Catalytic Leadership

The System for Hiring Top Talent and Scaling Past 7 Figures

• Dr. William Attaway • Season 4 • Episode 9

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Hiring top talent is the single greatest lever for scaling beyond 7 figures. Yet too many agency owners find themselves stuck in bottlenecks, worn down by failed hires, or wasting energy micromanaging instead of building.

In this episode of Catalytic Leadership, I welcome back Kasim Aslam, founder of multiple 6, 7, and 8-figure businesses, creator of Pareto Talent, and author of Hire: The Essential Guide to Building Powerful Teams and Reclaiming Your Time. Kasim has hired hundreds of people and built companies that thrive because of one system: his 7-step blueprint for hiring top talent.

We unpack how to treat people as peak performers, not commodities… why paying more can yield exponential returns… and how to delegate projects instead of tasks so your team accelerates without you being the bottleneck. Kasim shares the exact filters, trial projects, and systems he’s used to place nearly 100 executive assistants and run 17 businesses without managing a single one himself.

If you’re scaling past 7 figures and want a proven system for hiring top talent that fuels freedom and growth, this episode will show you the way.


Books Mentioned

  • Hire: The Essential Guide to Building Powerful Teams and Reclaiming Your Time by Kasim Aslam


You can access Kasim’s book, audiobook, hiring templates, and global job posting board free of charge at TheHireBook.com. If you’re ready to hire an EA through his company Pareto Talent, Kasim and his team can help you do that as well.



Join Dr. William Attaway on the Catalytic Leadership podcast as he shares transformative insights to help high-performance entrepreneurs and agency owners achieve Clear-Minded Focus, Calm Control, and Confidence.

Connect with Dr. William Attaway:

Dr. William Attaway:

It is an incredible honor today to have Qasim Islam on the podcast for a second time. We don't have a lot of repeat guests around here, but a handful of people will say yes to. Qasim is one of those. Qasim is the founder of six, seven and eight figure businesses. His newest venture, pareto Talent, specializes in recruiting, training and matching high performance executive assistants with growing entrepreneurs Our topic today. He's a hiring expert. His experience in hiring hundreds of people positions him as a legitimate expert with a unique perspective on how to find, train and manage true peak performers. He's the author of the new book Hire the essential guide to building powerful teams and reclaiming your con. Awesome, I'm so glad you're here, man. Thanks for being on the show again. Dr Will, thanks for having me. I'm flattered. This is going to be a great conversation. I've been looking forward to it.

Intro:

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 Attaway.

Dr. William Attaway:

The audience. If they have not heard your first episode, I'm going to encourage them to go back and listen to that. They can find you just search the show. You'll find Kostin's episode in there and find out a little bit more about him. Today I want to talk about your new book, because this is a topic that I hear people struggling with all the time. Clients that I work with, groups that I work with, masterminds that I work with hiring is difficult. Hiring well even more so. So I would love for you to talk about the book, why you wrote it and how you think this is going to make a difference.

Kasim Aslam:

The why I wrote it is interesting. I set out to write a book called Delegate, so I didn't want to write a book on hiring. I was going to write a book on delegation, and what was interesting is it became an impossible feat because the critical prerequisite to delegating is having somebody effective to delegate to. As a matter of fact, most of the failures of delegation that I see have very little to do with the framework of delegation and far more to do with the fact that you've got the wrong person on the wrong seat on the wrong bus. I realized very quickly because I kept having to offer all these prefaces as I was giving delegation frameworks. I realized I was like I got to go back. I got to go back in the timeline and make sure people know how to hire, which interestingly and I'll say something arrogant that I hope is still true the only thing I'm world-class at is talent acquisition, and I think I might be better than anybody in the world and I only say that, dr Will, because I've read every book on the topic, some of them twice, and my framework isn't mine, it's stolen.

Kasim Aslam:

I'm Dr Frankenstein and I just built the monster. I spent 20 years taking little pieces from here and little pieces from there and piecing them all together and I have a step by seven steps. Everybody who's listening is seven steps away from the best hire they've ever had in their entire life. It's not inaccessible, but it's hard. It's hard, it's tedious. It's not hard in the way that calculus is hard. It's hard in the way that the treadmill is hard. You have to build a funnel, but you only have to build it once, and once you've built it, it now lives forever and it's evergreen. And it's a gift that keeps on giving. It will continue to give you the best tires that you've ever had, as long as you follow the process and you're disciplined with.

Dr. William Attaway:

So how can you do this? How do you find that talent that we know is out there? We see it sometimes, we've stumbled across it. What does this framework look like?

