Motivating Contractors: How to 10x Productivity
Supercharge your team, while retaining equity
Kan Durz — ladies-man, child-prodigy — has one shot at making a unicorn startup. He doesn’t have the energy to indulge in the salary-slashing, make a bil off his equity gamble more than once. So, over his morning Celsius, he’s resolved to retain 100% ownership of his company. Durz will have to maximize the productivity of his workers while shielding them from the glories of financial upside. Let’s dissect his genius plan.
Keep It Clean
Without the allure of golden handcuffs, Durz finds himself honing the essentials of Herzberg's Motivation-Hygiene Theory. He sidesteps petty battles — pay, time off, collegial environment — that would cause him to lose talent to rivals. As the leader, it’s his duty to ensure his troops aren’t starved of payment starvation or fall victim to snowflake mindsets in the startup war. Durz does the meticulous steps, like hiring slowly and firing only for serious grievances, so that everyone feels job security. With structure in place, he’s able to motivate his team without migraines like Karen in marketing accusing Joe in engineering of misogyny.
Establish Principles
Once he’s mastered the basics, Durz establishes principles to guide each team: engineering, design, product, marketing, and sales. He aims to maximize productivity, defined as an amplification of both work and reward output. Durz knows that he gets what he puts in with contractors, so each time he has a call with them, he goes on for too long about the benefits of pranayama and makes them chant their designated principles. For engineering, he sets the following guidelines:
Work fast
Build for scale rather than spaghetti
QA before hand-off
Communicate blockers
Build for simplicity
Contractor Networks: Top-Down Motivation
To really milk his disciples for all they’re worth, Durz must ascertain — whom is he actually motivating? An independent in control of their own output, or the owner of a contractor network? If a network of individuals like TopTal or an abstracted service team like SuperAnnotate, he knows it works like a MLM of Oxycontin-peddling hotties. He has to incentivize the guy at the top, and the whip-cracking will trickle down to the work horses.
Durz always plays two competing contracting networks off one another, a lesson he learned whilst juggling multiple side pieces in college. He’s nowhere close to ready for marriage to anyone, and is always ready to kill a deal with one network if needed.
He negotiates a sweet price with each talent network’s CEO. Durz tantalizes — playing hard to get, pretending he has a better option — until they acquiesce to a favorable price.
Once price is settled, Durz interviews every candidate the CEO wants to add to his roster. Whether he’s hiring a QA engineer or a fractional CMO, he doesn’t trust the network lead’s opinion of quality. Not because she lacks acumen, but due to the potential misalignment of her motivations. Juggling numerous clients and varying quality levels within her network, she’s compelled to spread her top talent thin, rather than consolidating them for a single client’s benefit.
Individuals: Psychology Appeal
Durz masters the art of appealing to various contractor personas when dealing with individuals. He tailors incentives according to McClelland's need theory. Recognizing that his people trade their time for money rather than betting on long term upside, he aims to empathize with their circumstances by reflecting on questions like:
Do they have student loans, necessitating rapid earnings accumulation?
Are they constrained by family obligations, limiting their daily working hours?
Instead of dangling Michelin-bruleed carrots, Durz aspires to cultivate a culture of diligent effort without having to empty his pockets further. He becomes an expectancy theory virtuoso, adept at aligning with each team member's unique motivations.
Team members driven by affiliation want to belong to a welcoming group, as Durz did when he was president of his frat. These folks can’t resist the allure of water cooler conversations. For these social butterflies, Durz plays both event planner and therapist. He ensures that they feel valued by assigning them contributions that affect multiple teams. Durz meticulously engineers an environment where work allies become their closest companions—his company isn't just a top choice among affiliation addicts, but often the only community they truly belong to.
Those driven by achievement exhibit a penchant for jogging on the treadmill of self-improvement, consistently aiming to outpace their peers in the race. Durz hands them a marathon to tackle, complete with strategically placed mile markers. At each milestone — demarcated by KPI — he showers them with specific praise. The team member feels they are perpetually advancing through these feedback cycles, becoming a better version of themselves. As they hit micro goals, Durz lifts the veil on fresh insights from his extensive experience (or thanks to a quick ChatGPT query), thereby building the subordinate’s respect for him. He reinforces the notion that they're on the trajectory toward immense company growth, a journey with ample milestones left to conquer.
Those in pursuit of power present the low-hanging fruit for Durz's strategic attention. He introduces an ingenious company-wide title generator that bestows grandiose monikers, such as "Supreme Ruler of Coffee Supplies" or "Mighty Maven of Meeting Minutes." Only on occassion does he give titles that resonate with LinkedIn bros; he has to maintain the allure of his “VP” and “Chief” positions. He gives his team members opportunities to improve their power by training on new skills with platforms like Guild Education. Regardless of title, Durz makes sure working at his company is a status symbol complete with trendy swag and lavish dinners. He’s cooler than Sam Altman, and can definitely make his startup the OpenAI of whatever mundane B2B SaSS niche he chooses.
Through mastery of motivation, Durz retains his bejeweled shares while building an army of satisfied employees. He’ll only have to wait till his liquidation event to see if they retaliate against him.