De-stress Your Business
Business doesn’t need to be stressful. This weekly podcast is for business owners, leaders, and managers who want to get better results, with less stress. We go deep on tactics you can roll out today, such as freeing up 15 hours per week (!) of your time, empowering your teams, and sorting out employee onboarding. Paddy Mann and Alexis Kingsbury are serial entrepreneurs who have learned these lessons the hard way over the last 15 years, and now support 100s of other business leaders as co-founders at AirManual.
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Episodes
Tuesday Nov 15, 2022
Tuesday Nov 15, 2022
One of the biggest sources of stress for business leaders is simply time.
There’s never enough of it
So, what if I told you that sorting your processes could help you free up 15 hours every week (!!)
To be honest, you’ll hear that number and simply disregard it…
It sounds nice… but you suspect it’ll take a lot of work, and you probably won’t find 15 hours to save, right?
This is normal. When it comes to sorting processes, most leaders…
Underestimate the benefits
Overestimate the effort needed
So on today’s episode of De-stress Your Business, we go deeper on how sorting your processes will help you free up time.
And how you can get start seeing these results really quickly.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Monday Nov 14, 2022
Monday Nov 14, 2022
What to do you do when you have a great job candidate, but can’t hire them right now?
If you’re like most businesses, the answer is nothing.
Here’s a better option: Don’t do nothing.
Explain to the candidate that you wanted to hire them, but can’t right now.
Stay in touch — a short call once a quarter to give them an update on where you’re at, and find out what’s changed for them.
When a position comes up, reach out and see if they’re interested!
Because you’ve shown you care about them, they’re much more likely to leave another role to join your team.
And for your investment of a couple of hours per year, you’ve saved yourself and your team from weeks of recruitment.
It’s an awesome way to reduce stress in your business, and get better results.
And it’s the topic for today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Helpful resources for today’s episode:
Recruitment process: https://airmanual.link/templates/recruitment-process
Checklist for reviewing a job candidate: https://airmanual.link/templates/review-a-job-candidate
Checklist for staying in touch with a great candidate: https://airmanual.link/templates/stay-in-touch-with-a-great-candidate
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Friday Nov 11, 2022
Friday Nov 11, 2022
At AirManual, we get over 1000 applicants for some job roles, which is awesome!
But how do we manage the process?
Here are 3 things we don’t do:
Spend a fortune on an Application Tracking System (ATS)
Spend a fortune on recruitment consultants
Completely derail our own team
Instead, we:
Use our favorite tool for documenting any type of process (AirManual!)
Break the process down into stages that can be delegated to the best people in our team
Clearly define the questions to ask, and the scoring to use to compare candidates
It works brilliantly.
On today’s episode of De-Stress Your Business, we’ll explain exactly how you can you do this for your own recruitment process.
The end result will be a process that helps you to efficiently hire the best candidates.
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Helpful resources for today’s episode:
Recruitment process: https://airmanual.link/templates/recruitment-process
Checklist for reviewing a job candidate: https://airmanual.link/templates/review-a-job-candidate
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
Thursday Nov 10, 2022
Have you ever hired someone, and then discovered that their skill level is way below what you imagined?
This happens… a lot.
The culprit is not effectively reviewing their capability do to the job.
To do this effectively, you’ll need to:
Get really clear the key skills and experience they need to bring to the team
Set the objective of only hiring someone when you are confident that they have these skills
Work out what activities are needed to make you feel confident
For a sales team member, this might mean writing emails, and having mocked sales calls.
For an engineer, this might mean collaboratively working on real coding challenges, and a mini project where they take a new feature from start to finish.
We dig deeper into the stress and pain caused by making the wrong hire — and how to avoid this — on today’s episode of De-stress our Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
Wednesday Nov 09, 2022
When it comes to interviewing job candidates, we’re looking to answer 2 questions:
Does this candidate have the right skills for the job?
Are they good fit for our culture?
But… how you interview someone for culture fit?
The answer is to use your core values.
