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Welcome back to the Snyder Showdown podcast. Host Chris Snyder is the successful, straight-talking Internet business expert with zero patience for losing, a potty mouth and a well earned chip on his shoulder.
In this episode, Chris pulls no punches in discussing how modern day business hiring practices need to significantly improve. He talks about the importance of hiring the correct people, calls BS on the typical recruiting process, shares best-in-class hiring tips, and warns of the dangers and costs of bad hiring.
Chris details real-life hiring experiences while sharing invaluable hiring tactics - including setting validation periods for new hires and how to quickly sever ties with those who fail to meet expectations.
Upholding true thought leadership, Chris calls out BS within the typical recruitment process. He urges you to challenge the reliability of references, resumes and LinkedIn profiles and gives insight into hiring methods that work best in today's world. He also emphasizes how trusting your gut is likely your best hiring tool.
Finally, Chris tackles the importance of holding your team accountable. He gives concrete examples on how to get your employees to take on the responsibility of proving their own added-value through doing what they said they will do.
Related to accountability for his team, Chris also talks more about the importance ion setting clear objectives in "How OKRs Help Us Manage Projects".
Chris is the founder of fintech online financial marketplace Banks.com, as well as the President of Juhll.com, an online marketing agency providing full digital services for industries like Banking and Fintechs, Software as a service (Saas) or E-Commerce.
“I think it’s incumbent upon the team and everyone else to really evaluate—like, do you have your teammate’s back when it’s really super important?” (11:09)
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“This is digital agency services and we’re in performance marketing. Combine all those and you are in the toughest business on the planet. I believe that.” (13:02)
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“It just feels good to win. It feels good to be the best. And, I think, fortunately or unfortunately being the best and winning requires a shitload of hard work.” (14:09)
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“We did get some of the best and brightest and we paid them handsomely. And I would say that nine times out of ten, those people were the exact wrong fit for this company.” (24:57)
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“There’s such a preponderance of bullshit floating around that you can’t believe any of it. You have to actually spend time with these people.” (27:57)
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“The unemployment rate in our business is zero. It’s zero.” (34:12)
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“My style is zero to a hundred.” (38:53)
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Chris is the founder of fintech online financial marketplace Banks.com, as well as the President of Juhll.com, an online marketing agency providing full digital services for industries like Banking and Fintechs, Software as a service (Saas) or E-Commerce.
Chris pulls no punches in discussing how modern day business hiring practices need to significantly improve.
Chris Snyder:
Our culture is driven primarily by the fact that you have to be willing to run fast, work hard, and do things that are extraordinary, or you're going to be average.
Interviewer:
Welcome to Snyder Showdown,an original Juhll Agency Production. This is the show for unvarnished conversations about what's really happening in the world with digital advertising, with stories from the trenches about what's working and what's not. With your host, president of Juhll agency, Founder-Operator-Investor in banks.com, Chris Snyder.
Chris Snyder:
You know what’s interesting,the way I started this conversation was in preparation for this podcast.Sometimes I like to think about what I'm going to say or what am I going to talk about. Because literally during the day there's 25 things I got going on and I'm trying to figure out what the perspective is on any of this. It feels the more I think about what I'm going to say, it gets less clear about what we're about to talk about. So I plugged into a podcast with a very famous podcast person, which will remain nameless, but I was really listening to the words and listening to what was going on in those sessions. And ultimately what was going on in those sessions are like, for sure there's no bullshit. But there is also for sure these things that people are talking about in this group with the person leading the podcast that's the leader of this group of people that this person is trying to help.
And at the end of the day I'm like, what is anyone really getting out of this? Maybe you paid some money, you're in a session. Or maybe you got invited to the show and maybe it's important for this person to go on and on about what they believe is the accurate way to do things or not do things. And I'm really trying to figure out is that really helpful? Because at the end of the day, there wasn't a single thing that was said to four, or five, or six, or seven different people in the room that I think they could take away and go and apply to their business immediately. By the way, maybe that's not the point. Maybe the point to that particular show or that particular podcast is to motivate and inspire.And that's great. Motivate and inspire. I don't really need that. I'm actually really actually trying to figure stuff out. Right?
Interviewer:
Do you think that it's a mixed message from that podcast, so that sometimes you don't know what you're going to get? Are you going to get motivation? Are you going to get teaching?And it's maybe not being a good fit for you as an ideal listener for them?
Chris Snyder:
Yeah. You know what honestly,some of these podcasts including this one, I feel the personality of the hosts are what they are, and that is not going to change. And what I do see also with a lot of these hosts is that they're trying to figure out how to transform or change into I think how they make more money doing this, is actually what it feels to me. "Okay, we're going to start here and then a year later we're going to go to here. And then six months later we're going to realize that doesn't work as well to make money. So now we're going to basically start selling online conferences." I mean yeah, okay. Well, so now you're going to sell online conferences and you're basically going to sell consulting and advice. I don't know. It just doesn't seem, I don't know. It doesn't seem genuine to me.
