Building a team using SCALE paths
Using SCALE paths to learn about yourself is great, but it's is equally powerful in building out a team around your work.
Hi,
When entrepreneurs start learning about the SCALE paths, they generally map it onto their own experience to learn about themselves, but our system is equally powerful in building out a team around your work.
Whether you’re working by yourself, build with a partner, working on a shared project, expanding your business with a small team, or developing a full slate of freelancers, the SCALE paths can help you grow your business.
We’ve already talked extensively about the evolution track for path, including how to identify other people’s path to success for the sake of your personal growth, but not everyone wants to embrace every path inside themselves.
Many founders would prefer to hire for different positions inside their business, and we think that’s great. It’s probably essential to hire beyond yourself to succeed eventually.
At Wannabe Press, being able to identify the qualities we need in a role and map them onto a specific SCALE path, then hire somebody in that SCALE path, has revolutionized our hiring practices.
We know that we don’t do everything well. So, instead, we look for people to partner with who fill in our deficiencies.
So, let’s talk about how to use the SCALE paths to build out a team inside your business.
Before I get to it, I want to state that if you work in one of these roles and aren’t the path we recommend seeking out for that task, it doesn’t make you bad at your job. There are aspects of every path that can help in each of these roles, and you might be great at embracing bits of an path that is not your own. This is only a thought exercise.
Hire 1: Operations
Almost every entrepreneur’s first hire will be in operations, whether that’s a COO, an assistant, or an operations manager, somebody needs to keep things on schedule.
In this role, you’ll likely be looking for somebody detail-oriented who can hold a lot of disparate threads in their head at any one time. It’s the job of operations is to make sure everything flows properly and makes sense as a cohesive whole. Because of this, the ideal person for this role is a Spotlighter, whose superpower is depth.
We believe this is why most anthologies and shared world projects fail. These types of projects are almost always proposed by Evangelists, who want to build community and shared language through collaboration, and they fall apart either because those Evangelists misjudge the market or because they have no interest in making sure everything fits as one cohesive whole.
Spotlighters, with their ability to forecast the future and deep-seated interest in intricate detail, are perfect for this role in any organization. If you’re hiring, look for Spotlighters to fill your operations roles, but also your research and development roles. Spotlighters are great at knowing where the market is going, and how to inch your business into a prime spot to be a thought leader in that new paradigm.
Hire 2: Community Management
Once you’ve had some success, the next place founders usually turn to for help is in community management.
It should be no surprise that we think Evangelists are perfect for this role. These are the people who love to dig deep with fans and create posts specifically for fan engagement instead of growth. They are masters at getting people to open up and construct a community in a way that feels like a safe space.
The other SCALE paths are most interested in growth above engagement, and you really need to pick one or the other as your target.
One of the things I learned by hiring my own engagement people is that engagement requires completely rewiring your brain to write posts that foster that kind of community. You can’t just put “Leave us a comment” in a post and expect engagement. With my publications, I can tell which articles are going to have high engagement before they get out the door.
Ironically, these are often the articles with the lowest overall readership, but they’ll have 10x the comments of another article even though fewer people read it. I’ve tried hard to write the kinds of articles that get tons of engagement and I’m just not good at it. It’s a skill deeply embedded into the writing process, which is one reason Evangelists also make good editors. They will bring that out of your work and make you feel seen in the process.
Hire 3: Ads management
The biggest mistake founders make when building a team is hiring the same person to handle their community and their ads. I have been running ads for years and the only constant has been that the ads with the best engagement are never the ones that get the most sales conversion.
If you want sales from your ads, it’s best not to hire an Evangelist to run them. Because so many hire for community first, the vast majority of assistants are
Evangelists. Founders see how well they do in one aspect of their business and try to jam them into another part they hate, namely advertising, with disastrous results.
That’s because ads require a ton of optimizations and data analysis, which goes against every strength of an Evangelist, so they almost always struggle with ads. Arbiters, on the other hand, are amazing at ads management (as are Spotlighters) because they love digging into the data. Additionally, they will know what’s hot right now, because they follow that type of thing, and stay on top of how to get the most out of your ad spend.
The one constant thing we see in advertising is that you should absolutely not hire your Evangelist assistant to run your ads, even if they are amazing at running your community. Hire an Arbiter or a Spotlighter to run your ads, or help foster your VA to evolve their Arbiter energy to help you, but don’t expect them to be great out of the gate.
Hire 4: Launch team
Eventually, your business will grow to the point where you’re capping out at what you can earn with ad optimizations and community management alone, and want to bring on somebody to help you launch better. That might mean getting to #1 on Amazon, packaging your products so people spend more money, or planning your pre-launch more effectively to maximize excitement.
This is where a Launcher can help you. By the time you get to this point, you’ve probably got a slamming product, with an engaged community, and your ads are profitable. Now, you need to expand your profit and bring more attention to every launch, and Launchers traffic in excitement. They can help you put together a more powerful offer for that will get the attention of the industry, and help you take advantage of every launch.
Hire 5: Brand expansion
Now that you’re rocking and rolling, having piqued the interest of the industry and shown you have a viable brand, you’ll want to expand into other modalities, and this is where a Collaborator can be especially helpful.
It usually takes them a long time to get their own brand built from scratch, but they can be like gasoline on the fire of a successful business because they naturally understand the different areas where you can expand your brand.
Whether it’s into new platforms or new formats, Collaborators always seem to know the important players and have relationships they can leverage to grow your business quickly. You might not think of hiring a Collaborator because their business is usually small until it explodes, but their minds work in a way very different from the average person and they can be an invaluable addition to your team.
Additionally, many successful brands want to hold events or special offers to delight their fans, and Collaborators are masters of this type of delight. They are walking bundles of joy to fans because they are always looking for ways to delight them with something new. This is why they have the highest brand loyalty of any SCALE path.
Final thoughts
No matter your SCALE path, partnering with people in other paths can help you grow. Whenever I go onto a podcast hosted by a Evangelist, I can almost always make it their most watched episode because I bring the excitement, while their articles on my publication almost always have incredible engagement, helping build loyalty to what I’m doing on my own.
As a Launcher with heavy Collaborator tendencies, I often partner with successful businesses to give their launches a boost, and implementing my strategies usually gives them the best launch of my career, and better than I can do on my own.
It wasn’t until my ex-business partner, a Spotlighter, and me, a Launcher/Collaborator, built a company together that we got the kind of traction either of us wanted, and bringing in universally loved Evangelists and Collaborators like Mel and Tawdra made everyone want to work with us because they already wanted to work with them.
While we should all be working to evolve ourselves, expanding business almost always means looking outside ourselves and partnering or hiring with other talents to get where we want to go.
