The #1 Hiring Mistake Killing Digital Agencies—and the System That Fixes It Forever

Most digital agency owners are stuck in a cycle of hiring frustration—relying on resumes, guessing at culture fit, and hoping the next hire works out. In this episode, Dr. William Attaway sits down with Dr. Michael Neal, founder of Build My Team, to reveal the #1 hiring mistake that’s stalling agency growth and burning out leaders: trusting the resume.

You’ll learn how Dr. Neal replaced chaos with clarity using a hiring system that achieves a 97% match rate and radically improves retention and performance. We break down how to automate your hiring process, eliminate guesswork with psychometric assessments, and build a team that runs the business without constant oversight.

If you’re scaling your agency, overwhelmed by turnover, or feeling stuck in the fulfillment grind, this episode offers a proven roadmap for building the kind of team that makes scaling simple and sustainable.

What We Cover:

• Why resumes are killing your hiring process
• How to identify and attract A-players without guesswork
• Systems for hiring predictably and at scale
• Lessons from Disney and the Four Seasons on team culture
• The leadership mindset shift from doing to directing

Books Mentioned

• Who Not How by Dan Sullivan & Benjamin Hardy
• Think and Grow Rich by Napoleon Hill
• The Psychology of Money by Morgan Housel
• Atomic Habits by James Clear

Connect with Dr. Michael Neal:
Visit BuildMyTeam.com to schedule a consultation and explore a better way to build your team.

hiring mistakes, digital agency leadership, build my team, agency growth, GoHighLevel hiring, leadership coaching, remote team building, team culture, scaling digital agency, automated hiring system, recruiting A-players, agency operations

Chapters

• 0:37 How a Hiring Crisis Sparked a Scalable Solution
• 2:56 Why Resumes Are Failing Digital Agency Owners
• 5:48 The Hiring System That Replaces Guesswork with Predictability
• 9:08 Building a Self-Managing Team That Scales
• 15:09 What Disney and Four Seasons Can Teach About Team Culture
• 20:49 The CEO Shift: From Doing to Leading
• 24:48 Retaining A-Players and Removing Bottlenecks
• 29:45 Book Recommendations for Leaders

Transcript

Dr. William Attaway: 0:00

It is an honor today to have Dr Michael Neal on the podcast. Michael is the founder and chief executive officer of Build my Team. He's a practicing optometrist in private practice in Hawley, pennsylvania. He founded Build my Team to solve his own hiring struggles in his practice by modeling how companies like Disney and the Four Seasons hire. The process worked so well. He expanded it to help friends and now Build my Team services clients in eight different healthcare professions in over 40 states and Canada. Dr Neal, I'm so glad you were here. Thanks for being on the show.

Dr. Michael Neal: 0:40

Ah, thanks so much. I'm really excited to be here, William.

Intro / Outro: 0:45

Welcome to Catalytic Leadership, the podcast designed to help leaders intentionally grow and thrive. Here is your host author and leadership and executive coach, dr William.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:01

Attaway, I would love for you to share some of your story with our listeners, particularly around your journey and your development as a leader. How'd you get started?

Dr. Michael Neal: 1:14

Oh boy, I'm originally Canadian, so I have a program in Canada called Army Cadets to thank for that. It wasn't the military, but imagine Boy Scouts on steroids, and I was in that program from 12 years old to 18. And it was magnificent for building leadership in all kinds of people I love that.

Dr. William Attaway: 1:35

How'd you get from there to optometry?

Dr. Michael Neal: 1:39

Wrong turn in Albuquerque, boy? No, I was. When I was living in rural Canada, I was able to work in an optometry practice and I've been an entrepreneur my whole life. So I knew that I wanted to to be in business for myself in some form or another and I was fascinated by the science behind the visual system or another. And I was fascinated by the science behind the visual system, not to mention had a great opportunity with a fellow Dr Gary Wedmore, shout out to you who let me into his practice in high school to help in his practice, and that turned into an absolute love for eye care. And you know, I always knew I wanted to serve others and I loved healthcare because you got to help people all day long. It was really, really cool Still is.

