Kristen 0:00
Do you ever feel like you are just drowning in to do lists and feeling like there aren’t enough hours in the day to get everything done that you need to in your business? If you are like most people, I imagine, the answer is probably yes. It would be so great to have someone who could take the half those tasks off your plate, right? So today we are diving in to a question that a lot of you have asked me to talk about, and that is, when is it time to hire help in your business?
Kristen 0:36
Are you a digital product or course creator selling on platforms like Teachers Pay Teachers, Etsy or your own website? Ready to grow your business, but not into the kind of constant hustle that leads straight to burnout? Then you’re in the right place. Welcome to The Savvy Seller. I’m Kristen Doyle, and I’m here to give you no fluff tools and strategies that move the needle for your business without burning you out in the process. Things like SEO, no stress marketing, email list building, automations and so much more. Let’s get started y’all.
Kristen 1:16
Before we jump into talking about when it’s time to hire, let’s talk about a couple of different types of team members that you could hire. First of all, you might hire independent contractors, or you might hire employees. Now, if you’re in the US, this is a very important tax designation for what kind of team member you are hiring. Generally speaking, and I will give my I am not an attorney disclaimer before I say this, so definitely talk to your accountant or a business attorney in your area if you have questions about the difference. But generally speaking, independent contractors have more freedom and flexibility. They are almost considered as people who are running their own business and they contract with you to do certain jobs. Whereas employees are really a part of your business. That gives you more control over when they work, where they work, what kind of software and devices they might be using, those sorts of things. But in return, you also have more responsibility to those people.
Kristen 2:21
In many cases, you might need to pay for insurance, you will have some tax implications that you have to deal with for them. So independent contractors, you have less control, but also less responsibilities. Whereas employees, you have more control over when and where and how they work, but that also comes with added responsibility on your part.
Kristen 2:42
Now, in addition to that, if you are just hiring independent contractors, which is where I would recommend that you start out for your earliest hires, you could hire people to do one off, short term types of projects, or you might hire people for a long term working relationship where they will really feel like they are part of your team, even though they are independent contractors, who, like I said, are running their own businesses as well.
Kristen 3:10
So now that we are on the same page about what types of hiring you might choose to do, let’s talk about when you’re ready to get started. And first up, I think it’s important to talk money, especially if you were thinking about hiring long term team members, whether those are independent contractors or employees, because once you’ve hired people to work with you on a long term ongoing basis, you need to have enough savings in your business accounts that you would be able to continue paying them, even if your sales take a hit. If you are hiring people and you are barely making enough to pay them, you might need to think about changing your structure for how you are saving and spending your business income, maybe looking at that business budget again so that you can build up enough savings to be able to pay people, even if your sales take a little bit of a hit for a short while, I would suggest three to six months, so that you wouldn’t have to cut your team members who might be really important to continuing the work to get you out of a sales rut that you might be in.
Kristen 4:20
You want to Make sure that you have plenty saved, that you can continue paying them, even if you hit a rut of some sort with your sale, so that you can get out of that rut and continue working with those people. It’s really important to set aside some of your profits at the safety net for the business.
Kristen 4:36
Personally, I follow the Profit First framework. It’s in a book called Profit First by Mike Michalowicz, and I will put a link to that in the show notes. This framework really just ensures my business always stays profitable. I have enough to pay myself, and I have plenty set aside for my business expenses, and enough saved so that when it comes time to pay team members and when quarterly taxes are due, I am not having to stress out about those things, because I’ve been setting aside money all throughout the year for them. Highly, highly recommend the book if you haven’t read it. It really has been a game changer in terms of how I manage money in my business. So definitely check that out.
Kristen 5:18
Having that financial cushion isn’t just about you know the money and knowing it’s there to pay people. It really gives you so much peace of mind, because you know that even if your sales get a little slower, you’ll still be able to support your team, and you can focus on growing the business recovering from a dip, without constant stress about how on earth you’re going to pay your payroll for the month, or those independent contractor invoices when those start rolling in.
