Why you'll never get rich alone

Somebody asked me a question I get all the time: is it better to work alone or in a group? The answer, point blank, is in a group, because in a group you can start delegating. Hands down, if you really want to move yourself up to a higher level, one of the things you have to learn is how to get the right people around you.

Notice I said the right people. It is not just a group. It is the right group. I have been involved in places where I was not the one in control, and the people I was working with were a pain in the neck. It was brutal. Honestly, I would have been better off by myself at that point in time. A bad group is worse than no group at all.

But the right group changes everything. One of my ventures right now is about a dozen people, and it came from zero. It was just me with an idea and a building, getting it going. The operation I am building in Italy took me years, and man, what a group. Seventy or eighty people work out of corporate headquarters and another couple hundred work all across the country. I could not have done what I am doing without a good group. So let me tell you how you build one.

The most important person in the building

If you look at my life, it is very, very structured. I run my companies on an organizing board that is laid out like a chain of command, so I always know which post does what and where the next person plugs in. The first question I ask about any group is simple: do I have my hiring lines correctly established? You have got to be able to recruit, because a group that cannot bring in new people cannot grow.

And here is the part most people miss. The most important people in your group are the people who hire more people. I always take the time to make sure the people in human resources are the highest quality, even more so than myself. I actually wrote a policy on it. I described it at great length: the person in your human resources department has to be the finest you have.

Why? Because that person copies and pastes themselves all throughout the organization. If you have a so-so person in HR, you are going to have a so-so group. If you have credible people in HR, you have a much higher chance of having credible people all around the group. This is completely real to me. Make sure your HR people are the best of the best, people who actually understand how to evaluate a human being.

A screening cycle, not a sales cycle

Here is what happens when you do it wrong. You have a recruiter whose product is to get someone recruited for a particular post. So the recruiter is in there selling the company, trying to get the person to come work for you. Meanwhile the person who wants the job is selling themselves. Everybody is pitching and nobody is looking. That whole process is broken.

Hiring is not a sales cycle. It is a screening cycle. Your job is not to charm the candidate through the door. Your job is to make sure the person you are bringing in will actually be able to get the job done. Slow down and screen.

When does the interview really start?

Now I will give you a piece of my secret sauce, something I learned the hard way. I ask people, when does the interview start? They all have answers. Oh, on the first phone call. And the truth of the matter is you really get to know the person after they have been with you for a couple of weeks. They get relaxed. The force field drops, the curtains open, and the true personality comes forward, because now they are familiar with the people around them.

That is when you watch one thing above everything else: how do they handle other people? You can use force, or you can use finesse. You can use kindness, caring, and training. That does not mean you can never get mad. It means you do not stay mad, and you treat people the way you would want to be treated.

Not everybody has that skill. And those are exactly the kind of people you want to surround yourself with: people who truthfully, honestly like their fellow human beings and are willing to help them, take care of them, and train them. You have to have the policy there to train them on. But get people like that, and everything else gets easier.

This is how you win

Do this over a period of time and you will end up with a group so powerful and so dedicated that this is how you win in life. I could not have built what I have built alone, and neither will you.

If you want to get up into the millions of dollars of income a year, if you want to become a rock star and have the things people only dream about, it is going to take a group. So really get the data required to make a group, use it, apply it, and you too can be a rock star. There you go.