One of the questions I sometimes get from other business owners is “how do you find and retain such great employees?”.
Regarding the “find” part, there’s nothing really magical. I try to share job openings widely and make really compelling, fun job posts to attract great people. Then I hope to get lucky.
Regarding the “retain” part, I’d say the key is to hire employees that think like owners or entrepreneurs, then pay them as such. For Personal Finance Club, from the first year I hired Vivi I instituted a profit sharing plan. At the end of each year, we look at the revenue and expenses, then take any 25% of any existing profit and split it among the employees. This gives us all skin in the game. If we’re wasteful with spending or lazy about driving revenue, that will directly hurt the cash coming to each of our pockets. (Side note, I’m not actually withdrawing the other 75% into my bank account, rather leaving it in the company to cover taxes, future investments, etc).
With Nectarine we took that idea a step further. I could have founded the company myself (like I did with PFC) and simply informed my employees that their scope of work would be changing. But I knew with Vivi and Shane I had found two outstanding, hard working, smart, entrepreneurial team members. Instead of the deflating message of “hey, work harder on this new thing to make me more money” I went with the “hey, let’s work on this together as co-founders”. I received some feedback from others that this was a bad idea, that I was giving up too much money, control, whatever. I’m not doing it to be nice (although I like to be nice and believe nice guys finish first). I’m doing it because now I have two bad asses who are crushing it trying to build this huge project instead of two employees who are quiet quitting waiting for a better opportunity to come along. At the end of the day we’ll all be better off working together!
As always, reminding you to build wealth by following the two PFC rules: 1.) Live below your means and 2.) Invest early and often.
-Jeremy
