Cool. Okay. Good.

Well, it’s, you know, I don’t wanna say the time because it’s a different time for you, but, yeah, we’re, like, I think one minute past starting time according to my clock. I we can let everyone join in.

Folks trickle in. But today, I’m very excited because we talked about one of my favorite things, which is scaling with subcontractors.

It’s something that we’ve had a lot of success with. So I’m gonna get started, and, we can have others join in as they go. Hey. Andrew’s here. Okay. Andrew, we’re just kicking things off.

So welcome. Welcome. I was telling Abby this is, like, one of my favorite things to talk about is working with subcontractors.

So alright. Let’s get out. Make sure.

Alright.

Cool. So very quickly, what are we gonna cover is how to quickly identify when to hire a subcontractor.

And we can what we’ll talk about after the session is a a few of the nitty gritties because subcontracting is something that will you know, it takes time, but it frees up time. And I talk about that in the training as well. So we’ll talk about how to quickly identify when to power a subcontractor, when to fully transition, you know, to a team member, how to narrow down on the needle moving roles to hire for, and what metrics will you measure to gauge ROI and all of that. So it is one of the simplest ways to speed up your growth and reduce over which is what you need when you’re looking to scale, which is what we realized when we were looking to scale is this only that much capacity, especially if you, like us, have a lot going on on the life front.

So and at the same time, you’re very ambitious and which all of you in this room are and, you know, anyone who’s watching the recording, all of you are. So so you you want that balance, but you also know that you want you wanna do more, and subcontracting is a fabulous way to do that.

The reason I’m a huge, huge fan of subcontracting rather than bringing someone on full time as a team member is because subcontracting gives you the flexibility that sometimes you need.

You know?

It helps you to see hang on. Okay.

Got others messages for ambitious and constrained, that’s me. Yeah. Andrew. Yeah. Absolutely. So so subcontracting helps you to see whether or not your business would benefit from bringing someone in full time.

I know there are a lot of people who would say, okay. Yeah. You could, you know, hire someone full time on all of that. It that’s never been the case for us.

The one of the other reasons for that is because we are, I would say, we’ve always worked with and this is more mine’s department, but I’m gonna say and we’ve I think we’ve talked about this on our blog as well. One of the things that we’ve always focused on is keeping our expenses to a certain percentage of our revenue.

I’m gonna go out and say about twenty percent is what we look at depending and, you know, as your revenue grows, which it will because you are, you know, going to be subcontracting, and that’s the whole idea here. Right? You will be able to, you know, hire more, and you will be able to have a better idea of how the year is gonna flow and, you know, whether you need someone to, you know, come in full time or whether you can increase their scope and speak to them about it. Point being, it is a simple way to speed up your growth and reduce overwhelm, which is huge.

So what subcontracting is not? It is not about finding the cheapest option. It’s very tempting to do that. Very.

Trust me. I am I’m a big frugalist at heart. It’s very hard for me to look at, oh, you know, let’s find out. But I like it when people pay me well.

When it comes to spending, I can be really hard and to kind of convince. And Bank has a very tough job trying to help me see that this is the this is the ROI. So it’s yeah. Point is, it’s not find about finding the cheapest option.

That does not mean, however, that someone who may be starting out or is an intern or is willing to work for less would do a shoddy job. Point is you don’t go into the market saying, oh, I wanna hire someone, but I don’t want to pay you know, I wouldn’t say you you don’t wanna say, oh, I wanna look for the cheapest option. That’s what you don’t wanna say. You wanna say, I wanna and this is what’s what mine’s taught me actually over the years is you wanna say, I wanna look for the person who would do the best job possible in the budget I have.

So sometimes it takes you time.

But for us, me, you will always find people because sometimes you are working with a budget. Right? And it’s got nothing to do with you wanting to be a cheapskate. It’s just that your business cannot handle bringing on more help.

It’s not about underpaying contractors. That goes without saying. So we do not, quote unquote, haggle. We don’t like it when clients do it with us or try to lower laws. We don’t wanna do it when we’re the client.

Again, I’m pretty sure none of you would do that. It’s just putting it out there. But these other things are more important.

Subcontracting is not expecting to do it all. You need to be really, really clear about role and responsibilities.

A subcontractor would be your greatest asset and would be responsible for a lot of your success if you’re very clear on what is what is that you’re hiring them for. So even if you’re looking at hiring a VA or a digital business manager or an OBM or a salesperson or a research specialist, whatever it is, you need those roles and responsibilities really well outlined.

It’s not about expecting magic. This is a process that will take time, and sometimes you may have to kiss a few frogs before you find your subcontracting prince or princess.

Be prepared for that. It’s very easy to get discouraged and think that, oh, no one would be able to do this as well as I do or no one will be able to help me with this. You know, I’m guilty of falling into the trap of thinking, oh, you know, I’m I’m I’m faster and better.

