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Jamie Shilanski  

Intuition is the discriminative faculty that enables you to decide which two lines of reasoning are correct. Welcome back TPR Nation. This is Jamie Shilanski, an episode of Worlds to Conquer. And today we are going to talk about how intuition plays into the decisions that we make as business owners running team members. So you probably already know that there are two types of reasoning when it comes to logic, and that is deductive and inductive. So deductive logic is top down reasoning, and that means that we’re going to start with a general idea, and then we’re going to move to very specific conclusions, and it’s based on two logical assumptions, and the logical assumptions that go back to two statements of reasoning that turn into fact. So for example, all women are mortal. Jamie is a woman, therefore Jamie is also mortal. So it’s two supportive statements that turn our thoughts into fact by this deductive reasoning, and then we have inductive reasoning. And inductive reasoning is also known as a bottom up reasoning, but this method starts with more specific observations and general conclusion, and it’s based on our experiences, our facts, our observations and our ability to evaluate a situation and or make some general assumptions, like a theory. So we could use this for example, Jamie is hardworking, intelligent person, therefore Jamie wants to work for me our inductive reasonings. And so when we talk about, you know, our intuition, we’re most often talking about our inductive reasoning. And I’m a big, big fan of listening to your intuition. When I listen to my intuition, I’m almost never wrong in my assumptions, and I’ve never made some catastrophic conclusion from listening to my my intuition that has resulted negatively in my life. But when I go against my intuition, then I have those haunting feelings, those feelings of, gosh darn it. I knew better. Gosh darn it. I had a feeling. I should have trusted my gut. I should have showed up. Should have especially for women out there, when we talk about, you know, women’s intuition, this really goes back. I think it’s Jordan Peterson. He talks about women, and then sleep patterns at night, and the amount of like electricity that we have running through our bodies. For women when they’re sleeping is something in the 90 percentile, and men is somewhere around the 30 percentile. That is why women more often, because we are we’re meant to be alert during the evening. We are meant to be alert for the safety and protection of our family, where men sleep more soundly, because they don’t need that level of alertness to be cognizant that the baby is crying, that there’s a problem with the children, that something is happening, they need to rather, be alerted to get up if somebody was in danger or necessary. That’s why, oftentimes, in a heterosexual relationship, and the child is screaming or crying, the man continues to sleep, and the woman must nudge the man to get him up. Now, once he’s up, he has a shorter time of being groggy than than a female, necessarily, because he’ll respond what is needed and help jump into threat, but because our electricity is constantly going within our body, and we are constantly aware. That’s why we see people we’re like, Gosh, I really like that person. And we just chit chat with them and say, Man, I think we could be friends, or we meet somebody and say, Man, that guy gives me the creeps. He gives me the absolute creeps. I get the heebie jeebies. I don’t like working with that person. And then we remove ourselves from those situations whenever possible. We’re probably the only species that forces ourselves to go against our intuition for the sake of being nice to others. So not that I have any idea what goes on the brains of other species, but often think about the scenario where you have this deserted building and you have to go up to the top floor for whatever reason, and the elevator comes down, and the elevator doors open up, and there is a man in there that looks very predatory, looks very intimidating, and you still decide as a person to get in that elevator and telling him, instead of hurting his feelings or being rude or jumping to conclusions or judging a book by its cover, you still get in the elevator so that way you don’t hurt that person’s feelings, even though your intuition is telling you not to. And when you watch animal kingdom, that doesn’t seem to happen. Gazelles are run away from lions, not walking towards them. So, you know, we don’t, oftentimes, listen to our intuition when we should, when we should. We don’t use that inductive reasoning. And sometimes that inductive reasoning is just because, you know, I love the brain. I think it’s amazing. I love, you know, mapping it, learning about neuroscience and and studying these different impacts. But really, the brain is lazy. It’s going to take the easiest course of action every single time it can, because it works dog, Vint Lee, all the other times. So when it gets a break, it’s going to take it. And so when it comes to this inductive reasoning, a lot of times, what we do is we we jump on our former conclusions. We look on our experiences of the past to say, Hmm, I’ve been down this road before. This is how it ends up. And what I find is that most business owners, most managers, most leaders, we stop listening to our inductive reasoning, and we allow people to continue