Domaining MBA Monday: The Biggest Challenge Building A Domaining Business Is Finding Great People

Domaining MBA Monday

As many of you know I no longer work day-to-day in the domain industry. I spend about 30 minutes a day writing my blog and outside of that my entire focused morning afternoon and night is Fashion Metric. However my domain business continues to grow and more hours are spent working on Linton Investments than ever before, I’m just not the person spending the time doing it.

Where I do spent time is finding great people which is actually much harder than finding great domain names. Since this is Domaining MBA Monday I thought now would be a great time to talk about finding great people to run your business.

First things first. You can’t start hiring people until you’ve found a repeatable business model. It took me three years to do this working 40+ hours a week. If you can only spend a couple hours a week it could take you a decade or longer. Yes, Domaining is hard. There are no shortcuts and what worked for one person might not work for you.

Until you have a business model, i.e. a way that you make money, you aren’t ready to hire people. Once you do have a model that you have repeated over and over and are confident works, then it’s time to systematize and find other people to run the tactical so you can focus on the strategic.

So let’s say you have a model that works. Maybe you own a portfolio of geo-targeted domains focused on dentists and you’ve sold ten of them to dentist offices. You have a repeatable model, now you need to pull yourself out of the equation and find someone to do it for you. What you’ll quickly find is that good people are hard to find…why? Well-qualified people tend to either be working for someone else (like Google, Facebook, etc.) or they are running their own business and hiring people themselves.

This is why you need to look beyond people that are looking for jobs and find people that you know are already qualified to do the job that you want them to do. Once you think you find the right person, the journey begins. You need to train your team, provide them with the tools they need to succeed, and continue to push and inspire them.

Sounds hard? It is but if you’re going to build a Domaining Business rather than become a self-employed Domainer you’ll have to take the plunge and move from a day-to-day worker to a business owner. Next week I’ll share some tips for finding good people and share some of the mistakes I’ve made and learned from along the way.

Morgan Linton

Morgan Linton