I’m I’ve got this. So because I sometimes can get frustrated with the time that it takes to onboard someone. So you just wanna kind of keep an eye out for that. And then, also, subcontracting is not about towing the trend. So when we were looking to scale, it was very everyone everyone that I knew, every single freelancer or small business owner, at least, that I knew of was, like, you gotta hire a VA.

Right? I mean, it seems like the logical decision.

The thing is, for our business, that wasn’t a logical decision. For us, it made more sense to hire an editor because I hated editing.

I’m really good at writing. But if you ask me to go in and then read it out loud and do all the sweeps and spot so that was our first hire.

So you need to, like, look at your business. You need to understand what are what are your goals and not just go for whatever’s trending in the hiring world.

Okay. So here’s easy three step process.

You’ve got worksheets with you. If you printed it up, great. I don’t know if they’re fillable or yeah. Maybe they are because I think they’re in Canvas.

You could, you know, go ahead and pull them out. Point is I would love for you to pull them up because we’re gonna be working through them as we go further into this workshop. I’d love to kind of take some time to do that. So first up, you wanna identify those bottlenecks for, you know, for hiring and subcontracting.

We wanna see where in your business, which is what like, whenever we’ve hired anyone, this is how we look at it. Where in your business are you losing cash flow? You losing out on client experience? You losing out on your, you know, the whole peace of mind thing.

So rules that will prioritize profit, productivity, peace of mind, or project delivery.

Those four areas. You wanna look at where are you losing out or tripping yourself up or taking way more time than is needed because those are the roles you wanna prioritize.

Because it may be you may think and the only way you can do that, and if you’re not doing this already, I would highly recommend all of you do it, is you need to start tracking your time. You need to know exactly where your time is going in your business, because only then would you know for sure whether you really do you need someone to manage your inbox or do you need probably someone to do your outreach?

Those are two very different roles.

And then you wanna set curveballs, outcomes, and metrics so you can measure effectiveness because there is no point hiring someone, and as awesome as they may be at their job if it’s not bringing in what you want it to bring in in terms of time, money, or growth, or peace of mind and, you know, just that mental freedom which is, you know, you can’t really measure it, but you experience it.

Yeah. You need to have those noted down, not in your head.

And that is when you’ll be able to take decisions very clearly, like a business owner, and not go not let emotions rule your decision making.

So subcontracting, like I said, takes time in order to free up time. It will take time.

If you are lucky to find the best person for your business on the first, you know, route, amazing. That’s excellent. Hold on to them. But in all likelihood, sometimes you may be more disappointed than all excited, and you just need to kinda be prepared for that. The way to avoid this would be whenever you’re looking to subcontract, start with a test period or start with a test project.

This is something that has saved us so much grief because I’ll be very honest with you. Sometimes, subcontractors are you know, they’re like freelancers like us. They look great on paper.

But when you start working with them, sometimes you find that there’s a lot that just doesn’t align.

And having a test period or a test project is the perfect way of not feeling like, now I’m, like, stuck.

It gives both of you. And on the other hand, for the subcontract as well, it you know, it’s a win win because we may think they are really great to work with, but they may not like working with us. So it gives them an easy out as well. So always start with this. Like I said, it will take time, but once you get, like, the right people to help you with, you can just keep working with them over and over again like our clients do for us. Right?

So how do I identify what to subcontract and who to hire? Let’s get deeper into this.

First step, you wanna identify the what and the why. Before you look at the who, you wanna start with what is it that you’re wanting to hire out. Like, it we talked about, you know, the the bottlenecks and the areas that impact your profit, peace of mind, productivity, and project delivery.

So get really clear about that, and then think about why do you wanna hire it up.

Because, remember, we are not towing trends here. We are looking at helping you scale with these subcontractors.

So when you know the what and the why, it will help you set a budget for your hire as well, which is super important because you would know what’s the impact it’s gonna have on your business if that team member is gonna do a fabulous job. Right?

It would help you understand the impact that hiring this person would bring to you. It would help you outline responsibilities.

It would help you clarify outcomes and metrics. It would just make it so much clearer for you as to how is this person who’s gonna come in be a part of your growth.

So always, always before you go into, oh, I need a social media manager or I need a sales rep or I need a research specialist or I need a a VA or I need whatever, you wanna know why do I need this person?

What are they going to do for me? So worksheets open up the worksheet, our Google Doc. I want you to think about this should be easy. Think about three areas in your business that are currently holding you back because they aren’t your superpower. You’re spending way much time doing them and they impact client experience.

Example for me, fire framing.

Not my strength at all, takes me way too much time, and was impacting client experience.

Right? Or you could look at areas that are slowing down your growth because while you can do them, right, they take too much time.

Again, another self example, editing. That was editing for me. I can do it.

But because I hate it, it would just take me double the time. It would take someone who’s who would enjoy it like Jillian Hill who was who’s, you know, fabulous at editing. So anyways or it’s impacting cash flow because you don’t have the capacity to do stuff.