to work in our organizations that should no longer be there. Now, it’s been pretty trendy this last, you know, five years or so, to use the word toxic, you know, so, oh, it’s a toxic employee, it’s a toxic work environment. It’s a toxic culture. But if we really look back at like, what is toxicity? Because it’s not always easy to define, especially if you’re the entrepreneur, if you’re the owner of that organization or and I’m going to sound the alarm bell right now, if you have somebody in your office who is your manager, who’s your chief operations officer, who is responsible for the rest of the staff, forward this episode to them right Now, because they need to hear it as well. They have somebody on their team, most likely they know isn’t going to cut it for one of two reasons. One, their skill set doesn’t match their pay. Oh, it’s hard to say it, isn’t it. Their skill set doesn’t match their pay. And these are the people that always come back and they ask for a pay raise, they ask for a little bit more money, they ask for more compensation, and then that compensation hits this point where you’re like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe I’m paying you this much. And here’s what you’re really paying for. You’re not paying for an increased skill set. You’re not paying because this person is absolutely smashing all of their goals. You’re paying for your convenience. You’re paying more for a person who is under qualified for their role, because it is convenient for you to do that rather than looking at replacing that person. Why? Because replacing people sucks. It’s never fun. It’s not a great experience. I sit on hundreds of interviews, and I got to tell you, I do not enjoy them. They’re not a great time for anyone, because you have to sift through individuals. And here’s the real tragic part about the hiring process right now versus where it was 15 or 20 years ago, is that we now live in a world of algorithms. And so if I post a job on Indeed, let’s say that’s our number one platform. Well, guess what? I’m going to get 1/3 of the responses. 1/3 of the responses are people that are on unemployment and they have to apply for jobs in order to continue to get their benefits. So this is how they’re showing the proof of how they’re employing. Then I’m going to get people that the algorithm thinks are best candidates, but may or may not be the best candidates, and then the ones that I think would actually be a good fit for our organization, the computer’s not even going to put the job in front. I’m a huge, huge fan in finance of hiring people that have medical industry experience. I feel most of that translates, one, the willingness to help others. Two, the compassion to take care of people. Three, the HIPAA and the privacy four, charting and account records and regularly seeing people. Five, continuity of care, making sure that we are lining up with the CPAs and the state planning attorneys, and we’re coordinating all of the benefits in the care for the individuals. I’m a big fan that I think there’s a lot of translation between finance and healthcare, so I love to find people that are in those particular industries, but the computer doesn’t oftentimes, put my job in front of those individuals, because it’s not tied to their experience and background and skill set and qualifications. Inside the algorithms give me the days of posting a job and being inundated with resumes that I as a functioning human being can look at somebody’s skill set and say, oh, you know what? Maybe you would be a good applicant. I want to go ahead and get you in for an interview and then have a conversation with somebody. This is one of the most fascinating things I just had for the very first time, our ra of the Anchorage Alaska, Shilanski and Associates, and I had our COO. Normally, I do all of the most I’ve been staging it so that she could get better and better at this. But I used to do all of the hiring and therefore the firing, because if you hire, you must be the one to fire as well for the organization. And then I started bringing in our COO so that I could replicate this message, can I show what we’re looking for we have in a total employment process? If you want to learn more about who we’re hiring for, and we are hiring individuals, jump over to shilanski.com/careers. Amber will link it here in the show notes, but you can see the different roles that we have within our organization. And so when I do that, and I’m going through the different individuals. I know what I’m looking for. And so as as I began to train the CEO for this, and in this last January, she stepped it was December when she started the interview, but she stepped in and she was hiring a new operations person, and for 20 years she she was the head of operations. So she knows this role. She knows the candidate. Now what I found fascinating, and I think this is beautiful and should probably more often, I got to find a way to make it happen more often, is a resume I would have dismissed she interviewed and really liked the person and hired them, and they’ve been fantastic. I would have totally passed this individual over, because I’ve seen many applicants with her job history before, and they’re not great fits for our organization, and so my bias was dismissing people that she found a super qualified individual that was great has been sensational for our firm. So I need to find a way that I make sure that my bias isn’t always