Pod Insights The $100 MBA Show MBA2696 Q&A Wednesday: How Do I Find the Best People to Hire On a Budget? About this episode Hiring great talent is tough. Hiring great talent on a tight budget? Even tougher. If you’ve been trying to build a strong team without overspending, you’re not the only one asking how to make it work. This week’s question comes from Rob, who wants to know how to find the right people when resources are limited. Omar shares a fresh take on what makes a smart hire, and why the usual approach to budgeting might be holding you back. You’ll hear how to rethink your hiring strategy, focus on outcomes, and make choices that support long-term growth even if your funds are tight. Curious how to hire better without spending more? Hit play at the top of the page and learn how to make every hire count. To submit your questions, visit 100mba.net/q. Watch the episodes on YouTube: https://lm.fm/GgRPPHiSUBSCRIBEYouTube | Apple Podcast | Spotify | Podcast Feed Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 Small business owners, listen up. You started your business, but you can't do it alone. And that means you have to hire people to help. That's where Justworks comes in. Justworks is the payroll, benefits, and global hiring platform to unburden your brain from all the complicated small business stuff. They handle the things you can't afford to get wrong, so you don't have to worry. So you can focus on the parts of running a business that you enjoy, knowing everything else is running smoothly. You don't have to worry when it just works. Ever invest in something that seemed incredible at first, but didn't live up to the hype? For example, I really wanted to love the show Mad Men. I really tried to watch it and love it, but it just didn't do anything for me. As a marketer and business person, the show was a little bit of a disappointment.
0:45 Speaker 00 Marketers know that feeling. They optimize for the numbers that look great, like impressions. But then, we don't see revenue. LinkedIn has a word for that: bullspend. Instead, you can get the highest ROAS of major ad networks with LinkedIn Ads. Cut the bullspend, advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/MBAShow. Terms apply. Welcome to Q&A Wednesday here on the $100 MBA Show, where I answer your question about business growth and everything in between. Today's question comes from Rob. And Rob asks, "How do I find the best people to hire on a budget?" Hiring is one of the trickiest parts of building a business, in my opinion.
1:30 Speaker 00 Because who you hire is basically what your business becomes. Because the people that hire the best people, the best talented, skilled, hungry people, are the ones that build the best business. And with budget pressures, it makes it even harder. But after 20 years of hiring team members all over the world, I've learned one big truth. A truth that you can't avoid, and that's you get what you pay for.
2:02 Speaker 00 Welcome back to the $100 MBA Show. I'm your host, Omar Zenhome, where I deliver practical business lessons three times a week, Monday, Wednesday, and Friday, to help you start, grow, and scale your business.
2:15 Speaker 00 Real quick, if these episodes help you in any way, hit the follow button on this podcast app. It helps us to keep bringing you practical business insights three times a week for free. Thanks. So let's break down how to make smart hires even when money's tight. I know this sounds like, you know, you get what you pay for means I have to pay more to get great talent. Not necessarily. You need to kind of change the way you see hiring and see it as a job to be done. How can I get this job done efficiently and cost effectively as possible? But make sure that I'm doing as much as possible with the money I have. I'll explain in today's lesson. Most entrepreneurs, they try to hack hiring. They're looking for a deal. They're looking for the diamond in the rough.
3:00 Speaker 00 I know this for a fact because I used to be one of those people. I thought that I could, you know, find somebody that's really hungry and ambitious and smart, and they're just up and coming. And, you know, I'll just be able to afford them and then they can grow with me. Very hard to find, in my opinion, impossible to find. The person who will work for peanuts and then somehow deliver like a rock star only exists in your head. It only exists in your dreams. But in reality, that is just not the case. The case is that everybody that you see out there has value. And the more valuable they are, the more expensive they will be to hire. If you underpay, you usually get underperformance or they're just low in talent or skill.
3:44 Speaker 00 We have to establish this truth. There is such a thing called talent and skill. There's such a thing that people have experience. There's such a thing that people just are objectively better at something than somebody else. And you have to pay for that delivery of that kind of work. If people are great at something, you're going to have to pay a little bit more than somebody who's mediocre. I find that when you try to hire, looking for a deal, try to find someone that's less expensive, you end up... With a lot of things you don't want to deal with, like missed deadlines and low initiative, or high turnover, where they just leave you when you need the most. This leads to costing you more than you think, right? It actually ends up costing you more than just hiring the more expensive person, the more skilled and qualified person in the first place.
