Build your Bench

As you explore integrating global talent more & more into your business - might I make a suggestion?

Use your “executive assistant” role as a proving ground - and as an entry point into your larger operations.

At this point, I’ve done this many times:

• Someone starts as my assistant

• We figure out what they are good at

• We promote them into a new position within one of our companies.

We promoted Germaine (my assistant for the last year or so) today.

She’s been doing a wonderful job - and we can’t wait to have her continue to contribute for our team.

By starting as my assistant - I got to see her work every day!

I learned about what she is good at, her challenges, her strengths, etc.

I also got to “culturally” bring her into our team - working on responsibilities & tasks directed by me was a great way for her to learn what we are all about.

One of my most important roles within our companies is to build our talent pool, and this is such an easy way to cultivate that talent pool.

@BinsiDevadasan (who is approaching almost 7 years of work with me) started like this.

A short story - after we bought Garage Excell we were having major issues with our back office turnover.

At a certain point we all looked around and said “Well shit, why don’t we just have Binsi run it?”

“Jon, she lives on the other side of the world & this is a home improvement company”.

“Yea - we’ll figure it out”.

And we did!

As of today, she has built an absolutely stellar set of skills & experiences - and is often the motor behind many of our most critical initiatives.

After that success, and since that point, I’ve never hesitated to quickly train & promote our assistants/global all stars into all sorts of higher profile roles.

Funny enough - Binsi now has an awesome assistant, but she refuses to let me interact with her.

In her words:

“Jon, every time I finally have an assistant hired that I like, you promote them”

I mean, I think I’ve only done that like THREE times - but, guilt as charged.

Now you might think:

“Well Jon, aren’t you nervous about them finally learning what is going on, and now they don’t work for you as an assistant anymore?”

Two major things stop this:

• We aren’t firing them, we are promoting them - they are still around. The old assistant ends up being a mentor & resource for the new one. It also provides ( often times the first ever) opportunity for them to develop their leadership/mentorship skills.

• Everything about how to be a good assistant for me, is in our Notion. It’s the one that I sell at the bottom of the newsletter. We give that to the newbies and say “Do this. Jon will like you”. They start adding value straight away like that. They all keep those processes up to date, so there is very little (if any) onboarding/ training required from me.

Having a high quality, reliable pipeline of incredible global talent like Germaine, has been a game changer for us - I do hope you’ll give it a shot.

The key to replicating this success is identifying potential in your assistants.

Look for qualities such as adaptability, eagerness to learn, and a knack for problem-solving.

It might take the form of an assistant who consistently goes above and beyond, or one who devises solutions to problems before they escalate.

Once you have identified a potential candidate, provide them with opportunities for growth within their assistant role, gradually increasing their responsibilities and encouraging them to take on new challenges.

90% of the time, it works 50% of the time.

Ah just joking, and while it doesn’t always work - when it does, it’s awesome.

Yallah Habibi,

Jon

P.S. This is what we send my assistants on their first day. I have to do zero onboarding. Don’t reinvent the wheel. My brain damage is your time saved.

Passage of the Week

“Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.

The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.

Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.

The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.

It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known.”

―Carl Sagan, Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space

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