in coming into play, so that I’m not missing out on a positive candidate, but when we’re doing this, because that is such a troubling experience, because it takes so much time, so much energy, so much effort to try to find somebody, it is easier for us to keep somebody we know, we know isn’t the right fit for the organization, or can’t handle the tasks that they’ve been assigned. And so here’s what we will do, because we like people, because we are animals who like other animals. And we will say, I like this person. I don’t want to get rid of them. We will start inventing jobs that that person can specifically do. Tell me I’m wrong. We will give them tasks and create a job for that individual because we like them as a person, not because they have the skill set qualified to do the job for the work we need to get done. And so what we’ll do is we’ll redistribute work to other people, the ones that are more qualified, we’ll get a bigger share the ones that are less qualified, but we like them so much, we’ll take more and more off of their plate. We’ll be like, Hey, we gave it to them. They didn’t exceed there, and therefore we’re going to remove it. And then here’s what we’ll do to the people that are really, really good at their jobs. When they’re really, really good at their jobs, we’re going to keep giving them more and more, not because they can’t, not because they’re unable to do those jobs. We’re going to give them more and more because all of a sudden, we’re going to try to find what they’re not good at. We’re going to push them until they get to the point of breaking we’re going to promote them when they’re doing excellent in a particular position, until we get them to a place that they were no longer be excellent at. That’s what we do. That’s how we created corporate culture in America. We find somebody who’s really good, we give them a crap ton of tasks they continue to be good at it, and we promote them until we can finally find something that they are not good at. We promote them until they fail us. And then when it comes to people that we know we should get rid of, we keep them on board, because it’s easier for us. It is easier for us to keep the devil you know, then hire somebody else you don’t know. And I’m going to go through after I talk to you a little bit about who these people are and how they impact the rest of your team, I’m going to talk to you about strategies and ways that you can avoid feeling that hassle and that burden of having to hire someone and having it be so much pain. It’s still painful, but it won’t be as painful if you implement some of the solutions I’m going to give you all right, so the people that we know that are toxic or troublesome to our organization, we’ve got spidey sense about them. But if you don’t believe in your spidey sense and you want to kind of dissect, what are these toxic behaviors? Now, if somebody’s just straight up, mean, disrespectful, rude, that those people instantly get the way out, right? We don’t have a problem being getting rid of those. These are people that are toxic, and toxic people don’t walk around with signs on them saying how toxic they are. In fact, what they do is they’re two sides of a coin. One part of them you really like. The other part of them you really can’t stand. And the problem is the part that you really like is probably the end result of their work product. They’re probably really good with clients, they’re really good with prospects. They are really good with vendors and third parties. But, man, they suck to work with day in and day out, but you feel like you can’t get rid of them because of how many compliments you get from other people about how much they like that individual. And so now we’ve created this toxic environment. And by toxic, this is an individual that has manipulation tendencies, manipulation tendencies, and those are difficult because a really good person, a person that is really, really capable of understanding manipulation, can manipulate you without you know you’re being manipulated. You really don’t know it until afterwards, when you’re reflecting on the situation, on the encounter, when you’re going through that conversation your mind, when you’re thinking of all the best comebacks that you should have said and never did and will never have the opportunity to say again, because the moment has passed and it’s over. But those feelings of manipulation, here’s one way that I I get to know when somebody I feel is manipulating me, when we have an encounter, and then I leave that encounter and I’m feeling like, gosh, that wasn’t super positive. That was a great experience. And then in my mind, I’m thinking, Well, you know what, it’s okay, because I like Bob. I like Bob a lot. So the next time I see Bob, Bob’s gonna apologize to me. I know he’s gonna apologize because he’s gonna reflect on this situation. He’s gonna know it wasn’t a good situation either, and then he’s gonna give me an apology. And the next team I see Bob, I’m like, Hey, Bob, how’s it going? He’s like, Jamie, it’s going great. This is what’s going on. And never apologizes. He never addresses it. He never brings it back up. Now, where did I fail? I failed because I didn’t call Bob and say, Hey Bob, that conversation left me a little disheartened. I don’t like how we left it. Can we go over a couple pieces of this? Can we, you know, really grab the bull by the horns instead of later, I’m gonna sit there and stew and