Hey, it's Samantha. Women consultants fall into different camps when it comes to the idea of building a team for their consulting businesses. There's always those who are doing everything themselves, partly because they believe they can't afford to hire team members, and sometimes because they have a belief that no one else can do things as well as they can. Sometimes they think I'll figure it out. They probably can because women are amazingly capable. They can multitask, they can learn new kinds of things. Most of my clients are multi-passionate and multi-talented, and also just interested in learning and doing all kinds of different things. But those ideas can keep us small trying to do all the jobs in the business. They can just keep us overworked and frustrated too.

Now, what's fun is when I am the one reliable team member, they have. And yes, I know that we don't always think of a business coach assisting us as our team member, but I'm totally on my client's team. And it's interesting when everyone else they hire is letting them down. And I think, well, you found me. You found someone you can rely on. But that feels different to them sometimes, like a different kind of relationship.

Most women consultants I work with have found one reliable helper. They have a virtual assistant who's often like a Jill of all trades. And while it's great to have a reliable team member, you can run into issues when you're having one person expand into doing too many roles, it's just as stressful for her as it would be for you if you were doing everything. So I find then we can get discontent with that VA, when she's not good at it all. You know, all the 10 things that she's doing, and doing all the 10 things causes her to drop the ball on the things she's actually really good at. It's like finding out she's human. So I like to keep people who work on my team in their specific joy and genius zones, which you're going to hear about in today's episode.

And lastly, I do encounter consultants who've hired an employee and, many times, making the salary for that person is causing them extraordinary stress. My job has often been to help them realize they either hired a full-time employee when they only needed a contractor, and then we rectify that situation, or I showed them that they were hiring ahead of growth, and now it's time to give that employee something to do. In one case, that employee was on the verge of getting fired. When I started working with my client, she's now like a mega revenue producer. So there is hope.

In today's retrospective from my past episodes, we're talking about building your team and you're going to hear both practical tips and also some philosophical points of view that I believe are like really helpful ways to think about building your team.

INTRO

People can be the most joyful or the most stressful parts of our businesses and of our life, by the way, right? My intention today is to help you make the people piece of your work energizing and fulfilling. You'll find links to the full episodes of each of these in the show notes, of course. And now let's start with, I think, the most important principles to keep in mind when building your team.

PJC199: How to Expand Your Business and Build an Extraordinary Team

So what are the helpful beliefs that you need to have? Well, if joy is one of my big ones, you need to stay in your joy and genius zone. That means the things that you're doing in your business are your genius area. Like you're amazing at that. And they give you energy, that's the joyful part. You should feel energized by the things that you're doing. So anytime you're doing a task that you feel like, Ugh, I want to (mumbles) just cannot stand this, that is a sign that you need to give that one away, or extremely minimize your time doing it.

Very often, and this is a crazy thing, very often there's somebody who loves to do that, love to do that thing that make us nuts. So find that person, hire them for that task and get those kinds of things off your plate. So staying in your joy and genius zone is really the core principle of Profitable Joyful Consulting.

And I had a mentor, spiritual mentor who said, and I thought this was incredible, to come from a spiritual perspective and say something like this, only do what only you can do. Look how much that applies to business, but like spiritually speaking, like only do like on planet Earth, or in my world, or in my life, what only you can do. It really helps you have clarity about what your purpose and what your role on planet Earth is.

So I love to apply that to the work that we're doing in our businesses. You can also apply that to your team. Like everyone on your team should only be doing what only they can do. And when you have those kind of clear delineated roles, it's going to be amazing for you.

Do you love those ideas? I love them. Joy and Genius Zone™, only do what only you can do, so life-giving. Okay, now here's another one of my favorite concepts. That's from that same episode, bench depth

I'm a big fan of hiring ahead of growth because I like to know that I have capacity, and so then I get excited about going and selling new stuff to fulfill that capacity. Some people are a little more conservative and they'd rather have those clients and then quick, quick, quick, let's get the team on board. If you're going to do things that way, then here's what I want you to do. Have bench depth meaning for every person on your team. I want you to have somebody who backs them up so that when you need to quickly hire and have more people on the team that you can pull from people who you already know who are maybe sometimes working for you.