Kristen 5:46
So we’ve talked about the money side of things, but let’s talk about business readiness. How do you know if your business itself is ready for additional help? When you are overwhelmed and you’re not getting things done that is a major sign. If you’re feeling a lot of burnout, if you’re missing those deadlines that you might have set for yourself, if your to do list is overflowing to the point that you can’t even decide what to work on, because you just feel overwhelmed when you look at it, those are all major red flags that you are getting to the point in your business that you can’t do it all on your own, and you need some help.
Kristen 6:25
I know for me, I hit that overwhelm point when I was still teaching full time, and I was working on my business at night and on the weekends, and my business had been rapidly growing, and I was at this point where I just literally could not get everything done that needed to be done. It was a breaking point of sorts. I was just at a point where I knew I couldn’t handle it on my own and I had to have some help.
Kristen 6:53
So if you are feeling overwhelmed, that might be a really good sign it’s time to either look at what you are doing and cut some things off of your workload. Or if the things on your workload are all vital to growing your business, then it’s probably time to hire some help.
Kristen 7:09
Another reason that you might need to hire some help for your business is when you find that you just need an expert. See just because you could learn something doesn’t mean it is worth your time. When we’re just starting out in our business, we tend to just try to find ways to DIY everything, to learn and do things ourselves. And I think that’s really important. Early on in your business, you don’t have the income to support hiring a team to begin with, but also it’s important for us to kind of get our feet wet in all the moving parts of running our business, so that we know what we enjoy, what we’re good at, what needs to be done by a team member that we hire down the road. Those things are really important.
Kristen 7:59
But as your business grows, there comes a point where you need an expert to handle things that you aren’t good at. And just because you could figure it out on your own, it doesn’t mean that it’s worth your time or that you’ll get the best result that way. There are, of course, those tasks in our business that really do require our own personal attention, but so many other things that we’re doing in our businesses could actually be handled better by someone who specializes in those things.
Kristen 8:27
I am thinking about tasks like accounting. I am not an accountant. I don’t keep track of all the changing tax laws, but my tax strategist and accountants do. So it is much better for me, personally and for my business, for me to hire that out.
Kristen 8:45
Photography is another good thing to hire an expert in, because their work will probably be better than yours. Running ads, whether you’re doing that on social media or on Google or Pinterest, a lot of times, an expert in those platforms will be able to help you run better ads and get better return on your investment. And web design is another big one that just because you could figure it out doesn’t mean you’re going to get the best result from the work that you do, and you may have lots of stress and frustration from trying to figure it out on your own.
Kristen 9:17
Early on in my business, I had learned to take some pretty good product photos. In fact, a lot of them are still up on my products today, because I really do think they’re pretty good photos. But hiring a professional to do my product photography was huge. It made such a big difference in the quality of my photos because they think of props to put with my photos that make them just look that much better. They think of different layouts so that I can use the photos in different ways. They’re keeping up on trends that I don’t pay any attention to. So the photos that I’m getting are so much better. And to be honest, taking and editing product photos is not something I enjoy doing. So that was a really good place for me to hire an expert who specializes in that thing.
Kristen 10:04
Likewise, hiring someone like me to do your web design can save you a ton of time and headaches. See, I am always staying on top of tech changes in terms of what themes and plugins and hosts are working well together and which ones we need to avoid. I’m also paying attention to design trends, and it can help you strategize and plan out conversion focused layouts and content for your web pages. So even though you probably could figure out how to make pages yourself, hiring a professional like me to help with your web design can really make a big difference in the end result that you’re getting and give you a better site that is working better for your business in return.
Kristen 10:46
One other sign that you might need to hire help in terms of your business getting to the right point is when you are ready to scale. And when we say scale, we mean grow your business exponentially. You are ready to get bigger and bigger in your business. See, there is only one of you, and all of us have 168 hours a week. And let’s face it, we can’t work all of those. We shouldn’t work all of those hours.
