Recently all my clients are working on hiring assistants or expanding their team in some way. One recently purchased an existing business, adding it into her already successful solo practice. Another is having a torrent of success and more opportunities than she can follow up on. A third is facing expansion, and a need for some additional course/offering development.
They have all reached the limits of what they can do on their own.
But the cash ain’t there yet. All three of them face potential or real cash flow issues in bringing on new team members, and so it’s a bit of a struggle to know when and how to hire the help.
I know, it’s not always clear on when you’re ready to hire. My clients are clear, but they haven’t always been.
Whether or not you are clear on whether to hire, here’s what I recommend. You’re probably crazy busy, with all kinds of deadlines and overwhelm, so what I’m going to suggest is going to be hard. But you have to do it.
Take a chunk of time, maybe two or three hours, and clear it.
Identify the tasks that you currently do that
(1) take up the most time, identifying how many hours a week you spend on each;
(2) you’re not so good at;
(3) you don’t enjoy doing.
Now, identify the opportunities you are trying to get to, including
(A) how much money they’ll probably generate (conservative estimate, not pie-in-the-sky thinking);
(B) how long those opportunities will most likely take to come to fruition;
(C) how much of your time they will take on a weekly basis until the money comes in.
If you’ve ever had to clear out clutter from your office or somewhere else, you may have noticed how much easier it is with a buddy. If you can, get someone to help you talk it through, to stay grounded, and to help you keep from over or under-estimating time and money. (Finding competent, heart-centered business buddies is one of the big advantages to being in community)
You’ll see pretty quickly whether getting help with some of your disliked tasks will be worth it financially. If it pencils out, meaning the opportunities bring in more than hiring the help costs, but you still have a real cash flow crunch, here’s what you can do.
Hire just a little help. Pick the task you hate the most, or that is the most time-consuming. That will free up hours. Use some heart-centered, compassionate, inspired discipline to use the time that’s freed up to work on pursuing the most profitable opportunity with the shortest timeline.
This isn’t rocket science, but with all the moving parts, it can be hard to name those two critical pieces: a time-consuming task you don’t like and the most profitable opportunity with the shortest timeline to fruition.
If you’re worried about putting off things you’re more inspired by, don’t worry! This is a short-term solution, and it’s the nitty-gritty of building up capacity in your business, which will ultimately allow you to really fulfill your heart’s vision of what’s possible.
Please, please, right now, STOP. Give yourself a few minutes right now. Put off answering emails, or whatever urgent but not truly important task is calling to you and instead, drop into your heart.
Check in and see if this resonates. See how it might feel to get help with the tasks you don’t like, and to have time to pursue the opportunities that are calling to you.
Then open your calendar, and schedule 3 hours to do this. Find a buddy to join you if you can.
A successful business is not a solo affair; we all need help. It’s impossible to have your business come into true momentum if you have to do every single last thing yourself.
You can start small in getting help, and you may never need or want to hire an actual employee. A virtual assistant a few hours a week, a bookkeeper, an accountant, some cleaning help, that may be all you ultimately need, depending on your vision for your business.
But start as soon as you can, before it’s necessary.
With gratitude and appreciation,
Mark
10 Responses
Hi Mark, great post, it all starts with planning and thinking it through. It’s a catch 22: If you wait with hiring until you can finance it, you are in trouble because you are getting drowned in work, if you hire too early you perhaps run into trouble with your finances. Good book on this: “The heart of business success. How to overcome the Catch-22s of growing your business” by Robert Cropping.
Something you should add to your list: Don’t forget to reserve some time to train new people. Even if you hire an expert, everybody needs a certain time to become familiar with your business. I’ve written a blog post on this in June: “You have to support them first” (before they can support you). Check out http://www.leadandconnect.com/support-first. I am planning 2 free audios for autumn: “What to do if you have to hire yesterday” and “How to interview with integrity”. If you would like to get them, please subscribe to my newsletter on my website.
Hi Jutta- Exactly. Sounds like a good book, by Robert. And yes, I agree entirely, that hiring someone initially takes more time.
Hi Mark!
Sweet article and totally what I needed to hear.
Thanks for laying out the nitti-gritty of getting thru this tricky situation.
You are so welcome, Clelie.
I had the added conundrum that nobody could do the work i would hate but me (it involved changing a bunch of passwords and updating a lot of profiles online, which can lead to a lot of side-projects that are important, but raise the risk of the original task getting derailed — in my experience.) I did better than farm it out. Like you said: I hired a buddy.
Just a grounded teenager from across the street who is the kind of matter-of-fact ‘compassionate’ that I need (NOT the “oh, what’s wrong? oh, that’s so hard” type of compassion that doesn’t really make the job any easier when it’s just technical stuff I simply have to do.) I hired him to do his homework in the same room as me and allow me to interrupt him whenever I wanted to talk out my strategy or find better words to use for a Google search. Big bang for my buck!!! We agreed on a minimum and maximum rate: I could pay him the minimum if I managed to draw enough strength from his presence (which motivated me to not ask for more help than I strictly needed) and a the maximum if I ended up needing his attention the whole time, and an in-between rate if we felt it was 50/50. It was brilliant.
I love this article and your tips are RIGHT ON, Mark. 6 months ago, I didn’t have much money AT ALL, but I knew I coudn’t make things happen without help concentrating on tasks I’d just rather not have to do. They were the lynchpin for me getting a lot further along!! I recommend hiring compassionate, grounding presence — they need not know much more than the average 18-year-old who enjoys technology to be very, very helpful to me and my patience with myself with technology — and it taught me that my peeves are actually insightful, not just “perfectionistic complaints about other peoples’ work,” which I’d previously been accusing myself of. Tech is tedious!
I’m going to do the exercises you recommend (kind of again) with great interest for the August call.
Thanks as always.
Briana- What an innovative solution! That’s awesome. And so glad that our experiences were the same. So curious to see what happens when you redo the exercises…
Brilliant, Brianna!
Totally agree with you – the difference in my “ability to focus” when I have someone else’s compatible energy in the house is indescribable!!
Bright Blessings ~
Mark –
What a GREAT share! I second – and recommend – what you have said.
As a freelance personal assistant, I am one of the “buddies” that people call…One of the biggest challenges I have come across with clients is delegation and affordability.
People are (naturally) very protective of their baby (business) and are worried that no one will do it right but them. And yet, if you are doing things you aren’t great at or hate doing, you are wasting your precious, talented time doing this and that instead of taking your life to the next level by hiring out your this and that to other talented beings.
I also recommend taking that time to make the list – I even have a checklist you can have at no cost…
And next, do take those baby steps, as you said, by hiring out just a little this and that at first.
More Proof that this works…
One of my clients DOUBLED her income in just one year by hiring assistants. She started with me and as time went on, she was able to hire more buddies. Eventually, she and her husband were able to follow their dream to move to France!
Listen to what Mark is saying folks. He is SPOT ON!! Baby steps 🙂
And thank you to Brianna for referring me here. She is one of my best friends and a force to be reckoned with, if you don’t know her already! 🙂
Blessings,
Amy (woid-key)
Your Savvy PA
Link exchange is nothing else but it is only placing the other
person’s web site link on your page at proper place and other person will also do same for you.
I think that if you have a client, you should be his assistant, for generating trust.