When The Client Has Specific Demands
Imagine you’ve developed an outstanding reputation for your industry and you’re garnering the attention from desirable prospective clients. They love your work, and have a big project in mind for you – but they’d like you to bring on team members to work on this project who are female.
As an entrepreneur who is passionate about serving their clients with stellar work, you think, “sure, I need to hire anyway, I can make sure my newest hire is a woman”.
What’s wrong here? Two really large problems: 
- Limiting the type of individual you’re hiring based on race, beliefs, sex, ethnicity, etc, is illegal;
- Beyond the confines of the law, what happens if next week you get a new client who wants you to hire a team member of a particular race or ethnicity? And the following week another new client requests that you hire a Veteran? Where will it end?
What’s Your Responsibility?
Remember – you’re the President, CEO, owner, creator and head of your company. As such, you have the responsibility and privilege of taking actions based on your mission, vision, goals, preferences, needs and wants; not the out-of-the-box desires of prospective and current clients. Even if it were perfectly legal to only consider job candidates based on these identifiers (it’s not!), the real point here is that you can’t bend to every client’s desire.
This is a real issue that recently came up in a real coaching session. My client and I worked on some verbiage that they would use to answer their customer.
I recommended saying something to the effect of,
“We know exactly what kind of result you’re looking for; we have your best interests at heart. We are as excited about this project as you are, and are determined to make this a success. To that end, trust that I will be bringing on team members of the highest caliber that fit exactly the skills and talent we need for your project”.
What if my new hire tries to do things their own way instead of my company way?
Another concern, almost the second your new hire steps foot in the door, is how to make sure your deliverables still look ask if you did all the work yourself.
For here, I turn to the master at training new hires in his way: Gordon Ramsay. Oh my goodness, I’m a huge fan of his for many reasons. But mostly, he is extremely particular about each detail of every one of his dishes, yet he cannot possibly do all the cooking himself; he hires all the time, and each new hire is trained in the Gordon Ramsay way.
I’ve had the pleasure of eating at 2 of his restaurants and the dishes were so good they brought tears to my eyes… yet I know (sadly) he was not in the kitchen that day. His people, his entire staff, has been meticulously trained to do things in the only manner he finds acceptable. And the result is stunning. Every. Time.
Channel your inner Gordon and make sure every new hire is trained YOUR way. Make short training videos showing your new person how to complete each task. Ask your new hire to write down the instructions as you dictate them. However you do it, documenting YOUR way is going to be the key to ensuring the results are branded to your company, and completely repeatable.
Look, no one actually likes creating documentation but once it’s done, it’s put into action for each new person, creating consistency.
If growing your team seems a bit daunting for whatever reason, book a free consult and we’ll start the ball rolling.