Think it’s too expensive to pull high-caliber people to join your team? I dare you to think again.

I met a couple of entrepreneurs at a recent seminar in Orlando. Although their ventures are very successful and conversation with them was inspiring, I noticed how busy they seemed. Not just busy, but busy as hell, in fact.

As our conversation progressed, they told me they were having trouble hiring great people to join their team. I wasn’t surprised.

I’ve spoken to many startup founders, entrepreneurs and even established Internet marketing gurus. They seem to have the same problem.

They struggle to attract A-quality talent to their companies.

And when you can’t get quality candidates on board, you can’t delegate enough. And of you can’t trust your team’s abilities, you can never build a truly Agile business machine.

People have told many different reasons why they struggle in this area. One reason many people tell me is they can’t afford quality talent. They just can’t afford to pay high caliber employees!

I’ve always tried to dissuade people from thinking that the #1 thing job applicants are looking for is salary! Why? Because there are several things in play when attracting high caliber people to work for your company.

When you show your company’s appeal in all these aspects, people will want to work with you. It’s worked for us, and one you’ve seen the formula, you can make it work for you as well.

Let me share with you some of our hiring statistics. In MindValley, we get applications from all over the world. Our current team consists of 25 people from 16 countries.

We now have citizens of the USA, Colombia, Poland, Russia, Slovakia, India, Indonesia, Malaysia, Estonia, Germany, Belgium, Iran, Yemen, Zimbabwe and Canada working on our team.

These are people who could’ve gotten jobs anywhere else in the world. Meike, from Germany, even turned down an offer from Google, preferring to join us instead for a salary a quarter of what she would have earned had she chosen to work for Google.

We also have solo-entrepreneurs coming to work at MindValley for no pay, just for the opportunity to observe our company dynamics and exchange ideas with other people on our team.

These “visiting guests” include Silicon Valley execs that want to observe new venture design, as well as MBA students volunteering as interns so they can write about company culture for their Master’s Thesis on Organizational Design.

High caliber people are always looking for something more, and MindValley is set up in a way that attracts them because we stumbled upon the right combination to tap into their subconscious desires.

A-class people are motivated and driven by very different things –fun experiences, intense learning environments, and a deeper sense of purpose.

When you visit our “now hiring” page, you’ll see that one of the first things we say is that we are reinventing “work”. We outline the 10 reasons why applicants should choose to work with us, and we talk not only about work, but also about life while working in MindValley.

What can you offer your prospective employees?

The reason we’ve been able to attract A-class people to work on our team in encapsulated in what we call the Job Quadrant.

The Job Quadrant

By looking at the four pieces of the job quadrant puzzle, you can easily recognize where you’re going wrong. So, if you’re trying to attract top talent based on money or learning alone you won’t get them, simply because you’re missing 3 other pieces of the puzzle.

Different industries and roles have variations of the job quadrant. For example,

Money e.g. Financial markets, banking sectors, etc

Fun e.g. Adventure travel and tours, etc

Learning e.g. Academia and other institutions, etc

Purpose e.g. non-profits, environmental agencies, etc

Using MindValley as an example, let’s take a look at each piece of the quadrant puzzle and how we use it to help us get the right people on board.

MONEY:

There’s actually more to life than money

It’s almost weird, but money seems much less important to A-class people. I’ve found that the more educated a person is, and the wider their skill set, the less money matters to them.

You’ll notice that jobs which are mostly not fun, not going to teach you anything, nor give you a sense of fulfillment will try to compensate by paying you more money. Candidates who don’t care about anything but money go for those jobs.

Garbage collectors, for example, make quite a lot of money. Often, they are people driven by the need for money. Perhaps it’s due to unfavorable social circumstances, or their mindset and perception, but more often than not they’re people who are willing to make sacrifices in order to get the higher paying job.

This observation has caused a huge change in the way we hire our team. Personally, I’d hate to work with people who aren’t sufficiently motivated by learning, fun, or purpose. So now, as an example of how differently we position ourselves on the market, we don’t use money as the selling point of our job positions.

