The Fierce Business Babe Podcast Ep 87: Behind The Scenes of Hiring & Outsourcing
In today’s episode we are going behind the scenes and talking about all things hiring and outsourcing within your business. I am going to dig into all of the things you can outsource in your business, how to get started, give you some really great tips on how to find your first team member and so much more!
Behind the Scenes of Hiring & Outsourcing
By: Melissa Lin
I want to dive into a topic that I do receive a ton of questions about from my clients. If my clients are having these questions, It means you probably do too. I want to chat about outsourcing, but not only what outsourcing is. Specifically, I want to talk about how to outsource, how to determine the first few items to outsource, where in the world you can actually find team members, what a typical interview could look like and more. Are you ready? Awesome.
Okay, so when we start our businesses. and I know this because I was in those early stages before too. I've been where you are and when restarting we were wearing a lot of hats and I mean a lot of hats. You can probably relate. So I know when I first started here were some of my hats that I wore. I was, of course, a CEO, business owner. I was a business coach, social media manager, I was my own marketing agent, my own graphic designer, my own accountant, my own data analytics person, my own content creator, my own email marketer and so much more. They are just so many more things and it can feel exhausting, meaning just taking up most of your day, that you just don’t even have time to make for sales in your business or even think about what you’re going to launch next. That can be frustrating and I can feel like “okay, how am I ever going to scale my business?” Well, outsourcing is one of the big key things you have to think about if you really want to scale. You get to release some of your business. I know it's your baby, but you do want to release some of it so that you can hire team members to help you. You get to outsource, you get to delegate.
So if you've been following me for a while, you know that in my early days as an entrepreneur I was the one woman show, like the best one-woman show. I was really good at it and I wouldn't let anyone near my business. Like, if someone was coming their way to my business. I put up a Karate sign and was like “Ah! Get away!”. That is definitely not the case anymore, I know that in order for me to serve more women, create a larger impact, and continue to scale, I get to do it with an amazing team with me, behind me, in my corner with me. I hired my first team member on Team Melissa Lin in 2018 and we really grew my team in 2019. 2019 was a big growth year for the business and our team. We’re going to continue to hire a few more in 2020 and it’s absolutely incredible. Those first few months of hiring my first team member, they weren’t easy. My very first team member was my first VA and it was very difficult to let some come into my business and take part of my baby. Even though I knew it was needed. I was the girl that felt I could do it best and it would take more of my time to train somebody else to do it, so why not do it myself. Right? I mean I can do it faster. I can do it the way that I like. Oh my goodness, there were all of these reasons coming up for me. Can you relate? Is this something you told yourself? Is this something that has come up for you? Over the years, I’ve let more and more of that go and today we have eight team members on our team, not including Pearl (for those of you that are new to me, Pearl is my one-eyed cat and she is the best assistant ever) and we will definitely have a few more before the end of the year. Me outsourcing and hiring meant I was able to start spending more of my time and my zone of Genius, my coaching, more time on the scaling of my business, more time on sales focus activities and more.
