1262: Hire: Scale Your Business Through Strategic Talent Acquisition with Kasim Aslam

Robert Plank 0:04 Hey, we're here back on the podcast with Kasim, and he is awesome, and he is an expert about things like delegation, business, scaling, team, building, efficiency. He's a serial entrepreneur. He's built multiple seven and eight figure businesses, including two successful exits. Costum was named one of the top 50 digital marketing thought leaders in the US, and he has this deep expertise in scaling businesses, delegation hiring world class talent. He's the author of you versus Google, which is a number one international best seller in marketing and advertising. So we're going to find out how to actually be a real growing up entrepreneur and do these things like building a business and growing a team and doing all these tasks that are important, and not just messing around, not just building yourself a new job, but actually creating this lifestyle business and having fun and changing some lives. So awesome. Awesome to have you here.

Kasim Aslam 1:00 Robert, thanks for having me. I appreciate you.

Robert Plank 1:03 Appreciate you too. And so did my best to hype up the audience about you, but in your own words, what just has you so jazzed lately?

Kasim Aslam 1:11 Talent acquisition, I think that for especially for your audience, I went to school on the podcast a little bit before we we hit the record button, and there feels to be a recurring theme, which is, how do I do more with less? How do I optimize? How do I, you know, be efficient? How do I leverage my time and my capabilities? And I think we're all trying to do that. And I actually think the world's been a little bit spoiled by things like process management software, AI. And when I say spoiled, I mean, we've taken it for granted, and now that it's the ubiquitous truth, it's no longer a unique selling proposition, like everybody's got it. So how else do you set yourself apart, especially when you're trying to build a business? And I think the way to do that is through people. What I usually tell my my students and or audience, if I'm coaching, is you really only have there's four key differentiators in any in any business, which is people, processes, programs and products. Most of us are not in a product based business, so most of us only have three, people, processes, programs. Programs are for sale. Anybody can buy them. Processes are reverse engineerable. People end up being the real key differentiator. And I think if you can focus on hiring and training truly stellar humans, in my experience, that's the way as a small business owner, to set yourself apart and put yourself in a position where you actually achieve very real freedom. You do that through people. So that's kind of that's the soapbox I like to stand on, and the drum I like to be,

Robert Plank 2:48 and that's a great path that we need to be on is getting quality people. And you're blowing my mind a little bit because you're making, as you're saying that I'm, like, going back in time, like 2025, years. Like I started off by just making information products, but that became really crowded. And then I'm a programmer, so I can create software, but then that was hard to differentiate. And then now I'm doing like, more like done for you services, which is huge with people, right? And figuring out, well, how do we make sure like, we can have the best process, but the people need to make sure that it's followed and that we're on track. And then there's all this talk on a many times a day about AI and how it'll just change so much, and it's gonna be so scary. But then, well, you still need people to, like, either do what AI can't do, or to kind of manage the AI. So I think it's a real timely conversation. And so as far as where you fit in, like, you talk about talent acquisition, like, what does that mean? It sounds like HR, or it sounds like kind of, instead of you taking over all this builds, this building stuff, you put people to work, and it seems like that's a more sustainable approach.

