Rerun the six questions for talent and weigh a redline

1. Put manpower at the front and walk the path again

The first time through, the order was more (why can't we do more?), then metrics, market, model, money and manpower: six stops. For talent, manpower moves to the front, and the same path follows.

2. More: can you do more of what already brings people in?

Ask of each way of getting people whether you could do more of it. In this order:

The way	Restated for talent
Warm outreach	How you are getting people now, as worded here
Cold outreach	Recruiting, by another name
Posting content	More job postings, in more places
Promoting the postings	Spending on them: the paid-ads version of recruiting
Employee referrals	More referrals from the team
Affiliates	Associations, guilds, listservs, community owners
Agencies	Recruiters and staffing firms
Employees	The same as on the customer side: your team does it for you

All eight get the same test: is there more of this to do before anything else is tried? If there is, do that. If not, move down to metrics. Why more comes first is argued on SOP 187 — Exhaust more before anything else.

3. Metrics: no numbers, or people are not the limit

At this stop, more is blocked either because your numbers are unknown or because people are not the metric holding you back.

A case of the second. A restaurant had two-hour waits. It had simply run out of room inside its four walls: supply-constrained. The options named:

• Expand the seating.
• Run the operation better, so tables turn faster.
• Change the hours, or extend them.
• Combine these, and just raise prices at the peaks.

Price as the lever. When supply is the constraint, pricing is called a big lever you can pull. If you have more business than you can take on, raise the price; the point is put as very simple.

The restaurant is offered as an example of either the numbers being unknown or people not being the limit. Then the move is to change the other variables: change the walls. Getting the numbers at all is SOP 189.

4. Market: not enough of these people where you are

Say there are not enough grade three welders in your area. Ask:

• Could the job be done remotely?
• Are these people impossible to get, or only expensive?
• Could an incentive bring them, a moving bonus for instance?

Impossible or expensive: a roofing case. A roofing company owner was opening new locations and could not find a manager for one of them. Did his current staff include several managers? Yes, but they did not want to move. Would 20 grand move one of them? He had never considered that. What would the new location make? Probably 500 grand a year in profit, he said. Was 20 grand worth it, then? Yes, he supposed so.

The wrong avatar: a martial-arts case. An owner of three martial-arts gyms found it really hard to hire salespeople who held black belts. The answer offered was to find black belts and teach them to sell, because that takes far less time than taking a salesperson all the way to a black belt. What had to be solved was the small gap in skill; once it was, his whole funnel for hiring and growing opened up.

Sometimes the trouble is that you are looking for the wrong avatar. Salespeople you could then teach the martial art, or salespeople who already hold black belts, are really hard to find, and finding both at once might be hard. Then aim to get 80 percent of the way there, and train the other 20. That is filed as a market issue.

Picking the hire whose gap is quicker to teach: SOP 192 — Hire for the smallest skill gap. Whether a customer market is truly too small: SOP 190 — Check whether the market is really too small.

5. Model: the offer is wrong, or the role is built wrong

If you cannot get more talent because nobody responds, the offer is wrong. That is said to lean a little further toward model, which is why it is placed here.

A physical-therapy case. The practice was fully booked: every bed taken, all four walls full. It sold fine, its leads were good, it was fully staffed, and it was not making any money. The answer came at last, at manpower: the business gave 50 percent of revenue to its therapists. The therapists did not market themselves, pay for their own products, or do the sales. The business did all of that, then handed over half.

That is a structural issue: the model will never work; it is broken. The owner faced what was called an impossible choice. She could:

• Raise prices, which would have to go up by an absurd amount if half is always given away.
• Lower wages.
• Stop paying by percentage.

The fix had to be a structural change to the role itself, so that more people could then be recruited and the practice turn a profit. The model stop as an owner meets it for the business itself: SOP 191 — Keep the vehicle and stretch the timeline.

6. Money: the same branches, on the supply side

The money stop for talent: there is no money to hire more people, yet more are needed. The same four concepts apply again, turned to supply. How they are asked of customers is set out on SOP 196, the fixes behind the customer branches on SOP 197, and the ways to speed up cash on SOP 198.

6.1 Not enough applications: a lead problem

Run through the same fixes as for leads:

• Better ads. Headlines, copy, the whole of it: the ads matter.
• Better content. With a brand, more people want to work for you. They look at your content or your site and decide there, and that raises your conversions.
• The brand itself.
• The offer. What you offer applicants, quite literally, raises the odds that they opt in and apply.
• A money-model mechanism. One option, if you want to: you could hold a giveaway. When one team hires for media, it runs contests for people who want to edit its videos. Roughly a thousand apply and are walked through the process; about 50 do all the work, and five are picked from those 50. You can add a mechanism like this depending on the role: it will not find you a CEO, but for front-line and mid-level roles it will, for sure.
• A better avatar. Aim the target higher, or aim it lower and add training. In one software business the need was true customer success: people who could run higher-ticket business-to-business onboarding, like a concierge. The first ads asked for customer support and drew tons of low-level applicants, never going to suit owners who paid a large setup fee just to use the platform. The title was changed to customer success, and the right people came.

Write it as ad copy. Whatever you do to improve leads on your front end, do here too. It is still a funnel. If you do not know your application flow's conversion metrics, it is no surprise that you cannot see where it stalls. And if this is what the business is built on, the question put back is what else you are doing, other than this, that matters more.

A giveaway run as an offer for customers is SOP 61 — Run a giveaway as an acquisition offer.

