Kasim Aslam on Talent That Scales

Inside Marketing Tactics with Kasim Aslam

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All right, welcome back to the Daily Mastermind, George Wright III with your daily dose of inspiration, motivation, and education.

And we're joined by a great guest. We could probably do a couple hours with this show, but we're gonna just try to keep it limited. Kasim, it's good to have you on the show.
Thanks for having me, George. I appreciate you.

Listen, for those of you that do not know him—and there’s probably very few of you, but there may be a few—Kasim has built seven- and eight-figure businesses with multiple successful exits. He’s the co-founder of a mastermind as well as several other ventures. He’s written three bestselling books, and is known for his work with Google, CRMs, and more. But we’re here to talk about something totally different today.

We're gonna talk about scaling your business—staffing, growth strategies—and I think you’re going to be glad you joined us. Before we dive into it, Kasim, could you give everyone your background? Just give us a little layup into what brought you to where you are today. People probably know you from several verticals, but I’d love a little backstory.
I'm a welfare baby. I haven't been super vocal about that, but I was raised by a blind single mother on Social Security disability in Albuquerque, New Mexico. I was a wannabe car thief at one point. My little brother did six years on a four-yard.

I'm the world's greatest failure. I'm a high school dropout, college dropout. I've quite literally failed at everything in life. And somehow, that's served me. It's not even self-deprecation—I believe strongly that failure is the most important alchemical endeavor. And I’m autistic enough to where failure never really shattered my ego. I always just looked at it as data.

You know what, it’s funny you say that because I think most super successful people have been failures. It’s not what defines you, but it definitely becomes a gateway to success. So I love that you accept that, and obviously your results speak for themselves. Let’s talk a little about your professional background.
Yeah. I built the number-one ranked Google Ads agency in the world. I sold it in 2022 for eight figures. I’m rich now, which was the goal.

And it’s fun when you give poor people money because we think we become investors. That’s more or less what I’m trying to do at the moment. I had the highest-performing real estate investment campaign on the planet for about seven years. I also own the largest English-speaking Montessori community in the world.

But the thing I’m best at, frankly, is talent acquisition. I built that top-ranked agency without ever running a Google Ads campaign myself. I found the best Google Ads managers and put them in place. I've cracked the code on finding people smarter than me and getting out of their way—and that's what I’m most passionate about teaching entrepreneurs to do.

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Discovering the Power of Talent

It’s interesting because your journey spans multiple businesses, but the common thread is talent acquisition. When did that become your focal point—was it always top-of-mind, or something you learned along the way?
Definitely discovered over time. Like most young entrepreneurs, I initially wanted to be the hero. I wanted to be the one solving problems and swinging the ax.

But eventually, I realized that being the smartest person in the room was actually the worst-case scenario. I saw what happened to my life when competent people entered my orbit—it lowered my stress, increased efficiency, and changed everything.

Entrepreneurship often feels like pulling a sled up a muddy hill in the rain—cold, tired, hungry. Every hire initially feels like adding weight to that sled. But eventually, you hire someone who grabs a strap and starts pulling. Then someone pulls harder and faster than you. That’s when things really change.

I bumbled into it, Forrest Gump-style, but once I experienced it, I became obsessed. I spent 15 years studying talent acquisition, delegation, and peak performance. It’s the key differentiator.

I can feel the passion behind that. And it's something most entrepreneurs only realize when they hit a tipping point—when they’re too overwhelmed to do it all themselves. So I have to ask: was there a specific moment or experience that made you pivot and realize that talent was the path forward?
Absolutely. I broke.

I had a financial goal: $250,000. For a welfare kid from Albuquerque, that was “rich.” I thought it would make me happy. I hit that number—and I was miserable. I owned a business I hated, had clients I didn’t respect, and a business partner who oversold everything and left me to fulfill the impossible.

I was burning out. I felt like I was in the trash compactor in Star Wars. I had hit my revenue goal, but the terms of success were all wrong. That’s when my mentor taught me that terms are more important than price.

You can sell a business for a billion dollars, but if the terms are $1 a day for a billion days, it’s meaningless. I had set the “price” for success, but not the terms. That’s when I started renegotiating everything—including how I thought about hiring.

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Making the Leap — Finding Your First A-Player

That’s such a powerful perspective—terms being more important than price. It forces you to reassess what you’re really aiming for. So when you had that realization, what happened next? What was your first experience bringing in someone who actually changed everything for you?
I met a young man named John Moran. He was the most proactive, hardest-working, most integrous human I’ve ever known. Ironically, he started as a client—his father owned a company where I was brought in as a vendor. And John was the worst client I’ve ever had.

