We recently connected with Ish Laos and have shared our conversation below.

Ish, looking forward to hearing all of your stories today. Your ability to build a team is often a key determinant of your success as a business owner and so we’d love to get a conversation going with successful entrepreneurs like yourself around what your recruiting process was like -especially early on. How did you build your team?

When I first ventured into my new business, it was just me, myself and I. At the time, it was strictly a website design company. Looking back during those times now, I think it was the best way that things could have played out.

I say that because I had made SO MANY mistakes, which at the time, were devastating to me. A lot of lessons were learned, a lot of business was lost, and many times I reached an ultimatum of whether I should keep going, or go back to looking for a job.

It’s important to understand your industry extremely well before even considering hiring someone to help run your business. Time is the only remedy to becoming more of an authority figure in your line of work. And this is just the business on the front end. As a person just starting out, I had no concept of what it truly took to hire someone, in particular as a digital marketing agency.

I suppose if you run a brick and mortar business, things would a bit different. For instance, if I were to own a pet shop, I would know exactly the type of help I would need, whether it be working as a cashier, bookkeeping, stocking aisles, etc…

But for a digital marketing agency, you could completely blow your budget by spending most of your employee’s production time in training them, in correcting mistakes, in cleaning up customer disputes, emailing, putting out fires, etc… All this before the employee actually gets to do the job they were hired to do.

It’s for these reasons that working on my own was what worked best for me. I had to learn the procedures myself. I had to wear all the hats, I had to make all the mistakes.

Most people who start their own business are individuals who have a technical skill and want to build a business around it. Most of those same individuals have zero experience when it comes to running a business, and hiring a staff is no easy task if you’re just starting out.

When I finally did come around to looking for help, oddly enough, I logged onto Facebook and just put it out there to all of my friends. I was really surprised at how many people were interested. The advantage here is that you are hiring someone you already know, or a friend of a friend.

The role I was looking for did not involve any serious technological background or anything. It was basically a lot of common-sense stuff, and only required some skills such as experience with Google docs, being really good at navigating around the web, knowing how to find stuff on Google, etc… I was also looking for people who took exceptional pride in grammar and punctuation, etc… This was most likely because I was so bad at it.

So, for the first few hires, it was great. I hired a few “stay at home” moms who had some extra time on their hands while their kids were away at school. The great part about this was that they brought their own skills to the business, skills they acquired when they worked in the corporate world. So, I learned a lot from them, and was very grateful.

All of this worked out well at the time because I had just the right number of clients to support new hires. But there certainly came another breaking point in my timeline when business really started to pick up.

I did not know how to scale my business, so more critical learning and more mistakes were to come. But thanks to today’s powerful platforms, SOP (standard operating procedures) software, and some exceptional skills in organization, onboarding a new employee can be much more efficient, and enjoyable.

Looking back at it all, If I were to do it all over again, there is not a single thing I would change.

Great, appreciate you sharing that with us. Before we ask you to share more of your insights, can you take a moment to introduce yourself and how you got to where you are today to our readers

My name’s Ish Laos, and I run a digital marketing agency in Atlanta, GA. called webstuffguy.com. I started way back in 2009, where I created my first website for the company I worked for at the time. The owner then referred me to other business owners, and things snowballed from there.

Today we offer much more than just websites. We help business owners establish a web-presence online. Our services include things such as, inbound marketing, SEO (Search engine optimization), online advertising such as Pay-Per-Click, local business optimization and much more.

We have over 150 five-star reviews, the most of any other agency in Atlanta, and we love what we do!

What’s been the most effective strategy for growing your clientele?

For me, the most effective strategy for growing my clientele is to offer more services that people are looking for. Some people will tell you to only hone one specialty and become really good at it. I don’t know, that hasn’t been my experience. I am always searching to find more ways to help my clients. I pay very close attention to the questions I often get asked, and then evaluate whether or not I can offer a service that would benefit their situation, even if it’s a skill that I have to learn from scratch.

What’s been the best source of new clients for you?

My number one source of new clients, without question is Google. It really does pay to have a good presence in Google searches. Sometimes, I’m too busy to see what they searched for to come across my company, but it seems that all my hard work truly does pay off.

Contact Info:

• Website: https://www.webstuffguy.com
• Other: https://360virtualbusinesstours.com https://atlantadronepros.com/ https://seo-swag.com/