Interviewer:
Why doesn't that resonate with you?
Chris Snyder:
Well first of all, I think people want to have hope, right? So they look towards some of these experts,and it's easy to pick up a free podcast. Listen to these experts, get inspired.Maybe it lights a spark and then maybe you start to do something. Then maybe you realize like, Oh shit, "I'm in over my head. Way over my head, and now probably need to go meet with this human being and actually have them tell me what to do for my business." But at the end of the day, no one can tell you what to do for your business, no one. They can, and you can go do it. But all you're really doing is you're going to transition this success to your self if it does work, but you're going to transition the failure to the expert that you've listened to if it doesn't work.
I guess as a human being, you really need someone to be around you and hear from them,and listen to their experiences. And I think that's fine and that's valid. But I also think there is a lot of this out here. And I'm actually not so certain how helpful most of it is, right? Because there's no detail around it. It's motivating, it's inspiring, and that's great. But most people actually want to get shit done and make stuff work, and figure out what the secret is. Which there are none. So I just found it interesting, and I also found that particular podcast as big as that one is, I found it more inspiring to me about the things that I don't want to do. And more of the things that I do want to do.
Interviewer:
So let's lean into that a little bit. How do you want this to be different than that specific experience?And then part two of that is how do you want the listener to feel after consuming one of these episodes?
Chris Snyder:
There's people out there today that are sitting at a desk or sitting in an office and they're faced with a number of problems. What I hope to tackle is very specific instances of things that happen at work or as an entrepreneur, or in some business environment that is relatable to the people listening. Whether it be people not showing up for work on time, whether it be people not doing what they say they're going to do. Whether it be office politics stuff, getting into really specific instances. And talking about situations. Then they're listening and then I think in an inspiring and motivational podcast you might be like,"Take a deep breath, relax." Do all this. Okay. Got it. Got It. But at the end of the day, I think we need to talk in real terms about the situation that happened and the three or four different ways that it could be handled, and maybe give some really valid advice two or three different directions on maybe how some of this stuff can get handled.
And specifically how I might handle it, for right or wrong. It might not be the right way. Just going to talk about how I handle it. And they might go,"Well jeez I did that and it backfired on me because I work at a huge company and Chris's direct approach would not work here, would never work here.So I can't take that advice. I'll get fired." Or something that. Does that answer your question?
Interviewer:
Yeah. I think it's important because when you think about creating each one of these episodes and as we talk through this process, you have to put that same filter that you have on or the whatever the BS filter is that you had when you were listening to the other one saying, "Why am I listening to this?" That's the last feeling you'd want to listen to this episode to feel so I think it's being,just lean with the content and every single nugget would be so dense in terms of the information that's provided that people feel like even if they are short, that they're still gonna get a ton of value for them.
Chris Snyder:
Correct. Yeah. I think what I could do is address a couple of topics that have happened most recently.Actually I'll tackle one at our business that happened most recently. I don't think it's a secret that we're not a huge business. So there is not a backup for a backup, for a backup. There isn't a whole bunch of people sitting on the bench, twiddling their thumbs wondering if someone's out of the office that day or if someone goes out on break, or if someone has an important client meeting.There's not people sitting around that have all the domain knowledge just waiting to catch all of this traffic. Whether it be email correspondence, or whether it be excel spreadsheets that need to be done, whether it be bidding and budgeting and ad words that need to happen or writing keyword copy that needs to happen. Or commenting on a design that needs to go back to a client.There really isn't a lot. We're pretty lean.
Interviewer:
And honestly this is how most companies and startups are as well. So I think this information is super relevant, and it's super applicable to people who are just in that starting phase.
Chris Snyder:
Yeah. And so there's a couple things even just today. One, all of our people are important. So if one important person is out of the office on a business trip or one important person that has the office on a break which everyone deserves. We need to get something really super important done, and we can't get it done because that one person who holds all the keys to this one kingdom, right? And no matter how much you talk about business process and no matter how much you try to plan for someone being out of the office, it's inevitable. If something's gonna go wrong, it's going to go wrong when that person's out of the office, for sure.It's going to go wrong when that person's out of the office. That that happened to me, not me personally. But that happened to our team today and with a client. And at the end of the day and reflection on all of this, it's like what are the odds of this ever happening again? Ever when this person is out of the office, ever? None. The odds are probably pretty close to zero. Right?
But in reflection of it I'm like if you're a big name brand or of a huge company with a lot of backups and a lot of business process and people that help people and it's all good, this wouldn't be a problem. Or maybe it is a problem and I'm imagining that it's not a problem for those guys because they have shit loads of money. Right? I don't know. But in our company, it's a huge problem. I think what it comes down to is do you have the right people at your organization that are contactable while they're out? And by the way, I feel terrible contacting people when they need to take a little bit of a break for themselves. I feel terrible.
