How to Build a High-Performing Team with Steffen Schebesta: An EOFire Classic from 2022

0:01John Lee Dumas:Light that spark fire nation, JLD here and welcome to Entrepreneurs on Fire brought to you by High Level, the all-in-one sales and marketing platform. On today's classic episode, we'll be breaking down how to build a high-performing team and to drop these vibe bombs, I brought Steffen Schebesta into EO Fire Studios. Steffen is the CEO of Send in Blue. He is passionate about business and technology and always open to new ideas, discussions and contacts. And today we talk about how success comes from the work you put in and the obstacles you overcome. hiring is essential. The heart of the company is his people and how people are everything.

0:32John Lee Dumas:Hire the best and focus on the right fit and oh, so much more. And a big thank you for sponsoring today's episode goes to Stefan and our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you eight to 20 qualified calls each month, then train you to run the system yourself. Email my team at john at eofire.com to learn more and see if Nexus is the right fit for you. If you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. High Level gives you website hosting, funnels, email marketing, automation, calendar booking, payments, and course hosting all on one platform, plus award-winning 24-7 support.

1:10John Lee Dumas:Get a 30-day free trial and my full bonus stack that includes a 15-minute private call with me and much more at highlevelfire.com. Highlevelfire.com. Stefan, say what's up to Fire Nation and share something that you believe about becoming successful that most people disagree with? Hi, John. Good to be here. Thanks for having me. Yeah, well, so I think one thing that some people don't believe or most people don't believe looking back at somebody who has become successful is how much work it actually takes and how many obstacles I or you actually have to overcome in order to become successful. And I think there's two reasons to that, why that is.

1:57First of all, when you start a new business and you try to make something happen, people ask you how things are going. And a lot of times, it really sucks. You're not progressing and things are not going the way you want. But I call the you're in the fake it till you make it mode. So in reality, you kind of pretend that things are going much better than you actually feel they're going. And the second point is, once you have become successful and you look back, it oftentimes looks like you've gone through this very straight path where in reality, you know, it has been lots of turns, lots of intersections.

2:37And one thing has not necessarily led to another. And there was some luck involved as well. So yeah, these two things attribute to people oftentimes looking at successful people and not realizing how much effort, how much work and how many obstacles they had to overcome in the end.

2:58John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, team building, as discussed by email, is our focus today. And of course, who better to bring on than Stefan, the CEO of SendinBlue. We have a lot of cool things that we're talking about, as I mentioned in the intro. And I do want to dive right into the first step in team building, Stefan, which is actually the hiring process. And this is something that you've had to go through as a CEO, of course. So I want you to break down why. why is hiring so important yeah i mean hiring is super important i think it's the the heart i mean the heart of the company that you're building is really the people that you work with um and i you know jokingly i say i probably spent more time with my co-founder back in the day than with anybody else in the world right more than with my wife more than with my friends and my family.

3:54And that's, you know, that holds true for a lot of people. So it really matters who you work with. It really matters who you hire. And it really builds the core of your company and what you do and who you are. And I really like to refer to a book that I think is incredible, which is Good to Great by Jim Collins. I'm a big Jim Collins fan. And one of the takeaways from this book is first who, then what. So to really get the right people on the bus, basically, of your journey in your company and of your startup, what you're building, you want to make sure to get the right people on the bus. And it's much more important who that is than where you're going and what you're doing.

4:46Things will change. If you start a business and you haven't pivoted at some point, then you haven't really experienced what it means to be an entrepreneur. So it's super important to have the right people on board that are not in for the destination in a way, but more for the journey. So if you promise somebody you're going to build a rocket ship and then you realize, you know, that's not where we can excel and where we can make money and with our expertise, instead you end up building airplanes. Then somebody who joined the company to build a rocket ship, they're not going to stay. But the ones who joined for the team, they will be there, they will continue to support you, and they will be on the bus with you wherever the journey takes you.

5:34John Lee Dumas:So the problem that I've had, and I think a lot of people have when this process really kind of boils down to being face to face is that everybody looks good on paper. I mean, resumes are dazzling. I mean, you can write whatever you want on these things. How do we look past the glitter and the glamour and just find the right people? It's a really good question. And honestly, it's not easy. And it takes a lot of trial and error, a lot of experience. So for me, there's a couple of things that I've learned over the past years that really helped me find the right people. And you're right, on paper, a lot of candidates look good.

