LY Podcast: Ep. 60: Who to Hire – Dream Team Series

Melissa Anzman: Welcome to the Launcher Dream Team podcast series brought to you by Launch Yourself. I'm Melissa Anzman, and this is a special series dedicated to helping you scale your business with your Dream Team without sacrificing profit us is you're tired of wearing all of the hats in your business and being that bottleneck and you're ready to scale. You know that is how but you're not quite sure what to do. It's not as easy to find trustworthy team members or, heck, even have and manage a team as some gurus and business coaches make it seem. And your human capital your people are the most important component to your business's success. For over 15 years, I've been working in human resources first in corporate America and then as the founder of a seven-figure HR consulting firm, Better, where I've worked with clients like Google, Clorox, Honeywell Williams, Sonoma, and more and has been featured as part of the HR Forbes Council to help increase employee engagement and build their employee experience culture.

This series will help you fast-track your team building and business scaling skills so you can learn how to do it the right way from an actual HR expert. But first, let's talk about how to actually find great people to join your team. Did you know that there are four different search strategies that you can use when finding a contractor or full-time employee? I share each strategy, how and when to leverage each one to know exactly what steps you can take to find your next Dream Team member in my new free guide. Just go to Launchyourself.co/hire. That's H-I-R-E. To Snag. A. Copy it's easy. Pause this episode. Go to Launchyourself.co/hire and Voila. You got the guide. Now let's get into the show.

Hey, welcome to the show. I am so excited about this series, mostly because it feels like my two worlds are finally converging. Now there's a reason they haven't converged before. That's another story for a different day. But it is time to bring my better my HR consulting experience. Here to you the entrepreneur small business market, mostly because not only am I expert in it, I love it, but also because I'm seeing a lot of bad information being shared out there because team is now a hot, sexy thing, which is so exciting for someone like me. But the downside of that is you have a lot of gurus or business coaches or whatever insert their other expertise, trying to give you advice on how to hire a team.

And part of the trouble I'm finding is those same people were asking me questions about team in the past, or they themselves have gotten into legal situations. Or shall I say, hot water? So I don't want you to follow that advice. I don't want you to be scared of team. I don't want you to fall into any traps around the employment situation. So I am here to help you from an actual HR expert who just also happens to be an entrepreneur. Today's episode, we are going to focus the first in the series on who to hire next. Now, this is something that I see a lot out there. I hear people say the next person you should hire or the first person you should hire is an admin or VA, a virtual assistant. Then someone else says you need to hire someone to do your task.

And then another person says the first person you hire, the next person you hire. Your most important hire is an Ops person. And of course, my personal favorite is the team saying, just delegate everything. Find a bunch of people delegate it all. Now here's the thing. Just like everything else in business, there really isn't a one size fits all solution. Your business is going to determine who you need to hire next, what makes sense for you and your business? Now, how do you do this? Because I didn't answer the question. You still are stuck with it. So instead I want to give you a little bit of work around how to actually find and figure out the right next hire for you and your business. So the first thing you're going to do is understand what you're spending your time on the most.

And the easiest way to do this is to look at your calendar. But I actually find that's just sort of layer one. If you want to truly understand what you are spending your time on and what you should or should not be doing, and we'll get rid of the sheds later. But you know what I mean here is to actually do some time tracking, do it for a week, do it in 15 minutes, increments. But it's a Google spreadsheet. You can make it fancy if you want to. You don't have to. There's even programs that do this for you that track your time. But the point here is I want you to actually understand where your brain power is going because that is going to dictate what your next hire should be, because the whole point here is having a team growing a team helps you scale your business because it brings you into your zone of genius. It allows other people to take things that others can do that are not just reliant upon you so that you can do the things that only you can do as the CEO or the business owner and really scale in that manner.

And so I want you to look at what you're spending your time on. And then once you have your tracking done, I want you to really go through and just sort of say, grade yourself. Whatever makes sense for you of was this an effective use of my time? And was it an efficient use of my time now, just because we can do something doesn't mean we should. But also, it doesn't mean that something that we can do very quickly or easily doesn't mean it has to come off the plate either. So let me give a little bit better of an example. One of the things that I see a lot is like, take your admin off your plate, so get a VA, have them, do your scheduling, have them send out your emails, whatever that thing is.

And when I looked at my time tracking, those are things that take me a lot of time. And my schedule is something that is just more hassle than it's worth to hand it off to someone else. So by that popular definition, was it an effective use of my time? I would say yes, because otherwise I would have to spend a lot of time rearranging calendars and moving things along or being grumpy in meetings that aren't during the weird time. I want them. So really look at that. Is the time being tracked. And then is it effective use of your time? Are you using your brain power in the right way? And is it an efficient use of your time? The next thing I want you to look at for those things, you're going to get closer and closer to understanding through each step. Like, what is the right next hire for you? So first where you spend your time, then is it effective and efficient? And now we want to talk about is it something that can be handed off? Can you train someone else to do that piece for you? And if you can, what are you going to spend your time on instead?

So this is the cool part here, using that same example for me, scheduling on my calendar, is it hand off of? Absolutely. It is. Can I train someone to know exactly how I like my calendar? I absolutely can. Is it my top priority? No, it's not. But when I look at that and understand those five minutes a day or maybe it's 30 minutes a week in total. What else am I going to do during those 30 minutes? And is it sort of a good trade off? Is my brain power in my zone of genius going to be greatly higher if I use that 30 minutes differently. And for me, the answer is no. For you, the answer may be heck yes. So you see how there's a difference there the next thing you want to do. You're going to get closer. Now you're probably thinking, hey, it looks like I need this type of role filled or these types of tasks handed off and completed. Then I want you to really dig into the critical piece here, which is the ROI for the role. And ROI means return on investment. And one of the things that HR.

