Jason Hull, the founder and CEO of Door Grow, and Sarah Hull, the COO, discuss the professional lessons learned from the departure of a long-term team member. They describe the experience as bittersweet, acknowledging the torn feeling between being happy for a departing employee who has a great new opportunity and not wanting to lose a valuable team member.

You'll Learn

(00:00) Bittersweet Departure: Empathy in Leadership

(01:03) Maddie's Journey and Role Development at Door Grow

(06:33) Security Through Documented Processes

(11:08) Confidence in the Door Grow Hiring System

(12:44) The "Super System" and Scalability

(15:56) The Value of Structure and Culture

Quotables

"I think that's the first thing about being a leader is not only wanting what's best for you and the business, but truly wanting what's best for your team."

"Having processes documented has always given me a sense of security."

"The slowest path to growth is to do it alone. So let's grow together."

Resources

DoorGrow and Scale Mastermind

Transcript

Jason Hull (00:02)

Hello everybody, I'm Jason Hall. This is Sarah Hall, the founder and CEO and the COO of DoorGrow, the world's leading and most comprehensive coaching and consulting firm for long-term residential property management entrepreneurs. For over a decade and a half, we have brought innovative strategies and optimization to the property management industry. At DoorGrow, we have spoken to thousands of property management business owners, coached, consulted, and cleaned up hundreds of businesses, helping them add doors, improve pricing,

increase profits, simplify operations, and we run the leading property management mastermind in the industry with more video testimonials and reviews than any other coach or consultant in the industry. So let's get into the show. All right. So we got some news this past what week from my daughter. I need to get rid of that. OK. We got some news this past week from my daughter, Maddie, that she is leaving.

DoorGrow, she got another job offer. And so my oldest daughter has been working for DoorGrow for five years now. Which is wild. And so I remember she called me up from college and she couldn't find a job there. And she later told me the last thing she wanted was to ask me for a job or to work for me at the time.

I guess she was just humbled enough that she had to come to me and ask for a job because she's like nobody was hiring around her campus because it was just a college town. Everybody had taken all the jobs and so she asked if she could do some work for me and ⁓ she started doing some graphic design stuff and she was working on her marketing degree and ⁓ she ended up working for us and she's handled all sorts of things. My social media, DoorGrowth social media.

graphic design stuff, video editing, podcast editing, ⁓ lots of stuff. Client support. And then we moved her into client success. And so then she was managing client success on our team, helping to retain clients and make sure they're supported. that's, yeah, so she's had quite the journey of growth here at DoorGrow. And she was really nervous to tell us that she was leaving.

She was like very concerned about this. And I told her, it's okay, I just want you to be happy. So excited to see her move on to the next thing that she's gonna do. This is like her first job outside of DoorGrow, as far as I know. And so I'm excited for her. ⁓ So we were just thinking like, what are some lessons that we are getting from this experience? And ⁓ yeah, so we thought we'd talk about a few of those things.

The first thing is that moment where you go, I'm losing a team member. And you're kind of torn and you're stuck in between, I'm so happy for them and I want this great opportunity for them and I want what's best for them. And also, man, I didn't want to lose them. That happens a lot. And I would say to anyone out there that has experienced something like that, we had a client.

Jay Shaw that had an amazing person in his business and this person got their dream job opportunity and came to him and said, hey, I don't know what to do with this. And he did exactly what we said. You have to take it. If you want to take it, want you to take it. I want you to do what you think you need to do and what's going to make you happy and what's going to give you

opportunity to learn and grow and challenge yourself and experience different things. Right. So I think that's the first thing about being a leader is not only wanting what's best for you and the business, but truly wanting what's best for your team. Yeah. So that's what, you know, she's my daughter. So of course I want whatever's best for her. Um, one of the things that I realized, one of the things that

I've always been particularly good at is identifying personalities. One of the things we wanted to recommend to all of you is that it's really important to understand your team members and their personality. Meaning, like getting to really know what their natural inclination is towards, not what they're skilled at, not what they're already trained at, but where would they naturally gravitate towards if they had had other opportunities. so Maddie's personality type, she's extroverted.

naturally. I saw this in her growing up. ⁓ She's very much a feeler. She's ⁓ organized and ⁓ so yeah, so was very clear.

Ladybug okay good. I think I on your foot

So totally live. All right. So, ⁓ yeah. So what was I talking about? You were talking about ladybug finding, finding the right personality. ⁓ right. Okay. So Maddie and Myers-Briggs would be probably an ENFJ, right? ⁓ they're great at community. They're great at connecting with others. And she was going to school and eventually graduated while working at Door Girl.

for like graphic design, marketing related stuff, advertising, and she thought, I'm gonna be a graphic designer. Well, I was like, Maddie, are, like, this is, you're naturally great with people. I'm thinking you should move into client success. We had a team member leave. She started taking over client success and doing the social media and graphic design stuff and things like that and podcast editing. And then,

We knew we were gonna scale and so we said, and she knew and she said, well, if I have to pick one role or the other, I think I'll pick client success. And so it's awesome to be able to have that as a father, I think it's super important to understand your kids and to not try to push them into being what you are if you're an entrepreneur, not trying to push them into a certain job or career path in school, but to.

move them towards what their natural personality would be inclined to succeed and win at that they would love to do. And so that's what I've done as much as I can with all of my kids. so Maddie, I thought, let's move her into client success for sure. And when we put her into that, eventually she chose that. She really recognized that she had a skill at that and she was really, really great at it. And that allowed her to grow and develop new skills besides just

graphic design. ⁓ But yeah, she's learned a lot of different skills at DoorGro. She didn't know how to do video editing. She was very much into graphics and then she started editing our videos for us and figuring it out. And so over the years, she's just developed a whole bunch of skills. She's invaluable, super smart, learns lots of stuff. The other, I think, important lesson that is important, you talked about team members, when they leave and how you freak out. Well, we're not really freaking out. And why?

Why are we not freaking out? we're sad to see her go. Sad, happy, bittersweet. A little bit of bittersweet feeling there. we're prepared for any and all of our team members at all times just in case anything happens. And that's one of the things is if they do decide to, for whatever reason, exit their role at your company.

we have all of our processes already documented for each of our team members. So now that she's stepping out of that role, it's not like we're back here scrambling going, we have to hurry up and figure out how she's doing things and have her write it down and have her train somebody else and get everything out of her head. All of that already exists, which means that when we hire someone to step into that role, it will be

infinitely easier for them because everything that Maddie is doing is already documented. What she does and the steps and the systems and the tools that she uses and how she's doing each thing, it's documented in our system. So that in case a team member or sometimes you have several leave at a time, didn't you have a guy that won the lottery and his whole team left? Somebody called me once.

So they lost their whole team because they had an office betting pool with the lottery and they won and everybody quit their jobs. So now you have no team. Yeah. So yeah, very suddenly not likely to happen too often, but no, it is nice. as a, as an entrepreneur, as a founder, as a CEO, having process...

DGS 323: Team Member Departure: Lessons on Hiring