6:16And it's not easy to filter them out. And sometimes CVs also suck and the person behind is great. So it goes both ways. But for me, one thing I've definitely learned is to hire slow and fire fast. So if I hire somebody and I know it's a super important position and I'm not 100 % certain this is the right person, then I'll rather wait it out. Rather look at 100 new CVs and wait until I have the right candidate. It's super important. So I'd rather take more effort, take more time and conduct more interviews than hire somebody prematurely just because she's the best candidate that we have. Or it seems like it's a good fit, but I'm not 100 % sure on the skills.

7:11It should be a really, really good fit. That's super important. When you start the company, especially at the smaller stage, but also I strongly believe it should also happen much later on. I interview everybody, everybody who goes through HR. And our company is a bit bigger now, so we have a couple of steps before, a couple of people interviewing on the HR side and then a functional lead. But I interview everybody. And that's super important to me because I want to make sure this person is a good fit and aligns with the company values. That's super important. Company culture, DNA. If you hire the wrong person, especially at a small stage and an early stage, it can destroy everything.

8:02And that's a risk I don't want to take. So I talk to everybody. And when I find somebody who is interesting, who I get along with, and where I believe the company culture is a good fit for them, then I value attitude over aptitude. That's super important for me as well. I've seen juniors becoming extremely good. They didn't have a lot of skills when they started, but they had the right attitude. They came in motivated. They wanted to grow. They want to learn. And so I'm always, when I interview, I look for the right attitude. And if there's something missing in terms of knowledge or expertise, it's something we can overcome.

8:42It's something we can train on. It's actually an opportunity for that person to grow and develop individually as well, which is great. So these are the things that I typically look at.

8:55John Lee Dumas:Attitude over aptitude. I love that phrase. And one thing that I've always been a believer in that goes right along with this is you can't teach motivation. You can have the most qualified person in the world and they are so skillful and so technical on A, B, and C. And if they are just not self-motivated, they're just not going to perform to the level that you as a CEO, as a business owner is gonna want them to perform at. You want motivated people with the right attitude because you can teach the skills. Now, I wanna stay concise on this next part, Stephan, but walk us through one of your favorite hires.

9:31John Lee Dumas:And we don't need to use names or even positions. We can keep it more of an aerial perspective, but just what did it look like when you interviewed and then hired the right person? Kind of a gut feeling. I have a very good feeling about that person in the beginning already when I start talking and we get into a discussion and we see that we get along and there is a match in terms of company culture. And maybe one tip as well, that I got this tip from a fellow entrepreneur of mine. Hiring, it's a lot about experience and a lot about gut feeling as well. And some people are better at it than others.

10:13So if you know somebody in your company, somebody you work with who has a really good gut feeling and over time has shown that he or she select the right people, have them included in the process because some people have a better feeling when it comes to hiring than others. So I think that's a nice trick. Coming back to your question, one of my favorite hires was a person who on the CV we did not think he would be a good match for the company. Honestly, we almost rejected the CV. We ended up inviting him because there were not that many applications. And in the interview process, he asked for the minimum wage, which was a really weird number.

11:11I'm originally from Germany. I was back in Germany when I had a company in Germany. He asked for like 17 ,972 euros, something like that. Like a really weird number. We looked at each other. What does this guy want? And so only after we found out he was looking for it calculated, it was exactly the minimum wage. We ended up hiring that person. We had a gut feeling that there is more to him and that he would be able to perform well. We actually invited him one more time, added an extra step in the interview process, had him come in for a trial day and worked for us for a day, basically. And then we hired him.

11:56And this guy, he developed incredibly. He was one of the best employees. He started programming. He became a senior developer in the end. And it was quite amazing to follow this journey. and the reason why it's my favorite story in terms of hiring is because it was very unexpected. Even we weren't sure when we hired back in the day, but it was, maybe we got lucky, but it was really, really unexpected. It was a great experience to see this development, this personal development.

12:33John Lee Dumas:I love those real world examples because now Fire Nation, you can kind of put yourself in the position that Stefan was in and say, what am I looking for? How am I going to develop this situation? And we have a lot more value coming up when we get back from thanking our sponsors. Fire Nation, if you are building a real business, you need real infrastructure. That is why High Level is Entrepreneur on Fire's featured partner. High Level gives you a website builder and hosting, funnels and landing pages, email marketing, appointment scheduling, payment processing, course and membership hosting, and so much more.

13:05John Lee Dumas:Everything you need to succeed, all under one roof. No duct tape, no juggling five platforms, just one clean system for your business, and their award-winning 24-7 support has your back when you need it most. When you sign up at highlevelfire.com, you also get my exclusive bonus stack, a 30-day free trial, a private 15-minute call with me, JLD, access to my weekly live office hours, a digital copy of my book, The Common Path to Uncommon Success, my 50 Days to Something Execution Roadmap, and more. Visit highlevelfire.com and start building your something today. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer, but you are not getting enough quality sales calls on the calendar, Nexus Install is exactly what you need.

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14:34John Lee Dumas:simple, focused, and built for predictable, long-term quality lead flow. Stephan, we're back. And now that we have a team in place, it's all about leading them. It's all about motivating them, or hopefully if they're self-motivated, like we've talked about, keeping them motivated. Can you share your top tips that you've learned on motivating people? I think people should be and have to be motivated from within. you know peak performers are not really goal driven they're more value based and inspired by a purpose and you know the carrots and sticks that we know from back in the day are really out of time it can work for a short period of time you know for a sales manager you give them a big bonus and you ask them to close five five more deals until the end of the year and it might work once might work twice, but over time it will wear off.

15:32So I use this framework, which I really like, which I found in a book written by Susan Fowler. It's called Why Motivating People Doesn't Work and What Does. And the framework is the ARC framework, A-R-C. So there's three parts to it. The first one, the A stands for autonomy. An employee, if I hire somebody, they have to have a certain degree of autonomy. They have to be free to choose what they can do, what tools they can use. I can't micromanage them. If I put myself in their situation, I would hate to be micromanaged. So there has to be a certain level of trust, certain level of empowerment, and autonomy.

16:18The second part is the R, the relatedness. So to have a bond between your employees, between your team, in your team, to care about other people and to care that they care about you as well. So even this part is a little tricky when it comes to full remote teams and during lockdowns everybody worked from home and so on, but there's still tools that you can use to create relatedness, informal check-ins or team events that you can host to keep this relatedness alive. And the third one is the C, and that stands for competence. And somebody who I hire has to be capable of doing this job. Maybe not in the very beginning.

17:09There's an onboarding, and it's completely normal to go through some struggles as well in the first couple of months or weeks. But in the end, the person has to feel that he or she is capable of doing the job. and capable of doing it better than others. So overall, if these three autonomy, relatedness, competence are checked, then usually that leads to a high intrinsic motivation and people staying motivated and really driven and working for the company.

17:49John Lee Dumas:The three C's, Fire Nation. Are you on board? Are you in placing these in your process? And let's be honest, Stephan, I think you've experienced this. I don't know for sure, but I hope to hear from you if it is the case. Churn. Churn can be such a killer for companies. I mean, you find the right person, you hire them, you train them, you bring them in, you bring them on the platform, you spend all this time, energy effort, money on them, and then they leave. You know, I mean, it's just super frustrating. So I'd love to hear from you what you found are the best ways to retain the best people. Yeah, and it's a very important topic.

18:29We just had the great resignation as well. A lot of employees leaving companies, getting better offers from other companies and so on. So in the end, it comes, like coming back to the last question, is about how motivated am I? How well do I fit into this company? And salary is one part of the equation, but feeling like you're contributing to something bigger is even more important and that you're part of the team. So company culture plays a huge role in retaining people. And And also, I mean, the ARC, the autonomy relatedness competence that I just mentioned. And we do it on a daily basis, basically.

19:19So for autonomy, for example, we have tools in place that empower employees, but give freedom and also accountability like objectives and key result OKRs. For relatedness, we just came back from a global company offsite that was supposed to take place in 2020. We all went to Morocco, 460 people of us. It was a great experience, a week of really working together, partying together, talking, and it was really something else. We have a pizza Wednesday. Everybody comes to the office. A lot of people in our company work remotely or fully flexible. But getting people back together, feeling that relatedness, seeing other people working with me and talking to them and getting a coffee, you can't have that virtually.

20:17And when it comes to competence, I think that's probably the most important topic when it comes to retaining people. It's about developing on a personal level. It's acquiring competence, but always growing as well. And what we do at Send and Blue, and I think what we're really good at, is to let people follow their passions. And typically when you're really passionate about something, you also become pretty good at it. Because you're very interested, you spend a lot of time on it, you read up on it, you grow in that specific field. And at Send & Blue, there's a lot of internal mobility. And I'm a really good example for this.

21:04Originally, I'm from Germany. Then my company was acquired by Send & Blue. So I moved into this group. And as a former CEO of my company, I needed a new role. and then an opportunity came up to move to North America, open our North America business. So I moved here. I was interested in it and I was drawn to it. And then last year we started acquiring three companies and I had been on the other side of the table and I was naturally interested. So I got into that as well. I became VP corporate development on top of being CEO for North America for Sendinblue. So things like that, it's important to understanding what your employees want, where they want to develop, and give them opportunities inside the company to develop.

