Best Foot Forward – Now More than Ever (We are Hiring)

3 MIN READ

June 3, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

Here’s the thing: Business owners cannot reset the button when it comes to their people.

A lot of business owners have shown loyalty during this time. Okay, I know that most business owners laid off people and trimmed down their operations – but hey, there are those that also sacrificed a lot for their people.

Thing is, there are some people that do not reciprocate for the price those sacrificial and loyal business owners did.

Sadly, business owners cannot hit a ‘reset‘ button to reshuffle out bad eggs and hire new good eggs.

You see, during this time, your bad eggs will sink your business further. They will produce bad output, they will be unreliable when you need them, they will need you to keep on checking on them (waylaying your focus and output in reviving your business further).

And that is because these bad eggs will justify to themselves that you may not be paying them right – which may be true – but you are also not paying yourself right. In fact, as an entrepreneur, you may not be paying yourself at all during this time and may have even taken out of your savings just to provide for your people – both good and bad eggs.

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Think: If you keep those bad eggs and your business does not produce better output, you will lose even more clients.

If you lose even more clients, you will be worse off in paying your people right – even the good eggs will suffer because the bad eggs performed worse.

So here’s what I need you to think about – how can you save the good eggs and provide better for them in the shortest time possible through this slog we are all experiencing?

I believe the solution might just be one of the toughest decision for a people-centered leader and entrepreneur.

Sever the bad eggs from your team and open hiring. Hire great people who have been fired by self-centered leaders and entrepreneurs to save their own selves.

Look out for them – because they are out there and they are looking for work and for people-centered entrepreneurs.

Make sure your hiring process is stellar in weeding out bad applicants – you wouldn’t want lazy, new hire remote workers in your team.

Oh and, yes, WE ARE HIRING 🙂

What Good can come out of the Pandemic?

3 MIN READ

June 2, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

I struggle with this question.

Imagine the year when we thought everything was going our way at SEO Hacker. That was 2019.

Then BAM!

2020 hits you in the face and everything is in disarray.

Next thing we know we wake up from the sucker punch and we crawl – trying to pull ourselves together. Only to find out that we can’t go back to the way things used to be.

The office is closed. We’re locked in our homes. We are warned to the point of fear as if the zombie apocalypse is on its way.

This is actually the first crisis I’m going to lead through.

While that statement may sound exciting, it’s also nerve-wracking.

There are some entrepreneurs who have led their business and organization through the great depression, the Asian crisis, the 2008 recession – among other things.

I have none of those under my belt.

What I do have is tons of adversity, betrayal, and business-specific crisis that I’ve dealt with in the past. Those things have helped me to navigate this foggy, blurry road we are all forced to take during this time.

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“Wisdom is Derived from Adversity” – John Maxwell

I realized that the deepest, most important lessons in your life are learned in your journey through the darkest valleys.

What good can come out of this crisis?

A lot.

People in the team who stay and serve and step up to lead and work hard stand out easily – and you can reward them and show them even more loyalty when the dust settles.

People in the team who pretend to be hard workers and leaders also stand out easily – and you can weed them out.

The crisis brings out the truth in people.

Truth is precious and is always worth paying the price for.

What I look forward to is the day when I have my leaders today who have stepped up and slogged through the mud with me – and we look back to these tough times and say “Those were dark days, but we got through them because we stuck together, did hard things, served others, and trusted in God.”

A crisis is a catalyst to what makes a solid dream team. Do not let it go to waste.

Leading SEO Hacker Through the Pandemic

4 MIN READ

June 1, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

I have to say, it’s tough.

When the pandemic hit and the announcements of lockdown started, I didn’t think too much about it since SEO Hacker is an SEO company and we’re playing in the digital marketing industry.

But the economy is an intertwined machine. If you are part of a larger machine and it slows down to almost a grinding halt, then you are going to slow down along with it.

Our receivables have become just that – receivables. We weren’t able to collect what we needed to for the people in the team.

It was tough – and our team members all have it tough up to today.

I remember a story from Bob Chapman’s experience as the leader of his company Barry-Wehmiller during the 2008 recession in the US. They suddenly lost 30% of their orders so their board of directors, along with Chapman got together to discuss what they were going to do.

The board suggested to layoff people en-masse but Chapman rejected the idea.

Instead he said this: ‘It’s better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot.’

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I have read this idea from a book – I’m not sure where. But it left a mark on me.

I wanted to be a leader who would put my people first. Above and beyond myself.

This pandemic gave me that opportunity to practice this.

Push finally came to shove with the COVID-19 and I had a choice to make – do I do what I said I would do and put my people first? Or do I do what’s comfortable and best for myself and my family?