So you’re great at it. It’s your superpower. You just don’t have the bandwidth to do it.

For instance, sometimes it’s like blog posts or when it was a really large project, like, I remember the hundred k project. I had so many emails. Like, I I had to bring in someone to help me with the emails.

So because it would make no sense for me to say, oh, no. I’m gonna try doing it all on my own.

Not realistic. Right? So I want you to take, like, five minutes. Think about it.

Put it down. Write it down right now. I’m gonna pause. I’m gonna mute myself, drink some water.

Alright.

Keep this with you because we’re gonna come back to it at the end of the session. This one, I I wanted this to be, like, kind of interactive, and I wanted to for you to walk away with knowing who your next hire is gonna be.

So now that you have these five areas, what you wanna start doing is narrow down on the needle movers. So out of those watts, you know, you wanna narrow down on and this is something that we use internally is we use a three c approach to the client experience, cash flow capacity.

Those are your needle movers.

If your client experience is great, it’s such a huge win because that kind of, you know, improves your cash flow.

Anytime client experience suffers, you can be sure, you know, repeat projects are not gonna happen, referrals are not gonna happen. It has a ripple effect on pretty much everything. Right?

And you wanna enjoy the experience as well. And then, of course, capacity. For us, because of chronic health issues, capacity is something that we value a lot. So yeah.

This is what we use.

So I’d want you to kind of, like, start thinking about it. Because when you know what your needle movers are based on your cash flow capacity client experience, you get really clear on why you’re hiring and what’s the impact you’re looking at. Because you’re hiring to either increase cash flow or revenue, capacity, or client experience, all of which has a direct impact on your growth.

All of which has a direct impact on sustainable growth, most importantly.

Because the last thing you wanna do is just focus on cash flow, ignore capacity, and then end up feeling burned out.

Or create great client experience, but overload cash flow, which means you won’t have a good profit margin.

So when you’re looking to scale, you wanna scale in a way that doesn’t burn you out. And that it’s so much easier to do that when you do that looking at, okay, out of these five areas, which ones have a direct impact on either of these three c’s. Ideally, if you’re looking if you find a task that has an impact on all three, that is exactly where you wanna store. So you wanna narrow down again. In the same workshop, you wanna narrow down on one to three areas that impact your cash flow and or client experience.

So here’s the thing. Capacity is a great first level filter. That is obviously your first level filter. Right?

But when you focus on cash flow and client experience, it can create capacity because you’re giving say, example. Let’s say you don’t have the capacity to take on block content for a client who may need it for their launch. Right? Now you wanna give them a great client experience, so you subcontract blog post writing, which means that you’ve now created capacity for yourself while improving cash flow and client experience too.

So look at go through the areas that you’ve identified and look at which ones have a direct impact on cash flow and or client experience. Remember, capacity is a great first level filter. So if you don’t have capacity for something, see whether hiring it out would give you capacity too.

Cool. Was that quick and easy? Are we done?

Yeah.

Okay. I can see nodding heads.

Alright.

Next up. Now based on these areas, those you know, the things that you don’t like or you wanna hire out or you wanna, you know, free up time for or you wanna hire a subcontractor for you wanna look at what are the roles you’re gonna hire. This is where you get really specific about who your subcontractor is gonna be Because sometimes people who we we may think we’re hiring like I said, like, the example. Sometimes you may think you’re hiring the social media manager, and you may think that they’ll do, you know, your your all reels for you.

That may not be the case. They may need you to do the filming. They’ll give you the guidelines, but they may need you to do that. Or you may be hiring, say, a researcher who may not be coming through surveys or may only be coming through a certain number of survey responses.

So you wanna be very, very clear on exactly who would you be hiring and what will they do.

This is where you wanna write a job description, and you wanna write a really good job description.

So this is not no longer about, oh, I just need a b c. This is about not only what the role will involve, but also things like what tech are they comfortable with, what kind of communication you expect, what’s the cadence of meetings, are you more an asynchronous meeting person, do you prefer, communication only via Slack, or is email okay with you? Do you wanna be reached on WhatsApp, or do you not wanna be reached on WhatsApp? You wanna be really, really clear.

And I learned this through lots and lots of hiring, lots and lots of job description writing. So what kind of support, you know, will you you, your team, you know, anyone else you’ve got on your team be offering them? What kind of support do you expect from them, especially if you are if you’ve got your own products that you’re selling, like Abby, you know, you have a program. If you’re in launch season, will your let’s say you hire you’re hiring a social media manager.

What kind of extra support will your social media manager need to pitch in during that time? Because that would be very different from, say, when you’re not in launch mode or when you’re you know?

So point being, you wanna be very clear on everything and, of course, the pay.

And that is why it’s important to set a budget.