By highlighting everything else in the Job Quadrant, and not stating expected income when we promote our jobs, we can filter out people who are motivated solely by money. (make sure you’re subscribed to our list, as we’ll be sending out examples of our most successful job campaigns).

We can safely say that the brightest talent we’ve attracted costs a quarter of what it would cost in USA, plus they get better quality of life than they would in the USA. Adventure, travel, and the metropolitan city, are all at a fraction of what it would cost to have fun in San Francisco, for example.

While other companies talk about job titles and money, you can out-do them by placing emphasis on other parts of the job quadrant, such as…fun.

FUN:

Promise A Fun Lifestyle, not a J-O-B

Take for example, Janne, a member of our team. Janne is a Ruby on Rails programmer from Finland. His skill makes him hot on the wanted market list. His friend in Finland was telling him how excited he was to visit South East Asia, adding that he’d been working himself into the ground all year, saving up for a trip to Thailand. He was wondering when would be a good time for Janne to accompany him.

Janne had to tell him that because he’s working in MindValley, he can go to Thailand any weekend he wants.

This is the kind of lifestyle we’ve tried to create for our team. When we set up shop in Malaysia, we knew it was an ideal location for people who want the combined lifestyle of freedom and work.

Because our office is in Malaysia, it’s only a stone’s throw from the world’s most beautiful beaches and tropical rainforests. We make it so that the work schedule allows people time to escape and explore the Tioman islands, or to fly to Phuket, Thailand for the weekend.

For the kind of people we want to attract, fun also means working with quirky, well-traveled, open-minded, intelligent people. People who enjoy networking, connecting with like-minded people, hanging out in Starbucks, surfing the net, coming up with big ideas and discussing them with other who also happen to enjoy taking frequent vacations to exotic beaches.

Great people enjoy working alongside other great people.

If you visit our website, you’ll notice something different. We put the profiles of our most brilliant people, and we’ve been told that’s why many candidates choose to apply. (It also attracts a lot of headhunters and poaching, but we’re not afraid.)

Great people love to share and bounce their ideas off other great people who are limited in their scope and vision. This is why great people grow. Allowing them to see who they’ll be interacting with and working alongside shows them that we’re interested in their growth and development, not in stifling their talent and abilities.

PURPOSE:

Highlight your deeper purpose

Whether you’re in a non-profit or a web2.0 software development company, there’s a deeper purpose to your business, be it saving the manatee or developing beautiful user interfaces people can use to connect and network online, allow your team to explore their own expressions of that purpose.

We operate in the personal development industry, and because our products help people to grow, we strive to do the same internally…otherwise we’d be hypocrites.

While working with us, we help our employees and give them opportunities to grow into entrepreneurs and joint venture partners (you’ll find out more about this in another post).

We believe that “business” and “saving the world” can be said in the same sentence, and we’re not shy about it.

Many high caliber people feel the same.

You’ll see that members of our team have experience with not-for-profit organizations and volunteer work. It’s in our blood. It’s in theirs, too.

They’re blessed with opportunities, talent, and resources, and most of the time, they are the kinds of people who want to give back. Help them on their mission, and they’ll want to be part of yours.

If you’ve never really given it much thought, if you step back and look at your business I’d bet that there’s a deeper purpose to the reason WHY you’re in the business. You need to make it clear to everyone on your team so that you can work together to achieve it, focusing your energies towards the same direction.

This brings us to the next segment of the quadrant…

LEARNING:

Provide intense learning experiences

When I first spoke to Mike Williams, I was intrigued by the business he was running. He is the co-inventor of a patented, portable Hookah. Even while he was busy growing his business, he had a deep desire to master marketing on the Internet. That’s why he joined MindValley.

But, he wanted to learn all of it. Right Now.

Many high caliber people are like that. They want to learn a lot, and they don’t want to do it by the book.

They want to immerse themselves in it. They want to get their hands dirty and become a master. And they want to do it fast, because they know they can.

For this reason, we offer them the most hardcore Internet marketing training they can ever get.