The way that this can look is I have a marketing team member who is constantly working for me, but when she's unavailable or if things get really busy, then I have a backup person that I can bring in who maybe works on a couple of other client projects, but not quite as much as that initial person.

In the case that we got a new client, well, those two are now full-time, and by full-time, I mean full-time contractors, or I'm taking more of their time as contractors. And then I bring in a third person who is the backup to those two. I just like bench depth. It makes me feel safe. It means people can take vacations and it means that you are never the backup.

If you don't have bench depth, meaning an extra person who can step in, then you're the backup to everyone on your team. I want to make it to where you're never the backup. Yes, the buck stops here and it stops with us, but I do not like it when something happens, suddenly you have to be the one to step in and figure things out. I want that there always to be an additional team member who can do that, isn't you.

Who isn't you. Oh my God. Imagine how much you can expand your business when it can transcend beyond your skills and your capacity. You can build that team. If you've been accustomed to doing everything yourself, the hardest thing to start to do is to delegate. I never learned to do this well back when I was at corporate and I struggled so much in the beginning to do this in my own business.

I had a VA who was like $750 a month, I had no idea what to give her. It was just so much money going out and no, like nothing coming in. And she didn't know how to help me. I didn't know what to give her. But once you build your team and you have roles sorted, well now in my business it's like a well-oiled machine and it's so easy to delegate. It's actually hard to do anything myself, and so much easier to delegate to the team. You know who to delegate to and you can trust that it will get done.

By the way, way back in this early episode, I talked about the basics of delegation. It's an older episode and also in the sense that you're going to hear that in the audio quality, but the principles I covered back then are worth going back and listening to. I also mentioned there, a free resource that you can get at samanthahartley.com/delegate.

You'll find a link to that in the show notes, along with the links to the full episodes. So here is Build Your Business with a Team.

PJC17: Build Your Business with a Team

So there's four kinds of tasks in your business, at least as I divide them up for discussion purposes today. The first one is revenue generating. So most of your revenue generating stuff, your work and your business, will be done by you. You might have other things that perhaps a team member does for your clients on your behalf. Like I have team members who write on behalf of my clients. So revenue generating tasks are the top thing and most important, right? A lot of times you're going to keep most of that yourself because that's going to be your genius work.

The second kind of tasks are going to be joyful tasks, things that you love doing. I will be honest, I have no business playing around in Canva and I love playing around in Canva, so it makes me happy. So I don't do primarily all of my own social media graphics, but from time to time, as a little reward for myself, I will go and play around in Canva just because I can. Those are two kinds that you might choose to keep.

Then there's the tasks which are delegatable, I think, they belong to other people. That's because other people can do them faster, better, and cheaper than you. And this is going to be everything from bookkeeping to potentially invoicing, handling your CRM software, your email software, putting stuff up on your website, dealing with ClickFunnels. Listen, if you want to get in there and do that, knock yourself out. But when you start to hate your life, and want to quit because you've worn yourself out doing software stuff, then that's a good time to say I know there's somebody else who could be doing this who isn't me.

Don't let failure of imagination prevent you from hiring somebody. Oh, it'd be so hard to find somebody to do this. Are there even people who specialize in this? Yes and yes. It's easy to find somebody who wants to do the job that you don't want to do. The internet is filled with reliable, lovable, likable people who would want to help you with those tasks.