So, you can put up these job descriptions. We’ve had success with different VA groups. We’ve had success with different job builds. But point is, even if you don’t put it anywhere, just share it with your email list. Point you need to give people a clearer guideline of what you are looking for.

Then finally, how do you measure, monitor, and manage? You wanna set a cadence and a workflow for measuring effectiveness. What would that look like for you? Remember, you will find a lot of guidelines or in, you know, in various books and, on what kind of meetings to have, what kind of interviews to do, etcetera, etcetera. At the end of the day, this is your business. You decide how you wanna, you know, measure, monitor, and manage. So I’ll give you an example.

Peers of ours have weekly startup meetings.

They work with a whole bunch of contractors.

They’re they’re also a couple in their business, and they, they do book publishing. So, they they have a stand up meeting because they work with a lot of contractors. So every week, I think they do it on Mondays or whatever, when is they meet on Zoom, but they do, like, quick check ins with everybody to see how’s it going, what would it you know, what’s everybody working on, does anyone need any extra support? Etcetera, etcetera.

Mike and I do asynchronous meetings because that works well for us.

So we check-in with any of our subcontractors on Slack. Let them know what’s coming up.

They fill in lesson, end of the week updates and let us know, you know, what they’ve worked on, what’s coming up for them, if they need any extra support from us, and that works well for us. So you’ve gotta figure out what kind of cadence will work for you for managing, working with your subcontractors.

And what you need to remember while a subcontractor is not an employee, they don’t have those full time benefits, a good subcontractor shows up as a team member. We’ve been very lucky, though. So one of our, subcontractors is is Natasha Blinky. We work with her on our research projects, and she’s also been course coordinator for for a really long time and optimization course optimization as well.

The reason we’ve worked with her for as long as we have, and she’s our first point of contact for any, you know, project that we know she would have the capacity for and the capability for is because she’s always shown up as a team member. She makes suggestions for the business that sometimes both Mike and I haven’t even seen. You know? And we’re like, oh, wow. That’s, like, such a great idea, which is what we try and do for our clients as well and, you know, why our clients love working with us. So we love working with people who show a lot of initiative.

This is something that’s really important for us.

Does every subcontractor do that? No. As long as they’re doing the core job you’ve hired them to do really well, I think that is great. If you find a subcontractor who, like, say, Natasha, goes the extra mile, I would say hold on to them. Really, you know, that’s that’s rare, but it’s really great. And as a business owner, on the other hand, for you, you need to remember that you aren’t gonna show up as quote unquote boss.

You’re gonna show up as a leader. It requires a lot of work and to for, you know, for us to kind of start showing up as not as contractors for clients, but as leaders for our own subcontractors. So this is, like, something that you would wanna start working on, start reading about, start, you know, just kind of observing, okay, where are my gaps?

What can I do better when it comes to communication? Because sometimes and I’ll be honest with you. So early days, really early days, I think this is I would expect someone I would hire, like, say, a social media person to basically just know what I’m thinking when it comes to strategy. Right?

And this is a dangerous position to be in because here’s the thing. Because I’ve been doing social media management before we pivoted into the copyright, I knew how social media works. So I would be like, but this is so obvious. Like, you know but and I would say, okay.

But have you told her this? That this is what you’re looking for? No. But she should know it quicker.

No. So it requires a lot of, you know, reflection and looking at, okay, what can I do better?

So something to keep in mind.

How do you do all of this is you create detailed SOPs. And here’s the deal. So with your subcontractors, if you’re hiring someone for a role for the first time, one of the things you wanna keep in the job description is that they need to document and create the SOPs as they go. This is something that we did when we started working with Natasha initially for our blog content.

Like, so she when she would publish a blog post, she created, like, a detailed SOP, complete with the video tutorial. So when she moved on and she started specializing in research instead, I already had all those SOPs to hand over to whoever replaced her. Right? So you wanna be very, very clear.

You wanna create and if you if you feel that you would need to explain to someone how to do something, then I would say create those SOPs yourself right now and detailed workflows as well. What happens when? Who who sends what? What needs to you know, who needs to talk to each other.

All of those things need to be documented.

Have a communication cadence. Cannot emphasize that in our whether you do weekly check ins, end of week check ins, start of week updates, doesn’t matter. But radio silence from either side is never is never good. Legal compliance, contracts, ideas, you wanna have those in place.

We always buy our contracts from, like, like, lots of great legal template shops, legal pages. One, we bought our contracts from. The particular is another one we bought our contract from. So, would recommend those.

I’m sure there are others as well. You want, again, remember how it works you need and not what a book or a coach or anyone else says. And know that it may not always work out, and that’s okay.

Alright.

That was longer, a little longer than our usual twenty minute trainings, but yeah.

Questions?

No questions? Okay. Then I have a few. I wanna know who’s got some like, a clear idea of who they need to hire in order to scale.

Yeah. Andrew.

Can you hear me okay?

Yep.