But I also feel this work life balance or some of this other stuff, it doesn't happen often. It happened one time, and I feel terrible trying to reach out and solve this problem. I think everyone on our team feels terrible trying to bother someone while they're spending time with their kids or they're out on vacation.Clearly, we wouldn't do it unless it was important. But I think what it boils down to you as a good piece of business advice is when you have the opportunity to figure out the folks on your team, if they're really committed to your organization, are they willing? And they know that it's an emergency. I'm only talking about emergencies. Are they willing to step up, step in there, and get this stuff done? And at the end of the day, a lot of folks aren't. I don't think a lot of folks are, or they're completely uncontactable.
Right? And for a business our size or even for a business with 100 people to be completely uncontactable unless you're in Costa Rica and you're just like,"It's my wedding." I don't know. It's something super important, not just, "I'm taking a few days off." I think it's incumbent upon the team and everybody else to really evaluate do you have your teammate's back when it's really super important? And you can't plan for that. There's no business process for that, there's no coaching for that. You know what, our people are contactable. They chipped in, they helped the first available opportunity they had and they're going to get this stuff done. I think it comes down to agency culture. For us it's agency culture. For you it might be company culture for another it might be brand culture. There's a lot of different descriptors around this. But for us it's agency culture. Everyone will always do whatever it takes to get stuff done and get the work done.
Interviewer:
What's interesting about that Chris, is I think you've developed a culture it sounds like where you treat people good from day one or from the hire, or you've set a company culture where people know that you're giving them that leeway. They know that when they take time off, 99 times out of 100, you're going to respect their time. They seem to be willing to go to bat for the company. So when it comes time for this one off, they don't think twice about helping you out. I think its peaks to the culture that you might be creating there.
Chris Snyder:
Yeah. Well and the other thing too, I think culture is a whole topic and I think it's a really fuzzy thing. Especially in an organization our size, it's super important. Even in an organization the size of an Oracle or a Facebook. It's super important too, but t's really hard to control 20,000 employees and instill this type of culture in them. But at the end of the day, culture's a hard thing. I tried really hard over the years to respect people's time. I've tried really hard over the years to be super clear about how demanding I am, and how demanding our clients. I've been super clear about, "This is digital agency services, and we're in performance marketing. Combine all those three. You are in the toughest business on the planet." I believe that. And if someone wants to respond to this podcast and challenge me that they're in a tougher business than I am,I would love to talk to them. Because you wake up one day and Facebook's like,"We leaked all your data." Or you wake up one day and Equifax has given away however many social security numbers.
Wake up one day and Google's like, "I turned off that feature or functionality that allows you to spend at 800 percent ROAS as for the last two years, and I just decided to turn it off because we're not going to do business that way." Right? So our culture is driven primarily by the fact that you have to be willing to run fast, work hard, and do things that are extraordinary, or you're going to be average. You're just going to be average. And guess what?Since this is our brand, and when I say our brand and my business partner and my wife and I, we have a very specific pride and way that we operate and how we want to win.
I don't know I've said that before, but it just feels good to win. It feels good to be the best. And I think fortunately or unfortunately, being the best and winning requires a shitload of hard work. And sometimes it requires that you step away from your kids and your family every once in a while, and respond to an email or a text, or a phone call. Not often, but it happens. And if you really want to be the best and you really want to win, then you just integrate this into your life and everybody gets it and they're like, "Daddy's cooking pancakes. He's on a phone call, and he'll be done in 15 minutes. And then he's gonna put his phone down, serving my pancakes and give me his undivided attention." So they get a little bit of business. I get to do my call, and nobody's complaining that I don't have any work life balance, because it doesn't exist anyway because I love what I do.
Interviewer:
Well yeah, exactly. If you think about the idea of the balance is this perfect equilibrium with the seesawis literally horizontal and there's no one going down or knowing going up.That's the zen balance and that doesn't exist. It's going to be one way. It's either going to be tilted to the life or it's going to be tilted to the work.Then I think it depends on what you deem is important at the time and for that moment in your life, and that's where it swings. And like you said, don't feel guilty about it.
Chris Snyder:
Well you can't because it's the facts. The fact of the matter is if you work at an agency in digital and you deliver performance marketing campaigns that where you put a dollar in,you're expected to get three or four, eight or 10 out depending on the occasion, you're basically a day trader. You're basically a stockbroker. You literally wake up and you're playing with hundreds of thousands of dollars in some cases every month or every week, or in some cases every day. Once you give Google that money, it's gone. You are not getting it back. You're never getting it back. So you better figure out real fast how to get some structure and some commitment to how much focus and attention you have to have on numbers,discipline, the kind of business you're operating in. And don't have unrealistic expectations about where you're at in life. Right?