I do want to go through an exercise with you to help you determine what to start to outsource first, second and third in your business. Before I do, I want to share some of the things that I currently outsource in my business. I outsource a lot, If I can outsource it, I’m doing it. We outsource photo shoots, photo editing, right? I use the same photographer here in Seattle. I absolutely love him. He’s amazing. He's got an amazing team. We Outsource all Administration and operations in the back end of my business. One of my VAs takes care of the majority of that, We outsource Facebook ads, I have a Facebook ad manager, we also outsource PR. So press, all of that is outsourced. I outsource customer service support. I have two co-coaches that help run part of my group programs. I outsource Pinterest management, LinkedIn management. I outsource some graphic design but that is actually a part of my creativity, my creative side. I actually love to make my own Instagram stories and do certain things here and there when it does come to Graphics so I don’t outsource all of that but I do outsource a majority of it. Website items, the client onboarding and then there's also things outside of my business that I outsource, like instacart.. I spend lots of time on the instacart app and it saves me so much time along with Uber Eats and that type of thing. So we outsource tons over here at Team Melissa Lin over at The Melissa Lin headquarters up in Seattle and here is an example for you. If you're reading this and thinking “I want to, but I’m scared and I know I should but is it really worth it? I'm still in the beginning stages”. Here's an example for you. So let’s say that you hire a VA for 5 hours a week at $10 an hour. If you can find a VA for $10 or $12 dollars an hour, Let's say that you hired one for 5 hours a week. So let's scale back to a month's picture of you. That would be 20 hours a month. And what that can do is that it can give you 20 hours a month back in your business, for you, for only $200- $10 an hour $200. Now, imagine what you could do with 20 extra hours back. You could close or find new clients worth a thousand dollars. So hiring and delegating, for $200 a month, could help you generate an additional $5,000 in sales or more. Sounds pretty worth it, right, but that's how I like to think about it. How many more things can I accomplish in my business? How much more can I serve my clients if I outsource this item? How much more can I bring into my business? How many more people can I serve? How many more people can get access to my courses and things like that if I start to outsource more and more?
Let’s go into a little exercise that you can do right now, in this moment, to start to determine what tasks in your day that you can actually start outsourcing and what that really looks like. So what you can do to start to outsource some of these things in your business, you can outsource them now or you can get outsourcing down the road. I want you to take a fresh piece of paper and separate it into four sections. So draw a line down the middle vertically, then horizontally, that way it's kind of like a big quadrant. You have four squares on this piece of paper, so separate into those four sections and label them 1, 2, 3, and 4. Now, what I want you to do for number one, this is going to be the section of things that you love doing in your business and also are so great at, so write “Love”. These are going to be things that are in your zone of Genius. For me, these are things like coaching. I love coaching. That is my zone of Genius. So that is up in that corner. So the things that you love, that you are great at, that only you can do, but you absolutely love doing them. Now start to do that, start adding things. but at least write like “Love”, “Great At”, “Zone Of Genius”, something like that in that first square.
Now, move to the next corner and let's label this number two. These are going to be the things in your business that you like, you don't love them, you like them and you're good at them as well. So these are things that you will most likely continue to do until you're ready to really scale and grow your business, you know, once you hit the 5K month range, 10K months, 15K months, 20K a month, and you have a little more income to put back into your business to hire more people to help you, as the outsource and delegate.
Now, let's move down to quadrant 3. This is going to be the section for things that you dislike that you're good at. So you can be really good at this stuff, but you just don't want to be doing in your business. So for example, I was a chemical engineer. I was great at data analysis. I dont always love doing that type of thing. Right? I don’t always want to be collecting data for my business. I know I get to look at it, and decipher, and go into like, what's happening with the story that these numbers are telling us in the business, but it doesn't mean that I enjoy going and collecting all that information. So it’s a little tedious for me but I know I'm good at it. It doesn't take me very long, but I don't love or like doing it. Things like that are going to go in that corner.
Now, let’s go to section four. These are the things that you dislike and things that you are just not good at, at all. At all. At all. I have a lot of things in my business that I dislike and that I'm not good at. We want to delegate these things in 3 and 4 as soon as possible. Those are the things you really want to delegate.
I want to say the first things in my business that I started to delegate were: podcast show notes, things to do with my podcast, just because it took me a while, took some time to do. Editing, writing show notes, uploading things and things like that. So, of course I record the episodes because nobody else in my business can really do that for me. It gets to be me. I also love doing it, it's a form of coaching for me. I love coaching you girls.