Sorry. I’m in a public co working space. I’m trying not to speak to you.

I think my next, hire, I think I really want someone to basically help organize all of the research for me when I have a new client, and basically package it together so that I could just take, like, two days and just go through it without worrying about, like, oh, I have to, like, go through these, like, pick up these sales call recordings and go through these. And then I have to, go through, like, analyze this and, like, that whole lot just have it packaged for me. And I think I would I would need someone who understands the industry a little bit because, you know, with technical concepts, there are certain things where you have to kind of understand like, oh, okay. Like, I would Basically this as, you know, helpful. I don’t know.

But, yeah, just someone would have to have a certain amount of, like, research knowledge for for it to make sense.

But, like, I would love to just have someone basically do the research for me, but I still need to understand all the everything that they have. So I’m thinking of of it largely. It’s basically them doing the organizing parking cycle. I’m terrible at it, and I it takes me way too long.

And I’m always always changing the format. Like, always, like, oh, no. This is the right way to organize it. Or no.

This is a better way. So I think just having someone go just deliver me this, like, here’s everything you need to know to get up to speed up this event and just go through an order. Got it. But, like, just just thinking about that is, like, a huge lift off our shoulders.

Oh, cool.

Right. And, so, basically and what I’m hearing is, like, why you wanna hire this person is because it would free up your capacity.

Right? But would it also improve the client experience? Like, do you think it would improve the eventual results that you create for your clients?

It could. If the first I would say that I would say that the main thing is to get that, like, is to is a capacity thing, because I’m losing a lot of time to sort of just, like, indecision. I do part of the research here, part of the research there.

So I think it’s largely a capacity thing. But I think with the right person, it could potentially help get a better result too because then I’m, like, a little bit more fresh when I start writing.

So, you know, I think that rather than if you do after doing all that research, it could be like, oh, I’m already, like, half burnt out on this.

Right. Right.

Right. Right. It so I think it could it could have a better client experience as well, but it would be a different capacity and easier, like, freeing my mind up. I I actually the more I talk about it, the more I think it would be better for the client experience because I think that the way that I’m approaching it now is probably I’m probably causing some, there are probably some gaps that pop in the cracks.

Yeah. That could be the case. Like, when we don’t enjoy a particular task, then we tend to either rush through it or, you know, like, feel like it’s not. And what, at least, I found was that a hiring researcher really improved client experience because then I can, like, present that research in a much better way to the client, you know, and they would have Yeah. Way more understanding of what went into the project and where am I coming from so I can, like, pick depending my copy code and code is something that I very rarely have to do because they know it’s, like, you know, all of this data has gone into into the research. So I think that’s a really good place to start. What I would love to see from you is a job description.

Okay. So it doesn’t matter okay. Here’s the thing. You may not hire this person this month or even next month or maybe not even this quarter.

Maybe this would be, like, a q four thing that you’re looking to do, which is very important because you wanna look at your budget. Right? So you’re gonna look at, okay, where is this gonna come up for? Where is this higher?

And what kind of a budget am I working with for and, again, remember, something like what Adam was talking about, you can easily do a test project. So that’s, like, you know, a single project to see how it goes with that particular person before you start working with them over and over again. So but I would love to see a job description, mainly because I’m curious to see, the role that you flesh out for this person. So because this is a role that we’ve, like, hired for multiple times.

So, yeah, I’m interested in seeing the the role you flesh out. Cool?

Cool. That was good.

Okay. Good.

So Thank you.

When would I see that? I’m not gonna let you off that.

Gonna do, not like the repurposing one that I saw you Yeah. And just ignoring. Yeah.

Ignoring and feeling guilty about.

So this one, I’m gonna have this done by the end of tomorrow to give myself a good deadline for this week.

Alright. Yeah. We’ll check-in with you then. I will. You know I will. So cool. Okay.

This was great. Who else wants to share what’s the next role they wanna hire for? Yeah, Maria.

I need somebody for social media. I do not like social media. I have tried liking social media. I have tried a lot in not just with this business with other businesses, and it’s just like a recurring theme, but I don’t like it.

Like, I’ve made, like, so much content that never gets posted because then I don’t get it into the right form or the right template or the right this or the right that. It’s not like a lack of ideas.

It’s a lack of, getting it formatted right because I hate all that fiddly formatting stuff. Mhmm. Mhmm. And then, and then remembering to actually post it, and it it’s that whole thing. So I don’t mind, like, recording things. I don’t mind the writing of the thing.

I just don’t wanna do the actual like, I just wanna say here’s, like, the raw stuff.

Mhmm.

Put it into the make the carousel or make the reel or make the whatever. I’ll send you the pictures and the video clips and the they can pick the music for it, whatever. It doesn’t really matter to me. And then I just don’t wanna Mhmm. It. So I just wanna be like, there’s the thing. Go make it happen and post it.