So I tell folks, not my staff because they're amazing and they love what they do,and a lot of these guys had been here for a long time. But I do tell people in interviews and stuff like that I'm like, "Look, if you're looking for nine to five with an hour lunch and it's Monday through Friday, that sounds amazing.So do I. So do I. And guess what? I could have that. I could easily go down at Wells Fargo, apply to be a mortgage broker. Make $78,000 a year, wear a suit to work every day. Get 15 minute breaks every three hours because we do work in the state of California so we have to have our [inaudible 00:16:57], right? And I can get the Nestle, Nescafe coffee in the lobby and I can shake people's hand and use the antibacterial soap afterwards because I got to shake everybody's hand. And then I can go to the gym at 5:30 and have my amazing tri core by triple quad, heart rate workout thing, and just that'll make me happy."That's not going to make me happy. That might make someone else happy.
Interviewer:
Don't forget the vegetarian cafeteria.
Chris Snyder:
Correct. Correct. That's another story. We should write that down. I have stories like that as well. And by the way when I say these things, this is not for criticism. This is not a tall for criticism. This is talking to people who are coming to places mine or places that look mine and are saying, I" want to work here." And I come back and I say, "Really? Do you really want to work here? Because this is what's required." And by the way, I'm not making the rules. I didn't create any of this. This environment that we live in, this digital,always on news, Facebook frenzy, media, Kardashians. I didn't create any of this, I just happened to be a part of a business that this is how we make our living. I happen to enjoy most of it, and you have to enjoy it. I'm not forcing it.
But if you need all of this other stuff, there's plenty of big companies out there where you can be a wheel in a cog and just plod along, and you have to make those choices.
Interviewer:
How do people respond when they hear that from you?
Chris Snyder:
Well you know what's funny,everyone generally responds really well initially. I think that the rest of us when we're thinking we're at a spot in our life that we might not be or we romanticize about something that could possibly be true. "I have it. I'm up for the challenge. I'm really gonna do this." No you're not. Because you wouldn't quit after three months, or six months, or eight months if you were truly passionate about this type of business. You wouldn't quit. And the thing of it is, it's that's what I talk about in my interviews.
I'm like, "Look, I'm not going to bullshit you at all. It's going to be hard.It's going to be super hard. I'm going to be demanding of you and the only reason I'm demanding is because our clients are demanding. If our client calls and they say, 'Look, we need this and we need that,' I'm going to challenge our clients. That's my job to make sure and the numbers they're given us in the goals they're given us are achievable. And if I sort through that and I believe it's achievable because I've seen it and I've done it, that's on our team and they got to make it happen."
So I think what people think they want and what they think they're capable of sometimes, and the commitment that a job is. The big Job. This isn't something that you just kinda like ... My kids are in camp, right? My daughter wants to try-out baseball and she's like, "I'm going to go sign up for baseball camp for two days." Great. It's two days. Easy. Show up late, it's fine.Don't show up late to karate because that's not cool. But baseball camp, you're going to try it out. It's fine. Unfortunately in our world, there is no try before you buy on a job interview. You better really understand what you're inform, and most people don't. So back to the question Chris, what do they think?They love it. "I think I can do it." Chris, where are those people,some of them after three or six months? They're fucking miserable. They're miserable. So I'm getting better at not even talking to people whose paper doesn't reflect that they've done entrepreneurial things their entire life,because that's this.
It really does need to turn you on and turn you up every day to wake up and go,"Holy shit, there's 100 fires burning. Not really sure how to get after it, but I'm going to have a good attitude about it. I'm going to make a client happy. I'm not going to act they're a pain in my ass. I'm going to actually try to help them create revenue because when we don't, people lose their jobs and we lose our jobs." There's all this crazy stuff around it. Those are the kinds of people just flat out that will do anything and run through walls because they love it, not because they're here to make money. Or not because they're here because, "We're going to get the job at Juhll because they're going to teach us digital marketing or digital advertising. They're going to teach us how to put ads on Facebook or they're going to teach us how to bid,buy, and budget Google Keywords. Or they're going to teach us about how to look at an analytic spreadsheet the right way and talk to clients about it."
If you're coming here to learn or you're coming here for an ulterior motive other than the things that I just talked about, you're going to wash out in six months. Actually, I'll wash you out in 45 days. No problem. Right? Nicely. This isn't the right fit. We both made a mistake.
Interviewer:
Where do you think other companies get it wrong here?
