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This is part 2 from John Cow/Jason Katzenback on how to grow a business through hiring staff. Enjoy!

In my previous post of this series “Delegate or Die - How to Hire Locally to Grow Your Business“, I talked about planning for moving your business into an office, today I am going to touch on what to look for in office space, how to find employees and how to hold interviews.

Office Space: SHOP AROUND!

As I mentioned in the previous post, I am speaking to you out of experience and sharing with you what I have found to work best through trial and error. I am telling you this because I hope I can spare you from some of the HUGE mistakes I made and finding my initial office was a big mess up on my part. You see, I was so excited to be moving out of my home office that I jumped at the first office that looked half decent, which might not sound bad but 2 months later I was packing up and moving again.

1. Location: You want to make sure that your office is easy to get to. The further you are from your office you will find that you start making up excuses as to not going to the office. Do not fool yourself and think you can hire an office manager and not even head into the office, this is something that takes time to put into place and your employees need your guidance and leadership.

It is also important to consider errands, supplies and restaurants. The more central you are to other resources, the less frustrating you will find it. If you need to get stamps, paper, repairs and even food, it is extremely frustrating when you have to plan hours of your day to pick them up.

Last of all, is your office easily accessed via a bus or subway route? If you are going to have employees, you are going to want to ensure they have no excuses for not being able to get to the office.

2. Lighting: This was another huge mistake I made. I first found a great looking office but it was in the basement of the office building and there was only one small window. I thought that I could get lights but believe me, nothing replaces natural sunlight and do not underestimate how important it is.

3. Room for Growth: This was my biggest mistake of all. I did not realize how much room one person’s work area took. You need to realize that once you sign a lease, you can not easily get out of it and room for growth is not an acceptable excuse.

You need to have a clear picture of what you expect for size requirements for a one year period. The recommended space requirement per person is 250 sq/ft, which might sound like a lot but consider that is only a little more then 15 ft x 15 ft and in that space you have to fit a working station, area to move around equipment and so on. Now personally I think that is a little much but I would never budget less then 150 sq/ft per person, you do not want people bumping into each other to move around.

4. Privacy: You are going to want to ensure that you have an office with a door on it. Your employees will constantly want to talk with you and ask questions and by having a door you can make sure that you can shut the door and have your privacy to get things done. I will talk more about this in the next post when I get into managing your employees.

How To Find Suitable Employees

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I’m doing a lot of interviews lately, but this was definitely one of the best. Ray Edwards has embraced blogging wholeheartedly and is making serious changes to his business model to focus on his blog as the linchpin of his operation.

Ray’s core skill is copywriting and he has a lot of students who learn from him how to use words to their advantage. We’re talking authors, freelancer writers, copywriters, speakers and general small business folk who use words to sell (pretty much all of us who have an online business!).

I jumped at the chance to present to Ray’s audience through an interview and offer my thoughts on how blogs could be used to help authors, speakers and writers who want to translate their words into an income stream through blogging.

You can download the podcast here - Blogging For Six Figures? Writers Take Note!

It’s worth listening to this podcast to hear Ray speak too. As a copywriter he knows how to speak good copy as well, so listen how Ray leads this interview and you can learn a lot about good podcast technique.

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I had the Conversion Blogging video transcribed into a text document for people who prefer to read.

You can grab it right now as a free PDF download from here (right click “save as” to save it to your computer).

In case you can’t remember, the Conversion Blogging video explains my system for combining blogging with a traditional email marketing system to create a $100,000+ Internet business.

Grab the transcript and you can read all the details, but of course if you want to actually see my examples, you need to watch the video (which is still free).

Update: Jack from VidSummary.com has also put together a summarized version of the Conversion Blogging video. He’s stripped out the best bits so you can consume what you need quickly, however he does charge $7 for the summary. You can take a look here.

400 Students Strong

New people are joining Blog Mastermind every day and we’ve almost hit the 400 student mark, which is awesome. We’ve already done the first of many live group coaching calls and the questions came flying in. The forums are hot and the feedback from the students is fantastic - I love you guys.

If you haven’t jumped on board what I consider the best blog coaching program available today, please come join the party -

http://www.blogmastermind.com/coaching/

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Like most people before gaining experience I have fear about my capabilities. As you grow you become more confident and thankfully confidence transfers across a whole range of activities in your life. Unfortunately the opposite is true too - if you don’t feel confident in general, then you don’t feel confident doing anything new to you.

It’s a lot easier to accept your fear when you don’t attach your ego to the outcome you want. If you want to achieve something and it relates to something very important - like for example, starting an Internet business and doing well enough that you can quit your job - the fear of failure is so extreme that it can bend your perception of reality. It can be so bad that your subsequent poor mindset as a result of the fear will guarantee the outcome you are so fearful of - failure. That’s a nasty catch 22 situation.

For a long time I was fearful of selling my own products online. I knew I could do it in terms of creating a product, but the fear was whether I could actually help people and whether people would buy from me. No doubt this is common for every person before they release a product of their own creation.

The day I became a lot more confident was the day I experienced someone else’s product similar to what I wanted to create.

In my case, it was making the decision to join Rich Schefren’s Business Growth System, which led me to find the confidence to believe I could launch a membership site too.

Remove Ambiguity By Seeing What Others Do

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I finally had a chance to organize the Toronto meet-up I’ve been promising so many people since I arrived here.

As a lucky coincidence, John Chow is also in town, and like we did with the Vancouver meet-up and his Dot Com Pho regular gatherings, we decided to combine meet-ups for T-dot too.

If you are in Toronto and like to hang out with me, John Chow and the other people and bloggers who attend, come along this Thursday night (August 21st) at 7PM, to the Live Organic Food Bar.

Full location details are at this Facebook event page -

http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=24673968029

Please click the attend button on that page if you can make it so we know how many people are coming.

The location I’ve picked is a raw organic food restaurant (they have an amazing chocolate smoothie!). There are some cooked meals too, but everything is vegetarian, which might be scary for hardcore carnivores.

There is an Irish Pub down the road we are going to use in the event of rain or if too many people show up. We might just head there afterwards for those people who want to drink something harder. The pub is a 5 min walk - it’s called the “The Pour House” on 182 Dupont.

I hope to see a good crowd and I look forward to meeting many of my Toronto readers.

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