We run intensive, twice weekly training sessions on Internet marketing and personal development, we pay for all learning products, and more importantly, we have a fine-tuned process to turn the learning into doing (which we will detail in another post).

Within the first 6 months, fresh college kids can implement marketing campaigns for million dollar projects with no supervision.

Top talent learns very fast!

They’ll very soon return the favor by becoming better than you at whatever it is you’re teaching them, thereby adding tremendous value to your business.

NEXT STEP:

Use the Job Quadrant to design the ultimate talent magnet

Redesign your job advertising. How would you put the job quadrant apply into action?

Look at our jobs page for inspiration.Can you pick up how we’ve used the job quadrant to design even our job roles? Have you designed your job in such a way that it appeals to the kind of person you want to attract?

It’s sad that although so many companies do have great opportunities mot just for money but also for fun, learning and purpose, they never showcase these in their advertising.

Think, how will you promise fun for a candidate? What sort of learning experience can you create for them? What’s the deeper purpose of your business?

Imagine you’re interviewing a candidate right now. What kind of questions would you ask them in order to make sure they’re the right fit for your company? What objectives would you now try to achieve in your hiring strategies? What areas are you overlooking that could otherwise appeal to and draw A-class talent to work with you?

When you know what you’re looking for and you ask the right questions to draw out your prospects, you’ll find that their answers will reveal a lot of their deeper motivations. Their answers reveal if they fundamentally fit into what you have to offer.

How does this relate to Agile Entrepreneurship?

Jim Collins said it best. His extensive study of “good” companies versus “great” companies revealed…

Great companies focus on getting the right people on your team before deciding where to go.

More importantly, he cited 3 reasons why.

2 of those 3 reasons relate directly to Agile Entrepreneurship.

• Adaptability. The right people on the bus make adaptation to changing realities much easier. They will figure out what needs to be done when direction changes.
• Motivation: The right people are self-motivated. They want to be part of something great. They will do what’s necessary to produce greatness.

(Read more in detail here, and in his book, Good to Great).

Assembling a core team of adaptable and motivated individuals is essential for Agile Entrepreneurship.

These are people you can train, and trust. These are people who can steer the ship, with or without you.

A team of adaptable, motivated individuals will fuel adaptable, motivated work culture.

Anything less will hinder your success.

How does work get done in your organization?

• Freedom rather than fear?
• Peer-to-peer relationships rather than paternalistic platitudes?
• Engagement rather than estrangement?

If Agile Entrepreneurship is on your mind, you should know which side of the fence to be on.

The folks at WorldBlu call it Organizational Democracy.

There’s a global search and a international award for this every year, where organizations get analyzed and rated… and selected companies make the List of Most Democratic Workplaces.

MindValley is on the 2008 list!

 

Congratulations to the other winners! There are 25 organizations from a diversity of industries, including a Fortune 500 company.

Learn more about organizational democracy and the award from WorldBlu’s site, or you can hear it from the WorldBlu CEO and founder, Traci Fenton…

Perhaps you’ve heard it all before.

Perhaps you know about the need for “agility” or “adaptability” from the realms of personal development, software development, manufacturing, or management.

After all, when you can no longer plan, predict, and control everything in your business environment, you may choose to mutate quickly, adapt, and dominate.

That’s sums up Agile Entrepreneurship in a way, but let’s face it.

Nobody wants to be “agile” for the sake of being agile.

I doubt you’re interested in becoming “agile” for agility sake.

Especially if you’re more interested in growing a business.

We were exactly like that when we first started out 4 years ago. All we cared about was getting our product out, and getting money in.

However, we also had a burning desire to

• Achieve more
• Succeed sooner
• Have more fun and excitement at work

Perhaps you’re interested in that, too.

For us, we wanted it so badly, we tried a couple of crazy ideas and made a pile of mistakes. We were forced to transform our company countless times just to keep growing.

Along the way, we had to use the very best management and marketing tactics (including a wild card or two) to get ahead.

We had to bend the rules of business.

