S2 E81: You can afford to hire help early in your biz

Whether it’s a home improvement weekend adventure, a quick renovation, or flooring or paint refresh, Americans love DIY projects. 

In fact, in 2020 the total sales of all 3 types of home improvement stores totaled more than $450 billion dollars.

And HGTV’s website attracts an average of 10.2 million visitors each month.

That’s a lot of DIY!

But when it comes to your business, trying to DIY-ing it is holding you back.

You’ll get further, faster, when you build a team. And you may be thinking that you aren’t ready yet for a team. Or that you aren’t sure how to best build your team. Or you may feel stuck because you aren’t sure who to hire next.

In this episode, you’ll get:

• Why building a team is the best way to build your side hustle into a thriving business
• The assumptions you may be making about hiring that are holding you back 
• 5 steps to go from struggling solopreneur to thriving team leader 

And, you’ll hear how continuing to DIY your business is the ultimate bottleneck to your business growth.

****
Connect with Winston

LinkedIn     https://www.linkedin.com/in/winstonfaircloth/
Facebook   https://www.facebook.com/forloveofteam
Instagram   https://www.instagram.com/forloveofteam/
Twitter        https://twitter.com/forloveofteam

#TeamLOVE Book. Join the bold book writing journey as we write and share our first draft chapters from our upcoming book - Team Love: 28 Ways to Demonstrate Caring at Work here in season 3 of the For Love of Team podcast.

Be notified each week about a new episode and follow our journey at TeamLoveBook.com