Chris Snyder:
Well what's funny is hiring in today's age is so hard. It's so hard. As we scaled our business my business partner and I, we implemented tests. Problem solving tests, wanted to understand.It's like the NFL, right? Speed kills. If you're not fast, you're not playing NFL football. Sorry, you're not going to play. "Hey, I want to play DB in the NFL." Okay. Do you run a 4 340 and do you weigh 220 pounds, and can you just knock a 400 pound guy on his ass? No? Okay. You're not getting an interview. Right?
So we would run people through tests. If you were a developer, we had crafted developer tests. And if you were an analytics person, we develop all these data tests and you have to pass the test before I'd even interview you. That would get rid of a lot of people. Right away they were like, "I'm not going to take a test to talk to you guys." Well fine, them don't talk to us because I just paid $2,500 on LinkedIn for 40,000 resumes. Seriously, what am I supposed to do now? What am I supposed to do now? You can get anybody's name and any piece of data anytime nowadays. We would put people through a battery of tests, and then we got software called Top Grader by Bradford Smart. He's wrote a couple books.
He's a genius. He's awesome. I love reading his stuff. And every time we face a problem here with hiring, the one that we're talking about right now, I get a book. Two or three books on Amazon, Kindle. Generally I don't look for a podcast. I look for books that tell us exactly what some other companies are doing and how they're doing it, and then we walk our own path.
But getting back to the topic at hand, what I learned about probably hiring or having over the last five years, have generated more than $10 million, less than $20 million in top line revenue for this agency. And probably have had 75 employees in aggregate over that time. At the end of the day, I wish I could tell you that we created some secret formula for success that is now part of our hiring regimen, and it's rinse, wash, repeat, and we always get the best of the best, and things are easy.
Not true. Never happened. And on the flip side of that, I've hired people that have done not so great on those tests, let's call them C's or C+ from a smart standpoint, from the being overall raw intelligence. These are the people that probably took the SATs or the ACTs and barely got in or barely passed. But they got to college and they blew it out. Or they had a job and they were hard workers and they got through college, and had a job, and worked their way up, and they've grinded it out and they're great, great, great. So I guess what I learned from all of that is we did get some of the best and brightest and we paid them handsomely, and I would say that nine times out of 10 those people were the exact wrong fit for this company.
The exact wrong fit. The exact wrong fit, right? It was a stepping stone to something else. It was a placeholder for another thing and a thing. It was treated as if, "I'm just waiting for my Facebook or my Google opportunity." Right?
Interviewer:
Is that something you could have caught or can you catch earlier now?
Chris Snyder:
No. You know what's funny about this now. And of course if you read any of the pundit's books and you talk about it in and look at it closely, this is going to probably err on the side of just stupidity that I'm even going to say this. But the last person that I interviewed and hired came on a referral, and of course referral that's a no brainer, right? People who come on referrals, birds of a feather flock together in general. They like the same stuff. They do the same stuff. They're generally the same people. Driven, entrepreneurial, whatever.
I was like, "You know what, I'm not going to look at a resume. Not going to look at a resume. I'm going to tell her that we can talk for 30 minutes, we can talk for an hour. We can have a follow up interview. I can put you through a test.You're going to give me all the right answers. You're going to tell me what I want to hear, and then you're going to sit in that chair and neither one of us are going to know what the fuck is gonna happen next? Neither one of us. We're not going to know."
Interviewer:
You told her this?
Chris Snyder:
Yes. And she was like,"Is this the interview?" I'm like, "Yeah, this is the interview." So at the end of the day, I really don't care about this stuff anymore. Because you know what?
Interviewer:
Finish that story.
Chris Snyder:
Well, okay. So the story is she's amazing. She's amazing. And you know what?
Interviewer:
How long ago was this?
Chris Snyder:
This was about 90 days ago.
Interviewer:
That's interesting.
Chris Snyder:
The story is, is we probably got one of our most challenging client ever. This person is on the East Coast,the client is in LA. She's staying up until midnight East Coast time to support a pain in the ass account that was absolute waste of everybody's time. That's for a different story. But she literally ran through walls for 45 days, 50 days.That was her job interview. I made it pretty clear moving forward. I'm like you know what honestly, I'm trying to figure out instead of sitting people down,putting them through all these tasks, asking all these crazy questions. I'm going to look at your piece of paper, which you've probably doctored up quite a bit. I'm going to say, "You know how do analytics. You say you know how to do these models. You know how to do account management. You say how to talk to people and you've got a good communication style, and you know something about digital marketing."
Beyond that, what you write on that paper is all bullshit. All of it. What's in your LinkedIn profile is bullshit. It's bullshit. Look at mine. It's not bullshit because I don't update it, because I know if I update it people will be like, "That guy's bullshit." It's like there's such a preponderance of bullshit floating around, that you can't believe any of it. You have to actually spend time with these people. And how do you do it? It's like finding a life partner, right? You don't know anyone until you've been ... Three months by the way. Three months isn't even enough time. Six months you get to know someone, a year you get to know someone.
