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Each week, I reflect on lessons learned growing my Personal Holding Company — the good, the ugly, and everything in-between in raw, unfiltered, free-form writing.

How to Hire an Operator

One of the most important aspects to running a Personal Holding Company is hiring the right operator for your companies.

And it’s no easy task.

Over the past 8 years, I’ve learned a ton on this.

And I’ve made my fair share of mistakes.

I nearly lost my own company to an operator I trusted.

Yeah, that was rough.

There are two paths of hiring an operator for your company:

• Promote from within

• Hire from external

There are pros and cons for each path… and I’ve done both.

So today, we’ll go down each path and hopefully you can avoid the same mistakes I made when hiring an operator.

Promote From Within

The first option is to evaluate your employees constantly and see is fit for the job. For example, my current operator for UrbanEDC.com started off in customer service 5 years ago.

He worked himself up to the point of running the entire day-to-day operations himself. Pretty crazy, if you ask me!

I love this method.

Here are the pros:

• Deeper operator loyalty

• Less politics involved (performance-based)

• Operator learns everything on the job over time

Sounds like a dream, right?! Not quite. This path does have its downsides as well.

Here are the cons:

• Slower process

• More mentorship for operator

With this method, usually the operator is less experienced, so it’ll require more hands-on training. If you have more time to scale, this is a great path forward to find & hire your operator.

Hire From External

All right, let’s move on. What if you don’t have the time to find an operator internally?

It’s time to bring in a seasoned veteran from the outside.

Here are the pros:

• Scale much faster

• Less hands-on training

Naturally, if you bring in someone into leadership externally, they’ll be more experienced. This means you’ll spend less time training so you can scale faster.

Where do you find these operators externally?

You can look within your own network or work with a recruiting firm.

Ready for the cons?

• May bring in politics

• Operator may leave if incentives aren’t aligned

• Can alienate team if new leadership trust is not earned

I did this with my company GrowthJet.com. I hired a talented General Manager externally. Unfortunately, most of the team members from the original team ended up leaving one by one.

The new leadership trust wasn’t able to be earned over time. So, we had to build the core team around our newly appointed GM.

This wasn’t an easy process and an experience I learned from a lot.

So, there you have it.

The two paths to hire an operator.

Hope you enjoyed it!

Yong-Soo

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