Kasim Aslam:

Yeah. So it's seven steps. I'll go step by step if you don't mind, and then you slow me down or feel free to honestly, feel free to challenge me if I say anything that you disagree with. I would love that. Iron will sharpen iron. Step number one is philosophical in nature. It requires a paradigm shift. This is the most important step. As a matter of fact, if you do nothing but this, I think it will improve your hiring massively.

Kasim Aslam:

We are taught to hire people incorrectly. We're taught to hire, manage, train people as though they're commodities, and you know this instantly. When you hear people talk about the endeavor that is hiring, you'll hear somebody say something like oh, I need to hire a graphic designer, or I need to hire a bus driver, or I need to hire a neurosurgeon. That's a conversation of commodity. Commodities are things that are easily interchangeable. So if you have an ear of corn and I have an ear of corn, or you have a can of beans and I have a can of beans, or you have a bar of gold and I have a bar of gold, and we swap, none of us are any better or worse off than we were moments ago. But if you have a graphic designer and I have a graphic designer and we swap. Or you have a CFO and I have a CFO and we swap. If I lost my CFO, my whole financial world comes collapsing. Humans are not commodities which sounds obvious when I say it, but pull any business book off the shelf and you'll see a discussion about commodities.

Kasim Aslam:

Now here's what that means you buy commodities. The smart way to buy commodities is to pay the least to get the most Right. If I'm buying the least to get the most right, that's. That's if I'm buying beans, I want the most beans for the least amount of money. With with that paradigm, you end up in a position where you treat all people as though they are potentially equal, which sadly is not true. So this leads to the name of my company is Pareto Talent, because I'm obsessed with the Pareto distribution. I think it's the most important mathematical principle for life and business. And the Pareto distribution technically says that the sum total of the total participants, the square root of the total participants, is responsible for 50% of the output, and the problem with that is that's too hard to even understand or say so what people generally refer to it, as is the 80-20 rule, and it's 20% of the input is responsible for 80% of the output, and it's true in every organic ecosystem. 20% of the criminals commit 80% of the crimes. 20% of your customers are responsible for 80% of your revenue. 20% of the employees do 80% of the work. Now that's impactful, but we have to unpack it. Everybody knows this is true already.

Kasim Aslam:

Look at a thousand person organization Just as an example, because I have a 10th grade education and that's the best math I can do. It's a base 10. Thousand person organization 200 people do 80% of the work and you're like all right, you know, I was a kid, I worked at a call center. I've seen that to be true. I know that's a fact. But zoom in on the 200. 40 of those people do 80% of that work. Zoom in on those 40. Eight do 80% of that work, so on and so forth. What that equates to is, in a thousand person organization, one person is responsible for 25% of the work, which is mind blowing. Now here's it gets work. It gets worse. The Goldman Sachs Ivy League management consultant comes in and says oh, that's a key man risk. We have to mitigate that risk. So what do they do In a functional hierarchy where the most valuable assets climb to the top of the hierarchy. They flatten the hierarchy. They quote unquote mitigate the risk, which is why businesses move towards bureaucratic minimums and quotas. They're literally enforcing the average. They're looking for and incentivizing for mediocrity because they can't stand seeing existential crisis on a spreadsheet.

Kasim Aslam:

When I sold Solutions 8, I built the number one ranked Google ads agency in the world. I sold it for an eight figure sum to a soft bank backed MarTech company in 2022. When I did that, I had 80 employees. One human managed 40% of my revenue. His name was John Moran. He's the greatest Google Ads man on the planet.

Kasim Aslam:

Most people can't wrap their head or their mind or their heart around that risk and so they can't deal with it. But what they don't realize is to mitigate that risk doesn't do anything other than inhibit my ability to benefit from somebody like John Moran. So I lose revenue. I lose those customers. You can't just spread those customers across other people. You have to lean into the Pareto distribution. So that's the paradigm shift. That's step number one. If you can commit to, you can index towards those peak performers, especially because most businesses are. They're incentivizing the opposite. They're actually pushing peak performers away. So if we index towards Pareto talent. That would leave us to number two. But I'm going to pause and ask Dr Will how have I done so far? Any challenge or questions?

Dr. William Attaway:

No, I think that makes perfect sense. I will ask this as you think about this in terms of companies that you've led. You've given a good example of that. Do you see any outliers, like, are there times when you're working with a group and you don't see that 20% rise to the top? Or do you see other organizations where they have allowed and I believe firmly that you have what you tolerate, you have what you allow they have allowed mediocrity to rule the day and they don't have that 20%? That is, that's step seven. So you're getting ahead of both of them.

