LY Podcast: Ep. 61: Team Profitability – Dream Team Series

Melissa Anzman Welcome to the Launch Your 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 and 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, bettHR, 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.

Welcome back to the next installment of the Dream Team series. So today we're going to talk about how a team can scale your profitability or tank it. When we think about a team, I want you to know that what I mean by that in this context, today is a full time hire or a contractor vendor that you bring on to be part of your company. So whether that is they're an actual employee or you're paying them through 1099 as a contractor, that is all a team member. For this discussion, it is time to grow your team. I get this question a lot.

When you are the bottleneck, when you are the person preventing your business to grow or scale into the next thing. If that is happening, it is time to bring on someone to help you do that. The other thing is that you may be wearing all of the hats or doing all of the things and listen. Just because you can do it doesn't mean that you should. Even if money is tight. And we'll talk about that in a future episode of how to actually afford a team. If money feels a little tight and when to spend money on a team.

But these are the indicators. So you are the bottleneck you're wearing all the hats, or perhaps you are not spending the majority of your time in your zone of genius. Now this is really important because if you look around or look at your to do list and you realize that you are spending like 5% of your time doing the things that you are best at, the things that you love, the things that grow your actual business or move it forward.

It is well past time to grow a team, and I use 5% as like a grossly out balanced amount. But truly that number is going to be up to you personally. If I'm spending more than 50% of my time doing things outside of my zone of genius, that means I need to check in with myself, go through the formula and see if it's time to hire next and then move forward, and then finally, one that we don't like to talk about as much as an indicator is if your client service delivery has tanked, meaning that your clients aren't just happy, your retention rates aren't great.

You're getting feedback about your service delivery, your program. What have you of people just not being as satisfied as they used to? And that could be because the service delivery has gone down as in you are not always available. They feel like you may be a bottleneck or it could also just be you have grown past your current state of support. Now, if you don't grow your team strategically, however, it can not only be sort of what I've been told, a soul sucking experience. Have you had that experience before, but it will also greatly impact your bottom line. So growing a team is a strategic adventure.

This is not something that we just sort of do willynilly. Otherwise it can take your profitability very quickly and leave you hesitant to do it when you need to in the future, it can really stop your forward progress in your business. Let's walk through how a bad hiring process can decrease your profits. Now, first, huge time investment and money investment it's to bring on new team members. And if you do this the wrong way, if you do it in a way that isn't strategic, you will have wasted so much of your time in the process and money, whether it's posting roles or actually paying the person.

If you don't do it right, it's going to take your profitability because of that time and money investment that you've had. The next is that time opportunity loss from having that person being an underperformer. So not only are you wasting your money and your time, but you also sort of lose that time that that person's in the role or performing the work for you and the money that could have been coming in had they been performing the way that you needed them to. So our opportunity and time loss there is almost compounded by having those factors together.

The next thing that can just really hurt is your mental energy and angst around, whether it's firing that person parting ways, shall I say, or having to figure out how to get that person up to speed and become a high performer? It just is such a mental shock of your time and energy that not only does that get you off your game for that, but it can help spiral you and your business down a path that you don't want because you're having so much angst around this one person.

Now, I don't want you to think about hiring a team or bringing on a partner or what have you to be this soul sucking experience. And these are the four things that I've heard that make it so painful and also impact your profitability. But instead, I want you to learn how a team can actually be a really good thing and you don't have to sacrifice your profits doing that. And so how do we prevent that bad path?

Like, what are the steps that we can do to make this a positive and exciting experience for you that you want to repeat over and over again as your business scales? So the first thing is, for goodness sakes, please stop trying to Google together your people and hiring strategy. Knowing how to do this correctly is an actual skill set. I really want you to start thinking about people or HR personnel. Like, however, you think about this, I really want you to start thinking about it through the skill lens that you think about lawyers or accountants. Not all advice is created equal.

And here's a news flash for you, that business coach that you may be getting information on team stuff from just because they have a team now doesn't mean they're experts in this area, and I probably know about their mistakes on the back end that they've made, or maybe even some of the legal troubles they've gotten into from not knowing how to hire and deal with employment issues correctly.

So please think of this through the lens of expertise and stop trying to get advice on the Google and thinking that all advice out there is created equal. It is not. The next thing is to have a clear hiring plan and roadmap. So your plan, like your hiring plan would include everything that goes into your hiring process, including things like where to actually find people. The number one question I get, how to interview them, how to choose the best candidates, how to set them up for success, how to make sure you're set up to lead them, and so much more.

Now I'm going to be doing a deep dive on this topic specifically in an upcoming webinar. So if you want to grab your free seat there, just go to launchourself Coteam and you'll be able to learn all about how to create your own hiring plan and do that really effectively and efficiently. So that again, we make hiring profitable for you. And the second part of that was the roadmap. Now your roadmap includes your future.