4:27 Speaker 00 Instead, I want you to have a better mindset when it comes to hiring. And that mindset is have or create a budget to get the job done. When you have a problem in your business that needs solving, like sales or marketing or customer support, that's a problem that needs solving. How can you use your budget to get that problem solved? Then find the best way to allocate that budget for that result. I'm going to break down and give you some examples exactly what that means. But think about solving the problem. Getting a certain job done in your business, rather than I need to find one or two or three people to do this job. Let's say you got $4,000 a month in your budget to spend on customer support. You're getting a lot of emails, a lot of customer support queries, and you need somebody else or a team to handle this.
5:11 Speaker 00 Now, you've got a few choices. I'm going to give you some random choices here. These are viable choices, but they're not your only choices. The first one is maybe you hire out of the Philippines. Philippines is a great place to hire because you get exceptional workers, people that are good at what they do, at a pretty reasonable price. You could hire four full-time support reps for $1,000 a month each. That's one option. You can get four people working for you for $1,000 a month. And that would exhaust your $4,000 total budget. Or option number two is that you can hire out of South America or South Africa, where you can get two solid customer support reps for $2,000 a month each. Or you can hire out of the US, the UK, Canada, or Australia.
5:55 Speaker 00 And maybe you can hire one part-timer for 30 hours a week for the same budget, for $4,000. Which one is best? Well, this is how you can know which is best. Use this rule. You don't hire based on how many people you can afford. You hire based on who will get the job done best. Sometimes hiring one higher skilled, more experienced person beats four lower skilled people. Other times, you really do need that coverage if you want to offer 24/7 support and have people take shifts at different times, at different parts of the world. So a team in a lower-cost country might make sense. The holidays are the season business owners get pulled in six directions. More calls, more requests, more chances for things to slip through the cracks.
6:40 Speaker 00 Hoping you catch it all isn't a plan. That's why today's episode is brought to you by QUO, spelt Q-U-O. The business phone built so you never miss a call or a customer. Ever have a lead call or text at 10:00 PM? QUO's AI agent handles both 24/7. It answers questions, gets to the details, and can text them a link to book an appointment. By morning, you've got the summary and can jump right in. And nobody should have to ask customers to repeat themselves. In QUO, every call, text, and voicemail lives in one thread. So anyone on the team can jump in already knowing the whole story. If you have a business where your customers call or text you, this is a no-brainer. You must have QUO. Money is on the line. Always say hello with QUO.
7:25 Speaker 00 Try QUO for free, plus get 20% off your first six months when you go to quo.com/mba. That's Q-U-O dot com slash MBA. Today's episode is sponsored by Upwork. I don't need a script to tell you how much Upwork has helped my business. I've been using Upwork for over a decade, and it's the easiest way to find top talent to grow your business. From software development to AI implementation to marketing, design, and business operations. You can browse profiles, review past work, and get help scoping the role so you can hire with confidence and get started quickly. With Business Plus, you can access the top 1% of talent on Upwork.
8:04 Speaker 00 With over 170,000 freelancers holding five-star ratings, you can hire with the confidence that comes from hiring someone with a verified track record. I've hired engineers, customer service agents, marketers, copywriters, all on Upwork that helped grow my business from the moment they got hired. The best thing is, it's free to sign up, and posting a job is easy. Visit upwork.com right now and post your job for free. That is upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business grow. That's U-P-W-R-K dot com, upwork.com.
8:43 Speaker 00 Let me give you some counterintuitive examples. And here's where it really gets interesting. Example number one is customer support coverage. If your customers are global, let's say around the world, hiring two reps in South America might give you a time zone coverage. And if they're fluent in English and Spanish, you cover two languages. That actually outperforms four cheaper hires in one region. Let's go with another example. High skilled jobs like engineers, like salespeople, like management. Okay, one top tier hire can produce 10x the output. I'm telling you, I've experienced this over and over and over in my career as an entrepreneur, where I've had one person on my team that produces 10x the return on investment than another employee. And sometimes they're in the same field. There could be two different engineers.