think Bob owes me something. And guess what? Bob is thinking he doesn’t owe me anything. Bob is thinking he doesn’t owe me a thing. So those are little intuitions of that spider sense. Now, one of those aspects is you should grab the bull by the horns if you think somebody has owes you an apology. Now, if you’re part of the TPR nation, you’re listening to podcasts like this, I know that you’re not a snowflake. Why? Because we don’t hold any punches around here. So I know you’re not going to easily melt because you feel offended. Do you feel somebody owes you an apology for something they probably really do. It was sincere, because your feelings aren’t just walking around waiting to get melted and exposed, you know, if somebody has wronged you in some capacity, all right, the second part of that is the self responsibility of grabbing that person saying, Hey, I think this is what happened. And when you grab that person and you tell them, I think you owe me an apology, here’s another great filtering tactic, if that person turns the conversation and makes everything your fault and makes you question everything you did in that process, you are being manipulated. Because a normal person, a person that is sincere in their efforts, is going to have a substantial quality conversation with you. And if somebody comes to me and says, Jamie and Honey, listen, I offend a lot of people. I do, and sometimes I don’t even realize I did it. I’m a street shooter. I have, gosh, I speak faster than I think. And so there are times people come back to me and say, Hey, listen, this is what you said, and I’m super offended diet and oh gosh, here’s an example TPR nation, this just, this just happened. So one of my near and Dears, you know, a great employee of mine, was listening to the podcast, and the podcast they felt really was about them. Now my role in podcast listening is, if you think the conversation applies to you. Guess what? It probably does. It probably does. There’s probably an ounce of truth. You should self reflect and see how much it applies to you. But in this particular episode, it specifically by name, applied to them, and they knew it, because they were the only ones working on this project. And so they they got their feelers hurt, they got offended, and, you know, called up, and I said, Hey, you know what’s going on? I hear we have a problem. And took the bull by the horns, right? And they said, You know what? I was listening that episode, and it really hurt my feelings. And I’m like, You know what? Thank you. Thank you for sharing this with me. By no means was I trying to hurt your feelings. Let’s start looking at it and and the next breath out of their mouth was, but you know what, Jamie, you were right after, I got my feelings hurt, and I sat with it, and I got kind of upset, and I went back and I listened. There was so much truth to that conversation. There were so many things I did get wrong and I should have been better at and I said, Great, I think you’re you’re the bee’s knees, you’re phenomenal. You’re one of my favorite people. I love working with you, and I consider you a friend, but that doesn’t mean I’m going to hold back my criticism because you are somebody I enjoy working with, and because you are a friend, I want to be able to criticize you, and we both grow from this experience, and that is a normal good conversation, somebody able to articulate their feelings, somebody able to understand how that person felt that way, not defend their point of view necessarily. I didn’t blame faster and tell her all the ways that she screwed up this one task. And said, I said, Great, what? How can we both grow? And then she thanked me, and I thanked her. That is a normal conversation. That is how it should end up. So when you’re talking to a super manipulative person, and by the end of the conversation, they have completely been exempt from any responsibility, and move the conversation to being 100% your fault. Guess what? You’re being manipulated. That’s a tactic, all right. What’s the next one? Self centeredness, the eyes I like a bunch of freaking pirates. So I the person that only speaks for themselves, the person that fails to see the rest of the team, the one that doesn’t understand cover and move. So we love Jocko. Micah, my baby brother just went to jocko’s event here in June. He went to the Private Council and one of their four rules of combat, one of them is cover and move. And so cover and move means cover your teammate. Cover your teammate. This doesn’t mean lie and make excuses for them, but it means whatever decision you’re making, whatever choice you’re choosing, you need to make sure that you’ve covered your teammate. And we had this come up even in finance. I mean, thank god nobody’s shooting at us. But we were talking to a bunch of our advisors, and we were saying, you know about the operations and about how sometimes, because operations in our office, they handle the movement of money, so our financial advisors give financial planning advice, and the operations personnel are responsible for the movement of money, and so they do a lot of administrative support, such as paperwork and transactions and calling the client, etc. So our clients are talked to rather frequently, but not always by the financial advisor. The financial advisor steps in when there’s financial planning advice to be given. So we’re talking about some of the outstanding tasks that the operations team began to feel outside of surge. So surges are committed time blocks in which we are meeting with clients, but they started to feel outside a surge that the financial advisor wasn’t responsive. They weren’t getting client questions answered in a timely manner. Now, Shilanski and Associates, we have a policy for 24 hour turnaround. 