Dr. William Attaway: 2:29

I love that. Well, and as someone who benefits from your science, thank you.

Dr. Michael Neal: 2:35

Well, these aren't for show either, on my face, so starting your own practice in running your own business.

Dr. William Attaway: 2:40

You know a lot of people start something because they're really good at providing a product or a service, so they your own business. You know a lot of people start something because they're really good at providing a product or a service, so they go into business, they start a practice, but then, as they find success, they have to hire people to help them with fulfillment and serving their clients or their patients Well. Leading leadership's a different skill and hiring is a different skill. Yet so you started your company outside of your practice because of your hiring challenges. What happened there?

Dr. Michael Neal: 3:14

Boy. It was started because of the unmitigated, catastrophic disaster that we had in our practice in terms of this. Imagine a merry-go-round, a revolving door from a horror movie, where people just kept getting on and shot off one after another, after another. I mean, I could go on and on. It was really, really bad, and anybody who's had hiring issues in their own small business can relate to this. We were doing it the wrong way. We were just hiring the wrong way. We didn't know what the right way was. We also didn't know what the wrong way was. We just knew that the results we were getting were awful and consistently awful. If anything, we were consistent, consistently awful.

Dr. William Attaway: 4:02

Yeah Well, consistency matters.

Dr. Michael Neal: 4:04

Oh, we were fantastic at it. 10 out of 10. Would not recommend.

Dr. William Attaway: 4:09

So what did you do that? I mean a lot of people who are listening, most people are, you know either have hired, are hiring or will hire, and so, like, what are some of the ditches that you drove into?

Dr. Michael Neal: 4:21

Well, they were more chasms in a glacier than a ditch, you name it. I mean, the real problem that we had was we were focused on resumes for hiring, and resumes don't tell you what a person's good at, yeah, and you stop and think about that. Well, yeah, actually they don't. They just tell you a work history and you can be guaranteed that the work history is uh, embellished or nowadays, you know, ai makes it up in some form or another. Um, you know, you get. You get resumes nowadays for entry-level positions that read like like the person just uh, was running general electric, you know, or gm, or things like that. And I'm not, I'm not, I'm really not buying that. But all joking aside, they're terrible.

Dr. Michael Neal: 5:10

So we didn't have an alternative, we didn't have any other better way, and I was in executive leadership at the time. I took a look at some of their teams and boy, these were high functioning teams. So I thought, well, they can do it. I obviously can't do it. Let's figure out what they're doing differently and let's create a process for our own practice that would get me out of this mess for eternity. I mean, I wanted to get out of this mess in perpetuity, not dabble in it, not otherwise. You know, necessity is the mother of invention. Well, we had a whole bunch of necessity and ended up inventing a really, really cool process that solves the problem.

Dr. William Attaway: 5:49

So talk about that, describe the process. What did you come up with?

Dr. Michael Neal: 5:53

Well, remember, we wanted to solve this forever, and I say we because my wife and I, we were having horrible problems with this. So the quick summary of the process is that we write the job description and we post it out to over 20 different job boards. So why 20 different job boards? Well, you have to cast the widest possible net 300 resumes to go through. You'll die of paper cuts that never heal before you get anywhere with that. Well, we ended up automating the system, so that doesn't matter. So we get all these people and imagine just kind of pouring these candidates into the top of a funnel, if you will. What the system does is it will text them five seconds after they apply with a link to go through some assessments. And the assessments are super easy 10 minutes, designed to find out what they're good at Not, hey, what are you good at, because you can ask that in an interview. These are psychometric assessments that truly determine this with a very high level of accuracy, and so we're looking for what their natural strengths and talents are, what they're actually good at, and also what they're not good at. So let's say, for example, a position requires you to follow a lot of process, be very detail oriented and have a high stress tolerance. Well, we know that. We know that about the person before a human ever communicates with them.