I got together with the leaders of the team and we decided to do the former.

Thank God we did.

Morale went up, volunteers raised hands to help and we were even able to pull some of the meager collections we had to donate to people in our team who were not able to do any work at all.

I’m not saying that things went perfect – it didn’t. There were some people who are unable to see the big picture and play long-term. They expressed their desire to resign.

It always hurts when family decides to move on. But as the leader, you cannot let that get into your heart – it is your head that you need working for you especially in a crisis.

We scrambled to engineer a new hiring process for remote workers and we are using it already as I write this post. I’m not 100% sure how well it would be able to weed out potentially bad hires from good ones but I’m quite confident in the process as we derived it from our pre-pandemic hiring process.

“Crisis separates the pretenders from the players and there is no playbook to help us.” – John Maxwell

I guess this quote sums up one highlight I experienced in this crisis.

There are people in the team who are real team players – they will do whatever it takes to win. They might complain – but they are complaining because we can make a difference and improve.

The pretenders, however, are simply complaining for themselves.

Real team players are also self-starters. They are self-managers. They are self-leaders. They move things on their own.

Pretenders eat up more bandwidth from the leadership and management team because they do not move at par with the rest of the players and need to be led, managed and checked-on by other leaders in the team.

It’s been a tough time but there are great things that came out of it.

As a leader, I am always on the lookout for those things.

“Never let a good crisis go to waste” – Winston Churchill

Be proactive rather than reactive.

2 Critical Traits you Need to Get Up and Succeed from Failure and Mistakes

5 MIN READ

May 13, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

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Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

How do you usually recover from setbacks?

First, I remove myself from failure.

Don’t say that “I failed”. Rather, say that it was a mistake and move forwards.

A lot of entrepreneurs personalize failure. That is the mindset of a loser. You will be buried under a mountain of failure rather than standing on top of it.

If you separate yourself from the failure and see them as lessons, then it’s inevitable for you to get better.

With that, recovering from setbacks gets easier.

People who personalize the failure never get better because they are traumatized by it. They don’t want to try again because they believe that they will repeat it and fail again.

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One of our core values is experimentation. We have a short excerpt there that I wrote: “We try new things in the spirit of having a positive outcome”.

There’s an implicit mindset behind it. That is to be courageous. Have the courage to try new things.

No one goes to a gold mine to dig for dirt. But we have to dig through the dirt to get the gold.

You also have to have the tenacity, the grit, the resilience in the face of rebellion, betrayal, and failures.

They’re heavy words because they happened to me, but I have changed because of them.

People who give up in the face of adversity will not succeed. You have to have the strength and will to win and keep moving forward.

That is what we see in most successful people nowadays. They all failed. Most of them failed in a big way, but they still got up.

Elon Musk almost went bankrupt after selling Paypal, but now he’s as famous as ever.

Steve Jobs said in his Stanford speech that “It was bitter medicine, but the patient needed it” In line with him getting fired as CEO of Apple. After that, he sold Pixar to Disney, was reinstated as the CEO of Apple and made it the number one company in the world.

Know that you’re going to fail. But you don’t have the strength and resilience to get back up especially in the face of adversity, then you’re just going to stay in the mud.

You said that you’re ruthless in your decision-making process and speech. Are you still struggling with these?

Yes. There is a part of me that it became instinctive. I don’t like being ruthless, but it’s now my natural tendency for me to say things that way.

There are times when I hurt people’s feelings. Sometimes people argue that it’s because of my Dominant personality. I don’t use that as an excuse. I know I have to improve on that and so I try to first delay my first reaction to every opinion that I hear.

I also tell the truth. Trying to be less ruthless doesn’t mean you should sugar coat your opinions. You have to be clear. You have to make sure that your message gets across.

That being said, there’s a difference between being ruthless because of your clear and being mean.

Being mean is personalizing the fault and blame. That’s wrong.

If you’re being ruthlessly clear, you might shut down some opinions, but that’s because you’re trying to prevent them from making mistakes and protect the company. All because I have been in their place.

There are ways to say things better. I know that I don’t lie and I’m not mean but people say that I’m ruthlessly clear depending on the people I talk with.

The people who get hurt by it will not tell me that they’re hurt, then probably spread gossip.

What else do you struggle with?

I think one of the ways we can improve as an organization is the reporting system.

Everyone is accountable but it’s not clear what’s really happening on a big picture perspective.

It could be avoided if we had a big picture reporting system.

Personally, I want to improve my sleeping habits. I want to wake up early around 6 or 6:30 in the morning. A lot of people are saying that it’s difficult, but it’s something that I want.