Kasim Aslam 3:57 Yeah, it's the Dan Sullivan conversation. Dan has the quote, who, not how. And I think that it's a great book, but you don't even need to read it. If you've heard the title, you understand conceptually. That's that's the paradigm shift we constantly ask ourselves as entrepreneur, as entrepreneurs, how do I get this done? And that's the wrong way to approach anything. I think that the who question, that's the better question. And we're taught to I'm going to use the word, it's going to be mildly repellent, Robert, but we're taught to use people incorrectly, and the repellent word there should be used. People are treated like commodities. If you think about every business, book, course, podcast, video, training consultant, they talk about and treat people as though they're commodities, and a commodity is is something that's easily interchangeable, right? So if you have an ear of corn and I have an ear of corn and I give you mine for yours, it's a para pursuit trade. It's one for one, neither of us are any better off or worse off than we were a moment ago. Before we made that trade right? That's how you know you're dealing with a commodity. We're taught to treat people like commodities, and it's a catastrophic error, because I don't care if you take two humans who were born in the same hospital the same day, from the same doctor, raised by the same parents, went to the same school, have the same background, same experience, same education, and got the same degree, and put them in the same job, they're they're not the same thing. They're not an interchangeable commodity. And the more you work with people, the more you realize that, and this will get mildly soap boxy, but I really believe this on a deep, fundamental religious level, people are a miracle, like the human being is an absolute and complete and total miracle. And so when you set out to build a business that treats people like commodities. You nullify everything that's valuable about the person, you treat them like a robot. Well, we're actually in a really fun and kind of scary ecosystem where we get to see what robots can actually do. And treating people like robots is a flawed model, because the robot is always going to be a better robot than the person is, and so chasing, you know, the quote, unquote, scalable model is now it's, it's a, it's a flawed exercise in immediate, four stops lessons, because anything that the robot can do is a effectively free, and B doesn't need you. So the question now is, it's so weird to me that everybody's obsessing over what AI can do. You really want to be profitable if you want to make money, go figure out what AI cannot do, and that's going to be done through people. And you actually kind of nailed it at the beginning of this interview, you're like, I was doing info products. Info got tired. I was doing software. Software got saturated. The whole world is being pressed into that which doesn't scale. We're all being pressed into the human condition and the human endeavor, and we're being pressed there because every because everything else, it's not that it's not important. It's that it's so important, it's become a priority. It's, it's, it's pre existing, it's free, you know, I mean, like, open AI, the most you can give them is $200 a month, and then you have, effectively, a trillion dollar supercomputer with the genius IQ to do your bidding, right? Like that's insane. It's insane. So what is it that only people can do? And when you start asking yourself that question, and you start looking at people as though they're not commodities, as though they really are miracles, you build a way different business. You don't build Crick and loans. You know what I mean? Like Crick and loans is a soul sucking boiler room of absolute horse shit that nobody should ever have to work at. It's the it's the modern day equivalent of the coal mines. What do you build when you look at the human being as as a literal miracle? And those are the businesses, if you really think about your own engagement, the businesses that you hire, the experiences you have that are that are truly stellar. You know, the restaurants you visit the bars, you go to the coffee shop, you love the vendor that you really just can't get enough of. It's all people driven all the time. And what's crazy about it is because the whole business world treats people like commodities. All of the best people are so readily available. It's not funny. It's how I've done what I've done, dude, like, I've built six multi million dollar businesses. I built the number one ranked Google Ads agency in the world. I've never run a Google ad campaign in myself and in my life, I wouldn't know how to I own the largest English speaking Montessori community on the planet. I'm not a trained Montessori and I don't own a Montessori school. I had the highest performing real estate investment campaign in the world. I've before I ever invested in real estate or did lead generation. And it's not because I'm smarter than anybody else. It's because I just kind of cracked the code on Oh, I don't need to do it. I just need to find the person that can do it better than me and then get out of their way. And it's, it's completely counter to all conventional wisdom about how we hire, how we train, how we delegate, how we incentivize most of my peers are actually oddly and they won't admit this, but it's been my experience. They're afraid of competence. Most entrepreneurs and business owners don't want to hire people smarter than them, because they you know, they're afraid of being found out. They're afraid of imposter syndrome. They're afraid of being held hostage. And so they hire what I call manageable people. The problem with manageable people is they need to be managed. But if you, if you reverse your paradigm, and you don't try to commoditize humans, dude, the people that are available to you from a talent perspective, or they'll blow you a freaking mind. And I've proven that over and over and over and over again, and I have a whole framework for doing it. I'll give it to you. I'll give it to your listeners. It's free. There's no gate. I'm not trying to I'm not trying to do lead generation. My goal in life is to open people's horizons, broaden the entrepreneurial mind, and make it more accessible to hiring truly stellar humans and hopefully in emerging markets, because I think people in emerging nations really need and deserve that opportunity. So that got a little preachy. Forgive me, I'll pause there and see where you want to poke at me a little.