There was a time I owed him a deliverable—some software I was outsourcing—and I knew I wouldn’t make the deadline. It was Friday, and I thought if I could just ghost him through the weekend, I could get it done.

John emailed. I ignored it. He texted. I ignored that. He called. I didn’t answer. Then I heard someone knocking on my office door. It was locked, but through the glass, I saw John. He had driven 35 minutes just to check in on the thing I owed him.

He was kind, polite, and persistent. I admitted I didn’t have it, and he was understanding. Later, their business was taken down by a bad investor, and John got a job—despite being one of the most capable entrepreneurs I’d met.

I started calling him every few weeks, asking him to come work with me. He kept saying I couldn’t afford him—and he was right. But one day, I caught him at the right moment. He asked what the most was I could pay him, and I showed him my P&L. I said, “You can have every cent I’m paying myself.”

That meant we had 90 days to make it work. He quit his job, took the leap, and the rest is history. Together we built the number-one ranked Google Ads agency. I gave him 10% equity. He’s a multimillionaire now.

That’s incredible. Not just because of what you built together, but because you actually lived what you're teaching—going after top talent, taking a risk, and creating something scalable. And the key here is that you shifted your focus from trying to save money to investing in people.

Exactly. Everyone loves to quote Dan Sullivan’s “Who Not How,” but few live it. And here’s the deeper truth: most entrepreneurs are afraid of competence. They’re afraid of hiring someone smarter than them.

They want to be the smartest in the room, the one with the answers. Because if they’re not, they fear being replaced or exposed. But most people aren’t entrepreneurial. That fear is misguided.

Dr. Douglas Brackmann explains this in his book Driven. Only 10% of the population are what he calls “broken” in the entrepreneurial sense. We experience the dopamine/norepinephrine/serotonin cocktail during the pursuit of a goal—not upon completion.

The other 90%—the farmer brain—feels fulfilled when the goal is achieved. That’s why they’re great employees. We, the broken ones, only feel good when we’re chasing. When we “arrive,” we crash.

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The Tipping Point — When Doing It All Breaks You

That’s so true—and I think most people listening right now will relate to that. I’ve experienced that myself. You hit the goal and suddenly feel empty. But you also said something really important about being afraid of competence. A lot of business owners don’t hire great people because they’re afraid to lose control or credit.

Exactly. They want to be the hero. But here’s the price of that: burnout, stagnation, and underperformance.

The irony is, when you finally hire someone who pulls the sled with you—or better yet, pulls it faster than you—you realize you’ve been doing it wrong all along. And then you begin to ask, “What if I had five of these people?” “What if I never had to pull the sled again?”

That’s when business becomes scalable. That’s when quantum leaps happen.

And it all comes back to mindset. If you’re the one doing it all, you’ll always be limited by your own capacity. But if you find the right people—the right “whos”—you unlock exponential growth. So what holds most people back from making that shift? Why don’t they go get A-players?

Because we’ve been taught to treat people like commodities.

Every business book—Maxwell, Covey, Dalio—teaches us to build processes and systems first. Then slot in easily replaceable human components. Hire like it’s a conveyor belt. That kind of thinking works for machines, but people are not commodities.

If you swap two ears of corn, nobody wins or loses. But swap two CPAs, or violin instructors, or employees, and you absolutely get different results. People are not interchangeable.

And if you’re treating people like commodities, here’s what you do: you try to get the most for the least. You look for discounts. That works for corn. It does not work for peak performers.

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The Real Cost of Top Talent—and Why You Must Pay It

So what happens when you finally understand the importance of hiring elite performers? Where do you find them—and how do you pay for them? Most entrepreneurs assume it’s unaffordable.
Here’s what I tell people: if you want peak performers, you have to pay more. Not just a little more—10% more than the high watermark.

Let’s say a role pays $75,000 to $100,000. Entrepreneurs who treat people like commodities aim for the bottom—$74,900, trying to get the most for the least. When I say “pay 10% more,” I don’t mean 10% more than $75K—I mean 10% more than the top of the range. That’s $110,000.

That’s when they shut down: “I can’t. I won’t. That’s insane.”

But here’s the thing. You don’t get 10% more performance when you pay 10% more in compensation. You get 5x, 10x, even 100x more. That’s the Pareto distribution—also known as the 80/20 rule. It’s not just a business cliché—it’s a universal truth.

