Back in March 2019, I had made over €78.000 with my consulting business, and I started thinking of building a team. My plan was simple:
Hire interns on the cheap
Train them to generate a ton of additional business
Hire them full time as they cover their expenses
Become the CEO of a large sales consulting business
However things didn’t really turn out this way, here’s why:
Hiring interns is time-consuming
What I didn’t foresee with hiring interns was the time and effort necessary to hire one. I started by posting an ad on Berlin Startup Job for an “Entrepreneur in residence“. I thought it would make the offering more sexy.
Within a few days, I received over 100 applications from people all over the world. Most of them weren’t qualified or required a visa to work in Germany, which means a lot more effort and money than I could afford.
I ended up booking 24 screening calls of 30 minutes each. That’s 12 hours, just to find out if someone will show up to a Zoom call and look presentable. I ended up asking the same questions, over and over, only to shortlist 3 people.
At the time, I was working from a coworking space called “The Place“. I invited each of the 3 candidates to meet me onsite for a 2 hour workshop. Only 2 showed up, but with preparation, each workshop was actually 4 hours of work.
And at the end of the process, I realized that no candidate was a fit for what I was looking for. I decided to give up on hiring an intern.
Here’s how much time I spent for this whole process:
Building the job post: 4 hours
Preparation of interview questions: 2 hours
Screening of resumes: 10 hours
Inviting participants to screening calls: 2 hours
Performing screening calls: 12 hours
Debriefing screening calls: 2 hours
Preparation of workshop: 2 hours
Invitation to workshop: 30 minutes
Performing workshop: 4 hours
Debriefing workshop: 2 hours
In total, I spent around 40 hours for absolutely no result.
Interns need training… and a lot of it
Another thing I realized later during my journey as a solopreneur was the amount of work required to train an intern.
I’m quite independent, and I love learning new skills by myself, so I wrongly thought that anyone else would be like that. I quickly learned that most people need a ton of guidance and training (and that’s how I make a living, by the way).
When you hire interns, you have to spend money to pay them, and time to train them. I quickly understood that I had a simple choice to make.
I could either train my customers and get paid to do that, or train my interns and pay them to be trained.
With the limited resources I had, I couldn’t afford training interns, I had to stay focused on training customers (and making money in the process).
Interns have other plans
In Germany, when you hire an intern, you have two choices. You can either hire them as part of their studies, and you know they will leave at the end of their internship, or you can hire them outside of their studies, and they may end up accepting a full-time offer as an extension of the internship.
The first option is cheap (the law allows you to pay them almost nothing), but you’re sure they will leave. It doesn’t make sense to spend time training them if the skills they develop cannot be used after 6 months.
The second option is a lot more expensive. There’s a minimum salary requirement, which can get your total costs to €2.000 (including employer’s contribution, and all other costs of employing someone). But you may end up hiring this person full time.
However, most people choose to become interns to discover a job, get an early professional experience, and use it to land a full time position. It’s quite rare to convert an intern into an employee when you’re a one person consulting shop.
I had the wrong vision
Finally, my reason to hire an intern was the wrong one. I came from a background of VC-backed tech companies. I had experienced the start up life with 10% month-over-month growth.
I remember starting to work at Applause when we were 30, and leaving when we were 150. We were constantly adding new people, restructuring the desk plan to squeeze in more colleagues, and changing offices because we were growing like crazy.
I thought building a business could only be done through aggressive growth, and I didn’t understand that a consulting company would grow differently. I also had this grandiose vision of being the leader of a tribe, and hiring an intern was the first step towards building that vision.
But with time and introspection, I realized a few things about myself.
First, I’m a bad manager. I have no patience with people learning at different speeds than me. I don’t care about personal problems, and I’m way too direct if I’m tired or angry.
Second, I’m too honest to lie. If I hire interns and employees, it’s to make more money. I’m not interested in building a great atmosphere in my team, I’m just interested in making the most money, with the least amount of effort.
Third, I’m a control freak. I don’t know how to delegate and I prefer fixing problems myself than getting someone else to do it another way (I’m working on that by the way).
It took some time for me to come up with these 3 realizations, and accepting them. We’re constantly told that becoming a great leader should be a life goal, that building and leading a team is a great achievement, and that delegating is the key to getting more time.
I’m not interested in building teams or becoming a great leader. I’m interested in choosing what I do with my time, without having to worry about money. Being a solopreneur and working only on things I control allows me to make more money than ever, with more free time than ever.
Delegating will allow me to work on highly lucrative tasks only, and that’s one of the goals I set myself for 2022.
Key Learnings
Through this failed hiring process, I learned a few things:
Be careful what you wish for. Your vision can be misleading.
Don’t underestimate the time needed to hire someone. It’s also incredibly tiring.
You can choose between getting paid to train people or paying interns and training them. When you don’t have a lot of resources, choose wisely.
Interns are interns. They have other plans and you can’t expect them to know exactly what they want to do or stay with you because of your vision.
Make sure you hire interns/employees for the right reasons. If your goal is to hire people so you can become a leader, think twice.
Make an audit of your values. Becoming a leader/manager isn’t for everyone.
Want to escape the hamster wheel too?
If you’re interested in going further, here are 3 ways I can help you:
Go listen to my podcast “Escaping The Hamster Wheel“