Robert Plank 9:46 And preachy is okay. You're blowing my mind. I'm just trying to keep up here. And you think about some of these ideas you put down. They're really dated, right? You think about when you have like a nine to five, where they always watch you, right? You think about. Like the like school, public school system, and they're always like, you know, ringing the bell. They're saying, sit here. They're more like tracking your time and just giving you, just filling your day, instead of letting you loose and letting you free. And so, like, this whole idea of putting together a good team it, I can understand how people might hesitate about it because there's a lack of control, which, like, it seems like you say that's a good thing. But then there's also this idea of, like, people are afraid to, like, take the big risks, right? There's the thinking like, Okay, well, if I'm making the Facebook ad agencies, I need to be an expert at it, and I need to excel on my own, and then start handing it off. So how do you get over that mental hump? How do you from day one say, I'll put people to work instead of this weird, like, I'll do it and I'll then I'll transition, like, how do we do it your way? And Blick out of all this mental baggage,

Kasim Aslam 10:54 yeah, well, to be frank, most people don't. That's why most entrepreneurs get stuck at it's funny. It's almost a ubiquitous truth, most entrepreneurs, in my experience, get stuck right at a million dollars gross revenue, 30 employees. If an entrepreneur grows their business, they grow it to about a million and a half million, a million and a half gross rev, depending on the type of business, and 30 some odd employees. And the reason that that's the number is because that's as much as one person can manage themselves. One person can, and now you might find yourself in a much more leverageable industry, and your gross rep is three or 5 million, not one or two, but but the point still stands. The framework still stands most entrepreneurs to build a business up until they have all the plates spinning that they can possibly spin themselves, and there's there's no more split that they can control. And so they've been tapped out, and they they hit this ceiling, and they don't even know why they've hit it. And they have these thoughts, like, you know, there's so hard to find good help, and if you want something done, do it yourself. And you have to watch everything, and you have to inspect what you expect, etc, etc, etc. And so they can't build a business that's bigger than them, because their business is built on them. So I'm not any better or smarter than those people, by the way. I did that exact same thing too. I just got friends. I just got frustrated, and I started to see when it when things really did work. They worked without me. That's the paradigm shift. Is, if you want a business, most, most people think they own a business. They don't. They own a job. If you want a business, a business needs to function without your intervention or observation. That's when you know you actually have a business. Is if you can walk away in 90 days, come back, and the business is either as good or better than it was before, before you left, that's that's when you know you actually have, you know, something that exists outside of yourself, outside of just your volition, pushing it forward. And what's nice about that approach is it can be done slowly. You don't need to rip the band aid off and just, you know, and that's what a lot of people do too, is they get fed up and then, and this is why I hate the whole traction EOS model, because they think like, oh, I just need an integrator. All in I'm going to hire an integrator, and I'm going to get, you know, name it what you want, right integrator, Director of Operations, COO, ops person, right hand, man, I need to clone myself chief of staff. They get frustrated and think, I just need to go find somebody like me who can spin all the plates and then I can walk away. And that's that's the wrong way to do it. The right way to do it is to go endeavor by endeavor, department by department, and begin finding the human who's the who find the human that's going to own that department. And you can start in order. And when I say in order, I mean in sequences to the way your business functions. And so most businesses the very first in the sequence of events, as measured by exposure to the customer, the first piece of that, let's say assembly line, is marketing. So who owns your marketing, who loves that inside and upside down the front and center? And you find that person who can really screen from the rooftops who you are, and you put them in place, and then you move on to sales, and then you put them in place, and you move on to onboarding, and then customer experience, and then retention, and then finance and ops and HR and whatever, whatever, whatever, however your business is is built. But when you find these individual, who's they grow your business, sends your intervention because, dude, they love it. That's the thing that's really cool. About 90% of people are not equipped to be entrepreneurs, and that's more or less that it's not, I'm not shooting from the hip with that data point. There's this really good book by Douglas Brackman called driven, and Brackman talks about the epigenetic phenomenon that is entrepreneurship. Entrepreneurs are 10% of the people who were actually broken in interesting ways. We experience dopamine in pursuit of a goal, instead