Your worst hire decides where you finish

It fantastic to be here. I'm glad you invited me.

I I coach founder CEOs, not professional managers. And I coach ambitious founder CEOs to reach the goals. Sometimes I'm helping them set the goals, but it's, you know, over the next three to five years, they want to be somewhere. if they're venture-backed, they need to raise another round of funding. And they've got some somewhere they want to get to. I don't I think I don't help them get there where they wouldn't get there. So I don't I'm not doing break to fix, but I'm helping people get there quicker. So they might have a five-year goal and I'll help them get there in three. That type of thing. and I've got a sweet spot, which is there's a transition at about thirty there's there's transitions at sort of ten and ten and three, the the sort of rule of ten and three. So there's a transition at ten. You go from being a solo operator to having a team and then at thirty, sort of cross the desert, you come out the other side, and then on that journey to thirty to a hundred, and a hundred is the next big transition where you go, you now have a management team and then you have a leadership team. Going through that hundred is you have to stop playing basketball and start playing football. And that's the transition that I coach founder CEOs through.

Do you know what? J then well, do you know what? The the reason I have the job I have now is because I thought I wasn't very good at it. And so, you know, I I built maybe I built six leadership teams over time. Racks based, we got to 30 million, Pier One, we got to 30 million in the UK and 200 million globally. did a turnaround at IT lab but and some other teams as well along the way. And all the time I've thought I'm not very good at managing or coaching people. And so when I when we sold Pier One and I left, I thought I'm going to do some I'm going to do some coaching. And then when I get a proper job again and I'm running another tech company, I'll have improved my skill level. And then it turned out that that coaching founder CEOs is the best job I've ever had. and I've been doing it now for 12 years. So it's the longest job I've ever had by a factor of more than two. it's the most I've ever earned. And so I've got no desire to stop doing it. You know, occasionally people will message me and say, Would you like to come and work for us? Most recently, McKinsey. and it's like, No, not really. I don't want a job. I this is you know, if If the definition of a hobby is something that drives alpha waves, which you don't get paid for, but that you love doing and time stands still when you do it, then coaching for me is that. So I love doing it. I'm obsessed about getting better at it. I'm constantly either reading or interviewing people who've done it, written about it, done it themselves, which is why I have a podcast and written a couple of books. and it's just the the more you learn the less you realize you know. And you know, you go down a you sort of you go down a rabbit hole or you go down a branch and you go, God, it's I wish I'd known that. I wish I'd known that. You know, and I look back now, I look here I am now and I go, I look back and I go, God, I wish I'd known what I knew now. How dangerous would I be. and so that's one of the things that I then help my clients with, I think. There's a We use a tool called from Gallup called Clifton Strengths, which is looks at the world through a series of it says you don't have weaknesses, you only have strengths. The world has the world