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Ryan Englin on Coaches To The Moon: Building Teams That Run Without You

on Coaches To The Moon with Alex Morris ·

Key takeaways

  1. A great system with good people beats a good system with great people constantly fixing it. Systemize first. Then hire people who fit the process and the culture.
  2. Your first hire will not do it as well as you. That belief is wrong. They wear one or two hats while you wear 27. They focus. You are distracted. Train them your way and they will outperform you.
  3. If someone wanted to be a leader, they would not be coming to work for you. People want to be led. Put on the training hat and give them clear direction from day one.
  4. Automate the predictable and the important. Invoicing, payment reminders, CRM logging. Computers do not call in sick or cause drama. Save the human connection for clients and team relationships.
  5. Niche early and niche deep. The more focused the business becomes, the simpler it gets. Simpler businesses need fewer moving parts, fewer roles, and fewer things that break when you walk away.
  6. When you fix problems behind the scenes without telling anyone, no one else knows it broke. That means it never gets fixed well enough for you to walk away. Let things surface so the team can solve them permanently.

I went on Coaches to the Moon with Alex Morris to talk about why hiring the right people is the single most important move an entrepreneur can make. And fishing. We talked about fishing too.

Alex works with coaches and consultants who are scaling their businesses, and a lot of his audience is in that scary place of hiring their first person or building a small team. That gave us a chance to dig into mindset before tactics. Because the tactics don't matter if the founder can't let go.

Here's what I told Alex straight up. Let go of the idea that nobody will ever do it as well as you. You wear somewhere between 15 and 7,000 hats as an entrepreneur. When you hire someone, they take on one or two. They're not distracted. They're able to focus. More often than not, they will do it better than you. As long as you train them to do it your way.

And that's the second piece. You don't throw people in the deep end. People want to be led. If they wanted to be leaders, they wouldn't be coming to work for you. They'd be starting their own business. Your job is to put on the training hat and give them a real plan.

I shared the story of hiring my first coach at Core Matters. For years I believed people were buying Ryan Englin, not the Core Fit Hiring System. Then I got really sick and was out for three weeks. I had no choice but to let her run with it. She hated me for it in the moment. But she stepped in, served our clients, and came out the other side coaching more clients than I do. Clients request her now. She connects with people in a way I don't. I never thought I could hire another coach. I was right. I didn't hire another me. I hired someone better at the parts that matter most.

We got into the fishing analogy, which is core to how I teach recruiting. The first decision in fishing is what kind of fish you want to catch. That decision determines your bait, your gear, your location, your timing. Most business owners skip that step entirely. They just throw a line in the water and hope something bites. We call that post and hope. It doesn't work in fishing and it doesn't work in recruiting, which is a marketing activity, not an HR activity.

Alex asked about my dad, and I shared something I didn't even fully understand until four years into this business. My dad was a blue-collar guy in manufacturing. Worked 12-hour days, six or seven days a week. The amount of time I got with him was dictated by whether his team could carry the load so he could come home. Subconsciously that drove everything. It wasn't until I was sitting with my coach, breaking down why I care so much about this work, that it hit me. I didn't want to see other entrepreneurs go through what my dad went through. Working crazy hours to take care of the people he loves and never getting to enjoy the fruits of his labor.

That's why I built the Core Fit Hiring System. It's a set of tools and processes to help you hire better people faster. I'd rather have a great system and good people running it than a good system and great people constantly fixing it. When you systematize, you free yourself to hire for what actually matters. Culture. Vision. Purpose. Do these people behave the way you behave? Are they excited about where you're going? Will they stick with you when business gets hard? Because business gets hard. Anyone who tells you otherwise is lying.

We also talked about the importance of niching down. Someone asked me on another podcast what one piece of knowledge I'd take back 10 years. I didn't hesitate. Niche early and niche deep. The more I niche, the simpler my business becomes. The simpler it becomes, the more I can automate the predictable and the important. And the more I automate, the more I can hire people to do people things.

Automate the things that don't need the human condition attached to them. Invoicing. Payment processing. CRM updates. But hire great people for the work that requires connection, empathy, and trust. Your clients will love those people. And those people will catapult your business faster than any piece of software.

I mentioned my book Hire Better People Faster during the conversation. Everything I teach about the Core Fit Hiring System is in there.

If you liked this conversation, I go deeper on building teams and hiring for culture fit on Titans of the Trades.

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