You, of All People, Need to Read This Book

This week I got to sit down with Maestro’s own Travis Janko and speak with him about his new book, You, of All People: Outrageous Stories & Billion-Dollar Lessons From a SaaS Sales VP Turned 7-Figure Recruiting Agency Founder.

No matter how amazing your product or service is, having the right people on your team is essential. Travis has gotten hiring the best of the best down to a science. Lucky for all of us, he’s willing to share his secrets.

Whether you’re a startup founder, a sales leader at a large company, a recruiter, or looking to build your own recruiting company like Travis did, there is so much for you in this book. Travis knows how to tell a good story and, from his nomadic childhood to his decades of selling to running his successful recruiting agency, he has a lot of stories to share.

GIVING IT ALL AWAY

I asked Travis how he was comfortable sharing all of his hiring secrets, since the book offers a blueprint for how to do Travis’s job. You, of All People is so easy to breeze through and so clear on the necessary steps to take that the reader can easily lose sight of the fact that the steps are not easy. Travis pointed out that knowing the steps necessary for successful hiring is not the same as going through them.

There are plenty of recommendations that Travis’s clients can take and use from the book while still relying on him for matching them up with the perfect new hires. In fact, he recently asked one of his current clients what the organization’s interview process was like. To Travis’s surprise, his client held up a copy of You, of All People and replied, “It’s right in here.”

While Travis wrote the book for his clients, he suspects that potential and new recruiters are the readers who are benefiting from it the most, and he’s fine with that. And while not the target audience, SaaS sales professionals looking to advance their own career would be smart to read the book. It’s a behind-the-scenes look at what the best companies are looking for (or at least should be looking for) in sales professionals.

Most people who have been successful in their field for 25 years aren’t able to explain in layman’s terms what they have learned along the way. Travis is an exception. He strips away the jargon and the buzz words.

TELLING IT LIKE IT IS

When it comes to evaluating potential clients for his recruitment services, Travis is frank in his categories: green-light, yellow-light, and red-light. Red light means STOP. He writes, “You have the absolute power to decide who you want to recruit for.” Travis feels responsible for his candidates as well as his clients. “If I’m not comfortable with my son or daughter working there,” he says, “I’m most likely not going to work with the client.

Travis wants to ensure his candidate and client are an excellent match, and he feels the best way to do this is to be completely transparent. “I’m going to tell them what I know,” he says. “I tell all my clients this. When I’m talking to a candidate, I’m not going to oversell the company like a lot of recruiters do…I prefer they know everything about you and you know everything about them.”

By being up front and honest, nobody is unhappily surprised months into their new position, and Travis doesn’t have to do the same job over again. In the end, it’s better for Travis, his clients, and his candidates. The worst thing is if a candidate reaches out and says, ‘You should have told me this thing,’” he says.

SCRAPPY AND HAPPY

One of the best parts of Travis’s book is his exploration of how his unorthodox upbringing made him who he is and uniquely qualified him for his current work. He is the first to point out that having an “about my childhood” section in a business book is rare, but it provides insight into how Travis got to where he is now.

I’m not going to spoil your experience of discovering the twists and turns of Travis’s story. But I’ll say that when I got to the line, “the day the helicopters and squad cars showed up,” my jaw dropped. “It may have had something to do with the community garden,” he notes with wonderful understatement.

Travis recognizes that his upbringing made him self-reliant, adaptable, and capable of communicating with others in difficult situations—three traits that come in handy for entrepreneurs. Many of us go through difficult situations and only realize much later that we came out of them better or stronger.

Travis has the ability to get the good out of less-than-ideal situations almost immediately and look at them in a positive light. Even when describing a poor working environment, he identifies the reward of having worked there—“I learned how to protect my people that work for me from harm,” he reflects.

When I asked him if he got frustrated at certain points, such as when he saw others not willing to do the hard work, he replied that he’s always focused on the things that he can control. That’s what kicked in when COVID hit and he was suddenly without a job and without clients. Knowing how to be scrappy and focusing on what he could do about the situation is what got him to his current successes.

The degree of control Travis now has over his work life is something he truly values. He considers being able to protect his time the best part of his job. “We all think we have to work from when we wake up until we go to bed, but then we’re just doing things instead of being efficient about what we do,” he says. Nobody can book on Travis’s calendar before 9:00 AM or after 2:00 PM. He won’t take calls at night, and he walks with his Chief of Staff (Angie, his wife) every morning. “I protect my time like crazy.”

Whatever comes next for Travis, his off-the-rails stories will continue to provide fodder for his writing. He’s already working on his second book. The working title is Crazy-Ass Shit: A Startup Life. I’m pre-ordering it now.

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