they categorize the strengths into 34 strengths. One of my strengths is a thing is a s they categorize as a thing called input, which is I can slurp in a load of knowledge and I can synthesize and I can share it back. When I was running Rackspace or Pier one, there's not not a lot of need for that. I mean, there's a there was a bit, but it felt more like a personal thing. It wasn't It wasn't it wasn't the job and now I'm in a job where, you know, I can go and if I read the Harvest Harvard Business Review, it's not it I'm I'm trying to find solutions to clients' problems as well as it's interesting to me. So I've I've got that sort of perfect mix of I don't hobby and hobby and work and I get paid to do it and it's fun. And I've got no desire to retire because I think retiring is You know, people give up work 'cause they've saved enough money doing something they don't enjoy doing to do spend more time doing things they do enjoy doing. And I I don't I don't have I'm I'm not as time poor as I would have been as an employee or would be as an employee. So I don't feel like I'm on you know, I'm not only taking I don't take like two weeks' holiday or four weeks' holiday or whatever. It's like, you know, I can take as much holiday as I like. So I take as much as I as much as I want to have time off. and I could just do this forever. Like and maybe until my brain stops working properly and nobody wants to hire me anymore because I'm an idiot. But I think I think it's fab. And and I had no it wasn't it wasn't deliberate in any way. It was completely accidental. And and I started off just coaching CEOs and then I got into doing some one to one coaching as well because I was doing sort of CEO and leadership team. on the business development. And then one of my clients said to me, look, could you have a chat with this guy? Because like if you don't fix him, we were going to fire him. So there's no, you know, it doesn't matter if you don't fix him, like, you know, he's like he's fired. And I spent a few hours with him and we came up with a plan so that he could reboot his relationship with his colleagues and his own life. And he then got promoted twice more inside their business. And they didn't fire him. And it and it was like, Fly me. What what an amazing thing to have that sort of impact on people. And so it's when at Rackspace and Pier One, when I hired when I would interview people, you know, if you were sitting opposite me in an interview and we're having a chat and I'd be thinking, God, you're amazing. I l you just you have no you know, s meeting somebody and going, You are brilliant, you are no idea how brilliant you are, and I can see your future career in a way that you it is just totally you can't see it at all. And so then I'd hire those people and I'd give them opportunities. And most of the time off they would they would fly and they would end up being, you know, nowhere they ever expected. And it's the same now with meeting a CEO who sort of feels really stuck. You know, they've got a fantastic business. You know, they've scaled it from nothing to 15 million. you know, and they've got 80 people and it's but it's just fucking hard. And they're working seven days a week and they don't know what to do to get out of the hole they're in. And it's like, I can help you. I can help you transform your life. I can help you transform your business. I can help you transform the lives of the people who work for you, your customers. they're just some things that I know that I can share and it's like, God, it's just it's great.