Not totally, like, taking my hands off, but kind of. Because it just I know that because I’ve I’ve tried. Like, I’m in this Instagram class, like, learning how to do the things, and I’m like, okay. You can do this. You can do this. And then I love doing strategy and business y things and whatever and the social media stuff.

Mhmm. Like, is this boulder on my back? And so yeah.

Okay. But why why social media? What do you think the impact’s gonna be on your business? How will it help you scale?

Oh, how will it help me? Because nobody knows who I am. I mean, like, I I need to get visibility. So, I am writing a book.

And so, and so, like, I have this plan.

Like, I would like to, go to three conferences next year. So and have a book, and I need to test the ideas in the book. And I’m gonna do that through social media, which will get my ideas out there, and sort of, like, validate and get known so that when I go to these conferences in real life and I’m connecting with people, then I’m not it’s not like, what rock did you crawl under or out from?

Like, who are you?

Right? Yeah. Yeah. So Yeah. Yeah.

Like, I need to build some authority. And so, it’s not working me just trying to have the willpower to do it because Mhmm. Then it would be done already because I’m pretty Yeah. Disciplined.

But this Yeah. I don’t know. I just Yeah. Think it’s a it’s a barrier.

Okay. That’s, like, a really good yeah. So okay.

What I want you to start thinking about is when you’re thinking about social media because this is, like, such a broad umbrella. You know? Like, oh, I need someone to manage social media, and I’ve heard this often.

I’ve been that person.

What you wanna think about is do you need someone to create strategy, create content, create do all of the uploading, do the networking, or are they parts of social media that you enjoy, like the con creating the content but not the format, like you said? And if someone were to take let’s say, you do a you record a video or you do a podcast interview and someone were to take that and turn that into or you, you know, into a blog post and things like that. Because then you’re looking for for different people. A social media manager would map out your would ideally map out your strategy, help you look at it, help you see what goals are you gonna accomplish, and then go ahead, go through your content, create content based off your content, and then, obviously, send it to you for approval and things like that.

But they would create the graphics. They would give you ideas for what reels to film. That’s what, like, our social media manager used to do, which was really helpful. And then they would they would do the job of finding the music and and all of that.

Some of them also do a bit of networking on your behalf.

So you wanted to or you can work with someone who’s a repurposing specialist who can take one piece of content for you Yeah. And repurpose it. And sometimes, they also all have add ons, like, where they’ll even post it for you.

So you wanna think about you wanna give that some thought. And, like, that’s why I say, you know, it’s really important to get here on what is it that you would want this person to do and not just say, oh, I need a social media person?

Because that could mean so many different things.

So it definitely is like, I’m fine with figuring out strategy.

I can plan things That’s what I call.

Yeah.

All night. Yeah. Yeah.

I have so many strategies that it’s not even it’s the and, content.

Like, I’m building content for the thing that the offer that I’m currently having.

So I don’t have heaps of it yet. But I’m fine with creating content and generating ideas and, like, all of that.

Mhmm. Mhmm. But then it is I need somebody to take that primary piece of content, repurpose it into all the different formats.

I’m gonna start doing, like, a live stream. I’m fine with live stream. I hate video editing. I do not want a video edit, which is why I like livestream. But I also do wanna do some longer form stuff for YouTube, like some pillar content around my, diagnostic stuff. But, yeah, I just need somebody to, like, make it look like it should so people actually watch it.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s, you know, so that’s something that you wanna kinda give some thought to because, because I I know people who do both.

You know? Who I know people who who are great at social media management, and I also know, I would know like I say, I know a a handful of people who do social, you know, content repurposing.

So Mhmm.

So I know that there are two different things. And the thing with copywriters is we’re really good. Like I said, we’re really good with strategy. We’re really good with content.

We want our words to sound a certain way, especially because that’s what we do. Right? So, yeah, so I would want you to give some thought to that and get really clear on what is it that you would want this person to do. You could call them whatever you want.

You call them, you know, a social media repurposing strap, you know, assistant, or you would call them a you know, depending on what you want them to do. But social media manager, social media strategist, social media copywriter, You’ll hear all of these job descriptions all you know, but at the end of the day, you gotta get really clear on what will this person do because you’re really clear on why you need them.

Mhmm.

So that’s great. But I want you know, I think if you have more clarity on exactly what yeah. That would be great. So, yeah, job description.

So I did email put it out or not?

Yeah.

Go ahead. I I did email Shane because I went to a session last weekend. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah.

Talking about outsourcing, and I was like, okay. That is something that that might be a good fit for outsourcing.

But I can’t I don’t have budget to hire somebody full time, which working with somebody from the Philippines, he was like, full time is best. And I said, well, this is my budget.

This is it’s obviously not full time. So did he have any recommendations? So I’m waiting to hear back from him. But I see Andrew was saying, yeah, finding one person. So maybe if there’s more than one person, you know, collectively, we could full time hire somebody.

That would be kinda cool.