Today, we’re a profitable, award-winning, privately funded internet business incubator. We grow e-commerce businesses. We grow social web applications. With 10 concurrent ventures, and one new venture every months, some of our ventures make up to $1 million in revenue a year, some have just only begun.

More importantly, we grow entrepreneurs.

We’ve got (at the time of writing) a team of 22 of the bright minds from 16 countries in the same room. We’re also awarded “—–”.

Are we based in the Silicon Valley? No way.

We do all of this from a bungalow in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia (a stone’s throw from some the world’s most exotic vacation spots) and have scholars and entrepreneurs visit us, and come work with us, just to see how we do what we do.

We call ourselves MindValley.

Solid examples of Agile Entrepreneurship

We’ll tell you a few stories from our experience, and how adopting Agile Entrepreneurship in your business will help you

• Speed up execution and decision making
• Speed up the rate of discovering what works, and what doesn’t

We will be sharing honest accounts of the stuff we tried, what worked, and deadly mistakes you must avoid in your quest to grow your business.

There will be examples of radical thinking which can help any small business and entrepreneur achieve more freedom and success, in less time.

Follow the conversations on this blog to get it all.

Or, dive right in and get the book for free.

MindValley first started out in New York, despite the high costs of operating a business and hiring talent there. It consisted of three people –Vishen and his wife Kristina, and me.

We were excited and raring to go, and when we looked around, everyone else was outsourcing to India, so naturally, outsourcing seemed like a good idea because we figured being in the US, outsourcing work to people in a developing country would give us a flexible workforce and save us some money.

I know some companies who do really well with outsourcing, but we weren’t so fortunate. Using eLance, we found the first company…it was from Bangladesh, with an office on Wall Street. The company turned out to be a scam, and they ran away with our money. The “office” on Wall Street disappeared.

It’s true. I’m not here to slam outsourcing, and don’t deny that it has its place. We just had a bad experience.

Fortunately, we only lost our $1000.00 deposit, and no more. We were somewhat disillusioned but still hopeful, so we tried again. We had a great idea we knew would work –we wanted to bring everything to the user’s fingertips, right on their home page.

But 5 months later, we were still pushing our programmer to produce the quality of work we needed. 8 months later, we were so frustrated because it was still the same story. They developed a web application exactly the way we wanted it, 12months too late because almost ironically in the 11^th month, someone else launched an application similar to what we were working towards.

At this point, Vishen left his job to focus on MindValley full time. This was tricky, as Vishen was married but not a US citizen. Quitting his job meant losing his H1 Visa and permission to work in the US.

He considered taking MindValley somewhere else. Since his wife’s Estonian, and he’s from Malaysia, they were deciding between Europe and Malaysia for MindValley’s new home –a very difficult decision even after researching our options.

So Vishen, Kristina, and I found ourselves in the heart of Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.

Little did we know that being in Malaysia laid the foundation to what would later be known as our secret weapon in winning the talent war….

If you asked me right now, I can tell you frankly that moving to Malaysia turned out to be the best decision we ever made.

Kuala Lumpur is a very modern city, and is a stone’s throw from exotic holiday destinations.

Over the years, we refined the way we work and MindValley has evolved as we’ve learned new processes and systems, and sought to bring talent from all corners of the world to us.

We stumbled upon a concept more powerful than outsourcing, and it’s funny because it happened almost by accident!

We now have 26 bright people from 16 different countries (and counting), at local salaries, about 1/4 the price we would have to pay them if they were employed in the USA.

Our local salaries are competitive, allowing them better quality of life here, compared even to 3,000 US Dollars in the USA.

But still, why would they pack their bags? If you’ve read the Job Quadrant, you’re already in on the secret.

Of course, we use the rest of the Job Quadrant as well to really attract the kind of talent we needed.

People who hear about what we do don’t know what to call it. So we joked about calling it “Inside-out sourcing”, and the name stuck.

Inside-outsourcing’s best friend?

First, a very brief history lesson. I really don’t mean to bore you, but after reading this section you’ll really catch my drift of how you can leverage on this crazy powerful resource.