If you have core values that everyone in your company firmly believes in, then you can create questions that help you to assess if a candidate shares these values.
If they do, then great! If not, then move on.
In this episode of De-stress Your Business, we take a look at how this works in practice, with some real examples.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Tuesday Nov 08, 2022
Tuesday Nov 08, 2022
How do you go about defining core values?
Here’s a simple 4 step process:
List out the people in your organization that really shine. Don’t forget leaders!
List out the characteristics that they exhibit that really shine through. The ones that make a real difference to your customers. The ones that make it a place you’re proud to work in.
Take your long list, and iterate until you have 4–7 values that you really believe in. Try to choose the ones that will make a big impact to the way people behave.
Once you’re happy with your list, add descriptions and examples to illustrate what each behavior means in practice.
Once you have your core values, you should present them to the team and embed them into your organization:
Make them a key part of your recruitment process
Include them in performance reviews
Refer to them when making decisions
Publicly praise team members who exhibit them
Privately share feedback when team members conflict with them
We go deeper on this process in today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Monday Nov 07, 2022
Monday Nov 07, 2022
When used correctly, company core values are an absolute game changer.
Some great examples:
Amazon: Customer obsession; Hire the best; …
Meta: Move fast; Focus on long-term impact; …
Our own: Focus on impact; Enjoy the journey; …
By making “Customer obsession” a core value for Amazon, Jeff Bezos didn’t need to be in every meeting. His leaders and teams would understand to always prioritize the customer experience over other concerns.
When Facebook changed their core values from “Move fast and break things” to “Move fast” and “Focus on long-term impact”, everyone was clear on how they should act.
When used well, these values will help everyone to make better decisions, from deciding who to hire to deciding where to have your annual off-site.
And in doing so, they remove a lot of stress and conflict.
In today’s episode of De-stress Your Business, we dive deeper into why core values are such a game changer.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Friday Nov 04, 2022
Friday Nov 04, 2022
Before we interview a job applicant, we want to test 2 things:
Are they a good fit for our organization?
Do they have the key skills we need in this role?
Looking at CVs is a terrible way of finding this out.
CVs and resumes:
Don’t give us the information we need
Don’t allow us fairly compare candidates
Take too long to review!
So we start the process by asking our candidates simple questions.
We start by seeing if they’re likely to be a good fit for our organization.
And if they are… we then look at whether they have the key skills we need.
The way we do this leads to a great experience for both our team and the people applying for jobs.
In today’s episode of De-stress Your Business, we dive deep into the second step: Using simple questions to review skills-fit.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
Wednesday Nov 02, 2022
At AirManual, we often receive over 1000 applications for one job opening.
So we need an efficient way to filter this list down and make a great hire!
The first step is important. We don’t start with CVs.
Instead we ask 3 simple questions that start to show if this candidate’s right for us:
What’s your proudest achievement, and why?
What’s your favorite non-fiction book, and why?
Which of our features do you like the most, and why?
In 30 seconds, we can review:
Can this candidate write well?
Have they made any effort to understand what we’re about?
Do they align with some of our company values?
We filter out 75% of candidates this way, and it’s easy to outsource this to a VA.
We share this part of the process — and the pains it solves — in today’s episode of De-stress Your Business.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!
Tuesday Nov 01, 2022
Tuesday Nov 01, 2022
AirManual, we get over 1000 applicants for each job.
It’s not because we’re a household name (we’re not — yet!)
And it’s not because we pay twice the going rate (we don’t!)
It is because:
We get clear on one specific role we’re hiring for
We hire remotely (and avoid any location constraints)
We identify the things that make us special
We provide a compensation package that’s generous for people who prioritize work/life balance over money
We create an ad which _really_ sells this message
Even if you’re not hiring remotely, you can greatly increase the number of applicants for your job openings.
In this episode, we dig into how, and why.
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Want to learn more? Join our weekly webinar and we'll show you how to free up 15 hours per week and remove the constant stress of running a business, without slowing down growth. Visit www.airmanual.co/webinar for all the details!