Dr. Michael Neal: 7:27

We have oodles and oodles of information about these candidates and the reason I go on and on about that is each position that we're looking for and again this started, for our practice is extremely specific. So we want an extremely specific match to the position. We don't want somebody who to the position. We don't want somebody's close, we don't want somebody who, um, is or is far away. The tighter the match between the position that we have and the natural skill set and talents of the person that's applying. The longer they stay, the happier they are and the more productive they are. That's the math. You know the metaphorical math, the equation behind it, if you will, and that's what we were able to develop.

Dr. Michael Neal: 8:11

So what our software does after they go through these assessments is it will tell us with a thumbs up if the person can do the job or not, if the fit is that tight, and then we also send them a video interview so that we can make sure the rubber meets the road and matches the road and there's no surprises and stuff like that. The video interview tells us. You know, of course, the answers to the questions, but that's not the real thing we're looking for. We're looking for how they answer the questions and how they would represent our practice or our clients' practices, or our clients, small business businesses and then, when that's all said and done, we have something that are our software outputs, called an insight report. An insight report tells our either our clients or whoever's doing the hiring all kinds of intangibles and tangibles and measurable results about the candidate.

Dr. Michael Neal: 9:08

So you're not looking at a resume. In fact, the resumes aren't even looked at. They're not worth the time. What you're looking at instead is a report about what this person is actually fantastic at. And when you approach things that way, you get an incredibly tight match to the position. As I said before, that's where people are able to show up for work, do a stupendous job, go home and come back the next day and do the same thing over and over again. Extremely high performance. That's how we isolate, that's the secret sauce between how we isolate the extremely high performers for these positions.

Dr. William Attaway: 9:44

So as you develop this and I imagine there was some testing and adjusting and testing and adjusting in your own practice what did you see changed in the way that you hire beyond just you know? Here's the assessment, here's the link. Let's evaluate, like how did this change and benefit your practice as a whole?

Dr. Michael Neal: 10:07

well, first off, I always questioned excuse me, I questioned resumes, but you know there was no way to hire people about resumes. Now that I've used the, the assessment like to naturally um, find or find their natural strengths and talents, a resume is nothing more than a shotgun approach. I mean, sooner or later you're going to hit something, but there's no logic or rationale. And, most importantly, william, there's no predictability. We have incredibly high predictability as to whether or not a person's going to work out. You know, 97% plus, and that's delivered by just massive feedback loops to improve and improve, and improve. So what I see in the practice? Well, the biggest thing on a team level is that the people who weren't good fits for the position and weren't performing exited and they were replaced by performers. So the team just leveled up and leveled up and just when I thought it couldn't level up anymore, it went up a couple levels until the point where now the team runs our practice and the other side of it is on my own side personally, on my wife's side, on the docs. We show up, we go see patients, we do just a little bit of extra stuff during the day and we go home.

Dr. Michael Neal: 11:24

The most important thing about this, for me personally, is the completely different workday. Completely different workday. Stress has plummeted off a cliff. I didn't jump off the cliff, the stress jumped off the cliff, which is fantastic because it was close, 95% less stressful day. Not that anybody can measure that, or maybe somebody can but it's just joyous. Now I go, I joke with the team members. They're playing practical jokes on me. The other day they switched my food in the microwave. Just fun, fun stuff. This is fun. You know, we get to help people all day and we laugh all day. What's not to like? Before it was hellacious, it was awful, it was and it was, and tomorrow would be different because it was awful, and tomorrow would be different because we'd have to let somebody go and just over and over. So the best part about this is I'm not exaggerating. I'm simply not exaggerating.

Dr. William Attaway: 12:23

I'm describing the work environment that 30 years now and I have not heard anybody talk about this like you have In both of our conversations. I have just been blown away by this, and I mean the question that many of our listeners may be asking is the same question I'm asking.