And what’s crazy is that entrepreneurs know the 80/20 rule—but they ignore it when it comes to hiring.

Exactly. When I sold my agency for eight figures, John Moran managed 40% of our revenue. One guy—out of 80 employees—accounted for nearly half the company’s output.

And what do most companies do when they see that kind of concentration? They panic. The Ivy League spreadsheet guy sees risk, so they redistribute accounts. They dilute the peak performer’s workload.

That’s a mistake. You are engineering average when you do that.

So instead of protecting your top performer, you weaken their impact—and flatten the entire hierarchy. That’s why big companies get worse as they grow.

Right. Hierarchies are shaped like pyramids. Flatten them, and you shave off the top—the most productive part. That’s how you end up with bureaucracies like Quicken Loans, where talent and initiative are suffocated.

Every human being is a miracle. We’re ultra-smart, hyper-productive super apes flying through space solving problems. These people are out there—and most of them are not entrepreneurs. They want a job. They want to work for someone with a mission.

That’s a revelation. Most business owners worry that talented people will leave or try to steal their business. But in reality, many of them don’t want to run a company—they want to contribute.

That’s exactly it. John Moran could make $2 million a year freelancing. He doesn’t want to. After we sold Solutions 8, he went and got another job. Not everyone is wired to build—they just want to do meaningful work and be valued.

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Understanding the Pareto Principle

Let’s take a minute and break this down for people. We’ve mentioned the Pareto distribution a lot—can you define that clearly?
Sure. The Pareto Principle, also known as the 80/20 rule, is the idea that in any system, a small number of inputs produce the majority of outputs.

It’s true in nature, business, crime, agriculture—you name it.

• 20% of cows produce 80% of the milk.
• 20% of criminals commit 80% of the crimes.
• 20% of customers drive 80% of your revenue.
• 20% of employees produce 80% of the results.

But it’s fractal, meaning it’s true at every level. Zoom in on that top 20%, and you’ll find that 20% of them produce 80% of that segment’s output.

So if you have 1,000 employees, 200 produce 80% of the output. Zoom in again—40 of those 200 drive 80% of that output. Zoom in again—maybe 1 or 2 are responsible for nearly half of everything your company produces.

That’s why understanding this isn’t optional—it’s critical. If you don’t hire for the top of that pyramid, you’re working against the math of success.

Exactly. People think it’s a mindset, but it’s more than that—it’s science. It’s economics. It’s genetics. The Pareto distribution isn’t a theory—it’s observable in every organic system.

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Don’t Just Hire—Invest in Performance

So now that people understand why top talent is worth the investment, how should they approach hiring differently? What do most people get wrong in the hiring process?
They make the mistake of thinking hiring is a checklist. A resume. An interview. Those things tell you nothing.

Instead, think of hiring like sales—but in reverse. You're selling your company to the right candidate.

Step one: write job posts that attract peak performers. Most job descriptions read like prison sentences. They're full of compliance language—cold, lifeless, transactional. You have to make the offer magnetic.

Second: use flytraps. Simple filters that weed out people who can’t follow instructions. I use email subject line requirements, naming conventions for resumes, little traps that test attention to detail.

Then I offer a trial project. I pay them in advance—but don’t send the project right away. I wait to see who follows up, who’s proactive, who manages expectations.

It’s a funnel. And by the time you’re at the bottom of that funnel, you’re left with the best of the best—people who don’t just want the job, but who’ve earned it.

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The Hiring Funnel That Attracts Peak Performers

So now we’re talking about systems—your hiring funnel is one of the most original I’ve heard. Let’s break that down. What does your process look like?
It’s the same mechanism we use in sales—just reversed for hiring.

Step one is attraction. If you go to any job board right now and read the job descriptions, they sound like legal disclaimers or onboarding checklists. They repel top talent. You need to write job posts that are warm, exciting, and authentic to your mission.

Step two is filtering using flytraps. At the top of my job description, I include a line like:
“To apply, your subject line should read ‘Actually Read the Instructions.’”
If the subject line doesn’t match, it gets automatically filtered out.

Then I’ll include instructions like:
“Submit your resume as a PDF link with the following naming convention…”

Now, I don’t care about the PDF or the naming convention. What I care about is attention to detail. If you’re going to be a remote employee, I need to know you can follow basic directions. Fail that, and you're filtered.

That alone probably eliminates a huge percentage of applicants who can’t or won’t pay attention.

Exactly. After that, I move on to soft-skill flytraps. If your formatting is off, if your communication is sloppy—you’re out.