Again, for me to be able to rise to that goal, I need to fall back to my systems.

This is something that I hope I’m able to achieve by June this year.

Adjusting my entire lifestyle is difficult. I won’t be able to work on creative things at night, instead, I need to do them early in the morning. It’s better but I’m not there yet.

For now, there are two ways to go about it.

First, I will lack sleep every day until I am able to wake up early in the morning.

Second, I should force myself to cool down and sleep at a certain time. It’s healthier, better for my decision-making abilities, but is harder to do.

How do you Manage your Time Better? The Magic of Delegation.

6 MIN READ

May 12, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

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Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

What were some things that you had to let go of?

One of the things that I had to let go of was playing computer games. Back then it was a borderline addiction and it took a real effort to stop.

I managed to control that by completely deleting the games that I really liked. It would be a huge hassle to play it again because I had to download and install it again before I could even start.

James Clear who wrote the book Atomic Habits says “We don’t rise to the level of our goals; we fall to the level of our systems.

I had to make a system that had to create a system that would enable me to keep that addiction at bay. For me, that was uninstalling the software.

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He also said that if you were struggling with binge-watching on Netflix, then you should make sure to keep the TV out of your bedroom or put it in your cabinet. It puts in another obstacle before you can do so, making it harder for people to do it again and again.

Time management has four quadrants. These computer games fall under not urgent and not important. Some of the things that are urgent and not important I delegate.

For me, it’s important that you have other people helping you out. This is why we have grown to over 50 people in the company.

It’s so we can focus on making the decisions that are near the commas, not the decimal point.

If we have more people making bigger decisions that are closer to the commas, that will make for a bigger and better company with bigger and better growth.

If you’re the business owner, you want your people to move closer to the commas.

I delegate a lot of my old tasks. I used to do Legal, HR, SERP watching, project management, accounts, and sales.

Since I’ve delegated them all now, I can focus on other things. This year, my thematic goal is to raise up more leaders. Last year, I focused on making sure that the sales team is intact.

I just choose the things that I need to do and the things that can only be done by me.

To do that, you should discern and ask other people, mostly your mentors, what they delegate to other people. You realize things along the way so you experiment and delegate to other people.

For me, delegating is like going with them.

It’s like driving a car and giving the keys to someone. You’re not going to give them the keys without checking first if they can get to point A to point B and back without a dent or scratch.

You’re going to be riding with them for months to see if they can drive well. Finally, when the time comes when you will give the keys to them, you won’t be nervous. Instead, you’ll be happy that you don’t need to stay with him along the ride anymore.

The opposite is the two extremes, the micromanager, and just giving them the keys and leaving them with it.

You have to balance things out. Ride with your people. And when the time comes, award the keys to them.

It’s part of leadership to know the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Was this something that you learned along the way or something that you knew earlier?

This is why the hiring process is very important, along with the tests and exams that come with applying and becoming a regular team member.

They’re important because you’ll be able to see their personality, their competence, their temperament, and their strengths and weaknesses.

You can delegate better if you know all of these things about the person.

Influential people who are fun and talkative are good for sales.

Corrective or Compliant people who are into details and asking questions are good for programming.

You can also check it out via Strengths finder.

My main strength is Self-Assurance, those with this strength have an inner compass. They know what to do and what to say at any given time. They know what the vision should be.

Those with the Command Strength are great for managerial positions. They can take command of a room. They can lead a group of people.

My brother and I have a theory that the strengths that you have will be different at x stage and y stage of your life.

Was delegating something that you wish that you knew back then?

I’d rather want to know how to hire better because if you don’t know how to hire correctly, then you can’t delegate well—because you don’t have anyone to delegate things to.

Once someone that is stealing nuts and bolts from a train track goes to university and graduates, they’re not going to steal nuts and bolts, they’ll steal the entire train track.

You can’t change their character. You can just help them in what they’re doing. Improve their skills and knowledge, but you can’t change their fundamental character.

Get the right people in your team. Make sure that they fit into your culture. Take time in your hiring process.

How do you Prevent Employees going AWOL?

4 MIN READ

May 6, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

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Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

In reality, contracts are the lowest form of trust… I don’t trust you, you don’t trust me, so we have this piece of paper to keep us in check.

What do you think is the cause of people going AWOL? Was this a problem when you were still starting out?

AWOL was a problem. We even had a recent experience with people going AWOL just around a year ago. That was when we already improved our hiring process.

It was more common before because they got in too easily. I hired the wrong people.

My whole hiring process sucked. It was just one seating where I asked a few questions. They’ll get in immediately just because we needed help.

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I should have worked harder to fulfill my need in hiring that spot instead of hiring someone that will just leave more problem with us.

If I just took time in the hiring process, they would have AWOL’d within the hiring process.

Contracts are another thing. We make our people sign and they’re bonded with us for an x number of months or years.

For me, contracts are the lowest form of trust and agreement. The highest form is verbal.

Needing a contract is the lowest form because it basically says that you don’t trust one another and that you need a piece of paper as proof of your agreement.

That being said, it would be stupid of me not to have employment contracts. These are to protect the employees and us, the owners, as well.

I can argue that even with the contracts, people still go AWOL. It will not solve AWOL problems.

You still need contracts, but what will really prevent that from happening is to prolong the hiring process. Weed out the people who would have gone AWOL anyway.

The reason why people go AWOL is several. Most of them get bigger job offers, some say they have family problems.

What we do to them, is we put them in a blacklist.

I don’t think a person went AWOL because they didn’t like how things were done here. Instead, most of them do so because they found something else, or they were not mature individuals.

You can’t really say why they’re going AWOL. What you can only do is to prevent it by prolonging the hiring process. Optimize it so that you can really check on your applicants.

Do you think there are still many holes in your hiring process?

When we started our current hiring process, we’ve only hired two, maybe three people that were wrong hires compared to 80% of the past hires being bad ones.

We’ve already hired 50 people over the course of one year. Some of them didn’t become regulars and that’s fine. At least we part ways well.

Those who did choose to be regularized will be staying with us for two more years and then they’re going to graduate. It’s up to them whether they want to stay or go.

One thing that we can improve is something that I’ve been thinking about for a long time. That would be to have the strengths finder exam for the probationary hires just to know them better.

We pay for that exam, but it wouldn’t be that much help to someone if they didn’t enter the workshop.

It’s difficult to learn how to internalize it if they don’t see how it’s supposed to work.

My wife has suggested doing that in the hiring process, which can be too risky and costly.

We’re still trying to improve our hiring process, but right now it’s working fantastically.

The 5 Enemies of Unity in your Team and How to Defeat Them

6 MIN READ

May 4, 2020 By Sean Leave a Comment

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Excerpt

This is a reverse-guesting episode where I was interviewed about my story in starting up SEO Hacker as the leading SEO Services company in the Philippines.

Gossip is the antithesis of unity… I can’t tell you that I know each and everything that’s happening in the office. But my team knows my stand on gossip.

What is your Why and how did you find it?

Our purpose statement is different from our mission and vision.

Our Why statement is we exist because the world is underserved by digital marketing companies. There are some out there that are not good, not outright, and even go as far as scamming companies.

There is a huge gap that is yet to be filled by digital marketing companies.

We exist because of that gap.

We want to serve the world, in the best way we can, through digital marketing.

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My Why is directly related to my identity. I am a child of God and we have a mission. That is to go out and make disciples of all nations.

It’s not easy to influence millennials. We’re not all Christians in SEO Hacker. We hire any and all kinds of people with different beliefs. It’s just that one of the things that I want very much to happen is for them to get to know the Lord. That will always be my Why.

How I will be able to do that is dependent on where God has called me. Right now, God has called me to be a businessman, an entrepreneur, and a voice in the Philippine startup market.

People will not listen to you if you’re not good at what you’re called to be doing. You’ll just be another person with an opinion.

People will criticize you. Society will tell you to become successful. But when you are successful in a way, people are going to criticize you.

What I realized is that you should just go the path that you’re called to and don’t pay any mind to the critics.

There have been so many times when I heard voices from critics all around. If I let it get to me, then I wouldn’t be here today.

You have to realize that you’ve been fighting a worthy fight. There is a reason why you exist.

It’s your choice to allow what they say to get into your heart or not.

Unity is an important thing. How do you plan to keep everyone unified while still maintaining professionalism in the workplace?

First, we have to educate them on the five enemies of unity.

The first enemy is gossip. It is the antithesis of unity. With it, you can never have unity in your team. It breaks down trust.

Without trust, you cannot have unity.

I can’t tell you that I know each and everything that’s happening in the office. But my team knows my stand on gossip.

It’s an everyday fight. You have to make an effort to keep these things at bay because if you let your guard down, these things will really wreak havoc within your team.

The second thing I really don’t like is unresolved conflict.

If there are people between teams that don’t see eye-to-eye, have bitterness in their hearts. They might even go as far as to sabotage each other’s output.

When that happens, both you, your clients, and your shareholders will suffer. This can lead to letting go of people just because you’re not making enough revenue.

When you know something is happening between two members of your team, get them in a room and act as a mediator in their alignment.