Dr. Michael Neal: 12:51

Is this real Is this possible, and so I'm going to throw some caveats out here. This isn't for all positions on planet Earth. These are for entry-level positions junior management, middle management, clerical, administrative-type positions. We're not hiring doctors. We're not hiring. You're not going to have 300 doctors apply for your job anywhere in healthcare. You know you're not going to have 300 doctors apply for your job anywhere in healthcare. So we have we are extremely good at these types of positions and we don't pretend to do anything else. So that's where the feedback loop has just grown tighter and tighter and tighter.

Dr. Michael Neal: 13:29

Imagine, you know, early on in this process, um, my, my operations manager, who's fantastic. He rated our team members when he started on it with the traffic light red, yellow, green, nice, and we did not have a lot of green. No, it was. It was yellow and red, red, red, red, red. Um, now the red people, the great people, but they just weren't happy, they weren't working in a great job for them, they were just punching a clock, getting a paycheck. It wasn't a good fit for them. So they moved on and we helped them move on and helped some of them get different positions, et cetera.

Dr. Michael Neal: 14:09

One of them was red in the job that we had her in and switched her role to focus solely on her strengths and she became the greenest of all greens. I mean, what? Wow it? It? It was from exactly one end of an arc of a pendulum to the other. She went from zero to hero same person. We just asked her to be herself all day long and she's spectacular at it, absolutely spectacular. She's now our patient advocate. Before she was working our front desk and all that empathy that she had all day long and do anything for patients was a disaster at the front desk and it is categorically phenomenal. As a patient coordinator. She will move mountains to get patients care and she is categorically phenomenal as a patient coordinator. She will move mountains to get patients care and she does every day. Same person. Two different job roles.

Dr. William Attaway: 15:02

So that was my next question how has this translated into what your patients experience?

Dr. Michael Neal: 15:08

Yeah, Happier people. The Four Seasons is terrific with that. So is Disney. You go there and you have these people who smile at you all day long. Mickey's not going to come up to you at Disney and be like oh man, I'm having a heck of a day, Although I got to say that'd be one of the coolest pranks to play on somebody ever right.

Dr. Michael Neal: 15:33

But they don't do that because they're professionals and these are. You get people to act like that not by telling them you must be happy. That doesn't work at all. You get them to be happy because they show up happy. They're just happy people. They're working in a fulfilling role, they like what they do. They're asked to be themselves all day long. This, conceptually, is not rocket science. Where the really tricky part comes in is how to identify those people and get them into those roles.

Dr. William Attaway: 16:01

And that's where the magic happens. Just fascinating to me, you know. I think about the number of people that I have hired or that I have helped clients as they're hiring, and how often those hires end up failing, and so often it's around expectations, the expectations that you set during the hiring process. We talk about that. What you're doing with Build my Team takes us to a different level and I have not seen anybody else doing this. This can change the staffing industry.

Dr. Michael Neal: 16:32

It does take it to a different level. But in reality we're not going. We're not doing what folks generally think. We're meeting the candidates where they're at. Yes, okay, like I'm not asking you in an interview, I'm not asking you what you're good at in an interview, I don't care at all. Okay, because all I know for sure is you're going to tell me whatever you sense. I think I want to hear yes, okay, um, because your electric bill needs to be paid and your landlord doesn't care about any more excuses. They want their money. Okay, well, you know, is that a hard, cold reality? Well, for a lot of candidates, that's the situation they're in. So, with our approach, before an interview comes or before a person shows up for an interview, we already have the insight report. We know they can do the job or they wouldn't have been sent over no-transcript. That to the interview process. I mean, you're really trying to do everything blind and this way you have all that information in front of you and it's highly, highly predictable.

Dr. William Attaway: 18:15

You know, a friend of mine has said for years that the hiring process is one of the most deceptive things we do, because everybody's trying to put their best foot forward and saying, like you said, the thing you think the other person wants to hear from both sides of the table. Yeah, this seems to short circuit that it does up.

