Poor Onboarding is a Silent Poison in Your Startup

Getting new hires up to speed is an unfair advantage (especially in proptech)

Author

Nate Smoyer
November 30, 2023

Will you be Scottsdale next week?

I’ll be attending IMN SFR in Scottsdale next week. If you’re planning to be there, let’s find time to connect! Reply to this email and I’ll send you my calendar. Looking forward to catching up, talking marketing, and capturing interviews on site.

Many years ago, Canaries were used by coal miners to detect dangerous gasses, such as carbon monoxide. The bird would alert miners of dangerous gasses by dying (sorry for the tragic story right out the gate). This however was an alert to the miners to vacate the mine shaft so that they too wouldn’t fall victim to the silent, odorless, and tasteless killer gasses.

Unfortunately for too many, Canaries are not suited for finding problems in your marketing team (or entire startup for that matter). And there is an odorless, tasteless poison within many companies. It’s poor onboarding.

Why Onboarding Matters

Successful onboarding is a cheat code to growth. Some treat onboarding as if it’s a matter of just making sure an employee gets a computer, knows how to submit a reimbursement, and completes legally mandated trainings. But you’re missing the most important stuff.

Successful onboarding accomplishes the following (and more):

  • Squashes cognitive dissonance (buyers remorse, if you will) about joining your startup—quickly (read: increases retention)

  • Establishes healthy relationships amongst peers, both on the employees new team and elsewhere throughout the company

  • Creates consistent cultural patterns and habits

  • De-mystifies industry and internal jargon, reducing the feel of being the new person who feels lost in discussions

  • Accelerates the speed of industry and internal education, reducing the “who does” or “how do I get” type of questions

  • Encourages empathy for the customer

The list of benefits goes further than this and I’ll provide a few more links below, if that’s your thing.

“Nate, I thought this newsletter was going to focus on marketing. What’s this got to do with marketing?”

Valid question. This has everything to do with marketing.

Marketing Makes Promises Product Must Keep

Ineffective onboarding leads to in-congruencies across teams. It also leads to poor copy, design, positioning, strategies—should I continue?

Remember when I said “Data is Content”? Or how about “Product is Your Best Marketing Channel”? These ideas do not ever come to fruition without solid onboarding. That’s because these ideas require knowledge of what other teams do, what they care about, company values, technical capabilities, and creating cohesion across teams.

Onboarding is not just a marketing team problem. It truly is an organizational problem. But here’s the deal, marketing is making promises on behalf of the organization.

Marketing is telling the world about your AI, your automation, your advanced analytics, etc. These promises are in the form of ads, social media, email, conference banners—anywhere marketing is pumping out messaging. But if that messaging is inaccurate, false, or fails to demonstrate empathy for the customer, you’ll be set up for poor conversion rates, high CAC, and disappointing results. Not to mention it’ll brew conflict between marketing and other teams as it’ll look as if marketing is clueless on how to promote the product. How can your new lifecycle manager fully understand the customer if you’re asking them to launch email campaigns day two?

Slow is Smooth, Smooth is Fast

When I am building a team, I aim to provide each new hire 10 days of training. In terms of hours, I’m literally working to put together 80 hours of guided training, self-guided training, exploration, research, and additional 1:1 time with me for reflection.

This is in addition to stuff like meeting onboarding buddies and doing all the HR crap.

In one instance, I recall feeling heat from the co-founders because I mentioned a new hire wouldn’t working on any active projects for two weeks. To them, this felt like we weren’t moving fast enough. I understand that. But getting someone up to speed so they can operate efficiently, know how to work with their team and other teams, gain a sense of belonging, AND know the customer (minor detail) is the absolute best for everyone. Doing this well will have your team operating optimally—which ultimately means fast.

Detailed and intentional onboarding may feel slow, but slow is smooth. And when things operate smoothly, you’ll notice things move fast.

Additional resources for doing onboarding well:

If you’ve struggled with detailing your onboarding process (and please don’t tell me you just had your HR take over this), let me know. Happy to share more in detail what I do.

Proptech News

Weekly Podcast Feature

Investing in Real Estate Debt with Brian Dally, Co-founder and CEO of Groundfloor

Brian Dally is no stranger to the proptech ecosystem. Brian Co-founded Groundfloor just over 10 years ago, and is still driving the company at an aggressive growth rate. Groundfloor has achieved Inc 5000 recognition four times as being one of the fastest growing private companies in the US.

In this interview with Brian, we cover the specifics of the Groundfloor product—a fintech/proptech solution enabling investors (both accredited and non-accredited) to invest in real estate debt. Groundfloor promotes investors have seen a consistent 10% annualized returns on its short-terms offers. We also discuss the challenges of operating a business like this with the many changes the real estate industry has seen over the last 10 years.

One thing I find when talking to more seasoned veterans like Brian, is that sometimes the more things change the more they stay the same. Maybe you'll hear that theme in here too. Listen in!

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