The next step is a trial project. I email something like:
“Thanks for applying. I don’t believe interviews tell me what I need to know until we’ve worked together. I’d like to pay you upfront for a two-hour test project. Send me your PayPal.”

Then—I don’t send the project right away. I wait.

That’s genius. You’re testing responsiveness, proactivity, ownership—all before the real project.

Yes. Some people never follow up. Others check in after a few days. Some send thoughtful messages within hours. That tells me everything.

Then, once they get the trial project, I include subtle stress tests—incorrect login details, vague instructions—to see how they respond. Do they get frustrated? Do they problem-solve? Do they ask for clarity?

This is where the gold emerges. I’m not just hiring for a skill—I’m hiring for peak performance.

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Hire for Attitude, Train for Skill

This is such a shift from traditional hiring. You’re prioritizing character and performance DNA over experience. Do you believe performance is more important than competence?
Absolutely. I can train for skill. But I can’t train initiative, persistence, or problem-solving.

I’d rather hire someone who doesn’t know graphic design but is obsessed with learning it—someone who’ll run through walls, figure it out, and take ownership. Competence is important, but performance is foundational.

And once you identify that person, you’ve got someone who pulls the sled for you—not just sits on it. That’s what changes everything.

Yes. When I get to the final round of this process, interviews are just formalities. I already know who I want because I’ve seen them in action.

And honestly, if I’m on a growth sprint, I’ll hire multiple candidates for one role. Because once you find talent, you can build around them.

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The First Hire You Should Make

Let’s bring this down to something tactical. For entrepreneurs just starting to scale—what’s the first hire they should make?
Your first hire should be an Executive Assistant (EA)—every time.

You are the least scalable part of your business. Anything that consumes your time and attention—especially administrative, logistical, or repetitive tasks—needs to be offloaded immediately.

Even if an EA takes four hours to do something that would take you one hour, you’re still winning. Your time is worth more. And if you’ve hired the right person, they’ll get faster, better, and more reliable over time.

Entrepreneurs often think their work is too unique to delegate. But in reality, if you do something more than once—you can systematize it.

Exactly. People think “only I can do this,” but that’s just familiarity talking. If you’ve done it a thousand times, that means it’s predictable, which means it can be taught.

The right EA becomes your operational backbone. My former EA, Yvonne Boin, is now my business partner. Everything he did, he did better than me. Eventually, I just stopped doing it.

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Building Loyalty and Retaining Top Talent

So once you’ve found these unicorn hires—how do you keep them? A lot of business owners worry that top talent will leave, demand more, or go off on their own. How do you think about retention?
You keep them the same way you attract them: by being the kind of place people want to stay.

Top performers don’t just want money. They want meaningful work, autonomy, growth, and leadership they respect. If you provide that, they stay. Most of them don’t want to be entrepreneurs—they want to win inside a good system with a leader who supports them.

And you have to understand—when you hire a peak performer, you're not just hiring a worker. You're hiring a multiplier.

Most business owners look at hiring as an expense. But when done right, it's the best investment you can make.

And your systems give you the confidence to invest. You’re not just throwing money at talent—you’re testing, filtering, and qualifying the right people before they ever come on board.

Yes. And once they’re on board, here’s something I tell everyone: the first 90 days matter more than anything.

An employee will never run faster than they do in those first 90 days. That’s when they’re most eager, most responsive, and most open to your culture. So don’t slow-walk them into your business. Don’t say, “We’re going to ease you in.”

Overwhelm them.

Give them 10 things when they can only handle 8. Watch how they manage expectations. See how they communicate under pressure. The first 90 days set the tone for the entire relationship.

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The ROI of Delegation

That’s such a shift from how most companies onboard. But it makes sense—set the pace early. So let’s talk about ROI. A lot of entrepreneurs say, “It’s faster to do it myself.” You say it takes two hours to delegate a 15-minute task. What do you mean by that?
That’s exactly right. Delegating properly takes time.

If something takes you 15 minutes to do, it will take two hours to teach it to someone else. That sounds like a waste of time—until you realize that once it’s delegated, it’s done forever.

If you do that task daily, you’re reclaiming over 90 hours a year from a single 2-hour investment. That’s exponential ROI.

But most entrepreneurs quit too early. They say, “I could do it faster myself.” Yes, the first time. But not the hundredth. Or the thousandth.

Delegation is a long game. It’s how you scale yourself out of the machine.

And that’s why people burn out. They never get past the first two hours. They never train or systematize—and they stay stuck doing everything.

