Entrepreneurial Management

Two Different Types of Workers

There are two things you will hire people to do—execute processes you’ve already created, or create their own processes and execute on those processes. If you want someone to execute processes you’ve already created, then you need what we call a tactician. This is someone who can follow directions, show up on time, turn things in on time, and do their work properly.

The other kind of person is a strategist, and that is a person who not only can do the tactician work and execute on the process, but can also think. You are paying them, not just for their time, but you’re paying them to think. These two people are so different. If you hire tacticians and expect them to be strategists, you are going to be crying all the time.

One of the biggest points of frustration for entrepreneurs is that they have people who don’t do what they need them to do. They don’t think like a strategist. And sometimes they’ll promote a tactician to a strategic position and it doesn’t work out so well because the employee is not used to thinking that way.

When you hire a tactician, you are hiring someone to take action. Their value is through taking action so you don’t have to. When you hire a strategist you are hiring someone to come up with ideas, strategize, and create processes. You are hiring them to think.

Paying People to Think

You will have to pay a strategist more money because you are hiring them for their brains to think and solve problems. Here’s the best news though—these people end up being free. They end up costing you nothing because they produce at a high level, take things off your plate, and create solutions to problems before they even happen. They start preventing problems in your business and create much more value.

We recommend you hire strategists as full time employees so they can be in your business and grow with the company. You may want everyone to be a strategist in your company, but the truth is that you need tacticians. You need people to execute processes. We want to set up people to win.

The Best Employees

At The Life Coach School we hire strategic employees that are also tacticians. There are strategic people who are only strategic and are not good at execution. You may need that support, but if you hire people who are good strategists who can execute their own processes, that’s how you can build a foundation. This is why we’ve been able to build the business so big with such a lean team, because everyone is at capacity.

The Assistant Theory

We recommend that you hire an assistant first. Because when you are able to look at your own business and your own job and determine which things are strategic vs. tactical, then you will have a good foundation for how to separate your work. You can then build off this concept and the strategists you hire can also utilize assistants to delegate tactical work.

Once you go through this process, you can repeat it again with every position in your business. It forces you to think differently about what you do and what someone else will do for you. You don’t want your best strategists to be doing too much tactical work.

If you find that most of your work is repeatable and tactical, you are not utilizing yourself. The most value you are going to get from your money is by creating ideas, preventing problems, and thinking of new ways to execute your business model.