24 hours client has a question, you’re giving a response within 24 hours. Now you might not have a definitive answer within 24 hours, but that client will be responded to within 24 hours. And so we are always striving for that. That’s our internal policy. We tell our clients 72 hours. Why do we tell them 72 hours? Because we want to under promise and over deliver every opportunity that we can, every opportunity that we can. So our external policy is three days. Our internal policy, one day, you better respond to clients within one day, because clients reaching out to our firm are not a burden. They are not a task that has to be check marked. They are the reason each and every one of us has a job. There’s a heartbeat behind that person’s name and the email. There’s a heartbeat behind the phone call that you receive. We welcome and encourage clients to reach out to us every chance that they can. So when my operations, people who have this incredibly fierce self discipline about responding to clients, have a question, and they ask the financial advisor, and the financial advisors not getting back to them and what they have defined as a timely period, then guess what? Now it’s getting escalated. Now they’re failing at their job. So if we have a 24 hour internal policy and they reach out to the financial advisor, and the financial advisor does not get back to them until three

days later, guess what? They feel. They feel they have failed. They have failed. So

Jamie Shilanski  

we have these rules of escalation in these communication policies to help prevent that. And now this was occurring outside of surge that we have the operations personnel say, Hey, I can’t get responses out of this financial advisor in a timely manner, as she felt was timely. So we want to make sure that we define these terms. Great. Define timely for me, here’s what’s happening, blah, blah, blah. Well, this particular financial advisor said, You know what? Why don’t they just create a running agenda and I’ll pop in when it’s convenient for me and answer the questions. Now, did this person perform cover and move cover and move to that person? Cover their teammate and move the company forward? Effectively? No, they did what was convenient for them. They did what was convenient for them. They said, Oh, it’s convenient for me when I want to respond to client questions, for me to go into a document and type my answers that’s not covering your teammates. Because here’s what, you’re going to fail in a running agenda. You’re going to fail to understand the human connection part of it. You’re going to fail to hear the rest of the story. And then that personnel, that operations person cannot also ask a follow up question inside of a running agenda, unless they come back in and type it and then have to wait again for your response. So let me give you an example of that. Client calls in and says, Hey, you know, we’re going to put the down payment on a house. I need, you know, 100,000 out of my retirement accounts. Which account should I take it from? So the operation goes to the financial advisor. Says, client is ready to put a down payment on their house. They need $100,000 which retirement account do you want it from? Oh, well, actually, see if they have RMDs, blah, blah, blah, and you’re going through that process, what you’re failing to hear is the rest of the story is the client has already signed paperwork. The money needs to go out in the next 24 hours. The client already took their RMDs for the year. The client also needs some additional funds to move to the new home location. You’re not getting the rest of the picture. And yes, the operations person can spend the rest of the day typing out this long narrative memorandum, or you can have a standing 30 minute meeting with your operations person every single week, consistently at the same time, and get those questions answered. That’s what we want to do. That’s what we want to make sure when we talk about cover and move, is that we are covering our teammates so we can all move ahead effectively and doing a running agenda for question answers. I don’t think it works effectively. I think you’re always going to miss part of the picture. You’re going to miss part of the story. You’re not going to get to hear the other part of it, where you, as a financial advisor, would make different decisions. It’s just not going to happen that way. That’s not how written communication works. So we want to look at that cover move and that self centered attitude with the person saying, hey, the running agenda works best for me, but doesn’t work for the rest of the team, then you’re only thinking of you. And so this is where, especially as entrepreneurs, you know, it has to fit our schedule, it has to fit our time frames, but it also has to take care of the benefit of the team that we’re entrusting to get these things done. And then there’s just the regular unpleasantness of a manipulative person, and that is the person that when they are in the kitchen and you get up to go get coffee, you’re like, oh, I have to make small chat with this person. I do not want to talk