Kristen 11:15
When you’ve reached a point where you can’t continue to grow your business in the amount of hours that you want to be devoting to it, it might be time to hire some long term team members who can take some of the more routine tasks off your plate, take off some of the tasks you don’t enjoy doing, and free your time up for the big picture CEO level kinds of strategy and planning and creating the products, delivering the services, creating the courses, those sorts of things that really do require you.
Kristen 11:48
A really good example of this in my own business is my WordPress Care Plans. They were super manageable for me until I hit about 60 or 70 clients. At that point, I was spending so much of my time every week updating sites, checking up on every single website after I ran the updates, making sure the backups were there, answering the client questions. And I just really didn’t have time to add any more sites to my workload. But clients were asking me to join a maintenance plan, and I didn’t want to say no, so I looked outside of just myself, and I hired a team member to handle all of the routine weekly updates. And that really was the only way that I could add more clients to my WordPress care plans, because now she is handling all of those regular updates.
Kristen 12:41
After she does the update, she looks at every single website to make sure everything looks great after the updates are done, and that frees me up to focus on the non routine things. The requests to update or change something on the website, any issues that pop up that the client needs my help solving. I get freed up to work on that stuff because she is handling the routine things, and there is no way I could have scaled that part of my business to the point it is now without having that team member on board.
Kristen 13:13
So here is today’s actionable tip for you. I want you to start by creating a list of those tasks you’re doing that drain you either your time or your energy. So keep a log for a week or two of everything you’re doing in your business. Track the hours that you’re working on those things and label them depending on how much you like to do them. Do you love it? Do you like it? Is it one of those things that’s okay but you’d rather not do it if you don’t have to. Or is it something you truly cannot stand doing?
Kristen 13:48
For me, those tasks that I really don’t enjoy doing are the ones that I tend to put off and they don’t get done, and that can have some really negative effects for my business. So those are some of the first things that I choose to hire out because I know they need to be done and I tend to procrastinate them. So label the things that you’re doing based on how much you like to do them, and then track those hours that you’re working. Once you’ve tracked a few weeks worth of time, you can multiply that out to find out how many hours you would be working in an average year, and then divide that by your income to determine your average hourly rate.
Kristen 14:26
Think back to when we were working those high school and college jobs and we were getting paid a certain number of dollars per hour, as opposed to working salary jobs or running a business where you really only see that income kind of coming in when you are selling things. Determine what your average hourly rate is for your work, and then go back to your list and look at the things you’re doing and see which tasks aren’t worth what you are essentially paying yourself to do them. This is really big for helping you to identify those areas where hiring help can save you time time and also make really good financial sense.
Kristen 15:03
Because if your effective hourly rate for yourself is $100, for example, and you are answering routine emails about how a customer can access something that they’ve purchased from you, that is probably not $100 an hour task, and you could find a $20 or $25 or $30 an hour VA, maybe even someone less expensive, if you are open to hiring people outside the US, who can do those things for you. That will save you a ton of time, and like I said, it will make a lot of financial sense, because you get freed up to work on the things that are worth your $100 an hour effective hourly rate.
Kristen 15:43
So if you are thinking about whether or not it is time to hire that first team member or maybe hire some additional team members, maybe you’re feeling ready to make those long term team member hires, think about the things that we’ve talked about in today’s episode. Is your business financially ready? Do you have a three to six month cushion of how much you would need to pay those people just in case something happens? Are you feeling some of those signs of overwhelm in your business? Are there places where you need things done that would be better done by an expert in that area than by you figuring out on your own? Or is it time to hire some help so that you can scale your business up? Think through your business situation, see which of these resonate, and if you are financially ready, and any of those other signs hit home with you, then it might just be time to bring on some help, or some additional help for your business.
Kristen 16:45
Thank you so much for listening today. If you enjoyed this episode, please take a minute to leave a review on your podcast app and follow the show so you’ll get alerts when new episodes are released. Amd be sure to join me next week for the next episode in our hiring series, where I will be talking about how you can find the right person to hire for those positions that you are thinking about hiring for. I’ll talk to you soon.