So three and four. These are things that you dislike, that you're good at and things that you dislike and you're not good at, these are the ones you're going to delegate first. So as I mentioned, podcast items, outside of the actual recording of the podcast, I delegated very quickly. I delegated the organizing of my email list. So I write my emails. However, I don't enjoy it and I don't have fun actually uploading the email and making sure things look great and pretty. I write the content, but I'm not going to sit there at my computer for 30-50 minutes or however long to actually input it Into MailChimp and make all the sequences and things like that. I have a team member who helps me with that. However, I am still writing all of my content. So you’ve got your exercise and you know what to do. Now, let me answer a few questions for you.
Okay, Melissa, Where do you find your first team member? What does that look like? Where can you go now? There's a lot of different places in the online world that you can go and find team members. The first is going to be Facebook groups. For example, if you're looking for a virtual assistant or VA, there are Facebook groups specific to VAs where you can post your job listing for what you're looking for. You know, these are the items that I'm looking for the VA to start doing right away, these are things I would potentially want some help with down the road, etc. That is a great spot to start looking. You can search on websites, such as Upwork and Fiverr, or you can also ask some of your Biz besties for referrals. A lot of my team members have come from other friends. I know that I've worked with them because It was a trusted source. As you start searching, I do recommend having a very clear vision for what you want this person in this world to do. We always put together a job description and information in our posts when we’re on the search for our next team member. This can usually include something along the lines of, “Team Melissa Lynn is currently seeking a blank (whatever that name of job title is) and at this job title, you will be responsible for... we’ll add in a few bullet points of what we’re expecting. We will also include, “As a team member of Team Melissa Lin, you will be responsible for these items”. So they’re responsible for a certain job title for certain things and then, “As a team member of Melissa Lin, you're also responsible for these”. We add in that we’re looking for that right person that fits our values, shares our core values and shares what we approximate work hours per week or per month would be, what compensation would look like, and then any duties that we feel can be added down the road.
Now, when jobs are posted, if you go and post in a Facebook group, keep in mind that people will come flooding in and running your way. One of my Mastermind Babes, inside of my Six-Figure Fierce Business Mastermind, when she started to hire her first few team members had hundreds of people reach out to her. Her inbox was filled with people, it was insane. So keep in mind, people will come flooding, running your way. I'd recommend adding an application form directly in your post so that your DM’s and emails don't get bombarded. I know how overwhelming that can be, right, if our email inboxes show like 200 people have just applied for this. You’re going to just throw your hands up and not end up hiring anybody. So I recommend having some type of application form and have it right there in your post, wherever you are putting this post, that way they know. Okay. This is where I need to go and actually apply for this. Then ask them, depending on the position, to upload their portfolio if they’ve got a portfolio or even a quick 2-3 minute video explaining why they want the job and why they want to work on your team. There's lots of different things that you can do to start to get those applications rolling and start to decipher who really is the best fit for this. So that's really worked well for us, having an application form in the post. And once you are ready to interview, I definitely recommend interviewing more than one person. It is rare that the first person that comes into your inbox is the one. It’s like dating, like how often does it happen that the first person that you swipe left or right on in an app, like on Bumble, is the one that you're going to be with. So I definitely, definitely, recommend more than one interview and we always look for that one person that vibes best with our company values because, keep in mind, at the end of the day you can teach a skill to anybody. You want to make sure that the person you bring onto your team really fits in with your team and your core values and you guys are on the same page for your vision. Sp. we have gone through outsourcing, what we outsource in our business, how to decide what to outsource, how to put together a job description and start searching for your next team member and so much more. I would love to hear your biggest takeaway. So go ahead take a screenshot, share it on your Instagram stories and tag me @TheMelissaLin. I will always be your biggest cheerleader.
Topics we cover include:
What you can outsource in your business
What Outsourcing could mean for your business
What to start outsourcing
Where to find team members
How to put together a job listing
Selecting the perfect team member
And so much more!
Times to check out:
(10:03) What You Can Outsource
(11:48) What outsourcing can do for your business
(13:02) What to start outsourcing
(17:50) How to Find Team Members
(18:53) How to put together a job posting
(21:25) Selecting the perfect team member
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