SHOWNOTES
Today’s podcast covers an important topic. When to hire help. More importantly, how do you know when it’s the right time.
I’m going to break this down so there is no more confusion.
First, there’s the conventional thinking that you shouldn’t hire until you are super-successful and completely organized or when you hit a magical revenue amount. Only that day never seems to arrive.
When will you know?
I’m sharing some hard truths about what I experienced. I know many entrepreneurs will relate to the busy-ness of the day to day; except you never feel like you did anything to move your business forward. I certainly had plenty of days like that.
I’m busting a few myths today:
Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.
Some actions provide exponential returns which is what you miss by doing it all.
I know all the reasons why not to hire. I was right there too.
No one can do it like I can/ you can.
I can’t afford it yet.
There’s more than one way to hire and train. I outline just one of those that I’ve put into practice and helped other to do as well.
One of the best things is not being all alone. Knowing my team has my back has made such a big difference. I want you to have that same feeling of support. Grab the resources so you can see how making your first hire can work for you.
RESOURCES
TRANSCRIPT
00:03 Hey guys, it's Gary Vaynerchuck and you're listening to the front row podcast with our girl, Jen.
00:15 Hey, it's Jen Lehner and today we're going to talk about when to know if it's time to hire somebody. And I've got a couple of great freebies, so make sure you go to the show notes page at jenlehner.com/ready when do you know that it's time to hire somebody? Well, I can tell you for sure that most people think that they don't need to hire anyone until they get to some magical place in their business. That's either they've reached a certain revenue goal or they've finally got everything organized so that when they bring someone in, everything will be easy and it will all make sense. And then everybody's just going to squirt rainbows out of their eyeballs. But what I've learned is that the time to hire help is actually before you think you need help because here's the thing, you started your business because you were good at something.
01:02 So maybe you created a product or you're offering a service, whatever it is, you decided to do it because you had a vision and you wanted to make an impact and you wanted to earn enough money to be free from a regular job where you have to negotiate time. And that's time that you want to spend with your family and time to do the stuff that you wanna do to enjoy your life. And so you get into this business and you're super fired up. And it's so exciting that sometimes it's hard to even fall asleep at night because your head is spinning with all of the ideas and all of the opportunities. And when you get to your desk in the morning, you are so pumped up, you are fired up and ready to go. And then reality creeps in. And by reality, uh, I'll just paint the picture for you.
Read more...
01:48 So maybe you decided to write a blog post. So you open up your Squarespace or your Wix or your WordPress or your a Google doc or whatever it is that you use to write your blog posts and you start typing. And then you forget to spell a word. Let's say the word is restaurant. I actually always forget, forget how to spell the word restaurant. I don't know why it's not that it's a difficult word. I'd just always do. But anyway, you forget how to spell this word. And that reminds you that you had downloaded an app that will not only help you to immediately correct words that you frequently misspell, but it also helps with grammar and so on. So you go and look for that app and while you're looking for that app, you see a notification in your email. So you go over to your email to see what that's all about.
02:33 And lo and behold, there's an invitation to be on somebody's podcast, which is awesome, right? So you open up the email and they want to know if you're available on such and so date. And so you open up your calendar to see if you're available on those dates. And it looks like you are great. So you switch over to the other window to reply back. But as soon as you do that, you've forgotten the dates that you were available for or the times that you were available. So you have to switch to the other window and you accidentally click on the window that has Facebook open. So you click on that window and there you see that it's social media day and darn it, you're a social media strategist and you should've done something about that. Maybe it's not too late for you to whip up a cute graphic in Canva about social media day and post it to all of your social channels you think to yourself.
03:21 So you get busy doing that and you work straight through lunch and you're hungry and it's 3:00 PM and you realize that you forgotten to reply to the email about the podcast. And so it goes on and on and on. And this is what most of the days look like for you. And I know this because I had plenty of these days early on, and as I look back, it felt like I was really busy. But in truth, I did nothing to move my business forward. In fact, every single thing in this scenario is stuff that I should not have been doing except for writing that blog posts. Every single other thing was a distraction and something that I could have delegated or really gotten rid of altogether. So if I multiplied this day by hundreds of days, the whole year is so far away from reaching the potential that I set for my business that you set for your business, right?
04:15 You are so far away from making the impact you want to make, but somehow all this stuff seems so necessary in the moment and the reality that sets in when you started out to do this business for just the one thing that you're so good at, you realize that there's so much more that needs to get done to actually run a business beyond what it is you're good at. Beyond that thing. There's marketing and accounting and invoicing and scheduling and content production and sales and funnels and file management and just so much stuff. And it dawned on me during my second year in business that if I didn't get some help, my business was going to stay stuck. And although I wish I would have known this before I ever started my business, two years isn't that bad. Actually, I know solo preneurs who've been at this for years and years and still don't have help, and as you might imagine, they haven't had much growth.
05:09 And with marketers especially or even web designers or other people who are tech savvy, you know how to do just about everything. So you said to yourself, I might as well just do it myself because I know how to do it. I might as well save the money. And this is where we fool ourselves. You may know how to do everything yourself, but is that what you get paid for? So let's say you're a health and wellness coach. Your clients come to you for your knowledge and support. They buy your courses, they hire you for coaching and join your membership site. Are they paying you for landing page creation, social media posting? I am guessing that they are not. And let's say they pay you, we're just going to grab an arbitrary number. Let's say they pay you $200 for one, a one on one coaching for an hour, but you decide to spend three hours creating graphics in Canva or setting up webinar software.
