Give Away an Egg, Not the Farm
Feb 20th, 2009 by msdanielle
An affiliate friend of mine called me a couple days ago, concerned with the issues of hiring a part-time employee and not giving away all of his wonderful affiliate secrets in the process. Basically, How do I hire someone and ensure they don’t steal my business formula for themselves? Here was my advice to him.
Why Are You Hiring?
I took a step back and asked him why he was hiring. An obvious question but one that needed to be asked. He was looking to expand on his affiliate business but needed help. Since many of us work individually in affiliate marketing, we sometimes don’t know what to do when we need help doing grunt work and freeing up our time. There’s always the option to offshore the work to some overseas company, but often that requires micromanagement of important tasks, not to mention the fact that by hiring an assistant you’re putting money back into the hands of someone in your local economy. Anyway, like many affiliates, my friend wants to hire someone to help, not to run his business.
If You Don’t Want Your Secrets Out, Don’t Give Them Away
My simple advice to him was, if you don’t want someone to take your ideas, don’t give them away. You can hire helpers (domestic or abroad) to do the grunt work without giving them the knowledge or foundational principles of how you monetize your particular business. They will learn parts of your business no matter what (the egg), but they won’t be able to take your business from you (the farm). The discussion reminded me of the book and slogan “Only the Paranoid Survive.” Until you’ve built your business to where it is making a greatly profitable amount, protect it with everything you have as best you can.
For instance, if you’re running newsletter campaigns and you want to jump them to the next level, hiring someone to manage your newsletters and reduce your unsubscribe rates would be a helpful use of time. Give the person a few Seth Godin books, and see what they can do to your retention rates. It doesn’t mean they will understand how the article content and links within the newsletters are tracked and how they convert. It’s your job to optimize the monetization side of the business.
Later on down the line, when you’re ready to expand from the business and relationships you’ve been able to establish with your newfound free time, you can hire a more trusted business manager. Just remember to pull out that trusty NDA/non-compete.
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Teaching a dog new tricks can be to your own detriment, especially in the virtual type of business we all dabble in, where you are not selling a solid, tangible product as in a conventional business, but rather skills and services. Keep the business compartmentalized, and that should prevent the helper from getting too clever and deciding to do things for themselves.
I can understand your friends concerns. You can outsource a lot of work but there will come a time when you need to hire people to do specific tasks which are key to your websites growth and/or succes. And with certain jobs I’m sure the part time eployee will be thinking ‘Hey, I could be doing this myself and keeping all of the money’.
I think this is something which all industries suffer from. How many of the most successful companies in the world were created by ex employees of a company who wanted to go out alone.
It’s a double edged sword. The more competent and knowledgeable the employee becomes the better they will be at their job, however they are then more likely to go elsewhere : either for a better pay or to develop something themselves.
I think the pros of hiring someone outweigh the cons and losing ideas or secrets is just a risk you have to take (unless you make them sign something in their contract which restricts them from doing so).
NDA for the win. That’s what EVERY employee I hire signs. Effective until 2 years after they are no longer with the company.
That is the theory anyway. My experience with non disclosure agreements is that your trade secrets can still be highly compromised, although not officially so!
[...] marketing. He doesn’t want to give away all of his trade secrets, so Danielle tells him to give away an egg, not the farm. Only tell your hired help what they need to know to complete the task at [...]
While I do think it’s a valid concern, you have to come to that point when you want to hire where you can start trusting others with your business. Like you said, you don’t have to give away all your secrets, just provide enough knowledge to get the job done. With time, though, your friend might come to trust his new employee and be able to give them more responsibility. That’s how a company grows!
IMO it isn’t about keeping assistants dumb. I have found that it takes a quite a long time for people to actually steal your business ideas (yes, it did happen to me!). The most important thing is to ensure that you hold on to your key business idea or your USP. This is the only bit that you have to protect from your assistants.