So in corporate it's HR used to be personnel Department, one of the things that HR got wrong at the beginning. And now we're using a lot of time and effort to change sort of the publicity around is that there is an ROI for the people function. So people in your business, your human capital does have a huge ROI, and it's for every role. Okay. So I want you to look at the ROI, the return on investment for what they do, and to do that. I talked about it in a previous episode on the Launch Yourself podcast. But I want you to really look at what is the timeline for that person, whether they're a contractor or an employee to get the results you need. And what are those deliverables and milestones.

So when we look at, let's say a Facebook ads manager, which is the example I've previously used. We want to understand that they need some runway to get results. We know sort of what our role is and what we need them to do. So all of those things are going to calculate into the ROI of bringing them on the team. Once you've looked at all of these components now and only now are you able to then determine the role that you need to hire for next. And so if you're looking at things on your list that are related to, let's say, your course creator and everything on your list are things like manage the Facebook group and respond to customer questions and upload my live classes to Kajabi. If all of those things are a pattern and taking up a bunch of your time and not really an effective use of you being in your zone of genius, it is hands off about we can teach someone and train someone to do it.

We can work our numbers out to get our ROI for the role, our timeline, our milestones, and so on. It may be clear that you need an Ops person or a tech VA to help you take those things off your plate and save you that much time. But without understanding all of these elements, you may have just sort of gone forward with an assistant, or you may have gone forward with an Ops person or, of course, Genie. I don't even know what they're calling themselves these days, but the whole point here is the more clarity you have around those components for you and your business and where you are right now, the easier it will be to identify your next role. Now let me use another example. Let's say that you are spending a lot of your time on sales calls, and maybe you need to be spending that time because your zone of genius is maybe as a content creator, you wouldn't necessarily know that you kind of feel a little friction around sales calls, but you think you know what everyone does. It's okay. But when you go through these questions and really determine, is this a good use of your time is an effective and efficient use.

All of those things, you realize that, yes, you're still going to do your own calendar, and for now, or maybe you're still going to upload those things in Kajabi for now, but you really need someone to come in and take over your sales calls. Okay, so understand, for your business, what is the biggest impact to get you back in your zone of genius right now? And that is going to be true for your first goodness, like, five to ten team members. After that, we start looking at building out bigger teams and leadership and needs and service delivery and things like that. But until that point, we are still getting you out of the weeds of your business of being that solopreneur into growing into your own zone of genius. Okay, the next thing I want you to do, once you have a clear idea of who you should bring on board next is look at timelines. And what I mean by that is, first I want you to be realistic about the timeline to get someone to join your team.

A lot of people feel like, oh, my goodness. I need someone right now and they go out and hire someone within a week, and that person doesn't work out and everyone's upset. Well, the truth is finding someone and onboarding them to your team, whether as a contractor or full time employee in a week is not going to be an effective long term strategy. I'd be surprised if that's going to be an effective short term strategy. Okay, it's hard to do. I want you to be realistic about your timeline of how long it's going to take for you to find the person to interview them, to maybe do some test projects with them, whatever your process is, and then to actually get them on board. Which brings me to the second timeline. I really want you to consider, which is your investment to train them your time investment. We can't just bring people on board and think that they know what they need to do. Even if they're an expert, you need to spend some time with them.

You need a training plan and onboarding plan, even for your contractors, so that they have the right information. There's one answer for things. There's a process to get their questions answered. You have expectations set on both sides. All of the things take your time. And so if you're looking at your schedule and you're like, hey, there is no way that I can onboard somebody in the next three weeks, then it's not the right time for you to hire because that person is going to fail. And so you have wasted time and money and effort and energy and all the things we don't have enough of in order to set yourself up for failure. So instead, right now, as you're thinking of who to hire next, I want you to really carve out some time on your calendar to hire, but also on board. And also the timeline thing may absolutely influence your top priority of who you should bring on board, because let's say you have two roles that seem very close to being ready.

Maybe it's the salesperson and it's your tech VA, and those are like on your list of things. Those are your most desired hires. Well, I want you to then look at how long it will take for you to train someone in both of those spaces. Now, in general, training someone in sales and your sales process and overcoming objections and doing practice calls like that is going to take more of your time than teaching a tech VA how to upload things in your course platform. Okay, so if you have two roles, maybe three roles that feel next, the last layer of determination should really be your availability, your timeline higher and your timeline investment to train them. So, my friends, this is how you determine who to hire next. And again, it's up to about ten employees that this is really getting you out of the weeds. Now, that doesn't mean from ten employees. Something dramatically shifts and changes. So if you have ten employees to maybe about 50 employees, the way we go about this is you getting out of the weeds, but also how to get your team out of the weeds and get them in their zone of genius, too. So we're using the same process. It's just our focus on who changes slightly based on where our business is or where our revenue and profit is coming from.

Hopefully, you are super clear now on who to hire next and have a little bit of a cheat sheet of who to hire next. As you continue to scale your business from solopreneur to entrepreneur to like full-fledged business owner. For more information and show notes about this episode, go to Launchyourself Co 60. Thanks for making it to the end. Now don't forget to snag your free copy of how to actually Find your Dream Team. All you have to do is go to Launchyourself.co/hire a copy, and it'll pop in your inbox chock full of information of the four different search strategies use to find a great contractor or full-time employee to help you scale your business that's launchyourself.co/hire.