The idea started in the 1930s when representatives from schools across Europe exchanged information about various programs and schools that specialized in business and economy. By the late ’30s, students were carrying out internships in other countries, mostly at their own incentive, but it all came to a standstill with the onslaught of World War II.

Informal activity “to help develop ‘friendly relations’ between member countries” began in 1946, with the goal “to expand the understanding of a nation by expanding the understanding of the individuals, changing the world one person at a time.”

They describe themselves as “The international platform for young people to discover and develop their potential so as to have a positive impact on society”.

It’s called AIESEC - the world’s largest student organization, offering internships and traineeships all around the world. Its international office is currently in Rotterdam, Netherlands.

AIESEC is a real gem for those who know about what they do. AIESEC is cool.

Originally an acronym for Association Internationale des Étudiants en Sciences Économiques et Commerciales, AIESEC is an international, non-profit, non-political, organization run by students and recent graduates of institutions of higher education.

As of February 2008, the network includes 25,000 students in 105 countries at over 1100 universities across the globe, and realizing around 5000 exchanges yearly.

Although a lot of people don’t know about AIESEC, we had AIESEC in mind from day one.

Both Vishen and I were part of AIESEC as university students. Through AIESEC, Vishen had the experience of working as a programmer in Bulgaria, and I worked in Turkey as a marketer.

It’s the perfect place to connect with adventurous, highly qualified, knowledge workers - a perfect complement for the company who inside-out sources.

Today, about a third of our people come from AIESEC, and we have to turn away really good candidates on a daily basis, just to allow only the best in through the door.

However, really talented people want more than a “job”. They want a lifestyle.

Being in an exotic country is the ultimate A-class lifestyle dream!

And AIESEC is full of forward thinking students who look for work experience in foreign countries.

Is it worth moving countries, continents even?

Definitely yes.

For the first few months, Vishen and Kristina were in Malaysia and I was working all the way from New York. The moment I stepped off the plane, I knew it was the best thing –ever.

For some strange reason I have never understood, people seem to think that they have to be located where their customers are. Unless you are running and brick-and-mortar “mom and pop” store, I totally disagree.

MindValley is proof that you don’t need to be in Miami or Seattle or New York to run with your business and thrive.

This never fails to bring to mind the term “lifestyle design” –coined by Tim Ferriss in his book, the 4 hour workweek.

1. Find a beautiful place with affordable cost of living, somewhere you enjoy and have dreamt of living.

2. Talk to your wife.

3. Move there.

4. Attract high a high caliber work force.

This is one way to really tap into the power of the job quadrant. Like I said before, smart and talented people want a lifestyle more than they want a “job”.

Use location to maximize the appeal of the other sectors of the quadrant.

Using what Malaysia has to offer, we’ve designed a phenomenal work-life-style. Whenever possible, which is most of the time, we ban work on weekends. Our team has flexible work schedules, allowing them to travel to the world’s most exotic jungles and beaches.

These days, most inside-outsourced hires come in on a 2 year contract, but I think that when you create such a dream job/dream lifestyle for your team, almost all of them extend their contracts!

SUPERTIP: In Malaysia, we don’t pay taxes. Incredible? Absolutely. Technology companies in Malaysia are exempt from paying taxes.

How does this relate to Agile Entrepreneurship?

Inside-out sourcing isn’t for everyone. That’s the honest truth.

But if you’re in a position to start doing this and you are daring enough, here’s how…

1. Think of a country you’d like to live in. Maybe it’s in the Caribbean, maybe it’s in Malaysia. Think of a country that is fun, you can live for about two years, and operating costs are less than it would cost in the USA.
2. Go there, and set up an operation hub.
3. Use the Job quadrant to redefine your workplace, job ads and job positions.
4. Use AIESEC, connect with the local AIESEC chapter, and advertise the lifestyle and work environment of the future.

With inside outsourcing, you could find yourself free from paying taxes, cut your expense on wages by up to 400%, and create jobs which seem more like an adventure and travel than a mundane chore.