of a more secure world. this is what membership is. this is what membership does. time now to answer some of your business questions. jeffrey and larry are back with us once again. the first one is about effective ways to grow your employee base. what advice do you have for young companies as they re looking to grow their teams? what best practices on hiring would you have? larry, i ll start with you on this one. what advice do you have for him? go slow. especially when you re new and you don t have a lot of extra money, the most expensive thing you ll ever have as eye line item in your budget will be people. you make darn sure you really need to hire more people and that you can afford to hire more people. first thing i would do is ask
companies that you ve been involved with have successfully garnered media attention and utilized that to their best ability to either launch a product or bring their brand and image to a larger scale. this is your expertise, jeffrey. i love opm, other people s money. i m going to get other people to talk about my product. the best way to do that is deliver it beyond anything than you ve done before. people will recommend you and that s the best way. do a great job at what you re doing. is it just a matter of delivering something great, or do you also have to ask your customers, hey, write about us. there s nothing wrong with asking. you should be asking. i say in my last book, never stop selling your company. always keep selling. i can tell you the number of times i ve gone in someone s office, a friend of mine and they go, i didn t know you did that. i fail to do that. i learned early on, sell, sell, sell. larry? well, the worst jeffrey is
more from the people who already work for you. as far as best hiring practices, ask the tough questions. ask them what books they ve been reading lately. ask them what they know about you and your company and your industry. if i m just looking for a job, let them look someplace else. if they don t know anything about your company, it s not worth talking to them. the network of family and friends and that group. i ve always found the best people that way. the other thing is i d ask them why wouldn t i hire you? it s amazing how many people actually answer that question in an interview. when i talk to that potential hiree. they don t say because i work too hard. something stupid like well, i m always late or things like that. it s amazing how i can just check them off the list. i m with larry. ask some really direct and hard questions. okay. let s move on to the next one. here s a question about getting more exposure for you and your company. i would like to ask how the
decisions. and five, secure your i.t. invest in a firewall as well as anti-virus, malware and spyware detection software. when we come back, jeffrey and larry will answer some of your small business questions about how to expand both your staff and your marketing reach. and it s that time of year to go back to school. so i return once more to my alma mater who learn more about succeeding with a minimum viable product. you re comfortable here. it s where you email, shop, even bank. but are you too comfortable? these days crime can happen in a few keystrokes. american express can help protect you. with intelligent security that learns your spending patterns, and can alert you to an unusual charge instantly. so you can be a member
the small group and they re usually a lot like us. we want to expand beyond those like us. again, this is a great example of social media. it s a great way to do this in very easy ways and there s lots of survey tools out there that you can use that are free and some you have to pay for. you should be adding more zeros here. also about getting feedback, this gets to your point, larry, about being ready to handle. on feedback, if you get feedback from people, you have to be prepared to be able to react to it, right? yes. especially negative feedback. for a guy who sells all that fear, i get a lot of negative feedback. you have to be able to handle that criticism and learn from every critique that you get. larry and jeffrey, i love talking to you guys. i hope you re back soon. if any of you out there have a question for our experts, all you have to do is go to our website, the address is open forum.com/your business. once you get there, hit the ask the show link. open forum.com/you