Transcript

Winston Faircloth: 0:00

Okay, john, this is 81. I am going out of town. It's the weekend of the 24th 23rd of May. I'm going to be out of town next week. So I won't be recording another one until at least Sunday, May 2. So all right, so here we go. Hey there multipliers. It's Winston Faircloth, and this is for love of team. This is the podcast where leaders simplify teamwork, helping you surround yourself with teammates doing the work, they love, simplifying business processes, so that you can serve more focused on the work you love. And today we're going to talk about, here's something I want you to consider. You can afford to hire help early on in your business. So think you can't afford to hire help when you're just starting your business is actually costing you money. I understand why you might think this because I did too. But di wiring, every single thing in your business is holding you back from growth. You end up being captive to your business instead of the captain of your business. DIY. Do it yourself, gosh, there's so much out there that really helps you do these things. So many YouTube videos, submitted courses and so many coaching services says you can do this work yourself. But I'm here to tell you that every time you DIY, a thing in your business is holding you back from growth, you end up being captive instead of Captain. So let me ask you a question. What's the what's more important to you trying to scrimp, save DIY everything, or growing your side hustle into an actual real freedom offering business. So think about it. Do corporate CEOs do everything themselves? Nope. They have employees, they have departments who do things like accounting and marketing cetera. And you may be thinking, well, they make lots of money, so that's fine for them. But how do you think they were able to do that? By not hiring help and doing it all themselves? Of course not. At some point, we all have to look at what's costing us to continue to operate as a bootstrapped DIY, single person entity business. So let's count the cost. This is one of my favorite terms. So I'm just I was developing a list of all the things all the weightings that that approach of DIY costs us as owners and founders in our business. So I start with sleepless nights, tossing and turning over the upcoming week and day ahead. How about, have you ever done this, I'm raising my hand, multitasking on the couch while your family enjoys a nice game night or funny jokes or a good TV show? How about the hours upon hours of researching, then deciding and then dreading the tasks that are in front of you? How about feeling rust just before hopping on with a prospect or client call before because you forgot about x? Here's one that's bedeviled me a bit. The regret that I'm no longer meeting my vision for client experience or expectations. I know this is a family show. But you know, halfway doing I was gonna use a different or halfway doing your way through a business that was supposed to give you freedom. And then you know, the one that really strikes home to me something sometimes many of us leave corporate because we want to be our own boss. And we want to do some things that are different from what the leadership we've fallen under. But sometimes as a solopreneur, we are really bad boss to ourselves. And so we can look in the mirror and begin to want to wonder whether we've made a mistake, sleepless nights multitasking, hours of research, feeling rushed, regret that we're not meeting our vision, halfway doing a business that was supposed to give us freedom and looking in the mirror and saying goodness, I'm not the greatest boss of myself here. Well, there is a different way of thinking about this. And the truth is you can afford to hire help early on in your business. It just might be different from what you're thinking about. You can start small. You don't have to bring on full time salaried people early on No way. You can build trust first on a budget that works for you. and expand the row as you grow by starting with part time. collaborators. In earlier podcasts I call these independent contractors or call them independent collaborators. And perhaps you have realistic notions of what it takes to get the help that you might need. You might think it will cost you X dollars per year to hire someone. And while that may be true, that may be the annual investment, we don't give everyone that money up front, you spread out the payments per project or per payroll period. And then, you know, if you're still indecisive on whether this was a good move or not, my question to you is, how many payments would it take you for decide for you to decide that this was a worthwhile investment. Even corporations implement trial periods and review cycles. And with most contractors or employees, 90 days is more than enough time to decide. And as the captain of your ship, you don't have to wait that long if it's not a great fit. Having help early on doesn't mean that you're saddled with expensive salaries for people who may not be the right one for your, your team. And you can take time to establish the key performance indicators and the other kind of measures with your collaborators, whether they're part time full time employees or contractors, and grow at your own pace. Here's the key thing. You're not capping your own growth by trying to do all of this yourself. So I've got five practical steps for you today in terms of how you can start building your team without breaking the bank. And some of these we've covered in some earlier podcasts. But I want to recap them here because addressing this chicken or egg can afford it can I afford not to question bedevils so many founders early on in their journey. So step number one is to take a business activity inventory. And you can do this on just a nice sheet of paper pad that sits next to your desk when you're working during the week. And for the next week, you can capture the variety of actions and activities that you take in business. And that suggests that capture these as in granular detail as you can, for example, email. There's lots of different ways that we handle email, if you just put emails a line and track that by itself, you're going to miss the value of this exercise. So reading email subscriptions, the emails that you do to clients, the emails you do to team the prospecting the selling whatever types of emails you're doing, track them separately, and keep a rough number of minutes per line for the week. If you want a free spreadsheet, to help you go through this process, I have a free offer for you. So email me when wi n at when sites Wi Fi and si gh Tz calm when it when site with a subject line for love of team tracker, or FL o t tracker. And I'll send you a free spreadsheet that I used and my clients use to help them navigate this inventory process. So after that first week, we're going to take step two, don't do this before. But do this after you've taken that full inventory. And this is the evaluation step. And here you're going to grade, if you will these activities on four different four different levels. And I use these terms gifted and excels. skilled and novice, these are the four categories. In an earlier podcast, I gave you a deeper dive on this. But here's the basic description of these. Now this is is an activity that you barely know how to do, you'd probably have to go DIY research how to do it for you to to take it on in the business, you've had to do it recently. You're not good at it. And you don't even know quite how to do it. Skilled is the next level up. That's activities that you know how to do. They don't bring you joy, but you can you can get it done. You can grind through and get it done and want to pinch it would not be one of your favorite things. That's not something you'd ever want to keep on your list. Third is excels, excels with things that you do well. The business counts on you to get it done. But it doesn't bring you a lot of joy. You may get recognition from doing that work. It may even be something that you would teach others how to do. But these are not activities that you would do for hours on end. Because you just love to do it, you're proficient at it, you're really good at it, and you can equip others how to do it. Then fourth, my favorite category is gifted. These are the activities that not only are you skilled and excel at, but these bring you energy, joy, ease flow. And so as you grade these, and you go through the activities, you grade these, I'd invite you to look for patterns. What activities kind of fall naturally into the novice. What activities fall naturally into the skilled, what activities fall into gifted. These are the ones that bring you joy, energy, ease, and excels. This is the group that I've really helped my clients dial in on because these are activities where you have consequential, consequential benefits for seeking help on these activities. So as you look for patterns on what brings you joy, energy and ease, the flip side of that is what items do you dread or procrastinate on. And PS, if you'd like to take me up on a complimentary review session where I have a fresh pair of eyes looking at this with you and asking you provocative and supportive questions, I'll show you the cost of inaction on doing this work. I'll share how to connect with me at the end of the podcast. Step three, write out your ideal day in business. This is the new step I'm just adding to this review, because attacking this idea that you can't afford to take this action. This will help motivate you This will help give you a reason why. And so if you think about your ideal day in business, think about those items that you'd love to spend a higher percentage of your day on. Imagine time moving quickly and effortlessly in this work. You could write this out, I ask it for me, it always feels better when I write this out as if it's a written vision board. I tried to write out the feelings and and the joy that I feel and doing certain tasks. And what time of day I do those tasks better and enjoy to do it versus other parts of the day where I can take on other tasks, to write out your ideal day in business. And be true to yourself. Don't follow what the gurus or others say you should be doing in your business day. Just be true to yourself and just journal this out, write out your ideal day in business. This is step three. Step four, wants you to stake take a step back and think about the big picture of your business. And typically, at the highest level, they're really broken into three buckets, sales, service, and administration. And when you look at the items that are not on your ideal day inventory, can you put some of those activities from the earlier steps into one of those three buckets, sales, service and admin? And are there natural patterns? And could you group some of these items together? This is a fun exercise. Now you're starting to think like a seven figure business. These are activities that every business has no matter what size they are. And guess what a lot of these are on your list right now. begin to think about it like a department. Think of it like a big business would think of sales Marketing Service Administration, I have three, eventually, you might have four or five buckets. Let's start out simple sales service and admin. Then step five, count the cost. Now this is this is a very important next step. Because your value as the founder is x. And the talent it needed to help you out is probably why. And so when you look at all the tasks that don't fall into your ideal day, think about all the hours a week you spend on those tasks. And you can find amazing talent at that wide level and turning it over to them and you instead holding it in your own hands is the difference that's holding you back from the life and the business that you dream of. So a tangible example here I'm going to show you some theoretical numbers. If I value my work at$150 an hour, and there's an excellent person, there's an excellent resource available at$50 an hour. Does it make sense for me to keep that those tasks to myself, when instead I could invest in someone who loves this work is better and faster than me at this work. And more importantly free me up to pursue more of that $150 our value activities. It's a true trade off is a trade off to your benefit. Goodness, this is such a great opportunity. So founder, you're at a crossroads. Do you want to keep dry everything in your business and bottleneck your profitability? Or do you want to step into the role of CEO captain and start leading your company towards growth? Only you make this decision only you can make this decision and see oh my ideal list. I have a business that I love. supported by a team that I love what could be better than that. And that's the invitation here at for love of team podcast. If you'd like to get started on your own for love of team journey, here's how I can support you with a very simple two part two steps the first two steps in this journey. Reach out to me via email when at when sites calm subject line for love of team tracker or FL ot tracker when it when sites subject line FL o t tracker, or you can text me with the words FL o t trackir at 1-754-800-9461. That's my personal text number 1-754-800-9461. And as I share every week with you here on the podcast. Remember, leaders simplify teamwork, multiplying your impact your income and freedom in business. Be bless friends I'll catch y'all next episode.