9:28 Speaker 00 One engineer is just producing so much better work and high quality and volume. So paying that person 1.5 or 2x the going salary can actually save you money because you're buying an incredible tool for leverage in your business. I'm not calling them a tool. I'm just calling them a huge asset to the business. That A player might close more deals than five average sales reps combined. You know, this engineer can be producing more features and more bug fixes than anybody else on the team. That manager could be relieving you of, you know, 70% of all your headaches right now and is saving you so much time for you to focus on scaling your business. There's so much value in paying above market rate
10:13 Speaker 00 for highly talented people. In my opinion, this is one of the biggest hacks that you can deploy in your business right now is hire an A player, somebody that is way above average and therefore deserves way above average salary. But you're going to get so much in return. It's one of the easiest ways to just like turbo boost your business, right? To turbo boost it into another galaxy. Let me give you an example or just expand on what I've been talking about when it comes to productivity versus headcount. I once hired a team of bargain developers overseas. And it sounds great because you have all these hands on deck to, you know, ship features and fix bugs and help, you know, the company develop better code and all that kind of stuff, right? And it's low cost, but the coordination, the missed deadlines,
10:57 Speaker 00 the rework we had to do after all the damage that was done. Almost killed us, right? Later, I hired one senior engineer at double the cost of one of those engineers. And guess what? That one hire shipped more, shipped more code faster and was better than the entire team. Okay, than having a whole team of developers. That one person was producing better results than just having a bunch of people that were mediocre or below average. So, the counterintuitive truth is sometimes fewer, better people are more cost-effective than spreading your budget thin. And guess what? When you have less people, you have less people to manage. Every time you bring somebody on your team, there's onboarding, there's training, there's
11:42 Speaker 00 management, you want to make sure that they're feeling rewarding, you want to make sure they're motivated, you want to make sure that they have time to talk to you if they have questions or need training, or whatever it might be. Okay? You also have to pay for all these tools for them. You know, when you start building a business, you start using software and different kinds of tools for them to do their job. And every time you hire a new person, that's another expense on your books for all these tools. And sometimes that adds up. So, actually, it's more efficient to have high-quality people, less people in your team, and there's less to manage, less to worry about, less to spend on. Many of my friends run businesses that make $5 to $10 million in revenue each year at like 60 to 7% margins. And their team is small, you know, 5 to 10 people.
12:24 Speaker 00 And therefore, so much profit goes back into the pockets of the founders. So, this is like, in my opinion, success, right? Where you're doing a lot with so little, with not that big of a team, but the team is well-oiled, highly motivated, talented. And guess what? A players love being around A players. So, if you have a team of A players and you only hire high-quality people when you need them, then it actually becomes a great environment for them. And they feel motivated, they feel like they're amongst their peers, they feel like they're working in a high-level company. But when you try to dilute your team with not-so-talented people, it's not such a motivating place for people that are very skilled and high-achieving. So, keep that in mind.
13:07 Speaker 00 Keep in mind the culture that you're building in your company. So, how do you apply all this when you're on a tight budget? We've got to answer this question, okay? Step one, define the outcome clearly. What exactly does success look like after this is done? After this role is fulfilled? What are you looking for? Are you looking for faster response time when it comes to customer support? Or is the quality of the response more important? And you're willing to sacrifice first response time? Meaning like, I want high quality, but the response will be within 24 hours rather than five minutes? Are you looking for more sales closed? Is that what you're hiring the sales position for? Is it purely for that? Or you want to qualify leads and get some sales? You want somebody who's a little bit dynamic?
13:50 Speaker 00 Are you looking for a better designed product like UX and UI? Or is it about somebody that can do design okay, but also can do the coding? Or is design the top reason why you are suffering right now? Where you are not doing very well in your business and you need to get the best of the best and focus all your budget on that? So that's step one. Get super clear. Step two, allocate your budget to results, not headcount. Don't ask, "How many people can I afford?" Ask, "Which plan will deliver the best results within this budget? I have this budget. What's the best way I can get the best results?" Sometimes that's a part-time hire. Maybe that's a consultant. Maybe that's a freelancer. Maybe that's somebody who's working project-based, like on Upwork. Think of the result.
14:34 Speaker 00 How can you get to the best result possible with your budget? Maybe with your budget, if it's like $4,000 a month, let's say, instead of getting whatever you're trying to get done in one month, you get it done in three months, but the quality is super high because you spread over three months. So now your budget's not really $4,000, but more like $12,000. Tip number three, pay above-market in lower-cost regions. If you hire out of the Philippines, or South America, or wherever, don't just pay average. Pay above-market. You'll attract the best talent in that region and they'll stick with you longer because they're going to think twice before leaving you, knowing that I can't get the same salary if I start all over. So you're investing in loyalty.