Kasim Aslam:

Well, no, it speaks to your strategic prowess, because you see the lanes. But to cheat a little bit or give people a sneak peek, if you treat a peak performer as though they're mediocre, they will begin delivering on that promise to you. It's hard to fix, so there's risks, but the risks are very mitigatable and we'll talk about how to mitigate those risks.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's really good Please keep going.

Kasim Aslam:

This is great. Step two people say well, kostum, how do I get these peak performers? My answer is going to be repellent and it just is what it is. You have to pay more. Winners want to win and money is how we keep score. And when you're taught to hire people like commodities let's say, to use round numbers again that you know you're hiring the graphic designer we talked about moments ago, and a graphic designer costs, you know, 75 to a hundred rubies, and for 75 to a hundred rubies you can get a graphic designer. Well, how do you buy commodities?

Kasim Aslam:

Everybody in the entrepreneurial world tries to pay 74.9 and get the best graphic designer they possibly can. They're paying the least and getting the most. And then I come in and I say you have to pay 10% more than the high watermark to attract a peak performer, because winners want to win and money's how we keep score. And then they go gosh, kostum, you don't understand my margins, you don't understand my business, you don't understand my model, my scalability. And I say no, you don't understand math, because when you pay 10% more, you don't get 10 or 20 or 30 or 50 or 100% more. You get three times, five times, 100 times, as illustrated by the per capita distribution. This can do nothing but benefit. You Pay 10% more than the high watermark and then people go oh, okay, fine, 10% more than 74.9. And I say no, no, no, 10% more than the high watermark. If the range is 75 to 100 rubies, I'm asking you to pay 110. Now, 75 to 110 is a huge swing that's repellent to most people. But if you will suspend disbelief for just a moment, what happens when you pay more is you end up with access to talent that will blow your freaking mind, and the leverageability of the talent, especially in a post AI world, is incalculable. It's impossible for me to hyperbolize, which is why the Pareto distribution exists as a framework, because it helps you understand it. If you realize you're indexing towards Pareto.

Kasim Aslam:

An example the average Google ad specialist out of India was paid $500 a month by Google. I used to steal Google's people. They have three offices in India. I'd wait till they reach a glass ceiling and I would just go poach Google's best people. I had a young man working for me. He's one of the best specialists I've ever had. I paid him nine times what his peers made. So the average Google ad specialist at the time is making 500 bucks a month in India. I'm paying $4,500 a month and I had friends tell me dude, what are you doing? You're poisoning the well, you're ruining the market. But what happened? I got the best of the best of the best of the best of the best. Now he managed my best my top client who paid me $54,000 a month. They were a publicly traded pet supplement company that spent millions of dollars a month. I couldn't have had them without him. I needed the triple PhD brilliant human. I needed the triple PhD brilliant human, and that was one of 15 of his clients. The math can't not math.

Kasim Aslam:

So step two isn't just pay more. Step two is attract. So in order to properly attract a peak performer, you need to be the type of place that a peak performer would want to work. This is your job posting. By the way, your job posting is a sale letter Most job postings that we see. If you go to Jobbing or Monster or Indeed and go just for all the job postings and you're going to see things like, you must comply with all rules and regulations or you'll be publicly flogged. Who'd want to live in those conditions? Who'd want to work there? Be a fun place to work and pay more doesn't just mean money. It means lots of things. It means respect, it means time, it means adherence, it means authorship creates ownership. It's like treat them like an adult. Let them work from home on a semi-flexible schedule doing meaningful work. Whatever it is that you can give, give, pay more, be public about that, and if you do that, if you are the type of place that people want to work, you will. You should get inundated with applications, as long as you comply with step three.

Kasim Aslam:

Step three is a distribution strategy. Here's what I see businesses doing improperly all the time. They write a job posting, they post it one time on one job board and then they wait to see what the cat drags in. This is a sales funnel. This is a sales funnel. Funnels need traffic right, it's traffic times. Frequency equals ratio of success. So one job posting on one job board one time is going to bring in whatever that brings in. Post it on as many job boards as is applicable, as many times as you possibly can, and maybe put a little money behind it so you get more visibility and more distribution, because talent is so, so, so, so important. You have to have a strong distribution strategy, because talent is so, so, so, so important. You have to have a strong distribution strategy. Now, if you have a very, very strong attraction offer, step two a very, very strong distribution strategy.

