Your Blueprint to an 8-Figure Business: How to Hire a Dream Team
When I look back at how I built not just one, but two eight-figure staffing businesses, one thing stands out. I didn’t do it alone. Building the right team was absolutely essential. And what I’ve learned about building teams back then, compared to how I build them now, has completely changed how I run my businesses.
Why Recruiters Struggle to Hire for Themselves
It’s funny, but in staffing and recruiting, we’re often terrible at hiring for our own businesses. Why? Because we’re used to selling people. We look for the good parts and focus on fitting candidates into roles, rather than being highly critical and systematic about whether they’re truly the right fit.
This is why having a hiring system is so important. There’s a Harvard study that shows if you don’t have a system, you might as well just hire someone off the street who meets the minimum requirements. They’ll be just as likely to succeed as someone you put through endless interviews without a structured process.
Building My First Team
When we built our first eight-figure business, I had a fantastic co-founder, my then-husband, and together we grew by hiring a team around us. But here’s what’s interesting: we didn’t hire recruiters. We hired people with industry expertise in the niche we served.
Our niche was title insurance, so we hired title insurance professionals and trained them to be recruiters. It worked brilliantly. Why? Because you can teach someone how to recruit, but you can’t teach drive. And I’ll take drive over recruiting experience any day.
Our very first hire was a 17-year-old community college student who worked part-time at a diner. The moment she walked into our office, I knew she had something special. No business experience, no recruiting background, but tons of drive. Fast forward, and she eventually became the CEO of one of our subsequent companies, which we later sold. Last I checked, she was leading APAC at Meta. If I had insisted on hiring an experienced recruiter, I would have missed out on Meg.
Learning the Hard Way About Management
I’ll be honest, I was a terrible manager in the beginning. I was a control freak, a micromanager, and I made some laughable mistakes. At one point, we thought it would be a great idea to equip everyone with walkie-talkie-style phones so we could hear everything happening in each office at all times. It was a disaster.
But through those mistakes, I learned. Over time, I discovered that leadership isn’t about controlling every detail; it’s about empowering the right people and letting them do their jobs.
Building Around Vision
One of the biggest lessons I’ve learned is that business should align with personal vision. I build my companies around the life I want to live, and I also ask my team members about their own vision. If they can see how my business helps them achieve their personal goals, they’re far more likely to stay and thrive.
At one point in my career, I realized I needed to step away from running everything myself. During my first pregnancy, I ended up on bed rest for 10 weeks while we were doing around $25 million in revenue. That was a turning point. We brought in more executives, and it was a reminder that no matter how driven I was, I couldn’t scale without building the right leadership team.
How I Build Teams Today
Fast forward to now. I wanted a business where I didn’t have a physical office or direct employees. I wanted to see if I could build a high-functioning offshore team that could execute my vision while allowing me to focus only on the things I love and excel at.
And it worked. Today, my entire team is offshore. They handle everything from operations to execution so I can stay in my zone of genius. That’s how I built not just my business, but also my current staffing agency, the ATeam.
The ATeam doesn’t just provide virtual assistants. We provide sharp, strategic operators. Because my mission now is to make entrepreneurship easier for anyone who wants to start and grow a company.
The Truth About Scaling
You don’t scale by doing more. You scale by doing less of the wrong things and trusting the right people to handle the rest.
Does it always work out? No. Sometimes you put trust in the wrong person, and it doesn’t pan out. But I’d rather take that risk than spend my life micromanaging and burning out.
A Question for You
So let me leave you with this:
- Who on your team do you need to make sure stays on your team?
- And who have you been holding onto for too long?
Building a team isn’t about hiring bodies to fill roles. It’s about aligning vision, trusting the right people, and letting go of the need to do it all yourself.
If you’re ready to stop doing it all alone and want a team you can truly count on, that’s exactly why I built the ATeam. We match agency owners with highly skilled offshore operators who take things off your plate so you can focus on growth, strategy, and the work you actually enjoy.
Hi! I’m Diane Prince. I co-founded a company that we built from scratch to $50 million in six years and sold to a strategic buyer. I am a keynote speaker that talks and writes about building startups, founding businesses, and entrepreneurship. I share my perspective from my own experience from over 25 years building, scaling, and selling businesses.
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