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Whether you’re looking to hire in your business now, or you can’t even comprehend hiring someone, today’s episode is worth a listen. You will at SOME POINT need to pay a human to help your biz grow and run.

I’ve had a few one on one business clients recently hire a VA, or outsource for certain jobs within their business and it made me think about you humans, knowing when and how to hire. Because it can be an overwhelming part and time In business.

First off, one size does not fit all.

I have friends and colleagues who took a completely different approach to hiring than I did. So at the end of this, it’s important to do what makes sense for you, your vision, and the needs of your business.

And even if you aren’t ready to hire right now, I think it’s important to understand what to be looking for in your business before you actually get to the point of meeting to hire. More often than not, and I include myself in this, entrepreneurs end up hiring later than they probably should have.

And when I say hire, I am not talking about hiring full-time employees of your company. Or even a part-time employees of your company. Especially in the online world, it’s pretty common to take two or three different approaches for hiring contractors.

You have options:

Outsource for a given repeatable task within your biz – formatting and scheduling emails or IG posts. Some kind of task that happens on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis in your business. And having someone take over these tasks that don’t directly require you to do them, can free up space for you to either do less work, or do the work that is required of you to take your business to the next level.

I would also put hiring coaches in this category. You are essentially hiring more of your self or fill in gaps within your offer so maybe you do strength training online and you need to hire a nutritionist or registered dietitian on your staff and that is who’s going to work with all of your clients on nutrition. Or you’re simply hiring other qualified coaches within the strength world so that you can generate more revenue through your current offer. 

Another option is:

A certain one off project – editing videos for a program, building out your website. They should be hiring a person who has a specific trade and you need that trade within your business. Now, you might hire this person one time and then hire them again in the future for a similar task. But they’re not someone that you’re paying on a consistent monthly basis. A great example of this for myself is hiring the person who built out my workshop funnel for me, or hiring my brand photographer to do brand shoots for me every six months or so. I am paying people to complete a one off task for me in my business that makes my life easier and allows me to generate more profit. But they are not an employee of my company and I do not pay them monthly.

The last option that we’re going to go over is:

Hire a jack of all trades – virtual assistant. And let me remind you that you can do all three of these as well. It’s not like if you have a virtual assistant you can’t hire someone to help you build out your website that’s not what I’m saying. I’m just trying to kind of categorize types of hiring that you might consider when you are ready to hire someone for some part of your business.

And one virtual assistant may do something different for one entrepreneur than a virtual assistant does for another entrepreneur. So it’s a very broad section. But essentially you would just need someone to be able to fulfill the tasks that you have listed out for what you would want your assistant to do. And again that can look very different from person to person.

Just to elaborate on those or give some more examples, I’d prefer to hire for specific one off things that I need done in my business. so – hiring an expert to build out a funnel for me, or Hiring someone to handle Facebook ads for me. I am still in that process with the expert, but I am not the expert and they are taking the brunt of the work off of me to complete those tasks.

My assistant is more of a jack of all trades. Whereas I have colleagues who basically pay seven different contractors to handle very specific pieces of their business but it is on a monthly basis. That might look like paying someone to specifically manage your SEO and your blog. And then paying someone else to edit and upload your podcast on a weekly or monthly basis. As well as someone to handle your bookkeeping and numbers and reports. All of those people are working far less in your business but on a very specific task. So then you’re creating a team of sorts but those people are not full-time employees of your business. They likely do that task for several different companies. You could also have someone that manages your email or that on boards clients and handles client management for you. As far as booking and invoices and emails and things of that sort.

So I hope you can see why it’s important that before you hire anyone to do anything, you yourself have clarity on what exactly it is that you need someone to do for you. If you were unclear on that, and really we don’t know what the job description is. And that’s not going to make hiring someone very easy.

Now that we’ve determined kind of the categories that you can hire people for, let’s look at how you know when you need to hire someone And maybe how you can go about doing that.

When? How do you know?

I’ve talked about this before in other podcasts. And maybe I have even shared my own experience. I don’t remember. But there are a few things that can indicate that you might need to hire someone.

There will definitely be resistance or kind of a sense of pausing, or stagnation. In the sense that you feel like for some reason, you can’t seem to complete a task or move forward with whatever it is you’re trying to do. That’s going to be an over arching theme. You might also feel like you’re at a ceiling. That’s how I personally felt before I hired my assistant – and will get into that.