I mean, like, if everybody Or you could do some sort of project basis.

You know?

You could say, I’m gonna send you four videos.

I need you to create x number of pieces of content out of it.

Yeah.

So I have worked with people on Fiverr.

Like, before different business did a podcast, I had somebody that did all that podcast editing. I just found them on Fiverr.

So I could do that, but I’m I’m really I like the idea of having somebody on the part of the team, like, so that we’re, like, collectively building the business and everybody benefits.

Yeah. So Yeah. That is true. Yeah.

But I do need to do it sooner rather than later because I’m like, okay.

This needs to happen because I need I want clients, and then clients start looking for, like, well, where are you? What what authority do you have? Blah blah blah.

Yep. Yep. Yep.

Yeah. So That’s true. I like it or not, I need to do it. So this is this is the way that I can do it, and so I just need to own that and move forward with it so I can think about other things.

Cool. Great.

Okay. Good. So spend some time thinking about it. And then yeah. But even with you, Marina, I would love to see, you know, an outline of what you would want this person to do.

It may not be like a formal job description, but a really clear outline of what would this person be doing, how often would they be meeting you, what would they need from you, what would you expect from them? Because, also think about your budget. What kind of a budget are you working with? You know, think about the impact it’ll have on your business when you’re using it.

But, of course, you wanna also look at what you’re bringing in and then kind of work with that. So but, yeah, having a detailed description would be really, really helpful.

And I did do I do have a repurposing plan. I just need to, like, actually execute on it. Yeah.

So I mean, I You should have a repurposing plan.

Yes. Yeah. After our session, I was like, okay. Yeah. So I have the diagram, and I’m like, okay. This all makes sense.

And then Yeah.

It just yep, then I think, oh, I don’t know.

Yeah.

Oh, I just I like to make a note.

About how to I don’t do it.

Yeah. Yeah. No. I understand that. Cool.

Yeah. But I could give it to somebody else and say, here’s the primary piece of content.

Exactly.

Here’s the reporting strategy.

Here’s all the images. Make it happen.

Exactly. Exactly. Yeah. Oh, alright, Jessica.

K. So I’m kind of in this place where I have some clear jobs for sure that I’ll need to subcontract or something. So for example, cover designer, I’ll need to offload doing, book formatting, like, that kind of stuff.

So that’s easy.

That kind of thing to me is like, no problem.

Got that. That’s very clear. But then I have this kind of some of what Marino was saying, I was like, well, okay. So Joe is letting us put a team member through CSP or the intensive or something like that. Right? Okay. So couldn’t I, hypothetically, hire someone too to kind of, like I so I I think you follow her too, Prana.

Rachel Miller, you know, for the social Yeah. Yep. I have her programs, and I often have thought, you know, I should just pay someone to take this course for me, and then they can I’ll do the same thing, Marina. Like, record videos, you do the rest. I don’t care.

Can figure out the strategy. I don’t even care about that. You just make it so that when someone goes to look up Jessica, Noelle, books, publishing, I’m in all the places. Great.

Okay? That’s all I really care about. So I was, like, thinking about it, but then I have these other tasks that I want taken off my plate. So for example, I had I customized the, templated proposal.

Now, admittedly, it was a little more in the future, it won’t take this long, but it still took me with breaks, I think, about half the day. I was like, this is a waste of my time.

So I it it’s like that kinda task. The invoicing part, the onboarding, the, you know, like, that kind of stuff. I also want someone to just just do this for me. Like, I don’t care. Just do this. So I was kinda sitting there going, okay. So I have someone in mind that would like to be the VA.

Would be you work with great. But how far off of the scope of a typical VA? Like, can I slide in there and say, you know what? Would you be willing to take this social media course and help me repurp like or am I is that too I don’t know. Yeah.

So that’s that gets really muddy really fast. I know. Because then they feel that they’ve been paid to be a VA, but they’re doing the social media manager’s job, and it will lead to a lot. So you either bring this person in as a, you know, as a fractional content marketing officer or a fractional CMO or something like that.

You know? Or bring them in as so then they’re doing a lot, but then they wouldn’t be doing a lot of the admin side of things. So you wanna kind of start thinking about that because that’s two different roles that we’re talking about. Like, oh, take my social media and repurpose it, but then also manage my contracts and my proposals and my invoicing and all of that.

The the proposals and customizing the proposals and yeah. You know? All I would say that would be more a really good VA’s job.

But the social media side of things, what you can do here is either bring in someone who’s early in the game, eager to learn, willing to, you know, work with testing different things out, open to feedback, and all of that. Also appreciate is the fact that you’ll be giving them access to Rachel’s courses, etcetera, to go through it. That’s, like, education.

So that would that would possibly work. But, yeah, I would say off the right off the bat, this would be, like, two different roles. And that is what you and what you wanna decide is which one would have more of an impact on your scaling journey, which one would have more of an impact on your cash flow plan of snooze and capacity.

