In this game-changing episode, Michael Neal, Founder of Build My Team, shares strategies to hire high-performing team members. If you struggle with finding great talent, you won’t want to miss it.

You will discover:

- Why focusing on strengths over experience attracts top talent

- How to create roles that let employees be authentic

- What outsourcing hiring can do to lighten your load

This episode is ideal for for Founders, Owners, and CEOs in stage 3 of The Founder's Evolution. Not sure which stage you're in? Find out for free in less than 10 minutes at https://www.scalearchitects.com/founders/quiz

Dr. Michael Neal is the Founder & Chief Executive Officer of Build My Team. He is a practicing Optometrist in a private practice in Hawley, Pennsylvania. Micheal founded Build My Team to solve his hiring struggles in his practice by modeling how companies like Disney and the Four Seasons hire. The process worked so well that he expanded it to help friends, and now Build My Team services clients in over 40 states and Canada.

Want to learn more about Michael Neal's work at Build My Team? Check out his website at https://www.buildmyteam.com/

Mentioned in this episode:

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Founder's Quiz

Hello, hello and welcome.

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Welcome once again to the Start, Scale and Succeed podcast, the only podcast that grows

with you through all seven stages of your journey as a founder.

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Today's guest here with us today is the one and only Dr.

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Michael Neal.

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And he's going to not only demystify how to find great team members, but also give you

what basically amounts to the business equivalent of a video game cheat code for any

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reluctant manager watching today.

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or listening.

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If you feel like your growth is limited by your team or your inability to even staff that

team, you're in for an absolute treat today.

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Who is Dr.

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Michael Neal?

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He is the founder and chief executive officer of Build My Team.

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He's a practicing optometrist in a private practice in Holly, Pennsylvania.

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Michael founded Build My Team to solve his hiring struggles in his practice by modeling

how companies like Disney and the Four Seasons hire.

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The process worked so well that he expanded it to help friends and now build my team

services clients in over 40 states and Canada as well.

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And he's here with us today.

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Dr.

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Neal, welcome to the show.

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So excited to have you here.

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I wanna start off with what I think is one of the biggest myths that holds back business

owners.

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And that's this idea that they can't find great team members, not like it's hard, but that

they can't.

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And even if they did,

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Why would those team members come and work for them instead of working at some bigger,

cooler business somewhere else?

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So what do you think, myth or truth?

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boy, that's a big question on PaxCot.

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First of all, thanks for having me on the show today.

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As far as can't find people, you're looking in the wrong place and looking the wrong ways.

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Build My Team finds people all over the place uh routinely for our clients, but we're

looking differently than using the traditional resume hiring approach.

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We focus on strengths and talents for finding people and specifically not looking for

folks with experience.

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And the reason we do that

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is that we measure how fast people learn so you don't need experience.

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You don't have the bad habits coming into the position.

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If you're open to doing something like that, you will get completely different results.

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And as far as, you know, are people looking in the right spots or not?

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Well, I think that if you are unhappy with your hiring results and you're not getting the

folks that you want, by definition, it's time to look elsewhere.

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One of the things that I really like about that is that it's an awful lot of fun to learn

new stuff and it adds a lot of value for folks coming in.

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And one of the things that really forced a lot of employers to rethink during the COVID

pandemic was people didn't accept a whole lot of nonsense, right?

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Especially in the hiring process.

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There was uh a phase there and you could argue that we're still in it to some extent now

where folks had jobs that they liked or they knew that they could find one.

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or they were willing to wait until they did.

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And so one of the things that that pushes on us and especially in the small business

community is we have to compete to some extent uh with other opportunities in a way that

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maybe we didn't when there weren't as many jobs available.

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And so in addition to being able to bring people in, train them up, develop new skills,

what have you found great employees are looking for when they're vetting a potential

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employer?

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Well, to tie back to the end of your first question, I think as far as vetting an employer

goes, they're looking for contribution.

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They're looking great people have to make a difference.

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They want to go in, they want to be themselves, be their authentic selves, use their

strengths and talents, not be a babysat or treated like they're in kindergarten.

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They want to go in, do their thing and make a difference.