Dr. Michael Neal: 18:33

Well, it's a blind hiring process from our side, because we don't care if the person's male or female, black, white, pink, green, purple, none of that stuff matters, it is. You do this. Performers come in all shapes and sizes and what happens for our clients is they get used to these high performers. They don't care what the packaging looks like, as long as the person's presentable in a business. I mean, there are some minimums, of course, but as long as they're presentable, terrific. So what we do is we get that person in front of our clients through a completely blind process. They don't have. Nobody has the ability to influence that from the sense of well, we want this. I mean, we've had clients we've had to stop working with because they were read between the lines here here. They were extremely specific about the types of candidates they wanted, right in ways that are as illegal as illegal gets.

Dr. Michael Neal: 19:40

The system doesn't allow that yeah um, and and that goes internally for us as well by the time that the software provides a thumbs up, we know that they can do the job. The packaging of the person is just remarkable.

Dr. William Attaway: 19:55

You know, I think about you leading not just your practice, but now build my team and in both of these cases, your teams, your businesses, need you to lead at a higher level today than was true five years ago, and five years from now it's going to be even more so.

Dr. Michael Neal: 20:14

Well, yes, and no, how do you? Yeah, yeah, sorry, I cut you off. How do what? Well I?

Dr. William Attaway: 20:18

was going to say how do you stay on top of your game and level up with the new leadership skills that are required of you?

Dr. Michael Neal: 20:26

with a growing and high-performing team.

Dr. Michael Neal: 20:28

Yeah, that's the easy part. My team's doing it. That's the easiest part about all of this. When now, this took some some real learning on my part and and acknowledgement of the fact that um and my role changed from the frenzied nut job trying to drive a grizzled old bus full of vagabonds and pirates and whoever got onto the bus I mean in the wrong seats that backfired all the time. I mean, that was the original start. It was just out of a movie out of a movie. And now the team, the right people on the bus. They're in the right seats on the bus. I've got senior team members who are fantastic bus drivers and my role has changed to providing a map of where the bus needs to go and quite simply getting out of the way. I mean, I got to make sure the bus has enough gas in it, the resources that the team needs. That's where that comes from, and when they need resources, they get them as fast as humanly possible.

Dr. Michael Neal: 21:40

There's no discussion about it. These aren't people who ask for frivolous things. I'll give you an example. Our practice manager needed a calculator. She found one on Amazon for $9.95. It's pink. Why is it pink? Because that way nobody's going to take it. It's not going to get relocated in the office somewhere because it's a pink calculator. You know what I mean? It's $10. And just things like that.

Dr. Michael Neal: 22:03

These are A players. These A players. They only want to work with A players. They'll tolerate B players, but they leave their job because of C's or D's. To work with A players. They'll tolerate B players, but they leave their job because of C's or D's.

Dr. Michael Neal: 22:18

So you know, if you have a lot of turnover in your small business, one of the easy ways to look at that and say, are these the right people? You know, are they the right people for the jobs? Is it a really tight fit for the roles? Because your A players, they will run businesses. Your A players, they will run businesses. They will do stupendous amounts of things for a business. I mean, the productivity can be ridiculous. I'll give you an example. In software this is something that is hard to believe, but known in really, really high-performing software teams that you can have an absolute, super-duper A++ player team member that can be as productive as 100 people on a team. Those are the world-class software people. That's the delta between regular and extraordinarily high performing people. That, I think, is that's the most I've ever heard of, and so very quick example of that a little bit of a lightning rod right now, but the the Tesla full self driving team that is figuring out how to make these cars drive by AI, has about two 300 people on it.

Dr. Michael Neal: 23:35

Another approach to do it was Volkswagen did it. They hired 3,000. It's going nowhere nowhere at all, and they're laying off most of those people. So that was. It wasn't a 10X investment. It would have been much, much higher than that to keep that many people going. Plus all the managers, plus the the. You can just imagine the layer after layer after layer to uh, to 3 000 people. They didn't put a dent in what 200, 250, 300 people would do, and that's the power of the best how do you hold on to them?

Dr. William Attaway: 24:11

Because retention is a challenge, particularly with super high performers.