to them because you find them generally unpleasant to be around. This goes back to my client test. Would I go get a beer or glass of wine with you. If the answer is no, then it’s a hard no. Why are you? Person in your office? Everyone who works for me at Shilanski and Associates, I would welcome ly go get breakfast burritos, lunches, drinks after work. I would be happy to do so. I enjoy their company. I enjoy their dedication, I enjoy their openness. And you need to be around people that aren’t always fun right then. And part of being a part of our firm at Shilanski and Associates is you got to subscribe to the intensity. We’re super intentional, and that is really intense for a lot of individuals. And we believe in showing up at our absolute best. And so if you’re a B level, C level team member. It’s you’re not going to like that. You’re not going to buy into it. You’re not going to drink the Kool Aid, and you’re going to come to work disdainfully every day. We dress as professionals. I know there are some financial advisors, though not many, that are making a lot of money and T shirts and jeans. That’s not That’s not us. That’s not how we show up for our clients, we want them to have an exceptional experience, and that means we dress professionally on all occasions, so much so that when I’m outside of surge and I’m just running errands, going to Costco and stuff like that, I don’t even like going into my office to pick up mail or packages or anything or sign forms. When I’m not dressed professionally, I don’t want to set the wrong tone from the top down now occasions. Or is that going to happen? Yes, of course. But when it happens, guess what’s going to be in my lobby? Guaranteed clients, guaranteed clients or prospects, always sitting in the lobby the day I come in and my jeans and hoodie because I went to Costco for whatever reason. So we take that very seriously. We want to show up, even if we have hybrid employees, cameras freaking on. Turn your camera on drives me a nuts when cameras are off, and the reason they’re off is because you don’t want to be on camera. And ladies, ladies, I get it when we have to get on camera. It’s a 45 minute process to get ready for being on camera versus not being on camera, I totally get it 100% but you know what? If we were driving to an office or driving to a big corporate building, I would have been 100% ready for that job, and that’s how I treat it, even when I’m working for my remote office out in Wausau, Alaska, which is an hour north of Anchorage, I am still camera ready and my video is on. People need that connection. They need the activity. They need to know that this is still a job. It drives me freaking nuts when people are showing up in sweatpants, cameras off, hair undone. You know, women’s stress level, how high her knot bun is on her head. So fellas, if you got ladies in your life and you’re ever wondering if they’re stressed, just look at that knot ball, and the more and more begins to resemble the horn of a unicorn, the higher her stress level. That is our indication. So these are good things to be thinking about if you don’t feel comfortable around somebody, if they just give you the heebie jeebies, if they’re just not somebody that you want to socialize, if you are planning a company event and going, ugh, do we have to invite so and so guess what? You have the wrong employee. You have the wrong employee. You’re just conveniently waiting for it to become a problem, and before you take another action and have them go somewhere else. So really look at this all right. So now let’s talk about, how do we make that hiring process a little bit less laborious, because a lot of us out here, like we have an empire office. So we have, you know, 15 employees spread out throughout the United States, primarily in Anchorage, Alaska. But we do work. Half our clientele is in the lower 48 is how we refer to the content is the United States. And so we do have people in other locations. However, most of our heartbeat is here in Anchorage Alaska, because there’s no better place on earth to be than in Alaska as a United States citizen. So as we start going through, what is the process of having to replace an employee, and why do we wait to fire someone until it’s super, super inconvenient, until that person resigns, and we’re like, Oh, thank God we didn’t have to fire them. And then guess what? We go and discover all of the problems they left us that nobody was paying attention to because nobody wanted to work intimately with that individual. And so all of a sudden we start just uncovering everything else, everything else. And we’re like, Gosh darn it. We should have let them go six months ago. Gosh darn. It should have been a year ago, three months ago, whatever. When you are holding on to the wrong person, you are practicing a cruelty to them, to your clients and to the rest of your team members, because toxicity spreads, or the person’s like, Wow, I can’t believe I’m at the same pay scale as that individual. I could try a lot less, harder at work, and probably make the same amount of money and money in this exchange of value. When other team members see that B and C level players are acceptable, why should they constantly be an A player? Why? But if you throw an A player around a whole freaking team of other A players, guess what’s going to happen? Holy smokes. Are they going to rise to the occasion? A players want to be around other A players. That’s