Use that to decide. You don’t always have to hire for both. Sometimes you may realize that, oh, I could have, like, a tool do this for me, or I could have, you know, AI do this for me. But, because we do have that option too. You know? So, so you may wanna look at that.

Okay. Okay. Thank you.

You’re welcome. Abby, who are you gonna hire next?

I want to hire someone to, like, implement my customer feedback loop and then report back to me on the data, like, every month for the optimization. So that’s like, I need to very clearly define what that’s gonna look like.

And then so, yeah, that will free up capacity, and it will improve the client experience because I haven’t Yeah.

I haven’t done, like, all of it for a client before because it’s just, like, too much.

And then it will should improve cash flow as well because I’ll be able to, like, charge more because I’m offering a more kind of end to end service. And then the other thing I I really need in my business, like, the bottleneck is, like, eyeballs. Like, I just need more people kind of going into my funnel, for my course because that’s I really wanna make my course, work. So for that, I’m thinking about potentially hiring someone to to help me do YouTube or social media. I haven’t quite decided yet, but I definitely need someone to just, like, solve that problem of how do I get, like, five hundred people into my funnel a month.

So the five the lead gen part of things is obviously one one role, and you you could you could do that in so many ways, which is why it would be great for you to kind of do this exercise and say, what what are the different lead generation strategies that you wanna test out?

You know? So YouTube is great, but YouTube will bring you those five hundred eyeballs.

It’s a long game. Right? It would start bring But if you need more adults now, what are the things that you could do? And then see if you need to really hire that out, or can you test out some strategies right now? Maybe it’s ads. You’re you’re running ads. Right?

So I did run ads, and I ran it for two months, and I break even.

And I had, like, some clear kind of optimization steps, but then I’d I think I was just, like, overwhelmed with client work, so I didn’t do it. So I I should really revisit.

Exactly.

Yeah. Maybe revisit and optimize that. Mhmm. But the other the other rule is the client feedback thing that you said. Like, what was that?

Like, so for my evergreen process, like, I have, like, kind of different feedback points, like surveys Oh, yeah.

Yeah.

AB testing, that kind of thing. So, like, so I need someone to kind of set it up and then, organize, like, all of the data at the end of the month so I can, like, review it and see what where to optimize.

This is actually something you do you know Angela Tan?

No.

Okay. Can she help?

That yeah. She could help you with setting up all these automations and then also collating the data into Airtable or something like that so you can then kind of go through it. I think she may be able to help, but you yeah. You should speak to her.

But this would be like a systems and automations thing. You know? It’s this is like a quick one time project. So what I would actually love for you to think more is more long term, Abby.

These are like smaller projects. If you’re looking to scale, who’s gonna help you scale?

So and then or what is gonna help you scale? Actually, I would wanna start with what is gonna help you scale? Where are you kind of where could you create more cash flow for yourself? Where could you create more capacity to take on? So I would want you to just kind of start thinking a little bigger because these are smaller single one off projects, one and done. But what we’re looking at is some to bring someone on, you can either like I said, capacity is a first level filter. We have a capacity so you can take on more projects or help you generate more money, charge more from clients.

So things that you could possibly start adding on to packages and and projects.

Yeah. I mean, it would be for, like, the optimization retainer because it was so I would need them every month to, like, organize the research.

But then, yeah, like, same as what Andrew said, like, I would like someone to just, like, analyze it and put it in, like, a messaging guide for me.

Oh, in that case then, if you’re looking for, like, a retail team, then I think you should speak to Natasha. I don’t know whether she knows how to set things up.

But if you know how to set those up, then you can kind of record it and show it to her, but Natasha would be great for this. Yeah.

Natasha Harisari?

Oh, Natasha is, I can make an introduction. Natasha Blinky. Do you know her?

Mm-mm.

No? Okay. Cool.

I can make an introduction to her, but, she could be really great with distilling feedback data and to tell you exactly what needs to be done.

I mean, she’s brilliant at it. Yeah.

Thank you.

Yeah. And I didn’t mention her for you because you need someone with, with SaaS experience. Right? So yeah.

But she knows the online course industry. She’s like, yep. We’ve worked with her on multiple projects. We love her.

So, but, yeah, that could be a good, good way to improve both capacity and client streams. That would be a good hire. Yeah.

But go ahead. Like, create your impact. Do do this what everybody else is doing. Create your job description for this person, and I will make the connection. Yeah.

Thank you. Yeah. I will be able to do it by tomorrow like Andrew, but let’s see next Friday.

Okay. Cool. Alright. Cool. Any other questions?

Nope?

All good. All ready to hire.

Okay.

Cool. Great. I shall see you all in Slack, and we’ll check-in with you tomorrow then.

Okay. Cool.

Thanks, Brenna. It’s really helpful.

Thank you. Bye. Thank you, Brenna. Bye.