Make 'Em Beg To Work For You: 7 Steps to Find, Hire, Manage, Reward, and Release All-Star Players to Help Make Your Dream a Reality

By Dr. Angela E Lauria

Make ‘Em Beg To Work For You: Find, Hire, Manage, Reward, and Release All-star Players to Help Make your Dream a Reality

If you are like most solopreneurs or small business owners, the desire to make your dreams come true at a bigger level requires a team that can understand your vision and get stuff done. Unfortunat

• Language: English
• Publisher: The Author Incubator
• Release date: Aug 23, 2019
• ISBN: 9781683092384

Book preview

Chapter 1

Why Won’t People Just Do What I Tell Them?

Kate and Grace sat me down after only a few months on my team. Both experienced and talented editors, they were finding themselves overwhelmed by details and logistics and, frankly, things just changed too quickly for the job to feel like fun. There were always special exceptions and extensions and delays. It was hard to plan their own lives and taking a vacation was impossible. The job was 24/7/365 and while the compensation I offered was good for most editing roles, it wasn’t enough to make it worth the insanity of a job with a startup that never seemed to stop changing.

It was hard to hear their complaints. As 2 of my first employees, paying them was so hard. Mostly their monthly fees went on my credit card and I hoped someday the business would work. The answers to all their complaints sounded expensive and as I was still losing money on every new client I couldn’t figure out how to address their problems without going broke in the process.

Why wouldn’t they just take a risk and believe in me?

If they just worked as hard as I did I would reward them for sticking with me. Someday the company would be making millions and they would have senior roles and share in the profits.

What did I have to do to get them to see they were much better off working hard for me now than setting these ridiculous boundaries?

I called a friend. Threw a tantrum. Waved my fists in the air. And then carefully crafted a response. I’ve heard your feedback and I think you are right. I can’t fix it all right now but we can start. I’m going to hire you an assistant to help with the administrative tasks and cover for you if you need to take a vacation.

It wasn’t much, but it was enough to buy time.

I knew I needed a better plan. But what?

Maybe lower-wage workers in remote locations and more of them?

Or people who needed the jobs more?

What to do was not clear to me at all but what was clear was that it felt like editing these books myself would take less time than hiring and managing other people to do it. Now I was going to spend as much time managing these 2 editors and the assistant as I was editing the books myself, and they were all going to be unhappy about it as I went broke.

This is when the fantasies about moving to Hoi An (an adorable and cheap town with a great expat community in Vietnam) started. I would take 4 clients a year at $100K each and live like a queen in Vietnam or Thailand. When I wasn’t trying to manage my small but growing staff, I was dreaming about my great escape. The burden of building a team felt impossible.

I had a designer at the time. Talented guy. But the story there was the same. The covers were late. The interiors were full of dumb mistakes. And the reason for all of that was always me. Too many special situations. Too many changing deadlines. Too much last-minute.

It was frustrating because those deals they were complaining about – they were the only ones paying the bills. If they thought it was so easy not to have special cases and changing deadlines, why didn’t they make the sales?

I hired. I fired. I watched great people quit. I tried different tactics. Read all the books. Even went to Florida for a consultation with my father.

My dad, Mickey Lauria, is in the Hot Rod Hall of Fame. My dad was in the Hot Rod business for almost 40 years. At its peak, Total Performance, my dad’s company, had 22 employees, 8,000 square feet, and $5M in revenue. He is retired now and I really wanted him to look at what I was doing in my business and drop some serious knowledge bombs on me to get me out of this employee spin cycle.

Middle management, said my dad over a Starbucks Latte. That’s what I did wrong. I didn’t invest enough in middle management. Oh, and meetings. You need more meetings and more middle management. Yup. That is the answer. Middle management?

I left Florida and headed north absolutely scratching my head. Middle management? What did that even mean? Pay people to manage other people doing the work? Where was this money coming from? And had my father’s mental health started to decline? How on God’s earth could this be the answer?