Kasim Aslam:

Step three that what's going to happen, naturally, is you are going to get inundated with applications. If you're hiring locally, you'll get hundreds. If you're hiring internationally, you'll get thousands, thousands of applications. It's an impossible thing for anybody to go through. So what do we do? We filter. Here's how you filter my job applications. I'll read. The subject line must read. I actually read the instructions. When you apply for this job, the subject has to read I actually read the instructions, or I'm not going to look at it and mine automatically filters using Zapier and ChatGPT. You can manually filter if you want to.

Kasim Aslam:

Now that's a very strong signal to do what? To actually read the instructions and my instructions are not easy. There will be basic ones. Like you, submit a link to a PDF resume with this naming convention Do I care that it's a link and not an attachment? Do I care it's PDF and not Word? No, I want to know you can slow down and follow instructions.

Kasim Aslam:

If English proficiency is important and I'm hiring internationally, I'll ask for there's free English language tests they can take and they have to be one above. I'll ask for personality tests. I'll ask them to answer specific questions. I'll ask for why they think they'd be a good fit for this job. I always have at least three or four, but sometimes more. I call them fly traps, and these fly traps are little filters that make sure that when I get in and day with these thousands of applications, the only people that are going to make it through are the people that are actually conscientious, thoughtful, proactive, intelligent. I don't just want somebody good at the job, I want somebody who's good at working, and those are entirely different skill sets. So that's filtering the stack.

Kasim Aslam:

Now, filtering the stack doesn't stop at the application. Here's what's really interesting about filtering the stack is, once I've ended up with the filter, what everybody in the conventional business world teaches you to do is they teach you to hire using interviews and resumes. They're both worthless. An interview is a skill set unto itself. That's superfluous to the job. You don't get the best person at the job, you get the best interviewer, and unless you're hiring somebody to be a professional interviewer, it's not going to tell you anything. And a lot of these people have made a skill, they've made a practice, just that. And some of the people that are great at the job suck at interviewing. It's completely nebulous. Resumes. Interestingly, especially in today's day and age, 21st century, post AI, people are going to have gaps in their resume. They're going to have industry switching, role switching the things that normally we'd look at as red flags in conventional wisdom. Ignore resumes, ignore interviews. For the moment. This is the next filter. This is step five. You're going to run tryouts just like a sports team. We're going to have tryouts. You apply for a job.

Kasim Aslam:

For me, I say, hey, will. Thank you so much for following all the instructions. I really appreciate you. As you can tell, I'm looking for somebody with strong attention to detail. Listen, I've been hiring for 20 years I've hired thousands of people. I know, until we've worked together, I'm not going to know anything there is to know about you. Here's what I'd like to do. I'd like to pay you in advance for two hours of your time. Now I'm paying you in advance. To tell you one I respect your time. Two, I'm holding you accountable to a paid standard and, depending on where you are, that Doesn't have to make them rich, has to move the needle.

Kasim Aslam:

You do this with 10 or 20 people, let's say. Let's say you do it with 20, which is a lot $40 across 20 people. Across 10 is 400, across 20 is 800. Now here's what I do, though, is I say if you agree, here's the scope of work send me your PayPal or your Payoneer or your Wise or whatever's applicable in that geography, and I'll pay you in advance. They, and then I wait to see who goes, who ghosts me, who forgets, who doesn't pay attention. I get, I get emails from people a month later saying, hey, you sent me $40 and you didn't send me a child project, and I'm like, yeah, and I'm glad I didn't hire you. Person who very clearly needs to be micromanaged. Right, wait for now. You'd say gosh, cost him $800. That's expensive. No, that is the cheapest insurance policy you've ever had. The most expensive thing is a bad hire For $40, I just learned. Either you lack integrity or the ability to follow through on your commitments. So the people that follow up and say, hey, where's my trial project? I send them the trial project Now. The trial project needs to be hyper-applicable to the role. This is step five. We're running tryouts. It's hyper-applicable to the role. This is step five. We're running tryouts. It's hyper applicable to the role and it's not a check the box task.

Kasim Aslam:

If I'm hiring a graphic designer, I don't say create these assets using this scope of work with this request, because that tells me nothing that AI couldn't do. I'm going to say here's the client, here's their goal, here's what they want to accomplish. How would you do this? Every single role can have a project that shows you. Can they solve problems? Can they think constructively? Can they run through walls? Can they really figure out how to do this, so that you're not going to have to sit there and hold their hand for the rest of your life.

