How can I surround myself with great and talented people?

Grant Leboff:          One of the things that interested me, in about the book, is your emphasis on people. Although you have a chapter about people, this theme about people goes all the way through the book. Of course, everybody knows that to succeed in business you need great people, and actually if you look at the best, or the most successful business people, they are surrounded by great people. But how do you do it? How do you get them? How do you go about motivating them?  How does it work?

Lara Morgan:         I think, first of all, that recruitment is a bit of an art, it’s certainly not a science in my opinion, and you won’t get it right all of the time, so don’t be concerned that it’s not this prefect process.

I think the other thing is, in over 17 years, we just evolved this amazing recruitment process, because it’s just so important that you cut out some of the stuff that you just don’t need. It’s also important that you do the work around really trying to win great people. I think one of the best pieces of advice I’ve got on recruitment is; If you’re a cool company to work for, advertise in a cool way, in a different place… and actually, Oh my God that makes real sense!

If you want to attract cool people, don’t put it traditionally in a boring ad section in so and so. There are many, many better ways how to recruit these days. I once published an advert and turned it 90 degrees so everybody was reading the ad like this [sideways] on the train because it made me laugh, but it was our kind of company person.  We received 880 job applications – in the middle of a boom – for a general manager. So it works, right?

Once you’ve nailed the attraction piece of getting people on board, how many businesses don’t ‘induct’ their people properly. In other words, they don’t tell them what the ropes are – and I’m not talking about where the loos are – but I’m talking about meet the accounts team, meet marketing, meet sales… it doesn’t matter what you do, it matters that you know the team and they know you. And the faster that you understand somebody else’s job, the better and more efficient you can be, and the communication works better.

And then finally, and most importantly in terms of my leadership belief, is that you’ve got to do it yourself. You know, I worked long hours – that doesn’t mean you have to work long hours to be successful – it’s because I’m slow and thick! It just means that you’ve got to be around and available. I believe that you put family first, that you’re very flexible about what you do and you have to have trust. In that way you’ll be amazed that you will attract great people at actually, great, fair value and you will get great returns. Particularly if you – and this is the really boring dull bit, which most entrepreneurs are most bad at, including me – define the role from the outset. Employ to the role, don’t employ outside it because you like the person. They’ve got to be able to have the skill set and they’ve got to have a proven track record, in my opinion, albeit you’ll also have the roles that won’t.

When somebody comes into the business, how about sharing what their job is there to do, with others, and how about agreeing jointly what they call in business school, ‘Key Performance Indicators’ but it is; “These are the thing I want you to do on a regular basis” and, by the way, if you do them I’m going to reward you accordingly. But equally, I’m not just going to reward you with anything, what do you want? As in, most basic level; tell me 12 things that you want that are below £25, tell me four things that are between £25 – £100 and tell me one really big, ridiculous, goal that if we achieved together you would rock the world?

How many people really reward to people as to what to person wants as opposed to what I think you would like, without asking? So this series of ridiculous ‘people babble’ and then, genuinely… bribery with Jelly Tots, or Gin and Tonic, or Friday night wine, and all the things that are in books that people too often talk about, but don’t practise, they are valuable things at building culture. And people need to be trained.

They’ll stay if there trained. Don’t do this British thing, which is; if you train them they’ll go. No they don’t! They stay!

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