of at the completion of a goal. And we're we're the minority, so 10% of people experience dopamine in the pursuit of a goal. That's the entrepreneurial mind. Drachman calls it the hunter mind, the employee mind, that this is a normal human experience is to open me when they when they accomplish a goal. Brackman calls this the farmer mind, or the farmer brain. So entrepreneurs, and again, in my experience, tend to look at non entrepreneurs in something of a dismissive and or even, you know, kind of pejorative lens. They're not they're unkind. And it's, it's interesting, because I think that that needs, that frame needs to be flipped too. Just because they're not entrepreneurial doesn't mean that they're not brilliant, hard working industries, proactive, and you can find these people that would really want to move the needle. But the thing about it is, is there because they're not entrepreneurial, they're not going to spend spend 50 plates the way that you spend 50 plates, but they're going to spend one better than you've ever spun that plate in your life. And that's the key. Is stop trying to find the entrepreneur. Go find the employee. Find the farmer who like, you're like, Hey, dude, Robert, you're in charge of my customer onboarding and and I need you. I'm never going to be as good as you are, and they're going to your entrepreneurs are good at breadth, employees are good at depth, but it requires that you respect them, trust them, and keep your hands off the damn thing. Because what most of my entrepreneurial brethren do is they hire somebody, and then they sit there looking over the shoulder, and they're like, oh, change the circle to a square. Change red to blue, up, not down, left, not right. And you know, what does a smart, hard working, industrious person do when that happens, they take their hands off the wheel. They're like, all right, I guess you're driving. And my job is just to do what you told me to do. So don't do that. Trust. Trust people, trust humans. Find hire somebody smarter than you. And the way to find peak performers, by the way, is to pay more entrepreneurs. Hate to hear that, because we were taught to treat people like commodities you're trying to get when you're buying commodities you want the most for the least, right? Like I'm buying beans or corn or milk or whatever, whatever commodity it is, where it's all the same, I want the most beans for the least amount of money. Well, people aren't beans, and the way to get really, really, really good people is to pay more. And I think you need to pay more than the 10% more than the high water mark is my is my goal, and and that's that's a difficult thing for people to understand when they first hear it, because they think, like, Okay, 10% more. That's not bad. That's not what I said, 10% more than high water mark. So if the range for the role you're hiring for, let's say, is, you know, 75 to 100 grand. 10% more than the high water mark is $110,000 that's almost double the bottom of that range. And yet, here's what's really interesting, and this is what most people don't understand when they're early stage entrepreneurs. When you pay 10% more, you get 10 or 50 or 100 times the output, you get a degree of leverage that's difficult for me to articulate. It's the Pareto distribution, the predator distribution the predator distribution, is true for every natural ecosystem, and it says that 20% of people are responsible for 80% of the output, or 20% of the participants are responsible for 80% of the results, 20% of your input, 80% of your output. So the goal there is, go find your parental people. And if you think an expensive employee is expensive, wait till you see what a cheap employee cost you. I when I sold my agency, I sold solutions eight for an eight figure sum of money to a private equity backed smart tech company. When I sold that company, one person managed almost 50% of my revenue. With I had almost 100 employees, one person managed almost 50% of my revenue. And you might think to yourself, like, Oh no, key man insurance. That's, you know, we don't want that. You're wrong. You do want that, because that's the predator distribution. When you try to mitigate the proto distribution, all you do is force your high end employees to be average. You don't bring your average employees up. You bring your above average employees down. And if you look at every business and every natural ecosystem, that's going to be true. So you can reverse engineer. You can what would you call it? You could almost solve for Pareto talent. Finding Pareto talent isn't hard. Winners want to win. Pay them more. Be hands off. Treat them like they're real human beings. Be respectful, loving, kind, caring. Have a fun place to work and live. And you end up with these people that are unbelievably grateful to work for you, and they move mountains and run through walls, dude, it's insane. It's so much fun to watch.

Robert Plank 18:39 It sounds like a lot of fun to build, especially these adventures you've been on of just like getting the great talent, get the great people all together. And so how do we ensure success here? Like, as far as it's one thing to say, well, here's your advice, here's what you do. But as you know, sometimes you give someone a list and then they don't stick to it, or they get stuck at the first sign, and then you kind of revert back to what's comfortable. So do you have, like, a book or a course or just some kind of resource to keep people on this right track?

