In the last Behind the Curtains, I mentioned that IFy Atelier had reached a slightly unexpected milestone.
I posted its first job opportunity.
That article ended rather neatly with the realisation that my baby was growing up.
Apparently, growing up involves job applications, commission negotiations, interview scheduling, people who impress you, people who surprise you and, inevitably, people who simply do not turn up.
Nobody mentioned that part.
This wasn’t actually the plan
The strange thing about IFy Atelier’s first recruitment exercise is that I had not been planning to recruit anybody.
At least, not yet.
I had assumed that building a team was something that came later.
Much later.
In my head, hiring talented people required the sort of wallet that a very small independent publishing studio does not yet possess. There would be salaries, retainers, contracts and all the other expenses associated with reaching the stage where you could finally say, Right, now I can afford some help.
Then somebody rather persistently offered to sell for me.
For 3 per cent commission.
That got my attention.
Not necessarily because I immediately wanted to accept the proposal. Quite the opposite. I had questions.
Lots of questions.
How would the sales be attributed? What exactly constituted a successful conversion? Who would the prospective customers be? What would this person say when representing the business? How would the arrangement actually work?
But underneath all those questions was another thought beginning to form.
Hang on. Someone wants to work with IFy Atelier on commission?
Until then, I had been thinking about recruitment almost entirely through the conventional lens of what I could afford to pay somebody upfront.
This conversation introduced another possibility.
Perhaps I did not need a huge recruitment budget before I could begin bringing specialist skills into the business.
Perhaps certain functions could grow alongside the business rather than waiting for the business to become large enough to support them first.
And somewhere during that exchange, I stopped evaluating the person who had approached me and started evaluating the problem they were offering to solve.
Does IFy Atelier actually need a sales function?
The answer was increasingly obvious.
Yes.
So rather than simply accepting one unsolicited proposal, I decided to find out who else might be interested.
And that is how one person repeatedly asking to sell for IFy Atelier for 3 per cent commission accidentally created IFy Atelier’s first job opportunity.
I suspect neither of us expected that outcome.
Apparently people actually wanted the job
There is something slightly surreal about creating a vacancy for your own business and then watching strangers apply for it.
Until that point, IFy Atelier had largely existed as something I built.
I created the website. I made publishing decisions. I worked on the books. I dealt with distribution. I developed the brand. I handled outreach. I argued with technology.
Suddenly, people with very different professional backgrounds and experiences were sending me applications and explaining why they thought they could contribute to it.
That was probably the first moment when the recruitment exercise stopped feeling hypothetical.
People had looked at something I created in Belfast and thought:
I could work with that.
Which is a very strange feeling when you are accustomed to sitting behind a screen wondering whether anybody is paying attention.
Of course, attracting applicants turned out to be the easy bit.
Then I had to decide what on earth I was actually looking for.
Hiring teaches you what you actually need
Writing a vacancy forces you to define a role.
Interviewing people forces you to define it again.
I discovered quite quickly that a good CV was not necessarily the thing that interested me most.
I wanted initiative.
I wanted someone who could look at IFy Atelier’s books and immediately begin thinking about who might buy them.
I wanted someone capable of finding opportunities without waiting for me to provide a list of names.
I wanted someone who understood that selling books to retailers, organisations and other businesses is different from simply posting promotional content online and hoping somebody clicks.
And, perhaps most importantly, I wanted someone I could trust to represent IFy Atelier without needing me standing behind them correcting every sentence.
That last requirement matters more than I initially realised.
Delegation only saves time if the person you delegate to does not create another full-time job supervising them.
I already have AI tools for that.
At least when they misunderstand me, I can tell them to try again without scheduling another meeting.
Then came commission
The irony is that the 3 per cent commission that started this entire chain of events did not survive contact with the actual recruitment process.
And it was never my figure in the first place.
It was what the person who originally approached me had offered to work for.
Initially, that had seemed extraordinary to me because the number itself was almost beside the point. Somebody was proposing to generate sales without requiring a salary or large upfront payment.
That challenged one of my assumptions about what it would cost to start building a team.
Then I started looking at the role properly.
Someone doing this work would potentially be identifying prospects, researching retailers and organisations, making contact, following up, building relationships and pursuing sales that might take time to materialise.
Suddenly 3 per cent looked rather different.
The recruitment process therefore forced me to stop asking:
What is the smallest amount someone might agree to work for?
A much better question was:
What arrangement gives a good salesperson a genuine reason to want to sell for IFy Atelier?
That changed my thinking considerably.