Kasim Aslam:

I send them the trial project and I ask them when will this be done? I don't tell them. I ask them because I want to know can you manage expectations? Can you communicate all the things that you want out of a peak performer? So let's say it's Monday and you tell me it's going to be done by Friday Great Well, can't wait to work with you, already paid you in advance. By the way, the assets that you need to complete this trial project are in this drive folder. Here's the username and password. I send them the wrong password and then I wait to see how long until they follow up, because if I get a frantic email Thursday night now I know you're not the type of person that checks to make sure you have all the assets in order to do a project right.

Kasim Aslam:

When this is done, first of all, it takes a thousand applicants to produce one EA in my company, so you filter heavily. When this is done, you probably have four or five bloodthirsty, deadly assassins. Dude, they're killers. They're the best employees you'll ever have in your entire life, as long as the trial project is good, obviously. But honestly, if they've gotten this far, it's going to be good. As long as the trial project is good, you could hire any one of them. Which leads me to step six.

Kasim Aslam:

This is where we actually run the interview, and the interesting thing about the interview is the interview isn't the purpose of the interview isn't to see who gets the job. The purpose of the interview is to begin managing them as an employee. I'll give you some examples. When you do this properly, if you're paying as well as I tell you to pay, you're going to get people that are massively overqualified, especially internationally, because there's so many people that have no access to opportunity whatsoever. So if you hire for a bookkeeper, you'll get a CFO applying for this job, and it's actually depressing how often this happens. It shows you how little access some of the rest of the world has to opportunity.

Kasim Aslam:

Now that's a good thing for you to have a CFO wanting to do a bookkeeper job, but what I would ask is hey, mr CFO, listen, I'm so impressed by you, your attention to detail, your trial project, love to bring you on, and you are massively overqualified for this. Can you talk to me a little bit about that? Like, if I ask you to take out the trash or do this grunt work, is that going to be a problem for you? I want to know there's no entitlement. I want to know I'm managing expectations up front, and then I ask questions relevant to the role.

Kasim Aslam:

Another example would be if there are issues from a managerial perspective that you run into with your current employees. For example, I have a friend who does not comp his employees the bonuses they're offered until they get a review from their clients. You do the job. You're deserved a certain bonus as long as I get my review. If they don't get the review, they don't get the bonus. Now, when he manages employees, if you hire somebody and tell them that rule, that feels like a bait and switch and it's very contentious. So I taught him bring it up in the interview.

Kasim Aslam:

Will would love to hire you, really excited to have you in this client manager role. I need you to know if I don't get the NPS report from your clients on a quarterly basis, you don't get your bonus. Talk to me about your ability to get the NPS reports. Take everything that's hard about the role, bring it into the interview and now get them to sell you on it and guess what, it's no longer hard in the management process. That's step six, step seven, after you've hired the person that you like the most and, by the way, they're all going to work. So just hire whoever's the best culture fit. It's not uncommon for me to hire multiple people for a single role if I'm on a growth path, because I like hiring in groups. A horse never runs fast if they're by themselves on the track, but having two people on it, they run faster. They learn together. There's camaraderie, team atmosphere. If you can afford it and if you can actually scale into the growth, I like hiring more than one. Step seven is on board for success, and this is what you asked about initially.

Kasim Aslam:

When you bring in a peak performer and dude, we all do it, but it's so devastatingly detrimental. Authorship creates ownership. Your input to this person is unnecessary, shut up. The worst thing you can do to an adept human being is look over their shoulder and be like oh, you know what? I changed that square to a circle and changed the red to blue and I don't like where you put that line. And instantly, every, every person on the planet takes their hand on the wheel and they're like all right, you're driving and even if they don't know it, subconsciously, that's now your work product and two, two months, two years from now, if it doesn't work, if it fails, if it breaks, it's like dude, you're the one that told me the square should be a circle. If it's objectively wrong, critique it. If it's objectively wrong, hey, just so you know. The studs have to be 18 inches apart, because if they're not, they don't pass inspection. That's a good critique, but you know I don't like the color of the studs you use here. Shut up.

Kasim Aslam:

Chances are, by the way, you're an old fogey that doesn't know what the hell you're talking about, cause you're a gray beard. There's been doing this forever and the kid probably knows something right you and me both. Uh, authorship creates ownership. Get out of their way. Delegate projects, not tasks. If you're delegating tasks, you're not delegating, you're micromanaging.