6.2 Plenty of applications, too much junk: a conversion problem

A conversion-rate matter, as it was for customers. The fixes named:

• Page flow, headline and job description, and a better application process.
• Proof on the page: people saying they love the job, for one.
• A video sales letter: one for the company and, ideally, one per department or role, built as for customers. Tell the truth about the job, hard parts included; springing a surprise on a hire costs even more than on a customer.
• Nurturing the applicants, the way you nurture leads. Refusing to remind applicants does not work: no one cares, the world does not revolve around you, and you have to work it. In one practice here, even with a brand, the leads are worked.
• Better interview training. In a bigger business especially, hearing someone in HR or recruiting run a few interviews will turn your stomach, as your own salespeople's calls would if you have never listened to them. Training is how you get past that.
• Better reputation, which is the brand.
• Better applicant quality. This is where more friction can be added. If junk is pouring in, in healthcare work, say, or any low-skilled role with high volume and tons of applications, add friction and video sales letters. It is a sales process. Sifting, say, 500 applications for one or two good people calls for what 500 poor leads would: usually, more friction.

One more lever belongs in this branch: making the first interview one-to-many instead of one-on-one. Running a group interview is SOP 253 — Run a group interview for high-volume roles.

6.3 You cannot pay what they want

Here these people are worth less to you than the market rate, which means other businesses earn more from them than you do. So this runs back into improving the business: raise prices to raise pay.

An HVAC case. Technicians were scarce, which is very common for trades right now. The direction given was not to go and spend profit for want of cash flow. It was a solution stack:

• Install the sales process first: proof, a video sales letter, training on closing.
• Pair it with pricing: put the price up as the process improves, and win more customers while both rise.
• The cash that frees up can pay more people, fund big referral bonuses, or hire a headhunter.
• That money brings in the extra technicians and lets you outspend rivals hiring from the same pool.

Sometimes resolving the constraint takes several steps like these, but the step to focus on is whichever is directly ahead of you. The objection offered: I cannot take more jobs, so why fix my sales? The reply: pair the sales work with a raise in price, to unlock the cash flow that pays for recruiting the people you need.

6.4 Get more out of each person

Another way is to force more out of each person you have:

• Change the delivery ratio: say, from five clients per rep to 10 clients per rep.
• Switch from done for you to done with you, which is the same idea.
• Cap usage: a set number of hours, or a set amount of work on each account, so costs do not blow out.
• Time-block when each teammate works on which projects. Sometimes that means managing their hours directly. More times than not, the claim runs, you can double or triple how effective a team is through time management alone.
• Offshore or nearshore: hire from a different pool.

Several of these switches, as ways to cut what delivery costs: SOP 127, levers i, ii, iv and v. A weekly routine for blocking time: SOP 137 — Run the weekly time-blocking ritual.

6.5 The training bet, for high-end services

For high-end services there is a strategic bet, if you are truly set on dominating. Instead of hunting for third-year legal staff, take people straight out of college and build an exceptional training process that lifts them to a third-year's level, while you pay them like a first-year. The time given to capture that arbitrage is only six months.

Some of the biggest investment banks, and some of the biggest management consultancies, took this route too: they hire right out of college and pay six figures, because they train exceptionally well and because people above that level are so hard to find. A like arbitrage for low-skilled staff in a service business: SOP 200, section 9.

A booked-solid consultant. A high-end consultant was booked solid for six months: a tax strategist, it is thought, a practice that was half accounting and half consulting. The moves named: raise the prices sharply, alter the delivery ratio, bring on associates, then backfill by growing the training and the recruiting.

7. The redline call

When it applies. Revenue feels steady; or the hours are long and growth is absent; or you kind of need more leads yet could not cope with many more. If that sounds like you right now: typically, in one analysis offered of businesses that feel at capacity yet sit kind of in balance, you are really demand-constrained.

What to do. Break the business with demand; next, lift cash flow; after that, stretch capacity.

How far it stretches. No guarantee is given, of course. But in equilibrium it is called super likely that you could do 30 percent more if you had to, almost always. People can go all out for eight or twelve weeks, if they have to. So sometimes you have to break through a flat spell, producing the cash that then brings in more people and widens capacity. Sometimes you have to redline.

The recommendation, when you are not sure which kind you are. Make more money first, then turn the added resources on the supply constraint. Think through the other order: supply goes up first, and then what if the demand is missing? Then you are really underwater. The preference stated is to generate the cash rather than bring in the supply. What the phrase about extending terms, said alongside it, refers to: Not established on this page.

8. Where this sits

• Raising prices on the customers you have: SOP 83 — Write the price-raise letter with a vanishing discount.
• The series of offers a giveaway belongs to: SOP 59 — Assemble a money model from four prongs.
• Why a change costs performance up front: SOP 188 — Apply the cost-of-change rule.

9. What this page does not decide for you

• Which branch is the fourth. Four concepts are named for the money stop; which of the sections above is the fourth, or whether it is given at all: Not established on this page.
• The setup fee in the software case. This page gives no figure for the fee those owners paid.

10. The checklist

Step	What to do
Put manpower first	Walk more, metrics, market, model and money again, asked about people
More	Ask of all eight ways of getting people whether you can do more; if you can, do it
Metrics	Know your numbers; if people are not the limit, change the other variables, price among them
Market	Ask whether it is impossible or only expensive; remote work, a moving bonus, an avatar 80 percent of the way there
Model	If nobody responds, fix the offer; if the way the role is paid breaks the model, change the structure
Too few applications	Treat it as a lead problem: ads, content, brand, the offer, a mechanism, the avatar
Too much junk	Treat it as a conversion problem: the page, proof, a truthful video, ideally per role, nurturing, interview training, friction
Cannot pay enough	Raise prices to raise pay; pair the sales fixes with the price raise
More per person	Delivery ratio (say, five clients per rep to 10), done with you, capped usage, time blocking, a different pool
Full but flat	Typically demand-constrained; unsure which you are, the recommendation is more money first, then supply

11. What this page does not cover

Employment law is not covered on this page.