I don’t require my people to become friends, even outside of work. What I require is that they respect one another.

The third enemy of gossip is sanctioned incompetence.

If you tolerate incompetence in your team, they will follow suit with it—creating more mediocre output.

They will hate you for it because you’re protecting a donkey, while you let your stallions suffer, or worse, leave.

You’ll lose loyalty and your unity will breakdown.

Next is the lack of a shared vision.

It’s difficult to run a united team when everyone is going into different directions.

You always have to pull them back in line.

During our lunch breaks, we make sure to recite our core values, mission, and vision. We also have our purpose statements in our meeting areas.

It’s clear where we are going.

The main problem with vision is that it leaks. Sometimes people just lose sight of it.

Last is poor communication.

A lot of companies run their organization by just giving a map to their people saying this is where the party is at. Be there on time so we can have fun.

But when people use the map, it’s vague and ultimately takes them to the wrong places. These people get frustrated, get angry, and then vent out to other people leading to gossip.

When you have poor communication, your people will get frustrated. The reason why there’s poor communication is that the management is afraid to communicate or they’re so arrogant that they keep things from the team.

When you keep things from the team, you undergo mushroom communication. You leave your people in the dark and give them crap—that’s how you grow mushrooms.

In SEO Hacker, we would rather overcommunicate. I would tell my team that they are mature individuals and adults and I will treat you as such. But you must carry the burden of keeping things in the circle and solving the problems within the meeting.

I give them the burden of being mature individuals who will carry the burden with me.

This is done without gossiping, but instead by communicating clearly.

All of these things are being wrapped up in software that we develop and use internally. It’s called Teamstrr and we will be opening it up to the public this May.

Teamstrr has helped keep the team as united as it’s ever been. And I know how hard it is to feel betrayed, to experience the mutinies and mass resignations.

Right now, we have the greatest number of people, which means there is the most number of tendencies for these mutinies to happen, but it doesn’t.

And that’s because we have been communicating the importance of unity and we have Teamstrr that helps keep unity intact in the company.

< 1 MIN READ

The irony of this information and knowledge economy is that instead of stronger minds, we have developed weak minds. By now, you could imagine that we have harvested, harnessed and developed so much for our knowledge to keep things such as anxiety, fear, and depression out in the cold.

Instead, these things somehow finds its way easily into the heart because it is not barred out by the wisdom that comes from the fear of God.

Wisdom has been replaced by cheap knowledge – most of it counterfeit.

We have traded the absolute truth – which is the most valuable thing our minds can hold – for that which is relative, wobbly, and weak. Things that feels good for the moment but dissolve soon after.

“… Until at last, having educated himself into imbecility, and polluted and drugged himself into stupefaction, he keeled over–a weary, battered old brontosaurus–and became extinct.” – Malcolm Muggeridge

#ceoat22

< 1 MIN READ

“Using a dull ax requires great strength, so sharpen the blade. That’s the value of wisdom; it helps you succeed.” – Ecclesiastes 10:10

This is the time to sharpen your blade. You are not out there chopping down trees. There are no urgent tasks to be done.

You have the time to learn, improve, and reinvent yourself to come out better, stronger, sharper for the work ahead when the world economy resumes.

The question is, are you sharpening your blade right now? Are you investing in wisdom to help you succeed?

Or are you setting yourself up to fail?

Stop whatever it is your doing. Think.

Because when you fail in these tough, uncertain times, it is much harder to get back up.

< 1 MIN READ

“When a crime is not punished quickly, people feel it is safe to do wrong.” – Ecclesiastes 8:11

I was asked a question during the Breaking Through the Crisis webinar that mentioned their workplace breaking down with rampant gossip even when they would praise and congratulate exemplary workers.

While praising other people for their great work, competence and character, you cannot turn a blind eye to the wrong things.

If gossip goes unpunished in your organization, people will think it’s ok. And since gossip is insidious and dangerously contagious, it will spread like wildfire.

In the end, it will eat up and burn everything you have worked so hard to achieve.

Find out how to fight gossip in your team and how we implement a no-gossip policy at SEO Hacker by downloading the replay of the webinar here.

Excerpt

You said that you’re ruthless in your decision-making process and speech. Are you still struggling with these?

What else do you struggle with?

Excerpt

It’s part of leadership to know the strengths and weaknesses of your team. Was this something that you learned along the way or something that you knew earlier?

Was delegating something that you wish that you knew back then?

Excerpt

What do you think is the cause of people going AWOL? Was this a problem when you were still starting out?

Do you think there are still many holes in your hiring process?

Excerpt

Download Chapter 1 of my Book!