how it works. Nobody tries out for the WNBA and then goes, Yeah, you know what? I’ll just practice on this rec league instead. It doesn’t happen. They want to level up. They want to get better at their craft and their skill. So when it comes to letting go that right person, and you stop being a cruel human being that just allows this person to have a job, even though they don’t have the skill or they’re super toxic to the rest of your team members, then you need to look at replacing them. How do you replace them? Number one, did you create a job for a person and now that that person is gone, you don’t actually need the job? That’s a great self evaluation. We as financial professionals have a terrible habit of throwing human capital at process problems. One more time for the people in the back, we as financial advisors have a terrible habit of throwing human capital at process problems. We don’t have the process outlined and articulated in a way that is easy for others to understand. So we think hiring an unskilled professional to come in is going to magically solve our problems. No, it will complicate it. You must have your processes in place before you add the additional people. That’s how it goes. That’s how you scale. That’s the only way you get out of growth into freedom, into the Empire categories, you cannot grow beyond that. You’re going to hit a pain point every single time. So when we have this process outlined, we want to describe what is the role we are looking for, what are the tasks that this person needs to do, and even when I hire somebody that I wish I would have fired a long time ago, or I’m sorry, even when I let somebody go after I wish I’d been firing them for a long time, I still find things that they were doing that I didn’t realize that they were doing, that now have to get done too. So it’s not like they provided zero value. They just weren’t worth the value you were either paying or the cost you were paying by keeping this B level C level person on your team. So I want to make sure I have a real good job description. What were they doing? What needed to get done, and what would make me super, super excited to pay this person X amount of dollars every year. So for our support personnel, they make anywhere from 50 to 100,000 depending on their skill set. If you’re tiptoeing into the 100,000 you better be running a freaking team. You better be running a whole team of people. And you better make my job a hell a lot easier because you’re capable of doing so most most people are around that 50 to 65 marker. That’s where most administrative personnel sort of tap out. So when you write down this role job description, you have to think of yourself. Man, what would make me super excited to be paying somebody 75,000 or $100,000 a year? What would make me pumped to pay them that and think I got a bargain basement deal, and write that out? And then what you need to do is you need to develop an onboarding process for hiring someone. What are the stages? What’s the job ad look like? Who’s doing the interviewing? Are you running background checks? Especially today in the hybrid world, I run background checks on every single employee before they start. We were with a broker dealer. The broker dealer did that when we left and came 100% Ria. Guess what happened? Now, we had to do that internally. So making sure we’re using I use a checker. It’s not it doesn’t end in ER, it just ends in regular R. But I do drug screenings, I do the panel, I do the quality background check. Oh my gosh, last year because remember, I told you, I was training my CEO on how to interview people. And so she got all the way at the end of the interview process, and she forgot to follow one. She missed one step in my process, blueprint for how to hire someone. And she really liked this person. She had me with them. Said, Hey, I love you. Make a final decision. And she was great. She was awesome. She interviewed so well, and my heart went out to her. I could definitely see how much she wanted it. And I said, Great. Well, what did her background check come like? And she’s like, well, I didn’t run one because I don’t think it’s necessary, because she grew up in Alaska, and I went through court view, you know, because our records are public here in the state. And I said, Well, you know what? That’s not our process. Our process is to run a background check. So run the background check, and then we’ll make the job offer a contingent on that. And she said, Okay, great. So X amount of days passed by, we get a background check. Holy smokes. She could have been a true crime drama. I mean, she didn’t do anything here in Alaska, but she had a 10 year period where she went on a mass drug spree and crime spree through Nevada, Arizona, Florida. I mean, it was just, it was just all over on her background check. So no, I don’t hire somebody without doing a background check. And doing a background check is not a hey, have you ever committed a crime? Because if you’re able to commit a crime, you’re probably pretty comfortable with lying about it, too. I really do think this particular individual turned their life around, or was trying to turn her life around. And I think that’s amazing. I also think it’s a terrible aspect of this system of rehabilitation. Is that great? You’re trying to get your life back in order. But now who’s going to hire you? But I can’t pay that price at the expense of my clients. I can’t I can’t