I became more comfortable with starting commissions around 10 to 15 per cent, with scope to reach 20 per cent for particularly strong performance.
Then one candidate asked for 50 per cent.
I admired the ambition.
I did not admire it enough to say yes.
But even that conversation was useful.
For the first time, I was thinking seriously about margins, incentives and what a sale is actually worth to the business after everybody involved has been paid.
There is a difference between wanting help and creating an arrangement in which helping you is genuinely worth somebody else’s time.
That sounds obvious.
It becomes considerably more obvious when someone is sitting opposite you asking what they get out of it.
The person who approached me with 3 per cent had therefore done something rather unexpected.
They had not established what IFy Atelier should pay its salespeople.
They had made me realise that IFy Atelier could have salespeople at all.
Those are two very different things.
Interviews are interesting little experiments
Then came the interviews.
Some candidates immediately made me think differently about the role.
One stood out early as confident, commercially minded and perfectly willing to negotiate. Another came across as a natural closer.
Others looked promising on paper but became less convincing once communication began.
And then there were the people who booked an interview and disappeared into the void.
No message.
No explanation.
Just an empty Google Meet and me sitting there with a note-taking bot that, at one point, appeared to have more commitment to the interview than the candidate.
Eventually even the bot left.
There is something uniquely ridiculous about being stood up in your own virtual meeting room by someone who applied to work for you.
On the positive side, no-shows are remarkably efficient recruitment decisions.
Very little deliberation required.
The process also reminded me that hiring is not simply about finding the most impressive person.
It is about finding someone whose strengths fit the problem you are actually trying to solve.
A brilliant marketer is not automatically a brilliant salesperson.
Someone excellent at relationship-building may not necessarily be a closer.
Someone with an impressive corporate background may not necessarily enjoy the ambiguity of working with a tiny independent business where some of the infrastructure is still being built.
And someone whose experience looks less conventional on paper might immediately understand what needs doing.
The uncomfortable part of delegation
There is another side to all this.
Hiring someone means accepting that they may do things differently from you.
That sounds like the entire point until somebody actually does it.
I have spent a long time developing IFy Atelier’s voice, deciding how it presents itself and establishing what I am and am not comfortable promising people.
Handing another person an IFy Atelier email address and effectively saying, Go and represent this thing I built, requires a different kind of trust.
That is why I keep returning to the distinction between sales and marketing.
I am comfortable giving somebody the framework.
Here are the books.
Here are the distribution channels.
Here are the markets we are interested in.
Here are the kinds of retailers and organisations that might be relevant.
Here is what IFy Atelier stands for.
Here is what you can say.
Here is what you cannot say.
Within that framework, however, I have to allow them to sell.
Otherwise I have not delegated anything.
I have simply acquired another pair of hands that I am attempting to operate remotely.
And I already have enough gadgets.
Caractacus Potts would be proud.
Perhaps I don’t need another version of me
That may be the more important lesson.
When you have built something largely by yourself, there is a temptation to look for people who think like you, communicate like you and approach problems the way you would.
But another version of me is not necessarily what IFy Atelier needs.
I already have me.
What I need from another person is something I do not have, or something they can do better.
If somebody is better at sales than I am, I want them selling.
If they understand a market I do not understand, I want them telling me what I am missing.
If they have a better approach to a prospective retailer, I do not need them to imitate the email I would have written.
I need them to get the conversation started.
That requires a slightly different understanding of control.
Protect the business.
Protect the brand.
Protect the boundaries.
But do not protect your own way of doing things so aggressively that nobody else can contribute anything.
Otherwise you haven’t built a team.
You have built an audience.
So, did I successfully hire somebody?
That almost feels like the wrong question.
The recruitment process itself had already changed something.
For the first time, I had to explain IFy Atelier not as its founder explaining her own work, but as a business somebody else might work within.
I had to define responsibilities.
I had to think about incentives.
I had to decide what somebody representing the business needed to know.
I had to consider which systems they would need access to and which parts of the business should remain mine.
I had to distinguish between tasks I merely disliked doing and functions that genuinely made sense to delegate.
Most importantly, I had to begin imagining IFy Atelier with another person inside it.
That is a surprisingly significant mental shift.
The first Behind the Curtains article about this ended with me realising that my baby was growing up.
Perhaps recruitment is the next stage of parenthood.
You spend months teaching the baby to stand on its own.
Then one day it starts interacting with other people and you immediately think:
Wait. Who said you could do that?
Apparently, I did.
I posted the vacancy.
