This is a transcript from the Business Secrets Podcast With Robert Kanaat. Click here to view and subscribe on iTunes.
Hello everybody, and welcome to another episode of Business Secrets. My name is Robert Kanaat. Thank you so much for joining me here today. I am in a place called Lake Balaton, which is in Hungary. It’s one of the largest lakes in Europe. Actually I think it’s the largest lake in Europe. I’m out here with my family, and we’re celebrating my wife’s birthday. I’m just grateful to actually be here. I’m grateful to be able to spend the time and get away and kind of do the things that I want to do, and that I love to do – and to be with the people that I love to be with in my life.
So today what I wanted to talk to you guys about is something pretty important, and that is finding the right people to work with. Now your employees are everything. They are an indication of the quality and the value that you have in business. So they are a reflection on you. So basically, if you are in business and your employees are treating your customers like crap, and they are ignoring your customers– Or they’re simply letting things fall through the cracks, because they’re not paying enough attention to the details – then there is a serious problem.
Part of that problem comes back to you. So as a business owner yourself, as an entrepreneur, what I have to tell you is that you have to find the right people. I want to tell you kind of a little bit of a story about this. Because a really long time ago I started working with this guy and he really helped me to flesh out a platform that I had built. As a software engineer and an entrepreneur – like I want to do things myself, and I know other people kind of want to do things themselves. Because we’re just entrepreneurs, and we feel like we should be able to do everything on our own.
But you know what? We can’t do everything on our own, and that’s the biggest problem. So finding the right people, that’s really, really important to kind of take you from where you are to where you want to be. Because you cannot scale a business by yourself. Yes, you can get to – certain threshold. You can get to a million dollars in sales a year, possibly a little bit more than that. But scaling beyond that, to really, really – to create the systems and the people, that’s where the true magic comes in.
There are some people who are really, really gifted at doing this. Then there are some people who really fail at doing this. I want to tell you something. If you are going to do anything in your business, it is really to find the right people beyond of course building something that adds sincere amounts of value to the world. You have to find the right people. You have to find the right people who will help you, who will believe in your cause, who will help you grow the business – and who will just help you be the person or the entrepreneur that you want to be.
So to really embrace that, you have to find the right people. Finding the right people is one of the hardest things. So I found this guy and we started to work together. He’s a Pakistani guy, and we started to work together. Prior to that, I had some really bad experiences in finding people to work with. But I want to tell you, this guy has been with me for years now. The one thing is, I will always go back to him. Because I know that if I want to do something, it gets done right. I don’t have to like go back and check and then ask for certain things.
Finding those kinds of people with the entrepreneur mindset who pay attention to the details, that’s a really hard thing to do. So for me, I’ve gone out there, I posted jobs in all kinds of places. But I found that, for example, like finding really, really good help – it really starts on a website called upwork.com. You can find people who will work for you, who will work remotely. They’ll believe in your cause, but it’s going to take time to find them.
For example – recently – I’m building a blockchain business. It’s a company called Kribbz, that I’m building with Howard Panes and Kent Clothier. Just finding somebody to build the actual blockchain part of it has been such a struggle. Because it’s really, really hard. Because not many people in the world have actually built a blockchain. So like let’s just say that there’s probably like a handful, or maybe like less than a dozen actual blockchains out there. Possibly only a few that are really, really public, right? You’ve got Bitcoin, you’ve got Ethereum and a few other ones.
But finding somebody who can actually build the blockchain, wow that’s the hard part. So what I started doing was like – I started researching and learning Python. Because I can code in a lot of different languages, but I can’t code in Python. But I just started researching Python and then started building the blockchain, and then eventually I found somebody great. But now our blockchain is being built in C++, which is what a blockchain should be built in. Just because of the memory implications. It’s just faster. There’s less latency and stuff like that.