Org chart and how you are going to prioritize the roles that you have coming up for your team. Now, this is going to help you focus on the most important hires that you have, but also help you consider roles for talent that you meet along the way. So oftentimes, when you are searching for a specific role, you may come across a great candidate that you think has a lot of value to add to your company.

But it's not for the exact role that you have open. So if you have your roadmap created, you're able to sort of see if that person has a place in the future team that you have mapped out versus passing on. Great talent because great talent is hard to find. But making sure people are in the right role is also critical. Now, finally, in order to make this profitable, you have to hire for the right role.

So this means that not only do you have you sort of gone through the formula that I shared in episode number 60 of Who To Hire Next, but you're also very specific in the work that your team member will do. We are no longer going to be fluffy about our role description, our job postings, or what have you we need to stop thinking in terms of a unicorn because guess what, my friends, they don't exist.

Instead, what I really want you to think about when you consider the role that you want to post for or hire for is in terms of specialist or generalist. You may have heard me speak about this in a different context, but let me explain to you what it means in the HR space. So a specialist is someone who has deep knowledge in one area and they're going to come in and be really narrowly focused in that one thing.

And so you can think of a specialist as maybe it's a TikTok advertising person for you or a Instagram reels or a social media photographer like I'm using some examples that I've heard in the past, but really it could be anything that has a narrow focus for your business. So that would be a specialist, and the expectations for the specialist would be that they are highly skilled and qualified and experienced in that one really narrow thing you want them to do. Now, a generalist is kind of the opposite of that.

A generalist is someone who knows a little bit about a lot and can jump in and be a little bit more flexible. Now, this does not mean that they know everything and can do everything. But this means that, for example, if you're hiring a virtual assistant or a VA, they should have knowledge and a few different things to be able to support you. That doesn't mean they're going to be experts in Kajabi or experts in convertkit, but it does mean that they should be dangerous enough in both or smart enough to Google how to make things happen in those things.

So I want you to really consider for your open role. Do you need someone who has unique background and experience like a specialist would, or do you really need someone who can be a little bit more flexible, not as deeply knowledge, but sort of pitch in in different areas within one specific type of role? And I'll talk about that in a second, which would be a generalist. Now you can hire for either, but you cannot hire for both.

So let me explain what I mean a little bit about this. When you're hiring a specialist, they are coming in with very exacting knowledge. So we gave a few examples before, but let me use a different one. Let me say that you're hiring for an SEO partner, so someone who can come in and create or enhance all of the SEO for your website, you would expect them to have that background and knowledge. Maybe they've proven it in the past before and they're going to come and maybe it's a project based. Maybe it's full time.

It works for either one. I want you to know that, but they will come in with SEO knowledge and be able to execute it for your specific website. That is a specialist. You would not expect that SEO expert to then also be your graphic designer or your website builder or website developer as well. Okay. Two very different things of having one area of expertise versus a generalist. Meanwhile, let's take another example for a generalist. Let's say that you hire someone who maybe is a social media manager so they can come in specialist or generalist. But in this one I want to explain a generalist role.

So your social media manager as a generalist may create your content, may schedule all your content across all platforms and have them go live there, whether in hashtags and all the things that happen with social media posting. You can tell that's not my wheelhouse, but they would be a generalist in that they can work on Instagram and Pinterest and Facebook and so on. And so on. Just because they're a generalist doesn't mean though, that you're going to expect them to also be an expert in ConvertKit or writing copy for emails or what have you. So just because you have a generalist, it doesn't mean that they do everything.

It means that they may have a wider view on a specific topic, like a social media manager versus having a narrow view, like an SEO person. So when you think about hiring someone, you want to definitely get clear what your needs are. When you think about a generalist versus a specialist and which one is best for your business and the type of work you need someone to do. And with that clarity, you can then hire the right person for the role, because if you hire a generalist for a specialist role, they are going to fail and you are going to be very unhappy with the outcomes and vice versa.

And in fact, if you hire a specialist for a generalist role, they're going to get frustrated beyond belief and either feel like they are always failing or that they are above the work that you are having them do so again, no happiness on either side of the equation. And this is something this step, generalists versus specialists that most people don't know about, and so they skip.

But having this one piece of clarity around who you need and who you want to hire is going to greatly impact your success factor and the success of the person you hire into any role. I hope this is helpful for you, as you think about who you want to hire and how you can actually scale your team for profitability versus just trying to find a new team member. There is a strategic process here. Like I mentioned, I'd love to have you join us to learn more at an upcoming free class that we have. Just go to launchyourself.co/team to join us live.

For more information and show notes about this episode, go to Launchuourself.co/61. 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 to snag a copy and it'll pop in your inbox chock full of information of the four different search strategies you can use to find a great contractor or full time employee to help you scale your business that's Launchyourself.co/hire.