I I was just doing a video on on one of them yesterday on YouTube. so nobody does any training. We don't train anybody on anything, right? so we don't teach anybody to recruit. So you you go and hire a recruitment agency to help you hire somebody. And they all write job ads in the same way and they are really fucking boring. so they start with our company is amazing. This job requires you to be a nuclear physicist, even though it's only a fucking receptionist. You know, like so it's it's we're amazing, we're gonna try and overhire for expertise and experience, and then it's like, what do we give you back? Think and and it's written as if they have a right to talented people to want to work for them. And it Just that's rubbish. So I I think you have to write interesting job ads, which which the way I write them is we know that you're in a job. The the mindset is we know you're in a job and it's Sunday. Netflix is on the TV, you've got your laptop on your on your lap, you've got a beer in your hand or a glass of wine, and you're thinking to yourself, I wonder if there's anywhere else which is less shit than where I work now. Because I'm not really loving it. But I'm really good. I might be the best salesperson in my team. I might be the best customer service agent in my team. Or we might have been acquired and I hate the new organization. And they're the people that we want. I don't want to hire people who are out of work. I want to hire people who are in work and who are the best in our competitors, if you like. And so I need to write a job ad that says, we know you're amazing. We know what you're frustrated by. Come and talk to us about. removing that frustration. And when you write a job ad like that, you've got to think about the mindset of the client, of, of the, of the potential employee, but that then pulls people in. And then you have to go, right, what's the recruitment process we put in place? So we we get clients to grade their employees A, B, or C, A being the top 10% of available talent for a given job at a given location at a given salary, because talent is not distributed on a On a bell curve on a normal distribution, it's a power law. And you can hire people who are 10x better than average and they don't cost you any more money. So why would you not do that? You so you want to be in a position that every single person you add to your team is better than at least half of the people in your team. Because then you're making a conscious decision to uplift the talent in the team over time rather than an unconscious decision to lower the talent in the team. And so Managers have not been trained to hire. We we often have the first contact in the organization with somebody junior who doesn't really understand the the role. So an a player comes in, they they sp their first interaction is poor. They just bounce off and go somewhere else. So you've got to go right. How do we route them to people who would who would they would find impressive? Because we need to be impressive to them so that they would come in. And then in an interview, we've got to go, meet A players and get them to ask and ask sensible questions which would help them discern whether this candidate could actually do the job we're trying to hire for. And most of the time they don't. They sit there and they have a chat and at the end of it we go, what did you think? And they go, I didn't hate them. They're okay. I quite like them. It's like, yes, but can they do the job? I don't know because I don't know what the job is and nobody gave me an interview pack and nobody's so hiring is terrible. So we fix that. and then managers think their job is to get the work done. And in a scale-up, which is where I'm working in that sort of 30 to you know 30 to 300 journey where people might be growing, you know, a hundred or two hundred percent year over year, the number one job of a manager is to make themselves redundant. And human beings see the world in a linear way. It's r it's impossible to get human beings to think exponentially. You have to you have to make that programmatic, because otherwise they'll just think that tomorrow. Yesterday is the same as tomorrow as tomorrow is the same as yesterday. They just they just think like that. They get caught out by that all the time. And so you say to them, right, your job is to make yourself redundant. You need to have somebody on your team who can do your job six months from now. Is that true today? No, it's never true. Okay. Number one job is that. And whilst you're on that, you also need to hire a number two because when you step away and the number one becomes you, gets your job. You need to be able to already have set them up with the number two who can do who can replace them six months from now. So you need somebody to take over your job now and somebody else to take over the job in six months in six months and twelve months. And once you have a manager whose job is that, then the quality of their team needs to improve because they realize they don't have anyone who could do their job. They've just got people who can do the work and that they are head and shoulders above the team in terms of quality, which is Which when you're playing basketball is okay, right? You, me, LeBron James on a field, on a court will win because he's a rock star. And when you're small, you add another rock star and the team performance goes up. When you get to a hundred people, it goes from being a strongling sport to a weakling sport. And so a strongling sport is amazing people doing amazing things, right? And so you you often start you often listen to start ups and they talk about the hero, we go the extra mile, we throw ourselves on an exploded ordnance for clients, right? Doesn't scale. To get past a hundred people scaling profitably, what we need is we need fewer mistakes. If you look at all of if you look at the last 30 years of the football leagues in Europe, the where the team lands ultimately in their league is correlated with the quality of their worst player, not the quality of their best player. So what you have to do is you have to raise the average. Now you still have to be able to score goals. You can't be just average and shit, but that the the quality of the worst player is where is where league performance Is. It's so it's a different mindset. And no Premier League or Bundesliga player, no manager in any one of the major leagues is a player. It's a full-time job to manage the team. And so in a startup, you're a player, you're a player coach. You're on the you're on the field, you're playing basketball, you touch every ball, you're involved in every shot, everything. We need to get you off the field. And the team need be able to play without you. And so managers need to make themselves redundant. And then leaders, leading getting the work done through a series of managers is not the same as managing a team of people doing the work. And so that transit helping them transition to helping the s helping the founder to build a series of managers and then promote some of those managers up to leaders. People turn up here with leadership teams of 12 people. And it's like you can't lead a team of 12 people. You can you can have a team, you can have an executive team meeting of five people. seven if I'm feeling like generous. And so often we go, that's the first thing we need to do. We need to go from you, the CEO, having twelve direct reports playing basketball, to having five leaders running the company. And they need to be able to run the company without you.