have somebody who’s committed crimes involved in other people’s money. Won’t do it, cannot do it. So we want to take that into account. And then we also run the D, i, s, c profiles, disc profiles, a lot of people do Colby as well. There are four basic areas of psychology. Everyone’s fitting into some category, but this, at least tells me very, very quickly, and I’ve never made a hiring or firing decision on somebody with their DISC profile, because it’s not that good. But I will tell you this, This speeds up six months of getting to know someone. That’s how I use this the six months where somebody’s revealing after, because the first 90 days are going to give you the best part of them, and then the next 90 days are really when you’re going to start seeing who they are. I feel that by running this disc report, I get I get to speed up that timeline, and I get to see who this person is within that six month period a lot faster. So I like running it. I like having it. I like making sure this person’s in the right role. I use it as a communication device. It’s not a hiring firing decision for me at the firm. It’s just not it’s just one of the tool sets I have as a leader in our organization. And then we’re going to go through the rest of the onboarding. Now, once a person starts, that’s the interview process. Once a person starts outlining what that first 3060, and 90 days looks like for that person to be successful. Very imperative, super imperative. Because a lot of times the training, the oh gosh, I got to get them in, I got to train them. I got to go through all these things with them. That becomes the headache for most people in a manager role, it’s not just the hiring someone, it’s who’s going to sit with them over the next X amount of time in order to get everything done, to get them up to speed. And that means that now you’re paying two people to do one person’s job, because they have to hold hands during that whole process. So that’s one of the reasons that at Shilanski and Associates, we design an onboarding learning management system. This is online video tutorials. And so when you start with our firm, I often joke with you. I say, Hey, listen, it’s going to be death by tutorials. The first two weeks that you start, you’re going to go through so many videos on how to do your job, and a lot of it’s going to be drinking from the fire hose. You’re not going to know your head from your feet for the first year that you have this job, but I’m going to set you up for absolute success within the first 30 days. And by the way, these learning management videos that me and the rest of the team have painstakingly put together in order to take you through, they are available to you in an unlimited capacity. So if you feel that you’re neglecting or forgetting something, some aspect of your job cool. Jump back in on any of your devices, watch the videos and go through it. So my videos are set up as different courses. And so the first course is for everyone onboarding, and it doesn’t matter what role you’re going into, and it’s who we are, what we do, and who we serve. And then we go through one of the three paths, financial advisor operations or relationship management personnel. And then we went through and we spent

a hundreds of hours doing it, and we just did, videos, and written content about.

Jamie Shilanski  

With, who do we not work with? And we went through all of these different aspects and did that type of training. Now the other reason that I also did this is because training was laborious for the person that had to hold a hand, and so this allowed them an opportunity to spend half the day with that person, working hand in hand, going over things and doing hands on training. And then the other half the day, they said, hey, you know these videos, why don’t you go through this content? And by the end of the day, I’d like you to have completed X, Y and Z. And so now I took the burden of training also off of the person that needed to do the training. And so it allowed them to have a half a day, not a full day, training. Somebody’s very intense, and it can be very frustrating. Not all people are great trainers. So that’s something that we look at making sure, those are my tips and tricks on how to make sure that we are taking people who we know that are bad for our company, getting rid of them, not because we are afraid of who, who we don’t know. Coming into that role where we might hire somebody, people are going to be transient. We might hire somebody and have them really great for 60 days. We just hired somebody last year. Shinalski and Associates 

really great gal.

Jamie Shilanski  

She’s been here 10 months, and you know what she’s like? Hey, I feel really called to be more involved in my church, and that’s where I’m going to head out to she was lovely. We had a good goodbye. We said, You know what? That’s all right. Things that end don’t have to end bad. You are great love to keep you around, but you certainly understand that calling, and want to make sure that we we end on a high note. And so yeah, that means we spend a lot of time training a person who just began to understand every aspect of their job, and now has to move on to something else, but now we have a process in place that makes that easier, not fun, but a little bit better. All right. TPR nation. This is Jamie shilanski, an episode of worlds to conquer. Go find people who share your values and change the world.