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That's, uh it's

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paramount for high performers to be able to make a difference.

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You know, there are so many small businesses think, well, why would somebody want to work

in my business when you could go to a monster corporation?

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Well, they don't want to be drones in a monster corporation.

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They want to come into a small medium sized business.

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Of course, your, your compensation has to be reasonable, but it doesn't have to be

stratospheric.

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If you can create a position that

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they roll into every day utilizing their natural strengths and talents like what Build My

Team finds, these people love it.

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And they love helping folks.

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They love being part of a high performing team.

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It's addictive.

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If you've ever been on a high performing team before and you go back to a low or mediocre

performing team, like get me out of here.

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I want to work with the best.

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that's so true.

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That's so true.

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So one of the things that uh to some extent is a little different in the small business

world for CEOs that are m building a hiring system even is that that hiring system has to

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produce people that they like because they're going to work with them, right?

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One-on-one.

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You don't have the benefit, if you will, of just hiring whoever and then someone else has

to deal with it.

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Not that that's ever an appropriate hiring strategy, but you feel it more acutely in small

business.

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So

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What is the key to creating a process, a hiring process that consistently brings in folks

that you actually enjoy being around?

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Well, I think number one, they have to be themselves at work.

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And what I mean by that is the way Build My Team approaches it, it ties an extremely tight

fit between what the job requires and what the person is able to do performance-wise.

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So that means that the person shows up and they're themselves all day long.

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They don't really understand why what they're doing is so special.

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And from the other side, on the boss's side or the CEO's side of things,

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You get to work with somebody who A is excellent at what they do.

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B does not need to be babysat and C they they're themselves.

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Like they're not playing a role.

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They're not acting.

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They don't have that cognitive load on their brain all day long to try and be someone else

and be inauthentic.

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Those folks, you're not going to want to be around them for more than two minutes.

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And, and that is, I think one of the keys to really finding those, um,

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greet people on your team.

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The other part is when they are themselves, they can be themselves at work.

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They can have that sense of humor.

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They can play jokes on each other.

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know, uh make it fun because at the end of the day, we all have a certain amount of time

we can allocate to work.

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Let's make it as productive, as lucrative and as fun as possible.

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Yeah, yeah, couldn't say it better.

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digging in a little bit deeper, so for these folks who don't need to be micromanaged, they

show up, they want to contribute, what are some of the traits that we can look for that

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would put someone into this category of most likely to succeed?

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Well, it all depends on the position and that's critical.

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I mean, there are some, some general things.

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for example, stress tolerance, that's something we measure incredibly accurately because

some businesses require a high stress tolerance for the position.

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And some most certainly don't in healthcare, a really high volume medical practice is high

stress, a low volume concierge practice, different level.

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And that applies to any role.

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If you extrapolate that out, I think that the

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that type of, you know, it's not a catch-all per se that works across all of the

professions or the jobs.

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It's more the fit for the position.

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Okay, I like that.

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um have you found any, like what are the most common trends that you see in that?

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So it's unique to each one.

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Have you found anything to be common among smaller businesses or maybe even in the medical

field?

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The medical field's a really interesting one to me and we'll dive into this for just a

second because there's a handful of doctors that I go to that like, they're unbelievable.

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They're so good at what they do.

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And it is,

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agony to go to their office because they're just not great.

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They're not as good at hiring as they are being a doctor.

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And so the front desk is a mess and they're rude.

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it's just that experience, at least for me, is a very common one.

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for folks, let's just drill down there for a second.

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What are some of the traits that you see as being the highest correlation with success for

that group?

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for employees in a medical practice, you mean?

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being themselves at work, utilizing their strengths and talents.

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It's not by position again.

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I'm sorry, it's not a generality, it's by position, I should say.

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Let's say, for example, you have somebody at the front desk of an office.

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That's usually the first in-person interaction that uh a patient would have with a medical

practice.

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You want somebody who is happy, but...

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also very focused on achieving the results that they have.

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It's hard to describe to a person who's not part of the medical field how intense a front

desk position is.

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It is the nerve center of the entire practice.

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The transactional volume that goes through a front desk is usually anywhere between five

to seven times the number of patients that are on the schedule.