Scenario 1:

You need to add something new but your plate is full with what you’ve already built, and now have to manage. This is kind of what I was talking about with that ceiling feeling. Like you were aware that it’s going to take hours in space to create something new or scale or do whatever it is that you’re trying to do. But because you have a full client roster or whatever you have built so far is filling up your plate, something either hast to give, or we need someone else to come in and help with that process.

Scenario 2:

Something needs to get done but you don’t seem be doing it.

I know that that sounds like the same as scenario one. But I promise they are different. In scenario one you were capable of doing the tasks that need to be done you know what needs to be done you just literally don’t have the time for it. In scenario two it’s more so that there is a roadblock that is keeping you from doing some thing even though maybe you do have the time to do it. So let’s look at some examples of that.

You need to identify road blocks.

Knowing what the barrier is, what is the road block that is keeping you from taking action and getting “the thing” done?

So let’s say that you know that email marketing is really important. And you know you need to build your email list. You’ve made the email list but you have no way of driving people to it. So you know you need to create a freebie of some kind. A free resource. You know what the free resource is. You have the idea in your head. Maybe you’ve even sketched it out. But the idea of making a PDF and having to design it and make it pretty it’s so overwhelming to you that you just will not move forward with creating the freebie and therefore you can’t build your email list. This is just an example of how one thing, one roadblock can affect the end outcome that you’re wanting. Again, that is an example of kind of the tension or the pausing or the stagnation that I mentioned earlier.

With this scenario, you actually have options. I like to look at how can we lower the barrier to entry. If this person that I’m talking about is held up by having to create a pretty PDF I might ask the question can you just do it in a simple clean Google dock or a Google sheet? Is there another way to deliver this freebie that is less overwhelming and creating the PDF?

Then I might ask how much would it cost to pay someone to create the PDF for you? You create all of the content, somebody else plugs it in to canvas and makes a pretty PDF for you.

That is where hiring someone comes into place. This is actually an exact example from one of my business clients. We were at a standstill with creating a freebie for months and then we discovered why that was. And it wasn’t a super pressing issue but it was a cycle we kind of noticed.

She finally hired a VA to create the freebie for her and draft up emails for her mailing list. By doing that she now has a freebie and she is building her email list. And adding 50+ people to it was very easy once she removed that roadblock.

The same thing could be said for creating a website, or even not posting content because it’s overwhelming to you to create pretty Canva graphics or templates.

To which I would say either keep it simple and stick to simple black-and-white graphics – lower the expectations for yourself. Nothing fancy. Or if you’re willing to invest, buy some templates from someone. I’ll be sure to put a link in the show notes for Brandt Creative who did my branding. Tatum and her team have tons of options for templates and resources at very affordable prices in my opinion.

There are options out there in order to make your life easier at very low costs, and that’s what I want you to see. These are really small examples of paying under $100 for something or paying someone under $500 a month to make your life easier and to allow you to continue to build momentum in the direction that you want to go.

I just think sometimes when we hear “hiring,” we think bringing on a full-time employee. Rather than maybe just completing some very small tasks in our business that would free up brain space and time for us to do other things.

On a personal note, it was also hard for me to think that another person would want to help my business grow. Which is obviously a mindset issue on my part. But know that people are willing and excited to do that. Other people have gifts and abilities and interests that you don’t, and those can benefit your business. So just be open to that.

Before we end this, I do want to talk about pricing and paying people. This is another conversation I was having with business clients. How do you decide on a budget, and how much you should be paying someone to complete a certain task. Whether it’s on a monthly basis or a one off project.

I don’t know that there is a one size fits all answer for this. Or that it should be a certain percentage of your revenue, or profit. Maybe there is an equation that I am unaware of. But you know your numbers, or you should. So to me that’s a very personal decision. I am more so about finding a person who you trust, and either paying their rates, or having a budget in mind that you are willing to pay for the tasks that you need completed, and finding someone that fits within that budget.

Of course I think you want people to feel compensated for the work that they are doing, and also incentivized to do a good job. So take all of that for what it’s worth. Perhaps nothing, perhaps some thing. I don’t know, you tell me.

Please also know that there is not a rule book for when you should hire someone in regards to how long you have been in business. You might hire in your first year of business and you might not hire until you’re in your five. And that’s OK. But I hope that whenever you are ready to hire, or you feel like you might be reaching that ceiling, I hope that this podcast was helpful.

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