Kasim Aslam:

I have a rule called the 2-6-2 rule. If you give somebody 10 things to do, they're going to suck miserably at two of them. They're going to do six great check the box. The job is done. They're going to do two better than any human has ever done in the history of work. And you know what we all do Will, what we're taught to do by our business books. We go focus on the two things they suck at and we're like we're going to get you there, kid, and here's a performance improvement program and you can shadow Johnny because he's doing so well. Why don't we slow him down and get him to explain everything he's doing to you? Stop making him do those two things. Go focus on the two things that they're amazing at and congratulations.

Kasim Aslam:

You found yourself credit talent. Every human is a miracle. Every human being is capable of incalculable value. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it spends its whole life thinking it's stupid, the only benefit small businesses have. We are at a disadvantage along every level of analysis, except one Big businesses can't treat people like miracles. They need cogs and wheels. You and me, dude. If you're sub 100 employees, every person can be maximized to the degree that God intended. You get to alchemize the human endeavor to a point that I can't begin to hyperbolize. Why wouldn't we do that, especially in a post-AI world where peak performers can become nuclear weapons that are scaled to infinite degrees? Let people go, let them run, let them do their thing, let them make mistakes, and if you do that, I have you mentioned at the beginning of this call.

Kasim Aslam:

I built six multimillion dollar businesses. I'm on my third exit. I have a portfolio of 17 businesses. I don't manage one of them. I'm not any smarter than anybody else. Listening. The only thing I'm good at is talent, because, as an entrepreneur, if you can crack talent, you don't need to crack anything else. Until you crack talent, you have to crack everything else yourself. You have to go figure out finance, ops, hr, marketing, sales, fulfillment, ascension, legal da-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na-na. I don't have to do any of that. You bring me a problem. I go find the talent here. Bam, done did it. Chances are I already have the talent right, because once you bring on talented people, talented people cascade themselves. You crack talent. You'll never have another job again. I got a portfolio of 17 businesses. I don't run one of them, not one, because I know talent. That's all you need to know, and I've given people the blueprint top to bottom start to finish.

Dr. William Attaway:

That's the entire checklist. Where to begin? I am such a fan of that framework. You hit on so many things, but you know what I love most about it so many pieces, phenomenal. The thing I love most is that you are approaching this from the perspective that people have value individually, that they have worth, and you are treating them with value and worth throughout the entire process. Going back to the first piece, they're not commodities, they're not interchangeable cogs in a machine. They're actual 3d human beings that have hopes and dreams and that is how that entire process treats them. That is missing in the world and that is so much value just in that man. Like that's my favorite part.

Kasim Aslam:

Thanks, dr Will. Honestly, that's my favorite part too. I've ended up with people dude that the relationships I've had, the employer-employee relationships I've had, have been so inappropriate. You know just the degree to which I love them and they love me. One of my EAs young man, ivan Bunin I hired him when he was 20 something years old. He's Ukrainian national who's going to school in Poland, hired him as a VA, he became my EA, he became the company tech lead, became the CTO, helped manage my entire exit, is now my business partner and my best friend and I took my best EA and then I built a business finding and training EAs and guess what? I don't do a damn thing. I talk to you like this, I generate the leads and he does everything else and we have almost a hundred EAs placed. And what a blessing. He is man and I've changed his life and he's changed mine. He's a millionaire. I like to say I've made the kid a millionaire. I haven't he made himself a millionaire, but I gave him access to those opportunities.

Kasim Aslam:

One of my EAs is with Tim Bratton. Tim Bratton is the co-founder or no, the founder of Rhapsody, which became Spotify. I think yeah, he's the first guy to do a deal with all five networks. He's done an IPO, a reverse IPO. He's done a $100 million company. Brilliant, brilliant, brilliant guy. He was one of my EAs. Him and the EA just filed a patent together. Tim put the ea's name on it. Imagine that dude like and I've got. Justin donald has one of my people, john roman has one of my people like, like, really high-end entrepreneurs and the impact the ea has in the entrepreneur and the impact the entrepreneur has on the ea. When you take somebody from latin america, north africa, east europe, asia and you pay them more than they can make domestically and you let them work from home and you let them work on a semi-flexible schedule, it has anthropological impact Just letting them work from home when a mom is home less teen gang involvement, less drug use, less teen pregnancy, higher school retention. Oh, and then you equip people to spend. You give spending power to people in emerging nations. The ripple impact, man, it's unreal, it's unbelievable.

Kasim Aslam:

I get slack messages all the time. I got a message from a guy recently very first time he ever had pto, went on tour with his band. Got a message from another guy, first home he's ever lived in, the indian kid I told you about? It was making nine times. He bought his parents the first house the family's ever owned, got himself married which in india is very expensive and never bought himself a motorcycle. Like and I'm not mother, theresa, I'm minting money. You know what I mean. Win, win, win, win, win For everybody.

Kasim Aslam:

Yeah, so I hate to slander our collective environment. We don't have access to the same talent pool. If you're hiring in the States or even in the Western world, the peak performers want to work for a Fortune 100 or a pre-IPO or they want to work for themselves. It's just a fact. We're left with the leftovers, my cousin's one of them. I love my cousin to death. We were raised together.

Kasim Aslam:

He's like a brother to me, but work is number seven on his list. He wants to be a dad. He wants to be a husband. He likes to barbecue. He clocks in, clocks out. Dude makes 120 grand a year to call center. I can't even begin to touch that. You know what I mean. But if I go to Bogota, colombia, or Buenos Aires, argentina, my CFO is in Buenos Aires. He's a college professor. Poor guy was born on the wrong side of an imaginary line. He manages the finances of my entire portfolio. I'd be lost without him, and I hope I'm a gift to him too, because I get to pay him way more than he'd ever make domestically. But what I pay him, you couldn't find somebody to work at McDonald's for here. Isn't that sad, wow. And it's just the reality of what it is.

Dr. William Attaway:

Wow, where does retention play into this?

Intro:

It's one thing to find them. It's one thing to find them, it's one thing, to find them right.

Dr. William Attaway:

But how often do you see somebody who is incredibly high performer come on the team, everybody's flapping like a seal and then six months, a year later?

Kasim Aslam:

they're gone. This is what everybody likes to ask how do I retain top talent? Yeah.

Kasim Aslam:

My answer is you can't. You can't retain top talent. Top talent does not want to be retained. Obviously, top talent wants to grow. Now, every functional hierarchy is shaped like a pyramid. Hopefully they grow in your organization. But the better you are at capturing top talent, the less room you will have for growth. So what do you do? Option one is you try to handcuff them. That's what everybody attempts. It's a horrible plan because all that happens is you're incentivizing the midnight move out. You're just teaching them.

Kasim Aslam:

I can't be trusted. We don't own these people. This isn't indentured servitude. This isn't 14th century serfdom. There's an exchange I pay you, you do a job. Thank you so much. We're both benefiting.

Kasim Aslam:

What I do is I very, very, very, very visibly cultivate all talent and my ask is two years. I say what I'd like to get out of you is two years and before you leave, you find and train your replacement. If you do that, I will help you with your departure. Colin Schmelbeck is a good example. Colin Schmelbeck is famous in the Google ads world. If you go to Twitter and you look for the top Google ads minds in Twitter, colin is one of the very top, really brilliant guy Got a job with me. I knew for a fact he wanted to be an entrepreneur right out of the gate. I asked him. I was like look, I want two years. I want you to find a trainee replacement. He did went off. I started referring work to him. Anybody who came to me that I couldn't take, for whatever reason, wasn't right for me for my model, referred to Colin. Guess what was crazy that I didn't anticipate. Colin starts referring work back to me because he doesn't want to build a great big agency. He wants to have a solopreneur lifestyle business. So he skims the cream off the top and then all the businesses any dog with fleas that comes in which my agency is great at because we do great at digital plumbing, great at managing expectations, great at client management he sends my way Donna Shashrafi.

Kasim Aslam:

Another example Pakistani VA. This kid was really bright, problem solver, kind of a hacker, digital handyman type of person. He starts getting so good and he starts growing his own business that I'm like dude, you're too big for your britches. He was getting pulled in too many directions. He was trying to be my employee envious solopreneur. I was like go off on your own, I'll refer you work which I did.

Kasim Aslam:

One day I get an email from Danish. I've got a client that's way too big for me. Do you want him? It's Jay Abraham, the Jay Abraham. I'm on the phone with Jay Abraham CMO because a Pakistani freelancer somehow I still to this day do not know how got referred to Jay Abraham's CMO and he's like this is bigger than I want. So I'm on the phone with one of the world's greatest business consultants because I cultivated talent. And here's what happens.