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And for higher volume practices, it can be seven to even 10 times.

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So think about that one person walks through the door, you got 10 different interactions

with the front desk of various different levels over the patient experience.

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And so that type of person uh has to be able to handle that workload.

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have to be able to handle that type of stress.

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They need to be efficient communicators, uh have a very natural gift for following process

and, and attention to detail.

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Now those are all things we measure and that's why we can put somebody in that position

with such a great fit.

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But imagine if it's the opposite.

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You know, what you just described a minute ago essentially was the opposite type of

environment where the doc's amazing, but the medical practice team botches it all over the

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place.

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That fellow needs our number, respectfully.

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we would, the way we would approach that is to take his low performers and replace them

with high performers and keep that up till there aren't any more low performers on the

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team.

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Yeah.

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One of the things, and I want to go to how you can get some help from the outside, because

it's really tough to do this on the inside.

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So I want to get there in just a second, but I want to speak to fast forward a little bit

and speak to the post-hire, what happens.

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So we've got onboarding and everything like that, and you guys do a fantastic job there.

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When it comes to managing the right people well,

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That's different than just, you know, bring them in, tell them what to do once and then

forever expect them to do the right thing.

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So we don't wanna micromanage folks.

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And I don't know about you, but I'm yet to bump into an entrepreneur or founder who said

they started their company just to manage five people, right?

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That's usually not the defining motive.

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So, but there is a degree to which they can get the most out of their team and create that

fun environment.

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What do you think are some reasonable expectations for someone in terms of how they should

manage once they have the right people on their team?

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The metaphor I like to use that kind of talks to this situation, it comes from my

experience with our own small business, the Eyecare practice.

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It's a concept of getting the right people on the bus.

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Okay, everybody's heard this before.

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You gotta get the right people on the bus.

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It's like, you know, there's a magic wand that's super easy for that to happen.

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Come on.

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People struggle their whole careers with this.

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Well, you gotta take it one step further.

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You have to get them into the right seats on the bus.

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And so for a small entrepreneurial team, what you'll find is that there are people with

strengths all over the place and also heavy weaknesses all over the place.

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Don't put your team members in a position where they're trying to uh achieve a goal using

their weaknesses.

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They're not going to uh succeed in any way.

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So instead shuffle the people around.

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And you don't need a large team to be able to do this, but let's say you have a team of 10

people.

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Somebody on that team is going to love to do something you hate.

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Somebody on that team is going to hate to do something you love and everything in between.

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what we saw in our own practice, to give you an idea of how crazy this is, 50 % of the

people, within a couple percent, so half of the people that applied for a job at our

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practice ended up getting moved to a different role at the practice based upon their

strengths and talents.

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So a coin toss.

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A coin flip, they didn't know what they were good at.

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That's how crazy that is.

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So in a small business, like you said, of five people, you got two and a half folks who,

uh arguably, that don't know really what their natural strengths and talents are.

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So you switch them around in the seats on the bus until you find something they really

excel at, and then provide them a map of where they want to go, put some guardrails on the

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road as a leader.

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You always have to do that.

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And then get out of the way and let them drive the bus.

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Yeah.

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I love that because so many times, especially when getting advice from people who

specialize in hiring, especially if that advice comes from someone who's used to hiring

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into bigger environments, it's like, here's the role, ultra-define it, make them fit into

it.

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And it does the exact opposite of what you opened with of them being themselves.

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And what small business leaders don't realize is that they have way more flexibility just

because of the simplicity of their team.

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to really dial into the individual strengths of those team members.

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So I absolutely love that.

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And what I'm hearing from you is also keeping an open mind once you've brought somebody in

that that's not the end of it, right?

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There's an ongoing process of dialing it in and tailoring it to their strengths.

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If you want to be successful, that's exactly how you do it.

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If you want to be average to mediocre, bring them in, put them into a position and never

revisit it.

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I mean, that's also how you really uh repel high-end talent is to not look at different

ways to allow them to perform.

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And with really high-end talent, you're have to make some adjustments in how you work with

them and what you're asking them to do.

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I'll give you an example.