22:01So that's, I think, super important when it comes to managing people. I understand it's not always possible. And to foster personal development or environment of personal development is not easy. but in the end that's what I've seen in the past when my employees have the opportunity to develop they are motivated and they stay for a long time and they're really committed to the company

22:30John Lee Dumas:Such an important process to think through Fire Nation because like Stefan said churn is such a bad thing for companies when you spend all that time, energy and effort and then you end up not retaining these people who you know are the right fit for your company for something that could have been avoidable. And it really does bring me back to when I was actually out at a Tony Robbins little mastermind and we got to ask him questions. And this question was actually asked, how do you keep the best people? And his answer always stuck with me. He said, go to every individual when you're interviewing them and you know you want to hire them and say, what is the one thing that would make this the best job for you?

23:09John Lee Dumas:One thing, is it a three-day weekends? Is it coming into the office at 10 instead of eight? Is it more pay? Is it, you know, what is the one thing? Like, like everybody has a different thing. And when you give each individual their one thing that they know they can't get anywhere else, they're going to be a lot less likely to leave as a result. Nobody's going to be upset in the office because everybody gets their one thing and everybody gets to choose their one thing. It's like being able to choose your own Christmas present, but then guess what? You don't get upset with other people's Christmas presents because they chose that, you chose yours, just like you get to choose your one thing.

23:47John Lee Dumas:So think about that. That always kind of made me think, wow, I wonder what I would choose if I was in that situation. So Stefan, I want to end with a bang here. Give us the one key takeaway that you want to make sure Fire Nation gets from everything that we chatted about here today. For me, people are everything. That's the, you know, the heart and soul of your company is who you hire and who you work with and how you spend so much time with them. you might as well hire the best people and really find the perfect match. For me, it's key. It's super, super important. So if you hire and you have a bad gut feeling or you're not certain, I'd rather pass it.

24:32Almost every time I had a bad gut feeling when hiring somebody, it eventually turned into a bad lever or we had to let them go. So people are everything. That's my one takeaway. Really focus on who you work with and who you hire.

24:50John Lee Dumas:That was a powerful conversation about team building as discussed by email. Stefan, before we say goodbye, share with us how we can best connect with you. Any calls to action you have, and then we'll say adios. Sure. On a personal level, you can reach out on LinkedIn. I think that's the easiest way. LinkedIn.com slash Shibesta, which is my last name. S-C-H-E-B-E-S-T-A. Sorry, a little difficult to spell and to pronounce. And we have a special offer for all of you as well. For my company, which is sendinblue.com, which is an email marketing and online marketing, all in one solution. we have a special offer 50 % off your first three months with a discount code EOF.

25:41And you can find it when visiting sendinblue.com slash EOF. So that's sendinblue.com slash EOF. Use discount code EOF 50 % off your first three months.

25:57John Lee Dumas:And let's just take 30 seconds here. Why is Sendinblue so special? Sendinblue is special because we really enable small and medium businesses and very small business to be in equal footing with the big players, with Amazons and Walmarts out there. We provide tools that are really easy to use at a fair price point. So our customers typically use our tool to send out emails for marketing campaigns. They use our automation. They use our chat tool and our conversation tool where you can send messages through Instagram and Facebook Messenger. We have a landing page builder. We have a sales CRM. So it's really a lot of different features that help companies, especially small and medium businesses, grow and take advantage of all these online tools that otherwise only the big players have access to.

26:51John Lee Dumas:Fire Nation, you're the average. Of the five people you spend the most time with, You've been hanging out with SS and JLD today, so keep up the heat. And head over to EOfire.com and type Stephan, S-T-E-F-F-E-N, in the search bar, and his show notes page will pop right up with everything that we've been talking about here today. Make sure you check out that great 50 % discount for three months, promo code EOF. And Stephan, thank you for sharing your truth, your knowledge, your value with Fire Nation today. For that, we salute you, and we'll catch you on the flip side. Thanks, John. That was fun.

27:26John Lee Dumas:Hey, Fire Nation. Today's value bomb content was brought to you by Stephan. In Fire Nation, successful entrepreneurs are great at three things, productivity, discipline, and focus. That's why I created the Mastery Journal so that you can master productivity, discipline, and focus in 100 days, step by step. Visit themasteryjournal.com and I'll catch you there or I'll catch you on the flip side. Fire Nation, if you have a high ticket offer and need more quality leads, Nexus Install is designed for you. We'll book you eight to 20 qualified calls each month, then train you to run the system yourself.