15:17 Speaker 00 You know, when I hire, I think, okay, how can I pay this person so that they stick with me for at least the next three to five years? Because I want to get a return on the Investment I'm making with this person, not only in terms of the money, but the time I spend on training and cultivating their talents and making sure they're working at their best. And finally, tip number four, invest in A players for critical roles. I'm talking about leadership, I'm talking about engineering, I'm talking about product, I'm talking about sales. Anything that deals with how you make money, okay? You want to splurge if you can. One great person can change your company. I would also add marketing to that. Cause marketing, in a lot of ways in the digital world, is how you bring in high qualified leads and customers
16:01 Speaker 00 that then can be easy to sell to. So Rob, who asked today's question, the answer is this, stop hunting for a deal when you are hiring for people. You get what you pay for. Use your budget to get the job done, not to maximize headcount, even if you need to do it over a longer period of time. Or it's gonna allow you to just get started. Sometimes you have a budget, okay? Just get started with a part-time hire, so that you can get a return on that investment and take that return in money that you make from the business, because you invested in your business, it's a better business now. And then go and take that money and hire somebody that can give you more time, or you know, hire somebody that's higher qualified. This is why I always say when you're making your first few hires in your business,
16:43 Speaker 00 one, try to get a hire that's gonna free up your time so that you can make more money for the company. But two, try to hire positions that will get you a return on investment, meaning that directly impact the dollars you make in your business. Now, sometimes when you're trying to solve the problem that you're trying to solve in your business with hiring, it means hiring more people, but sometimes it means fewer, but better people, but people that are just on top of it. And in the long run, the right hire will always be cheaper, in my opinion, oh boy. The right hire will always be cheaper than the wrong hire. Because wrong hires will cost you not only time and money of all the time they were with you in the company, you gotta fix all the problems that they created while they were there.
17:28 Speaker 00 And trust me, I've made some really bad hires, I'm not ashamed to admit it, because I've learned from it, that cost me a lot of money. I had a bad hire that cost me over a quarter million dollars. So I don't want you to make that mistake. Hire the best possible talent with your budget. Thanks for the great question, Rob. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. There is a rule I learned the hard way in hiring, and that is trust but verify. Always, always, always when you make a hire, put them on a test project, on a probation period, on a trial run, where you just tell them, hey, we're going to work with each other for the first two months, three months. And at the end of the three months, we can shake hands and say goodbye to each other if it's not a good fit for either of us.
18:10 Speaker 00 But this is your chance to see how they actually work with real problems, with real customers, with real challenges in your business, with your teammates, so that you make sure they're a cultural fit as well. And that way, you don't invest too much money into the wrong hire. Sometimes you make the wrong mistake. Some people interview really well, and their evaluations are great, but what you really want to do is make sure with a trial run in the real world, in your business, to see if they can actually do the job that they say they can. That way, you know really quickly, even within the first month, sometimes you'll be like, hey, one month is gone, I already know that you're not great for the team, or not great for this position, we're going to have to say goodbye. So that three-month period gives you some wiggle room to figure out. It's kind of like an extended interview.
18:53 Speaker 00 So this way, you're not putting up so much money to find out if you have the right person. If you found today's episode helpful and you want more practical business lessons to help you start, grow, and scale your business, the best thing you could do is subscribe to this podcast. Hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, whether it's Apple or Spotify, or wherever you listen to podcasts. By hitting subscribe, you get our next episode automatically, and it's the best way to support the show. It's absolutely free, and it's a way for you to commit to growing your business. And now that you've subscribed, I'll check you in the next episode.
19:38 Speaker 01 Does it feel like it's getting really hard to figure out the best way to save for retirement? Fidelity can help you find clarity, so you can save the best way for you. With a free personalized plan, goal tracking, and timely insights, you'll be set to take on retirement your way. Get started at fidelity.com/future. Expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account apply. Fidelity Brokerage Services, member NYSE, SIPC.
Previous MBA2694 5 Ways To Use The Holidays To Make More Money Next MBA2697 How to Know Why You’re Not Making Enough Money in Your Business Page updated November 6, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