So this is just obviously me geeking out about blockchain stuff. But my whole point in kinda telling you guys this thing is that finding somebody really, really good. Finding somebody really, really talented who will believe in your cause and will help you kind of take that ball and run with it. That’s a really hard thing to do. But it’s also something that you should be spending a lot of time on. I’ve spent weeks and weeks and weeks literally trying to find good people who will work with me. Just interviewing person after person.
There’s usually stuff that I don’t like, or like just doesn’t really sit well with me. Some people will give a person a DISC test, or they’ll make them take a different kind of personality test. Just to check what their personality is like. For me it’s just – I can just talk to that person, and I’ll know like if that person actually knows what they’re talking about. It doesn’t take much, especially like if you’re in the business that you’re in and you’re trying to find somebody who will help you – whether it’s in sales or anything else. I mean, you want to find knowledgeable people, and you want to find people who are going to work hard for you.
So actually researching and digging into that. It just really just takes having a sincere conversation with the person. Like you can ask certain things and definitely find the answer to those questions. Like for example, I have found– I found that– I discovered, I forgot who it was. It was an entrepreneur who would take new employees out to restaurants and then start berating the waiter, to see how the employee would respond to that. I think that was pretty unique, like little twist an interesting thing. But I would never do a job like that. So I would have a hard time kind of berating anybody and seeing how someone else responded.
But yeah, so that’s kind of like what I want to talk to you guys about today while I’m out here kind of in the middle of Hungary. I want to say in the middle of nowhere, but we’re not really in the middle of nowhere. It’s like literally like the biggest lake in Europe or something like that and tons of people come here, and it’s pretty much summertime. So we rented this really cool house, real close to the lake and it’s just great. It was my wife’s birthday yesterday and we celebrated, and it was fantastic. We’re here with the kids, and they’re having a great time.
I really hope, I hope those things for you and for your business. Like one of the biggest secrets in business – again – I keep saying this like secret after secret. But all these things are really, really important. One of the biggest secrets in business is really finding the right people to work with. Because that’s really hard. Discovering the right people who will kind of piggy back your cause, and they’ll run with things for you. Then they’ll kind of like be a sounding board for you. That’s really, really hard and it takes a lot of time.
But another – it’s like you can’t just get distracted or dissuaded just because you have a problem finding the right person. Like I’ve had to like post certain jobs like repeatedly over and over again, half a dozen times until I find the right applicant, right? So I think that that’s pretty important. Definitely kind of a message that I wanted to give you guys while I’m out here. While I’m out here kind of at the lake. After this, we’re heading to Croatia, so I’ll probably be podcasting to you guys while I’m out there. We’re heading to a place called Split. I’m pretty excited about that, because we’re going to be on the ocean.
But anyhow, if you want to have kind of like the freedoms and stuff to do these things, I think it all depends on you and what you want. Like if you want to build a lifestyle business you can build a lifestyle business. If you want to build a brick and mortar business, like with a single location, headquartered where you live – and you can do that too. For me like, I enjoy the lifestyle business. But I’m also building a brick and mortar business.
So Kribbz is definitely a brick and mortar business. It’s going to have a single location with a lot of employees, and systems that need to scale, and marketing that needs to be thought through – and just everything else. Just thinking about it is just – just makes my head swell sometimes. It’s a business that I’ve been– Basically it’s a platform that I built for 3 and a half years but have recently been adopting and modifying to the real estate blockchain. So I’m pretty excited about it. Some super cool business partners to work with.
I’ll tell you guys more about that story coming up. I know that I related a little bit to it in the origin story, I think on the first episode of this podcast. But I just think it’s super cool how like you never really know what happens in life. But when you surround yourself with the right people, great things will always happen. Because they’ll just want to work with you. When you just do good things for others, right? In a past episode I talked about being a giver and not a taker. When you do good things and you really put yourself out there, you’ll find the right people. You’ll find the right people you can work with. You’ll find the right people who will champion your causes and it’ll just be fantastic.
So that’s what I’ll leave you guys with, and I really hope that you enjoyed this episode of Business Secrets. Please like and share and comment and subscribe on iTunes. I would greatly appreciate it. Until next time, I will talk to you guys soon.