But how do you put all these challenges in a bottle, throw it at someone you don't know, see how they respond to every single challenge. Because that's the only way you're going to know. You have to put them in the fire, they have to muck it out in the coals, jump in and out, get the water, run back, put it out,communicate with teammates, do people like them. And then at the end of the day being smart. That comes with the territory, but do you need to be Harvard smart?
Interviewer:
Street smart. Yeah. Which is more valuable? We had this discussion when we met last week about these MBAs that show up on day one to a company, and they've got all the bookmarks but then the real world they totally fall apart.
Chris Snyder:
Yeah, look. I think that education is super important, and I think that two kinds of education are super important. Learning by reading stuff in a book and listening to a professor tell you about a business case from a massive company, billions of dollars, o ra massive governmental organization billions of dollars. Or maybe talk to you about the case study about Tesla and Elon Musk, or PayPal, or any of these other guys. That is really interesting shit for a 22 or 23 year old kid to know that's in business school. "Wow, there's stuff around me that exists. It's called a balance sheet. It's called a PnL. Wow if you write a headline copy a certain way, maybe you'll get more clicks than if you write it another way." Right? Well it's an open rate? Go ahead read all of that, all you want, all day long. And then when you're done reading it, go do it.
Interviewer:
So that's a good place to pause that thought because it seems like that's going to be another topic for another episode. Just that, so we're going to tease that out. I think we're going to have that as a future episode. So that's already something that's in the can. To come back to this idea of testing someone for something that you're not even sure if they're gonna be able to put into use, this idea of a probation is really interesting, or probationary period. I've heard companies do this before where you get 90 days. It's 90 days for you to check us out and it's 90 days for us to check you out. And it sounds that's a model, I don't know if that's the formal word that you use. But it sounds it's fair because like you said, at the end of the day it's just words on a paper and at the end of the day, you get to see them in action for 90 days. At least you have a pretty good idea of if it's going to be a fit on both sides.
Chris Snyder:
Yeah. Well I would say unfortunately, it took me a few years to learn the hard way that we were spending so much time on the front end because that's what all the books say, right? Spend all your time on the front end. Vet these people, check their references. By the way, references are bullshit. And you know what? Find. Some PhD, they want to get on the show and be like, "Dude, you're doing it all wrong." Okay, fine. I don't have an HR department with 20 people waiting to call a bunch of references that all they're going to do is say, "Chris is a great guy." And by the way in state of California, if you're a reference for someone and you say something out of line, you could actually be sued because you could cost that person their job, right? Objectively, you could cost them their job.
So if someone puts me down for a reference, I actually don't do references. I basically just say, "Talk to HR and validate that they worked here."Because you can't even ask for salary in California either, prior salary. So if someone comes to me and says, "Hey, I was making $200,000 a year at agency X, Y, Z, back in the day." You could say, "Okay, show me last three months of W2's and let's match it. Let's do it. If you're a rockstar that,let's do it." Nope, illegal question. Can't ask it. But at the end of the day getting back to the question, I wished that I would have pushed harder on the this company is amazing. We're doing really interesting stuff. It's really hard. I'm not going to spend a whole bunch of time trying to figure out if you're lying to me on the front end, I'm just going to tell you to come in here and sit down here and prove it. I will tell you without a shadow of a doubt,you're going to have a monthly review with me. You're going to have weekly stand ups with your team, and they are going to be giving you feedback. And if any of us are not happy, you're gone. You're just gone.
And that's it. But let's be clear, I'm not saying it that way because I just want to crush it. No, it has to be a good fit. You're spending so much of your life and your emotional energy and your time with these clients and these people.And if you come in here and you're not a good fit, and we all realize it together, 38 days in, you have to be gone. Because we're all invested. We're all super invested, right? I've introduced you to clients. I've put you in charge of tasks that now take bricks out of my backpack that I'm going to have back in my backpack.
It's a shit show going through that process. But I honestly, I've given everyone all the tests, I've done it the other way too. And maybe it's just the size of our organization. It doesn't work. It doesn't work for this business.
And by the way the recruiters, they're not good either. They're just going to push a bunch of paper over to you and be like, "Here, you figure it out."They're not going to guarantee their work either. They might say, "We'll give you a replacement within 45 days." It's like dude, I already spent$100,000 of my time in my life over the last 68 days with this human being that you supposedly vetted, by all this stuff. And it sucked. Now you're going to give me another person that have to spend another 90 days of my life bringing up to speed? It's not good.
It's because the unemployment rate in our business is zero. It's zero. You can do whatever you want. Sign up with a company, get there for eight months, get your bonus check, raise your salary, get 100 grand, get a call from a company. They offer you 120 with a ping pong table and the lunch. Boom, you're off. You're off to the races. Come to my office. "Really sorry. Really liked it here.You're amazing, but I'm giving you two weeks’ notice and I'm leaving." Oh shit, right? Here we are. How do you predict that by doing upfront PhD analysis whizzbang problem solving tests and everything else? You can't predict any of this stuff.