Exactly. That’s why I say: hire an EA first. Take your low-leverage tasks off your plate. Let them create the SOPs, handle the admin, free your bandwidth so you can focus on growth, not maintenance.

That’s your job as a founder—multiplying outcomes, not managing to-do lists.

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Why Talent Is the Shortcut

It’s clear that you’ve built an entire operating philosophy around this. For entrepreneurs listening who want to grow, the old way doesn’t work anymore. So if they get it—they're sold—where do they start?

They start with talent.

Forget every other optimization strategy. Talent is the shortcut.

Go to TheHireBook.com—you can get my full book for free. No upsells, no course, no catch. Just the full system I use to attract, test, and retain elite performers. Templates, systems, processes—all of it.

The book explains how to:

• Write magnetic job descriptions
• Design flytraps and trial tasks
• Build scorecards and expectations
• Train for performance over skill
• Keep the funnel full at all times

And this isn't theory—it's been tested across multiple businesses, across industries. It works.

And the best part is, you’ve made it free. That tells people you don’t just believe in this—you want everyone to win with it.

I don’t need the money. I want the impact. I want to democratize access to talent frameworks, especially for founders who don’t come from privilege.

That’s the vision behind Pareto Talent Group. That’s why I shoot a daily YouTube video. I’m doing everything I can to help entrepreneurs stop struggling and start scaling.

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Final Advice — From the World’s Greatest Failure to Peak Performance

All of this has been incredible advice. But before we wrap, let me ask: for the entrepreneur listening—whether solopreneur, intrapreneur, or seasoned CEO—what’s your final advice? How do they start shifting into this mindset of becoming a magnet for peak talent?

Fail.

That’s my answer. Just fail.

We’ve over-indexed toward education. Everyone’s reading books, listening to podcasts, watching YouTube videos—and that’s great. But it’s not enough. For every hour you spend learning, you should spend three hours doing.

If you’re listening to this podcast right now, that’s a good start. But don’t go buy another course. Don’t go read another book. Take what you’ve learned here and go do something with it.

Post a job description. Use a flytrap. Test a candidate. Break your process. Learn from what doesn’t work.

That’s where growth comes from.

That’s powerful. Because you’re right—we don’t talk enough about action. About doing. It’s easy to consume more information. But the real magic happens when you move.

Exactly. If you’re sold on this idea of hiring talent—then go test it. Go build a system, even if it sucks at first. You'll learn 10x more by trying and failing than you will by reading about what “might” work.

Don’t let perfect be the enemy of progress. You learn through action.

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The Legacy of Talent-First Leadership

One of the things that really strikes me is your honesty. You’ve described yourself as the “world’s greatest failure”—and yet here you are, building eight-figure businesses, empowering leaders, and sharing a system that could literally change lives.

That’s the point. Failure isn’t a shameful thing—it’s a superpower.

I dropped out of high school. I dropped out of college. I failed at almost everything early on. But every failure taught me something valuable. It made me resilient. Curious. Humble.

What most people see as broken, I now see as forged.

If you’re reading this and feeling stuck, burned out, or inadequate—good. That means you’re ready to grow. You're ready to build something better. But you won’t do it alone. You need help. You need people. You need talent.

And the sooner you realize that, the sooner you get to stop pulling the sled—and start building the team that pulls with you.

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Resources & Next Steps

Want to implement what you’ve learned? Start here:

• 📘 Get the free book — The Hire Book: Full hiring system, templates, and process
• 📺 Subscribe to Kasim’s YouTube channel: Daily videos on talent, systems, and scale
• 🌐 Visit Kasim.me: One link to all Kasim’s companies and content
• 💼 Explore Pareto Talent Group: Talent acquisition services based on the Pareto hiring philosophy

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It’s never too late to start living and creating the life you were meant to live. Not just the life you want—but the life you were meant to build.

That journey starts with action. It starts with finding your who—not figuring out every how. It starts with creating space for elite talent to thrive beside you, not behind you.

You were never meant to pull the sled alone.

Start building your team. Start scaling your impact. Start now.

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About Kasim Aslam

Kasim Aslam is the founder and CEO of Solutions 8, one of the world's top-ranked Google Ads agencies. He's recognized for his expertise in digital marketing, having worked with major organizations like the U.S. Army and Intel. Kasim is also the author of The 7 Critical Principles of Effective Digital Marketing and a sought-after speaker at global marketing conferences.

Resources:

• Website: kasimaslam.com
• Facebook: Kasim Aslam
• Twitter: @kasimaslam
• YouTube Interview: The Truth About Google Ads

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