So the fourth kind is repeatable. If there's a thing that's going to need to be done all over and over and over again, and I keep mentioning email because that is something that needs to be done over and over and over again, it's really good to just outsource that to someone. That's why I hired somebody to handle the sending of my email newsletter. I don't want to deal with how it looks on all of the different browsers I don't want to deal with code broke or this thing, or that thing. so I hired somebody who would handle that for me, and that means that I can worry about the hard stuff, which is getting that thing out every week, right? There's a lot of work that still has to be done, which doesn't include messing around with stupid code when you're exhausted and should either be revenue generating or resting. Okay. Those are two really good options that you could be doing instead of figuring out how to put your newsletter into Constant Contact.

Okay. So again, four kinds of tasks, the ones you can keep and the ones you can delegate. So the first one is revenue generating. If you can delegate that, certainly do 'cause the more people who are handling revenue generation, the more money your business makes. But most of the revenue generation will be being done by you. Second thing is stuff in your joy zone, joyful stuff, some joyful things you'll keep and some joyful things you'll give away. Things that other people can do cheaper or faster, please get rid of those things. And last of all, tasks that are repeatable.

In that episode, I also shared something that I think is illuminating for my fellow consultants, a snapshot of my team. The episode's a little older, and so the composition of my team is a bit different now, but it's still pretty close, and you'll get an idea of the 360 degree nature of my team. It's pretty ironic that I went from not being able to find and keep a reliable VA, or to keep one busy, to now having like 20 people in my orbit.

I thought I would go through the list of who was on my team so you can kind of hear the scope of possibility. You don't have to have as many team members as I have. I'm going to point out to you none of these are full-time. This is not legal advice, but I don't advise you to hire anyone full-time. I will tell you that a lot of times what especially women consultants do is they hire people full-time, and then they have to worry about making payroll for that person when they themselves are not really getting paid as much as they could or should be.

You can have all of this remote team, 'cause my entire team is remote, you can do this too. They're reliable, punctual, they get stuff done, all of the good things. So my team consists of, in no particular order, a project manager, two marketing managers who also do writing, specific marketing writing, a copywriter, a video editor, two tech people. I'm a believer in bench depth or bench strength. So basically having somebody on the team and then a backup who can do their job in case something happens to them or in case they ever want to take a vacation.

Guess what? Sometimes there are holidays and people want to go away for a week, for the summer, and you need to have a backup for that person, otherwise the backup's going to be you. I don't want to learn those jobs. So, I have a social media VA, that amazing CRM billing software VA I told you about, I have a mentor, that's a person on my team who supports me to be my best. I have bookkeepers and a tax guy that I adore and a financial planner. And I have a podcast team, because I wouldn't get this podcast out if I didn't have them. It would've never ever happened. And I have a brand designer who I'm working with right now.

So that's what's possible. Your team may look completely different and who you need and want to bring on may be completely different, but I am so ecstatic when I'm working with my team, like I adore them so much. It's among the funnest things that I ever do, which is interact with my team. And so if you think of a team as a heavy thing, I just want you to potentially like bring forward a memory of when someone surprised you by saving your booty, or by just lifting you up, being reliable and dependent. If you can call to mind examples of people who helped you out when you were in need or people who are on your team, and you really benefited from them, then I think you can transform any beliefs you have.

And even if you have a terrific team now, constantly building new beliefs about like I can rely on people, my team is amazing, my team make me a better version of myself. Those are the beliefs that I want you to nurture and cultivate in yourself.

Certainly one of the biggest objections I get to bringing in team members is the idea of the principal consultant not wanting to have a bunch of people work for them because they fear managing them is going to be like herding cats.

What I find so ironic about this is that most of the people who've brought up this issue to me came out of human resources at corporate. That's the very people that I would expect to know how to handle something like this. They clearly have had some sort of organizational PTSD around trying to get a team of people to align and get work done and all that, and I don't blame them.

The idea I'm about to present though is a revelation to so many consultants. And that's probably why it's one of my most downloaded episodes on audio platforms and YouTube. It's called Leaders Versus Managers, Which Are You?

PJC85: Leaders vs Managers: Which Are You?