Interviewer:
Yeah, we talked about our favorite podcast, Masters of Scale. They were talking about it recently, this idea that it's more important the culture, or just letting people know what they're in for from day one and what you stand for. And an introduction like that is going to put people in a certain mindset and mood. And they're either going to be afraid from it and run, or they're gonna embrace the challenge and say, "You actually threw down the gauntlet, and I know what I'm capable of and I know I can thrive in that environment. So yeah, game on. I'm going to take it," and I think you'd probably find that the people who jump into it both feet turn out to be the rock stars.
Chris Snyder:
Yeah. I listened to that episode actually just last week. I think Arianna Huffington had some really cool things to say. And at the end of the day they were saying, "Hey, we interviewed our first 150. Some people interviewed the first 500 employees." We're talking about really, really big companies. That is really to me, even if you interviewed each one of those guys for an hour which I know you didn't, you spend a lot more time with them. That's a lot of timeout of your life. As a founder of a company or as an executive at a firm that is responsible for making these types of hiring decisions, it takes a lot of your time. There was a point in our agency growth when we had 30 employees. I was probably doing two or three interviews a day.
And I had it down to 30 minutes. I had four key questions. I had it all nailed,right? But at the end of the day, you know what? It didn't matter. Because the people that are going to leave are the people that are going to leave. And the people that are going to stay when shit really, really hits the fan, which you never know until shit really hits the fan. And you hope that doesn't happen,but you know it's going to happen. You hope that it happens in their first 30 days. "Oh please God, I hope the shit really hits the fan for Jimmy."Right? And it's like nope, shit didn't hit the fan. 95th day his shit hit the fan. Damn it. Now I've got a different problem.
Interviewer:
So to put a bow on this and bring it back around from the initial problem you brought up, you mentioned that someone was away and then obviously during a critical moment when you needed them and yet to reach out to them. So I imagine everything got resolved to your resolution, but what are you doing now to just make sure that type of stuff doesn't happen again?
Chris Snyder:
Well you know what's interesting? I think as I start to ... First of all yes. The situation included maybe seven or eight people on our team. They were all hustling. They were all asking the right questions. They were all trying to figure it out, including the person that wasn't even supposed to be available became available. They all figured it out. The point of the story is if you have the right people, you can make this stuff kind of happen, right? No problem.
But I think that at the end of the day, you never really know what you're going to get until shit really hits the fan, right? And then I think we moved a little bit into that cultural thing and into that hiring thing to bring it all the way back to when shit hits the fan, do you have the right people? I guess my conclusion on this is you're never really gonna know until stuff goes sideways.Right? And what I learned from this too is ... I think the word control freak is overstated in many, in many, many ways, right? I'm only controlling to a point where I can provide the value in the extra inertia to get stuff done. I feel like if I'm there thumping up and down a little bit on the topic and expressing that sense of urgency, maybe it'll get people moving in a direction that maybe they haven't thought about, or maybe they don't understand that this issue is this urgent. I don't know. I don't know. Or maybe it's a style thing,right? My style is zero to 100. I'm at zero or I'm at a 100, and not every single issue is 100. But if it's not 100, then I don't want to be involved. So when I get involved, usually it's 100.
But the thing that I learned about this particular situation is I actually just send a note and said, "I'm out. I'm not a developer. I'm looking at code in a text file that is supposed to be some security token for an AWS account."What the fuck man? At this point, I'm just the jerk jumping up and down asking people when it's gonna get done.
Interviewer:
And probably getting in the way.
Chris Snyder:
No. Dude, point of diminishing returns. Point of diminishing returns. Clients sends the email."Okay, we're going to get it done." I'm like, Everybody's good."Then it starts ratcheting up. We're not good. Oh my God, we're really not good.And then it reminds me of clients that I have that don't understand what we do as an agency, and then they call me every 10 minutes and they're like, "Is it done? Is it done? Is it done?" And I'm like, "Dude, just fucking stop. I'm working here. It'll get done as soon as I can get it done. And it'snot because I don't want it to get done. It's because we're sorting it out. So stop bothering me." Right?
So I think what I personally learned from this is these guys are going to sort it out, they're going to sort out and they did sort it out. And honestly next time, I'm just going to send an email and be like, "I don't want to be involved. I'm sure you guys will sort it out." But my fear is that if it doesn't get sorted out quickly and in the way that I would prefer that we sort it out, we could lose a client. Potentially we could lose a client.
