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When's the last time you took a look at your hiring system? Maren Kate Donovan is on the podcast this week to discuss hiring—specifically, how to create a system that allows you to discover and automatically sort through applicants to find highly-qualified candidates for your business. Nick and Maren discuss why most companies have outdated hiring systems, why hiring processes are like sales funnels, and the differences between hiring in-person and remote employees. This episode was recorded on April 8, 2020. You can view the full show notes at getleverage.com/podcast/70. Maren is a serial entrepreneur and expert on hiring remote teams. She's the founder of AVRA Talent, a recruiting agency, and Inde.co, a new hiring platform for remote workers. Maren is also the Ex-CEO and Founder of Zirtual, one of the largest virtual assistant companies in the world. Having hired thousands of remote workers and scanned through tens of thousands of applicants, Maren knows what it takes to build a successful hiring system for modern companies.
My guest on the podcast today is Maren Kate Donovan, the founder and former CEO of Zirtual, a company that went from rapid growth and success to shutting down seemingly overnight. The measure of their success ended up being their downfall: rapid growth, combined with the reality of unit economics, created a firestorm where it became painfully obvious that continued operations would lead to an inability to pay employees for completed work. Maren made the difficult decision to simply stop and pay everyone while they still could—a decision she still believes was the right call for the circumstances. Maren got back on her feet and is now finding her way to success through the founding of AVRA Talent. Her team partners with companies to help them fill critical roles in their staff, what they refer to as “on-demand talent acquisition,” And Maren knows that she never could have moved in this direction without her “$5 Million Dollar MBA” earned at Zirtual. Join us as we discuss Maren’s early desire to “Escape the 9 to 5,” her crash course in Silicon Valley and the Founders Institute, and how she turned failure into perspective and, ultimately, success. Complete show notes and links from this episode at https://whitneyjohnson.com/maren-kate-donovan
Maren Kate Donovan is an entrepreneur and writer. Her first venture-backed startup, Zirtual, grew to over 400 employees before she turned 30, but then, due to the perfect storm of missteps, was forced to shut down overnight. She now uses her unique experiences as Managing Partner at AVRA, a firm dedicated to creating a world where good help isn’t hard to find. In the show, Maren and I discuss: How a haunted cane launched Maren’s entrepreneurial career Why she decided to start her own virtual assistant company and how she overcame the mental hurdles in making that leap How she grew Zirtual to 400 employees and $1 million/month in revenue Why the company failed overnight and the lessons that this public and painful failure taught Maren What strategies Maren used in coping with the fallout from the company’s demise Why she decided to become a founder again by starting a new company called AVRA Talent Partners How Maren used the lessons learned from Zirtual’s failure in starting AVRA You can sign up for Maren's newsletter, We Love Work, at the bottom of this link and receive all the news that's fit to email, from the world of work. Resources mentioned: The ONE Thing: The Surprisingly Simple Truth Behind Extraordinary Results The 4-Hour Workweek: Escape 9-5, Live Anywhere, and Join the New Rich - Get your FREE copy of my e-book. Text OZAN to 345345 or navigate to weeklycontrarian.com to download a free copy of my e-book, The Contrarian Handbook: 8 Principles for Innovating Your Thinking. Along with your free e-book, you’ll get the Weekly Contrarian — a newsletter that challenges conventional wisdom and changes the way we look at the world (plus access to exclusive content for subscribers only). Don’t want to miss future episodes? Be sure to subscribe to the podcast and leave a review on iTunes or Google Play. As always, thanks for listening.
On this Scaling Session podcast, you'll hear hiring tips from Maren Kate Donovan, a Silicon Valley Founder Institute Graduate and the Founder of AVRA Talent Partners. Maren has helped build several startup teams in her career, and in this interview she shares some important lessons on finding talent, keeping talent, and building a well-rounded team. The interview was conducted by Mike Suprovici (EIR at FI, and the Leader of Grad Support Group). This podcast is produced by the Founder Institute. We're an idea-stage accelerator that works with solo-entrepreneurs and teams during the earliest stages of their business. In our 3.5 month program, participants build their companies via a structured process, receiving feedback and assistance from successful entrepreneurs and investors. Our alumni join a global network of entrepreneurs and receive ongoing help to get funding and scale. So far, our alumni have raised over $800M in funding, and they're building some of the world's fastest growing companies.
Kruze Consulting's Founders and Friends Podcast for Startups
Maren Kate Donovan of Recruit (https://thisisrecruit.com) explains how to scale your startup's recruiting efforts. We also go over frequent recruiting mistakes and best practices. Kruze Consulting uses Recruit and is a huge fan!!!
Maren Kate Donovan has some invaluable advice to offer as a result of her personal experience. In 2015, Maren was running her company, Zirtual, which had an $11-million run-rate and appeared to be very healthy. Due to some factors that Maren speaks about very candidly in this episode, the company suddenly came to a halt and had to let go of all its 400+ employees. How does this type of situation happen overnight? Maren will explain. She also talks about what she did next and how she got through the situation. As I’ve mentioned many times on the show, I feel strongly that entrepreneurs share their stories and lessons in order to pay them forward so other people can avoid the same mistakes. I appreciate Maren being vulnerable and doing just that. Notes from this episode: How a Why Not Now? moment led to Maren starting her first company. Maren talks about the process of raising money and its impact on the core business daily operations. What it means to be "growing broke" and how to prevent the situation. Maren explains the three factors that brought Zirtual down. What Maren did to recover from the intense situation. Maren's new company and the very first step she took when deciding to green light her idea. What keeps Maren up at night.
Serial entrepreneur Maren Kate Donovan joins Lisa to chat about Maren's former startup Zirtual (what went wrong and how Maren coped) along with Maren's new venture, The Memento Mori Society.
“I don’t judge people’s value based on the amount of hours they put in at the office, but on the amount of value they actually produce – if you can do equally good work from a Starbucks rather than a cubicle, you should do it!” This week’s Hardcore MBA features a true superstar of the […]
Maren Kate Donovan the CEO of Zirtual comes on the show to talk about how we can massively increase our productivity and happiness by using Virtual Assistants. We'll give specific instances where you can use them as well as the best ways to work with them. We also talk about Zirtual as a business and where its headed which is pretty exciting!
In Episode #7 of the WP Elevation podcast I spoke with Maren Kate Donovan, CEO and founder of Zirtual, a US based virtual assistant service. I recently hired a virtual assistant, or a Zirtual assistant as they call them, through the Zirtual service and was blown away at their excellent on-boarding process. I also wanted to find out from Maren why and how she has built her company to what it is today. The post Episode #7 – Maren Kate Donovan from Zirtual appeared first on WP Elevation.
----------------------------------------------------------------- What You'll Learn In This Episode of The Inbound Sales Podcast... ----------------------------------------------------------------- * How to know it's time to launch your entrepreneurial venture * How to find your niche * How to find opportunities to expand your new venture * How to price your services / offerings * When to take outside money to grow * How to handle that outside money when you do grow * The role of compassion in business and in life * The value of persistence, iterations, and thick skin to success * What to read to inspire you to grow * How to create a business plan that actually helps you grow your sales * When you should stop learning * How to leverage kids and teenagers to detect the next trend * What to do when you are ambushed * The point of money Support this podcast at — https://redcircle.com/the-sales-podcast/exclusive-content Advertising Inquiries: https://redcircle.com/brands Privacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy