Every time a good employee asks for a quick chat, it’s grimace emoji time. Because if they’re leaving, you have no idea how you’ll replace them.
You think if you could find more people like your best people, your problems would be solved. But there’s no one else like them, they are like unicorns. You got lucky meeting them and, next time you hire, you can’t hold out for someone that good, so you compromise.
But this is just a story you’ve told yourself, and it’s one that will limit you.
It’s supposed to be hard.
The reality is yes, good people are incredibly valuable. Yes, they are hard to find and hard to keep.
But finding and keeping them is a core part of the value you offer as an agency. And you have the power to do it - in fact, you’ve already proven you can do it. That’s why you have this irreplaceable person setting the standard.
The problem is you’re still relying on luck instead of working out what made you lucky.
One of the competitive advantages of having this small, incredible place to work is that you can make great people happy.
If anyone could do it, then there’d be no difference between you and the soulless agencies out there.
In fact, there would be no agencies at all because your clients would just bring the whole thing in-house.
You’ve got to make hiring good people a competitive advantage and you need to make it something you can do consistently.
Because if you can’t find more unicorns, then you are at risk of becoming less valuable.
So we need to stop relying on luck here and work out what makes us lucky.
It’s not all about them
In our personal relationships, there’s a question you shouldn’t ask if you want a peaceful life: if you’d met someone else, would you have fallen in love with them? Is your soul mate the only one?
You need to stop thinking about your best employees in the same way.
Everybody brings a unique set of skills, experience, and approach. But those skills, experience, and approach are not unique individually, it’s the combination.
And the purpose of your agency and the environment you operate in are part of the recipe.
Your good and another business’s good are different. A great person is a great person in the context of your business.
The unicorn is in fact the intersection of a set of characteristics with your business.
You’re not looking for perfect people. You’re trying to find the perfect people for you.
You can increase the chances
What makes up the perfect person? If they were an ICP or persona, how would they be described?
If you can break them down into that set of characteristics, then you can start to build a picture that you can go and look for.
And to increase your chances, narrow down those characteristics to the important ones.
Do you need someone with the exact skills, or is it the ability to pick up new skills quickly? Do they need to be an extrovert and exude confidence, or is it the passion for the craft that you want to see?
There are certain things that make that unicorn so valuable to you, and others that come as part of the package that you don’t need.
This isn’t lowering a standard, it’s defining one. And the tighter your definition, the easier it is to find the right person.
This is your offering
Your agency is nothing more than the people who’ve decided to identify with it. If those people aren’t good, that’s bad news. If they aren’t great, you have a ceiling.
So you can’t afford to rely on luck. You need to know your unicorn when you see one.
Start by breaking down your best person into the characteristics that actually matter to your business. Narrow that list to the essentials. Now you’ve got something you can actively look for.
Because the difference between an agency that scales and one that stays stuck isn’t whether unicorns exist. It’s whether you know how to find them.