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As a family member, uh well, I'll give you an exact example.

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My son gave him a six week school project during the summer.

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I guess how long it took him to do the project.

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Three days.

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It was three days.

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I had no idea that I was, I'm still blown away by that.

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I'm dumbfounded.

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It just so happened that the project I gave him nailed his strengths and talents to a tee.

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Look, this was a happy accident that this happened.

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And it really kind of refocused me on how incredible people can be performance wise when

you give them something they are stupendous at.

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And in a work environment, look, that's not gonna, you're not gonna take six weeks down to

three days very often, but you will take six weeks down to a week a whole bunch of times

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if you give the person something that's right smack dab in their wheelhouse, whether or

not they realize it's in their wheelhouse.

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Yeah.

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So one of the things that's a real challenge at this stage is you have your own job to do,

right?

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If you're a doctor, you've got your patients to see if you're whatever, every founder has

their own job to do at this stage, regardless of the industry.

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And so it feels like how could I ever possibly do all of this when I still have my job to

do?

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And so some of that is, well, this is part of your job, at least.

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But the other part of it is you don't have to do it alone.

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So

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What would you say to someone who feels that, who wants to do it right, feels the pressure

to do it alone?

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How can outsourcing that be an advantage to them?

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Well, I can speak with details about our particular case.

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You're an entrepreneur, you're wearing 20 hats.

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That's probably underselling it a little bit for a lot of entrepreneurs, but 20 major

hats.

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How good are you at each of those 20?

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The answer is you're not.

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You might think you are, but you're not.

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You're dropping the ball.

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Nobody can manage that number of projects well except for a handful of people.

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I would flip it and say, what if you found somebody

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uh a group, a company or whatever.

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One of those hats, that's all they did.

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And they were amazing at it.

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uh Incredibly deep inside a super narrow niche.

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Now, if you can validate that they are actually as good at it as they say they are, and

then they're affordable, take that hat off, hand it to them immediately.

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Spend uh a fraction of the time supervising uh what you just delegated to that team, and

then

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focus on the other 19 hats.

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What you'll find out is that the really, really high end leaders in business only wear a

couple of hats and that's it.

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They have those teams or outsource relationships where people focus on doing exactly that

and that's all.

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And that's where the magic comes from.

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Yeah.

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Dr.

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Neal, I got one more question for you here and then we'll make sure folks know how they

can get in touch with you and your team there.

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ah What would you say is the biggest secret that you wish wasn't a secret at all?

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What's that one thing you wish everybody watching or listening today knew?

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Okay, this will sound self-serving, but in our practice, the unlock, the colossal,

enormous unlock was putting people into a position where they could be themselves.

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Just be themselves.

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It sounds so simple, but that was the biggest unlock that we've ever had as a business.

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uh Net income went through the roof.

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uh Head count went down.

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Everything was completely unanticipated.

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And it's so much more fun to be there because you're dealing with people who aren't

acting.

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They're not em worried about playing a role.

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They're not trying to do something they suck at.

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None of that stuff.

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They're just showing up being their awesome selves and we get to have a really good time.

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Yeah, that's awesome.

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There can be a whole lot of fun to be had and I love that.

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It's absolutely the best way to do it.

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uh For folks who are listening who want some help with any of this or they just want to

learn more about you and the work that you and your team do, where can they find out more?

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You go to build my team.com schedule a consultation.

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By no means do you have to be in the healthcare field.

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We deal with businesses of all different types.

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Um, what we focus on are clerical, administrative, entry level and mid level positions.

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We're not hiring executives.

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We're not hiring doctors, anything like that.

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But, um, if you know exactly the type of person that you're looking for, we can narrow

that down to, uh, strengths and talents that fit our software and boom off to the races.

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Amazing, amazing.

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Well, check it out.

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There's a ton of great resources there as well.

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Dr.

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Michael Neal, thank you so much for being on the show today.

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It was just a privilege and honor having you here today.

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And for those of you watching and listening, you know your time and attention mean the

world to us.

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I hope you got as much out of this conversation as I know I did and I cannot wait to see

you next time.

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Take care.

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Thanks so much, Scott.