Kasim Aslam:

Other people see this and this happened very visibly at Solutions 8. We were the agency to work for. If you were in the Google Ads space and you wanted to learn Google Ads and you wanted to grow your own freelance business, you came and you worked for Solutions 8 and everybody knew it, which meant I had not just top talent, but actually a top talent that could have been paid way more than I could have afforded to pay them, because if you're good at a skill like that, that's a very leverageable skill. But they wanted the education, the connections, the camaraderie, the pedigree to be able to say I have a guy that, to be honest with you, I'm not very fond of, who worked at Solutions 8. His performance shifted in a way that's difficult for me to describe without giving away who he is, and so we parted as friends. His entire business and career is built on the fact that he worked at my company. That's how he advertises is oh, I did this particular thing for this agency and it's because I was so, so visible of here's how I promote people and here's how we grow people, and I ended up having the best people in the whole world work for me.

Kasim Aslam:

You can't retain top talent. Don't try. They're going to, no matter what they're going to grow. It's better to help them and be friends than to try to stop them. Now you can golden handcuff them. I'll do that all day long. I want you're going to make way more money than me, than you will by yourself, or it's just going to be a lot harder.

Kasim Aslam:

John Moran, who I mentioned. He was one person managing 40% of my revenue. During my exit I gave him 10% of the company because any day he wanted he could walk away with, you know, 40% of my revenue. So it made a lot of sense, right? It made a lot of sense to incentivize our and entrepreneurs are so afraid of that. They're like, oh gosh, I don't want to be at the mercy of somebody. What that really means is that person has brought so much value to you that you're afraid. What a great place to be to have somebody bring so much value that it's scary. And then God forbid that you give them a couple of points. You know what I mean. Like it just makes sense to align your interests. I still own 90. You know I did an eight-figure exit. 10% was a line item. My business broker got that too, you know. Like.

Dr. William Attaway:

You still did. Okay at the end I did. Yeah, I could talk to you for another hour. I swear man this. This is such a great conversation and I cannot wait to dive into this book. And I know our listeners are the same. How do they get their?

Kasim Aslam:

hands on it. It's free. They can have it for free. Dr will get out. Yeah, yeah, and it's not just the book. I'm going to give them the book. They get an advanced reader copy, a pdf version of the advanced reader copy. They get the higher audio book. They get the cheat sheet. They get the worksheet. They get all of the resources which the job the global job posting board I mentioned posts on every job board One of the things as well.

Kasim Aslam:

Which job boards do I post on? I have a job posting board that shows every job board by category and geography, and I also have templates. So I have the job posting template, rejection email template, schedule email template, offer template, contractor agreement vetted by an attorney. All they need to do is go to thehirebookcom, the T-H-E, hire, h-i-r-e bookcom, and download all that for free and there's no ascension. I'm not going to try to sell you a course on back end. If you want to hire an EA from me, I'd love to do that for you, but you don't even need to do that because you have my framework and this is exactly how I find and train EAs. I'm just the easy button. If you have more money than time, come talk to me, otherwise I want my name to be synonymous with hiring.

Dr. William Attaway:

I want to help as many a copy right now. Man, thank you for sharing so generously with our audience and with really the world at large what you have learned. Always say we have a choice. You and I, we have a choice to either be a reservoir of our experiences and everything we learn and try to hold it all in just for us, or we can be a conduit and we can share it for the benefit of those around us, and that's what you're doing and I know I'm grateful and I know our listeners are as well. Thank you.

Kasim Aslam:

I appreciate you, dr Will, and for everybody listening. I appreciate you for showing up and let me yell at you for 45 minutes. I know I was a bit of a firehose. If you don't mind, my parting words are this I have a thesis about our generation at large, which is we're massively overeducated. So what you're doing right now is a very productive endeavor and I'm grateful to you.

Kasim Aslam:

It says a lot about you that you're listening to this and not watching Netflix, because Netflix is so compelling. So you're improving yourself, and the bad habit that you're in, I assume because it's the bad habit that I've always been in is I spend way too much time educating and not enough time doing. So my ask is for every hour you spend learning, spend at least an hour doing and the impact on your life increases in multitude. It's exponential and really, to be honest with you, I think it should be one to three. For every hour spent learning, spend three hours doing, because doing is iterative and you're not going to do it well in the very beginning. But for now, as you're dipping your toe in, for every hour spent learning, spend an hour doing. Go do something. Go take action. It doesn't have to even be take action on the thing I'm talking about, but take some amount of action that's pair pursue with the time you spent learning, because otherwise it just becomes what I call productive procrastination.

Kasim Aslam:

So I hope that you'll take action on this, and I hope you find yourself a really truly extraordinary EA. I think that's the best role anybody can possibly hire for, and you now have all the tools to do that. You're seven steps away from the best hire of your life.

Dr. William Attaway:

Well said. Thank you, Fasson.

Kasim Aslam:

I appreciate it, Dr Will.

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