on “Mile High Twaddle: Life and Sports in Thin Air” and will mark the starting point for posts on “Mile High Twaddle: SEO Strategies and Observations”. I am determined to write 2-3 times a week. I will be giving actionable optimization tips and tricks based on things I am doing for myself and my clients. I will strive to be as transparent and open with every post as I can possibly be. After all, “secrets secrets are no fun; secrets secrets hurt someone”.