Dr. Michael Neal: 24:15

Well one. You make sure that fit is fantastic. You make sure that the contribution that they make every day is palpable and they have an impact. It's not always about money. People think like on the employer side it's always about money. It's not always about money. People think on the employer side it's always about money. It's not. In fact, I would say it's now probably the minority, as long as you're competitive type thing. But with those high performers you provide the resources, you provide crystal clear goals and you get out of their way. These are not people that will tolerate any level of spoon feeding or just when you're overbearing or you're micromanaging. Oh my goodness, you want to lose top people Micromanage.

Dr. Michael Neal: 25:05

You don't have to wait a week, it'll happen in days know, that is true, yeah, and that's hard for a lot of folks in small businesses. But instead of micromanaging, what you do instead is you focus on giving them the goals that they need to achieve, and the most remarkable thing about it is you might think it's going to take them a month. This happened to me, something that I expected about four or five weeks. Three days that's how long it took him to finish it three days. My head was spinning, absolutely spinning. It's remarkable.

Dr. William Attaway: 25:39

You're constantly learning and growing. Is there a book that has made a big difference in your journey that you would recommend to the leaders who are listening? Hey, this is one you need to take a look at.

Dr. Michael Neal: 25:49

There are so many. On what topic? What general leadership?

Dr. William Attaway: 25:58

Business leadership, people leadership.

Dr. Michael Neal: 26:00

Who, not how, is fascinating. That's by Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy. That's great bud Talks about. You don't have to know how to solve a problem, the how. You don't focus on the how you find the who who's already done it, done it, solved your problem and get them rolling. I mean, in a lot of ways that's what my team is to our clients. They don't ever have to get into the how the sausage is made with hiring, they just have to you know, we're very affordable.

Dr. Michael Neal: 26:24

Pay us we, we deliver the results. Um, that's a really good one. Um, there's. If you want to go to another approach, think and Grow Rich. That was written, I think, in the early 1900s. What was that fellow's name? Napoleon Hill.

Dr. Michael Neal: 26:46

That book was mind-blowing. First of all, it's not about the money. It really isn't about the money. That title is almost a bit of a misnomer. I've read that several times. What I found is that, boy oh boy, very few things in that book have changed over time. It is as rock solid 100 plus years later as it was then. And the other part is oodles and oodles of current business. You know the proverbial self-help books come from that. It is simply repackaged content from Napoleon Hill's book with a modern flair. It is remarkable. So if you want to read the one that all the rest are standing on, that's basically one of the unknown, unrecognized thinkers. That really is fascinating. And then, of course, james Clear Atomic Habits. If you really want to turn your life around, boy, just read that book and dive in. That's so good. It's a cookbook for success. In so many ways. These are great. This is fantastic.

Dr. William Attaway: 28:10

You have provided so much value today, michael, I'm so grateful for you sharing your insight so freely and about this remarkable process through Build my Team. I know our listeners are going to want to talk to you, find out more about this, more about you and what you're doing, and continue to learn from you what is the best way for them to do that?

Dr. Michael Neal: 28:30

Oh, it's easy BuildMyTeamcom. At the top of the page there's a schedule, a consultation call. We do everything at a scheduled time. We don't want to waste anybody's time. On our client side, we deal with some folks who time is extraordinarily valuable and that's how we meet them there and the whole concept is easy. You on the phone and, yes, tell us your secrets, you know, tell us you're hiring skeletons. Just open the closet, let all the skeletons come out. There's nothing to be embarrassed or ashamed or concerned about. We're not like that. Our goal is to figure out, first of all, if we can help you, if you believe in our strengths and talents approach to finding these people, and then start to whittle down the types of folks you're looking for and really be very definitive on that, and then get rocking and rolling. I love it.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:25

We'll have that link in the show notes.

Dr. Michael Neal: 29:27

Thank you.

Dr. William Attaway: 29:27

Thank you so much for your time and your wisdom today. It was so much fun.