06:04 So three hours, that's $600 you could've made instead had you delegated those tasks. But actually it's a lot more than that. So a better way to think about this is like this. If you delegated those three hours of tasks to someone else and instead spent that 10 time doing things like writing your next launch plan or your next webinar, or you called and secured four new affiliates for your new course, the value of that time is exponentially more than $600 because those are seeds you are planting to create real growth. Tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands of dollars and none of this is theoretical. I have worked with hundreds of solopreneurs now to show them the magic of hiring a virtual assistant to grow their businesses, and the results are usually instant, but I know all too well what the resistance is. It's, I can't afford it. I'm not ready. I don't even know what I would give to a VA.
07:03 I don't have time to onboard someone and train them. I'm not sure I could trust someone in my business or I don't even know where I would begin. I get it. I had all the same pushbacks and doubts and everybody that I work with has some one, two, three or all of those. All of those concerns. But the good news is you can totally afford it, especially if you hire overseas where you can leverage the exchange rate. So I could go off on a huge tangent over here, but I just want to tell you that while the world has seen this trend in the growth of entrepreneurship, because good Lord, there has never been so many people calling themselves entrepreneur. I'm quite sure that that's not a scientific statement, but you could just look around, right? Like entrepreneurs everywhere, but at the same time, and this is documented, there is a huge rise in depression, anxiety and burnout.
07:58 And the only way to really offset that and to make your entrepreneurship work for you is to leverage having, I want to say leverage the exchange rate, but I think that whether you hire locally or you hire overseas, leveraging another person to help you in your business is, is the way to go. But back to the exchange rate. So the other correlation with the rise in entrepreneurs and the rise in the sad, sad fact that anxiety and and burnout correlates with the increase in entrepreneurship. The other awesome trend is that there's an explosion of skilled affordable. There is a skilled affordable global workforce out there and I'm sure you have probably by now hired someone on Fiverr or Upwork or somewhere maybe you did or didn't have a good experience. I think a lot of times people will do that and then they'll, they'll think that that's what they are.
08:59 It's like if they didn't have a good experience that that's what's what it's gonna look like. If they choose to work with someone out of the country. But that is absolutely not the case. So most of the people that I've worked with out of the Philippines, virtual assistants for example, I should say out of the Philippines for example, that have advanced degrees, master's degrees, medical degrees, and most of the population speaks English very, very well. And so you can hire these people at an affordable rate, um, that is, that is a respectable living wage for them and definitely affordable for you. And also there are other ways to reward them without paying just us dollars. There's ways of giving them access to trainings, to giving them bonuses at Christmas time or for certain benchmarks along the way as you grow as a business, you could say, when we hit this level, when we get this many subscribers, when we raise, when we get this many people subscribed to our new membership site, you're going to get, you know, X percent or you're going to get these amount of dollars.
10:05 It's just a matter of being creative. But what I want to make sure that you understand is that you can totally afford it. Okay, so we're going to scratch that one off the list of objections you can onboard and train somebody in a semi-automated way that takes very little time. And one of the best ways to really get ready for someone is to use a screen recording software like loom video to record things that you do routinely in your business. And after you do this for just a week, you'll have a whole training catalog to give to your VA the minute that they start. So for example, let's say, um, every morning you have a certain way of, uh, of things that you do in your Facebook group. So all you're going to do is you're going to get to your desk the following morning and you're going to press the play button.
10:55 It really is, it's free software. This loom video, and I'm going to put it in the show notes, but you just click a button and your computer starts recording your screen and you have audio available. So you just start talking to yourself. Now I am going into the Facebook group. Now I am checking all the latest posts. Now I am going to organize this post into the unit that we've called sharing. And the reason I'm doing this is because we want to keep the group organized. So you're, you're just talking about what you're doing and why you're doing it. And you can sneeze and you can say, um, and you can make a mistake and you just say, Oh, nevermind what I just said. What I meant to say is this. Then you click stop. It gives you a link. You post that link somewhere that's easy to grab, like you know, on a Google doc or something.
11:45 I like to use Trello. By the time you do this for the week a week, you literally have a whole library of, of trainings to give to your VA the minute that they, that they start. And there's so many with regard to, to trusting someone, there are so many great tools that allow you to work with somebody remotely and keep your security intact. And I'm going to list those down down in the show notes, but that's absolutely and not to mention the fact that if you follow a really strong process in the beginning and in hiring your VA, then it's really unlikely that you're going to have a VA going to be somebody who is untrustworthy. And then as far as not knowing what to give to your VA, I have compiled a list of a ton of tasks to get your ideas flowing. Just two words smushed together.
12:36 So text VATASKLIST to 44222 and again, that's all one word. VATASKLIST to 44222. And finally, if you aren't sure if you're ready, there's a quiz that you could take to see if you are, and you're going to text VAQUIZ to 44222. Okay. I'm going to give you both of those again for the task list. It's VATASKLIST to 44222 and there'll be in the show notes as well. So that's it for today's episode. I hope you enjoyed it. I hope you found it helpful. Most importantly, I hope it inspired you to think about adding someone to your team. You know, aside from the obvious monetary gains and the growth that you're going to see in your business.
13:27 There's something so unbelievable about not being alone anymore about how even, you know, it's funny, my team is all the way across the planet, but I feel like they're in the room next door. They've got my back, we're in this together, we're all marching towards the same goal together. And um, I don't know that part of it is priceless and we share the joys and we share in the disappointments. That's just something, you know, I went into it because I wanted to see the growth, the monetary growth in my business. And that has been probably one of the nicest surprises is that, is that I've grown personally. My business has grown, my PR, my business is richer. And, and when I say richer, it is richer beyond any, any dollar amounts. Would love to hear your comments and your takeaways. Uh, you could come over to the show notes page at jenlehner.com/ready and as always, really appreciate your reviews over on iTunes or wherever you listen to your podcast. They actually don't make it easy for you to leave these reviews, but for the five minutes or so that it's going to take you to get there and figure it out and leave me a review. I'm forever grateful. See you next time.