Kasim Aslam 19:06 I do, yeah, I just wrote a book. It's called hire. It'll be out later this month. Your audience can have it. I'm giving it away for free. I'll share a link with you, or they can find it on Amazon or wherever if they want a physical copy, and it walks through in granular detail, step by step, how I find and hire, and even a little on how I start with Pareto talent. Because you can't treat Pareto talent the way that you treat normal talent. They don't respond, you know, like there's no you can't have the assembly line and the screenshotting desktops and the clock in, clock out, garbage. It doesn't work because you're dealing with real adults when real adults needed to be treated that way. And so it's a bit of a paradigm change, and there's some growing pains, for sure, but when you really start to use the model, I don't think there's anything you can do in your business that would be better or more effective. And because. I tend to aim for international hires. It's interesting, you pay international folks more than they ever make domestically, but it ends up being a fraction of what it would cost you to hire here on shore, assuming that the listeners in in the States. And so it's kind of a it's a fun game of arbitrage too, that you can play. But I'd love to share that with you. If and when it's when it's when it's live, it should be live before the end of March.

Robert Plank 20:26 Well, great. Well, we'll make sure to plug that again in a few minutes at the end, just so that. But now that we kind of have a little bit of a lay of the land, we're limited with on time, since it's a podcast. But I'm always curious about when things go wrong, when we jump into something with the best of intentions, but then we struggle, we panic, we have to improvise. So as far as these companies that you build and exited, or maybe even the people that you've helped and hire quality people like, where is an interesting mess up? Where have you or someone else perhaps struggled?

Kasim Aslam 20:59 Oh, man, I call myself the world's greatest failure. The interesting thing about failure, in my mind at this point is is it's actually the price of admission for success. And so my my note to the audience would be that, as you're pursuing your entrepreneurial endeavors, I don't think that failure is negative feedback. I actually think that your failures are the things that are going to propel you towards success. It's the corridor principle, the quarter principle, says that you're never going to see the true opportunity until you're on the field of play. But when you step on the field of play, you generally speaking, are in the wrong vantage point, because you chose your position arbitrarily. And so I think that your failures are actually the most important things for you to pursue, and you should maybe even pursue failure to some degree. I'll tell you my biggest failure generally, is almost it's almost always picking the wrong niche. I think that we tell entrepreneurs incorrectly to niche down. I think that's bad advice. It's good advice. Once you've you've gotten going, but to niche down arbitrarily means to you basically walk out in your backyard and say, I'm going to drill for oil here. Why would you do that? You have no data that says that there's going to be oil. So I think that the smart thing to do is to start broad. Start broad from an industry perspective, a service perspective, a geography perspective, and starting broad is that's a that's a flawed model long term, but it lets you kiss frogs, and you get to see like, you know, who do you like working with? What are you good at? Where is the market going, what resonates? And then as you see signs of life and incremental success, then you can slowly niche over time, but you're now niching down with data. So a lot of my failures historically and even today, they stem from being in the wrong niche, choosing the wrong niche, focusing in the wrong niche, pursuing the wrong niche, and doing so beyond what failure would teach me, and maybe not necessarily paying attention to the feedback that failure is,

Robert Plank 22:56 but you still made it work. And it seems like there's a common, recurring theme in our conversation about how it's it's really tempting to let ego get in the way and to make just arbitrary decisions, and then that affects other things. So we need to rethink, think some of this, right? There's a better way, such as what you've been telling us about, this Pareto talent, and in our last couple of minutes here, right? We've been talking about like business advice and people advice and just how to think in a better way. Is there a question that I'm not asking you, that I should be asking you?

Kasim Aslam 23:29 That's one of my favorite questions of all time. I think that people need to be more discerning as to the advice they take. There's a lot of armchair gurus who, you know, they went and they rented a San Diego beach house on Airbnb for a day, and they tore out a Ferrari, and now they're shooting Instagram videos trying to teach you how to make money. And so my personal opinion is, if we're going to listen to somebody, they need to be an expert upon the level of analysis that we're listening to them. You know, I don't want I don't want a fat personal trainer, and I don't want a skinny chef. And so I think one of the questions I really like is, how do I know who to pay attention to? And I really like Tony Robbins, his whole approach on this is model somebody who's accomplished what it is that you're trying to accomplish, and make sure the KPIs are real. I've got a big problem with the two comma club people, because the two comma club is, it's a vanity metric. You know, I know somebody, this is a true story. I know somebody spent $1.2 million in ads at a failing campaign, but sold a million dollars worth of ticket and so got his two comma club, you know, like, that's not a successful person. That's not somebody that I want to model, but he can walk around claiming to be in the two comma club. And so, you know, if somebody's teaching you entrepreneurial endeavors, I want to see your tax returns. I want to know what you've built. I want to know what you've sold. I want to know, you know, I don't care about your Vanity, vanity metrics. I don't care about gross revenue. I care about margins and. Net Income and and I think it's okay if somebody positions themselves as a thought leader, for us to call them to the table a little bit on that, you know, like, show me the truth behind the scenes, what you've actually accomplished. And that gives us a better sense as to who we should really be following and modeling.

Robert Plank 25:21 100% I think, yeah, we need to have the right qualifications, so to speak, from someone who we listen to, and that it's, I think that's a common problem with young people, right? They listen to their friend from school, neighbor down the street, family member, about their business, and it's like, That's great advice from a friend, but like, what? Like, what makes you qualified to give me advice in that domain? It's great that you're you care about me and my well being, but like, that's not actually helping me to get to my goal. If anything, it's hurting me. And so this is really a lot to think about, right? So we need to hire good people, and we need to pay them more, and we need to attract the right talent. That way, we're not struggling, and we're not just building things the capacity and that our business is not depending on us. That way, we can grow it beyond what it could be contained in, and then we can follow in the path of someone like you, who can sell a business and who can do these things that don't scale. Whenever I think about like podcasting, like we're doing here, one on one, or like net, LinkedIn, networking, stuff like that. It's like, cool. What doesn't scale? That's what a lot of people won't do, or they won't do consistently. And then that's if we're the ones that do that, then we can show that we really want it, and we're really serious and dedicated. So he said that the book that's coming out soon is called higher. That's H, I, R, E, by costum, that's K, A, S, I, M, and as far as some next steps here, I know that you're big on on Facebook and you have some websites, so if someone was impressed by what you had to say, where should they go to continue following?

Kasim Aslam 26:58 Yeah, I appreciate that, Robert, you can go to costum.me. K A, S, I M, dot, M, E, you'll be able to get my book for free. You can follow my YouTube channel. I shoot a video every day. I've got all my hot links there, so that's a good place to start.

Robert Plank 27:12 Great costum.me. K A, S, I M.me, follow that YouTube channel and watch those daily videos. And as people are going there, Qassem, and we're about to wrap things up here, it's time for the scary part of the show where I try to stump you, put you on the spot a little bit. I asked for a fun or interesting quote or lesson that has served you in life or in business. So what comes to mind for you as far as one last quote or lesson

Kasim Aslam 27:39 I really love Khalil Gibran, he wrote the Prophet. And one of the quotes from the prophet that actually used in all my job descriptions is, work is love made visible. And I think if we can view work as love made manifest, then it kind of changes the way that you work, in the way that you think about it. We have to work, you know, it's half of our waking life, a third of our time spent doing this thing that most people complain about. So you know, what if you did change your lens there a little bit and decide, no, this is the way that I'm going to show love to the world and to the people around me, I think it makes for quite a different experience.

Robert Plank 28:18 I agree, changes the game, instead of it being a thing that we hate that subtracts, it's something that you use to express love, that you're excited about, that is this huge chunk of your life that you use to express all these things to the world. So that's beautiful. It's wonderful to think about, along with your amazing ideas, plus the book that we need to check out by going to that hub site that's K, A, S, I M.me, Kasim.me, and thank you, Mr. Kasim for showing up and putting a face to the name and for helping us out with some of these ideas on Pareto talent. It's directly from a guy who's built these five, seven and eight figure businesses. I'm really impressed, impressed, and I'm really excited about the future and some of these possibilities you described.

Kasim Aslam 29:03 Thanks for having me, Robert, and thanks everybody for listening.

Robert Plank 29:07 I really appreciate you being a listener of the marketer of the day podcast. The place to go right now, if you want to know more about running your own podcast, is D, F, Y podcast.com/free go there right now claim your free gift, D, F, Y, podcast.com/free