How f how far how far back? How far back do you want me to go? Picking it pick how old how what age am I talking to myself at and I'll t I'll tell you.

God, that's still a big chunk of my life.

Five years ago. Five years before I started coaching. no, that's not that's not very much younger than me. I I'd have to go back. I think I'd have to go back to my first job as a managing director, which would have been in my thirties. I think that'd be a good that that so that's you know, I left university, I worked for a couple of big companies. I worked for Marks and Spencer's and Glaxo. And and then I and and I and I did an MBA and I'm like, right, I'm gonna I'm I'm gonna I want to be a managing director 'cause I want to be able to drive the culture and the strategy of a business. Cause I think those two things are the thing that as the managing director you get to do. what would my advice be? I one of the things which was which I don't know whether I would be able to take this advice, right? I can certainly give it, but I don't know whether younger me would would take it. but I have again Gallup strengths. One I mentioned input earlier. One of the others is Achiever. So people with Achiever get up every day and have a blank sheet of paper and they have to do stuff because if they haven't done stuff, they hate themselves. And it means that people with Achiever don't go on holiday and just lie on a lounger. They go on holiday and have to do shit or have an ulterior motive to be on holiday. Or they go skiing or they go sailing, like, or they or they go cycling, because like they have to do something. Like the holiday itself doesn't seem worth doing. and I think that one of the if that's the balcony, there's the big what's called the basement of these strengths. And one of those is saying thank you and celebrating success. And so that's one of those things where I think I have always been and remain crap at saying thank you. and I know how powerful it is. In fact, Pier One, the team used to say thank you on my behalf. They used to they used to send notes to people ostensibly from me, and people would come to me and say, Thank you for your thank you note. It made such a difference. Da da da da da da da and it's like I didn't fucking send it. The thing is, I knew it was so impactful, but you couldn't make me do it. It's like just like there are you can't make people do things that they're not wired to do. Like, because I would that's why people procrastinate, right? If you're if you find yourself procrastinating, it's because it's not because you're a procrastinator. It's because the thing that you is on your task list to do brings you no joy and gives you no energy. And therefore anything else, like tidying your bedroom or Polishing the silverware or, you know, cleaning the car seems really, really important at that moment. And you go do that and it gives you a dopamine hit and you go, That thing that brought me no joy, I I still haven't done it. I know I should do it. I know it's on my list. And it's it's but you're never gonna do it. I mean, you're just never gonna do it. And so so I I think I my advice would have been to have come up with those systems that I ended up with later on in life, which was partnering up with people. I d I didn't I didn't know the value in partnering up to offset your weaknesses. So at Pier One, I I hired Scott to be my VP of Global Customer Service. And in the interview, I said to him, Why should I hire you? And he said, Because I'm exactly what you're looking for. And I'm what's that? And he said, he said, Dom, I straightened pictures in other people's houses. And I'm like, I love you. And And he and I worked really well together. He was about making the trains run on time, and I was about envisaging the future of the rail network. Right. I would I would join my own team calls and he would say, Dom, tell us about your week, what's on your mind, shoot from the hip. I'd do that for about 15 minutes. And then he'd say, That's brilliant, Dom. All great ideas. None of them for today. You can drop off if you like now. Cheerio, see you next week. And and it was and you know, and so I He kept me away from distracting people. But he was fantastic at all of the things I was just totally rubbish at. And so I think if I'd if I'd known that coming out of Interline and Interactspace, I would have deliberately partnered with I would have sought out and hired. more senior people to work alongside me rather than make the mistake that I see founders now make, which is, you know, really I'm head and shoulders above the team. I've hired I've hired some doers, not not a partner. and I think and I think that's one of the things that we say to our clients all the time is you need to hire a grown up. You need some more grown ups. You're the only grown up in your company. and it doesn't that doesn't necessarily need to be a COO, you know, at at At IT Lab, my grown up was Rosa Howard, who was sort of head of HR. She doesn't come from an HR background, but she would say, No, Dom, you're wrong. That's not the priority this week. The priority's this. And you need that you need that counterbalance to stop you just having a new idea every week. We'd we'd have got more done.

Yes. Well I l I am lucky. I was born lucky. Right. There is only one Dominic Monkhouse. So you just have to type that into Google and you don't get fifty seven people have to try and work out what I am. You just get me. And so just type Dominic Monhouse into Google or ChatGPT or Perplexity or wherever you get your feed and and I will be the only result that you that you get back. So it's dead straightforward. I I put out a blog, I've got a podcast, we put I put out a video on YouTube every week. I'm just trying to help people avoid the mistakes that I made and meet get to where they want to get to, reach the reach the ambitious goals they've got for themselves.

Thank you for having me. It's been an absolute pleasure.