When I was growing up, we talked about my dad’s business at every family meal. Inevitably, he would tell my mom a story of another stupid employee doing another stupid thing.

So I looked him in the eye, he’d tell my mom, and I said, ‘I don’t pay you to think!’

It wasn’t the first time I’d heard that phrase. In fact, I don’t pay you to think was my dad’s mantra. He was in a permanent state of frustration caused by his employees.

My dad was the kind of guy you whispered about if you worked for him or with him. He can eviscerate someone with the slightest turn of phrase. As much as my dad hated his employees, his employees seemed to hate him. And yet many of them would beg for their jobs back after quitting in disgust just months prior. As much as they hated him, they were draw to his passion and vision.

About 4 years into my journey with The Author Incubator, I was struggling with hiring and managing employees. I had the passion and the vision, but people were not loving working for me. I assumed this was because, like my dad, I was a difficult person to work for. I wanted to know why his employees came back even though he had a sharp tongue and didn’t particularly pay well, so I reached out to some of those employees who’d begged for their jobs back and asked why.

This message from one of those employees was the single most critical moment in my journey growing The Author Incubator:

"Your dad wasn’t the easiest man to work for, but it was only because he expected perfection in every department, after many talks in his office I started to see my faults, I was very proud of the potential he saw in me, it made me see how important everything I did in there was.

He came to me one day, we had a toilet changed out in a bathroom, the new one was smaller than the old one... I got some paint, without asking and painted the wall so it would match, then I cleaned the whole thing... he pulls me aside and asked if I did that? Nervous I said yes, sorry I should have asked, he said that’s the kinda thing you gets you a raise!! He said the phrase (that’s not my job doesn’t apply, if everyone had your view on this place, I’d be a much happier man.... he said Rivers, you’re doing great, keep it up....

Bill Rivers, the guy who sent me this message, ended it by saying, I wouldn’t have traded my time there for anything, I definitely would not be who I am had it not been for him..., and that, I realized, was the missing link. I had to CREATE opportunities that would make this sentiment I wouldn’t trade my time there for anything inevitable.

My dad always said, I don’t pay you to think. But the truth is, it’s all he ever wanted from his employees, he just didn’t want to say it because he was afraid of people disappointing him.

If I was going to outpace my dad’s success, I had to become willing to be disappointed.

I realized the reason Bill worked so hard for my dad was that he didn’t see himself as an employee, as much as he saw himself as a student.

It was very beneficial for me to have learned so much from him, he said.

Funny, because I wasn’t thinking about how the jobs I was giving my employees were beneficial to them beyond a paycheck, and yet Bill didn’t mention money once.

With my employees, I would hire anyone qualified and willing to take my money in exchange for their time. But that’s not what Bill Rivers was doing with my dad. Bill was excited to share his time with my dad because he was surely a great role model for me growing up, after all I was 18 when I first started there, couldn’t even concave how intelligent he was.

The value of the job was much more than the paycheck.

I began to only hire candidates who could enunciate to me what – other than money – they needed from the job.

I began to apply the same rules of client selection to my hiring process. In my business I help people write, publish, and promote non-fiction books that add an extra $250K - $500K a year to their businesses. But if I have a candidate who wants to write fiction, or doesn’t want to do marketing, I won’t accept them into the program because I will not take money from someone who is struggling with a problem I don’t help people solve.

As an employer I needed to apply the same exact principle and begin to understand the PROBLEM the job was going to solve in my prospective employee’s life.

Once I had a team for whom their job was solving a problem much bigger than paying their bills, it became possible to take a giant step backwards from the business.

A couple months after reading this message, and a year after my dad suggested the missing link was meeting and middle management, I told my team, I pay you to think. I want you guys to care about this place more than I do.

And I’m willing to be disappointed in ways my dad wasn’t, because I know that willingness is required for us to go where we are going.

In order to outpace my dad, I had to pay people to think. I’m proud to say I’ve been able to hire people who are BETTER at what they do than I am and every day it gets easier and more fun to pay them to think.

Most businesses I observe are like my dad’s. They don’t pay people