Managing is a totally different skillset, I think, from leadership. And a lot of us assume because we're leaders, or a lot of us end up as leaders and then are expected to manage something, we feel like we can do that job. And I would say about this one, there's actually something to know here and not everybody is going to be good at it.

What's funny is that, in some of the research I did, leadership is like exalted and like management is like, you know, in the dirt doing the details, kind of thing like this. And actually, I don't think being a leader is more virtuous or amazing than being a manager because without managers nothing gets done.

And not every leader is a getter doner. Not everyone who is leading teams can get back in there and dig in and help them to get things done. So managers are those who have a goal and then construct the constraints. Like they bring everything together, then they manage that team or the resources in achievement of that goal, and usually there's an on time on budget and with as little death and destruction as possible kind of a caveat that goes in there.

So you've got to have either management skills on your team or a manager on your team. That's the key piece that's missing for a lot of my clients when they first come to me. They'll be like my team is growing and now I'm nuts, and things are not good for me working in the business. And I'll be like, who's on your team? And they'll tell me, and I'll be like, who's managing that team? and they'll say me, and that is when things turn into a problem.

It is perhaps counterintuitive to think that you needed to bring in somebody to manage that team. In some cases, this isn't right for everybody, in some cases, you're going to need to have somebody on the team who does the managing. Nowadays, we have a lot of popular terms for this. So COO was the first name that came to me back in the day when I hired for this position. I was thinking what I actually need is a COO who can run the business while I'm doing my thing. So that was close to what I wanted. You can also call this project manager. First lieutenant is another one of the kind of the terms that I was thinking of like you know, what I need is like a right hand person or a lieutenant. The person behind the person were the ideas that came to me. Again, nowadays we call this OBM, project manager, integrator, chief of staff. There's a lot of language which implies what this role does. So if you don't have this role in your business, then you need to spend some of your time doing this role, and it may drive you crazy.

If you've been managing your team and have a growing team, you are going to love getting booted out of the role as manager, so you can go back to being the vision holder. And you'll hear me talk about that again in a minute. But first, if you're in the coaching world at all, you've most likely heard of Dan Sullivan and the attention getting title of his book, Who, Not How. It's an intriguing way to think about solving problems in your business rather than wasting good brain time on learning how to do something yourself, especially when it's outside of your skillset and natural talents.

Instead of looking for who could be doing this for you, which is what you should be doing, I talk extensively about that idea in the episode called Collaboration: Who, Not How. But here in this clip, I bring up a concern that one of my clients had about solving a big challenge in her business with a who instead of a how. She was running so many things in the operations and just didn't have time to train another person on what she needed. So here's what I said to her.

PJC189 The Power of Collaboration: Who, Not How

Imagine bringing on somebody who is already up to speed, who is talented, who knows how to solve this problem. You're hiring an expert. You're not hiring a low level person. Those are two different things. You can bring somebody in who's inexpensive, usually this is the kind of the trade off is like an expensive person you hire for their expertise. And then, someone who's gone on the lower range is going to be somebody who's like, green, ready to go, teachable, trainable. If you're in the situation where it is costing you a lot and you don't want to invest a lot of time in teaching somebody how to play your whole entire game, well then just hire someone who's an expert.

Imagine that that's possible. You could bring someone in, again, like a $50 an hour person is usually really, really skilled. They know what they're doing and they can just hit the ground running. All they need to learn is like acclimate to your business, but honestly, how much do they need to know? Bring someone in, get them up to speed, and then set them loose. They should know whatever those skills are that you're hiring them for. So imagine that that is possible. If you need somebody that you want to bring in for copywriting, hire someone who knows copywriting. If you want to bring someone in for customer service or for search engine optimization, hire people who know how to do that.

Over the years, I've had many clients who had business partners. In the case of women consultants, it's been a mixed bag of results. Often there have been more issues and benefits, primarily with giving away their power to male partners. While I'm completely optimistic that any partnership I learn about can be an exception to that, I think it's important for me to talk about it so that it's in your awareness.