Retrospectively,that's why I get so worked up over this stuff is because I feel like if we don't do this the right way, we're going to lose business. Which means we lose revenue, which means we lose margin, which means we might have to lose employees. I take it all the way through the cycle. So no matter who I'm communicating with at the time, I'm looking at the whole cycle. How does this impact our reputation? Did we do what we say we're going to do? Are we upholding Juhll's values by having a good process and making sure the shits available? I'm going through the whole thing and just going oh man, this ain't good. I'm thinking about all of it. Someone else might be thinking like,"Dude, what's the big deal? It's just not that big of a deal." I'm like, "Oh no, it is a big deal." But maybe it's not. Maybe it's not.
Interviewer:
I think it's for up every owner, business owner to make that call. What's important and how important do you value your team's time? And I think this idea of you jumping out is really interesting because it happened recently with something in my business where I realized I was not adding value, and I needed to empower my employees to be the boss of that process. So if a client asks me something, I'm like, "Nope,that's a production call. You need to talk to Sarah. I'm not gonna answer that question because you're probably trying to get through me to get it done faster, which is going to screw everything up and everyone's going to be upset internally." So I learned that the hard way.
Chris Snyder:
Yeah. No it's interesting. I think that we all need to figure out, there's a topic in here about accountability. I love it when there's 20 people on a meeting and then I say,"Okay, who's actually in charge of this?" Crickets. Jiminy Cricket is in charge, no one is in charge of this. And it's like, "Wait a second,someone is either going to volunteer for this or I'm going to put someone on the hook for this." It's accountability. It's accountability. If you're going to be out or I'm going to be out, or we say we're going to do something.Someone's got to be accountable. Right? So I think it's about accountability and I think it's really, really important just to figure out who the buck stops with. And in a small business, it stops with me, right? It really does stop with me. It's really hard to create layers here and create, "That's your job, and I'm not going to touch it. I can't touch it." Well, that is easier said than done.
Interviewer:
How much of what the team does is documented?
Chris Snyder:
Tons. We have more documentation than any other business I've seen, and that's no joke. And clients if you're out there and you want to see documentation, you want to see project plans, we have intentionally hire people that are very meticulous with attention to detail, and they write everything down.
Interviewer:
I love that.
Chris Snyder:
And by the way clients,you're going to be on the hook to. If you say you're going to do something, you got to do it too. Seriously. Why would we go to a meeting, and I'm keenly aware of labor rates, right? We have clients in New York City, we have clients in Los Angeles. Think about the labor rates, right? We're talking 50 bucks an hour in some cases. Fully loaded, more than 65. And in some cases, for a prime time,well paid, 200 grand a year person, a couple hundred bucks an hour. This is a lot of money. Right? And then if you bring a contractor in as a consultant, as a specialist for a thing, you got eight people on the phone. You just spent$2,500 on a phone call. I want to see your notes. Bro, I want to see your notes. I took notes. I took notes. I spelled the words right and I put it in bullet point format, and I put people's names by it. I want to see your notes.We just spent $2,500 on a phone call. I want to see your notes. I want see your notes.
Now the clients, they don't have to take notes. They don't have to. That's our job. But when we take the notes, they go into confluence and those confluence notes get cut and pasted into a body of an email because most people are still on email in the real world. And the client gets the notes and by every single one of those bullet points or lines, there's someone's name by it or there's an organization by it. Your organization is going to do this and specifically Jimmy is going to deliver this by this date specifically because I asked him in the meeting and he said he would do it. And we all know, nobody reads the fucking notes. They don't. They don't read the notes. I'm like, "What are you guys doing all day?" Right. But we send the notes. Jimmy's by it. We show up to the next meeting on Wednesday. This is a Monday meeting."Jimmy, you said you'd do it. It's the 16th. You said you were going to do it. Jimmy, your boss isn't on the phone. But I gotta tell you, I'll send them the notes. I don't know. We're trying to move it forward here. If you don't move it forward, we don't get our shit done. CFO gets the bill, people get fired."
Interviewer:
Yeah, that's what I thought I'd ask because I think it's really important. One of my favorite books was Sam Carpenter's work The System, which is awesome and it talks about the idea of SOPs and it seems you've got that nailed down pat. So I think this might be a good place to wrap up that topic, I think we covered it a bit and I love the fact that you shared what's working in your business now, and something that's real world where things fell apart and how you were able to pull it together.So I think there's some really good takeaways for the listener here. Any closing thoughts on that?
Chris Snyder:
Yeah, just do your best. Just do your best. Do your best. That's what we're trying to do here. I don't know if we're always right, but do your best. Everything else will work itself out.
Interviewer:
Thanks for listening. Don't forget to head on over to snydershowdown.com where we have full show notes for each and every episode. Summary, timestamps, any links mentioned in the show in a couple of tweetable quotes for you to share the episode concepts. Snydershowdown.com. There, you'll be able to sign up for our newsletter to be notified when new episodes are available. See you next week.
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