Don't give away your power to male partners. In the episode I did on partnership pitfalls, I talked about one of the main reasons women seek partners that I think doesn't serve them. It's their hope that someone else will do the selling.

While it's certainly possible that aligning or merging with another successful business can multiply the revenues of both entities, for a small consultancy in the growth stages, looking for a rainmaker outside of yourself is a big red flag.

PJC197: Partnership Pitfalls

Here's the deal. You have to be the rainmaker in your business. You'll probably be the rainmaker for most of the time if you're going to be the face of the brand. If you don't want that either, the best options are go back and take a day job where you're going to have a salary and work for a company and have the perceived security that that provides. Or there are groups where consultants come together under one umbrella, and that's a great situation for people who want to have business handed to them and don't want to be doing the rainmaking part of it.

You can hear that there'll be some kind of the credibility, you're under somebody else's shingle, and there's kind of the perceived ease I think of, like having that business handed to you. There isn't the level of autonomy that you're going to get when you're out on your own, and to me it's a different version of having a day job.

So seeking a partner and expecting them to do rainmaking is one of the fastest ways to crash a partnership before it even gets off the ground. Because two people come together, they're both secretly hoping the other one is going to be doing the rainmaking, rather than that they're both equally going to be doing that.

And if you do come together, you do need to have clarity about what exactly the responsibility is for rainmaking. One of the, and I told you there were these, one of the successful partnerships that I have worked with, there were three partners, three women, and two of them were much more responsible for rainmaking and really brought in all the clients, and one of them did no rainmaking at all.

And I brought this up a few times just to see if there was any friction or any challenges around that. That partner was so skilled at the things that she did do that the other two partners did not have a problem with it. So they felt that there was fairness in her fulfilling this skill gap or this skill need and they were good doing the rainmaking.

Now, what I would also say is that business with three full partners did have a challenge to supply enough revenue for all three of them to have a decent takeaway from the business. So that's another thing to consider is if there's going to be two rainmakers trying to provide three salaries, then that's a lot of pressure to put on unless you're really thinking in terms of how you're going to grow this business. But we need to have clarity about the responsibilities there. Who exactly is responsible for bringing in and how much do we need?

One of my favorite expressions related to having a team in the business is the business does the work, not me.

This is the big opportunity when a consultant has built her team and is finally able to focus on only doing what only she can do. But it's a big mindset shift to step out of all of those tasks that you've done since the beginning to become a firm or a consultancy rather than a solo expert. I use the metaphor I share in this episode often.

PJC051: Replace Yourself in Your Consulting Business

So the big transitional piece here I want you to consider when you are ready to really replace yourself is to think of yourself, rather than being the person who wears all the hats in the business and does all the jobs, I want you to become the orchestra conductor.

So if you think about what an Orchestra conductor does, they set a vision for the piece of music that they're going to be performing. And then they work with the orchestra, the many different musicians, to have them bring the energy and the art and the nuance to that performance so that they achieve what they want to achieve.

Is this going to be a sad rendition or, what's the message that we want to communicate in this? Like, how is this going to go? And then they work with the individual musicians, and then on the day of performance, they are conducting that thing to realize the vision. Right?

You are doing the same thing in your business. You're setting a vision for it. You're working with the individual deliverers of the work in your business, so that you achieve what you want for your clients and for your own business. You know, in your brand marketing and your communications, you're achieving all those things; and you're achieving them through others, your team, through your clients. So if you think of yourself as the orchestra conductor, you know, you don't dip in when someone's missing and go play the drums that day. And you don't necessarily do like a violin solo, you have performers to do those things.

And so, if you think of yourself as like out of a job, if you replace yourself, then you're missing the fact that having the vision for the business and strategically growing it, creating relationships, making connections, creating the content, all of those things that again, only you can do, think about those and imagine spending all day, every day doing them.

One of the great pleasures of owning my own business has been building relationships with my team members, whether they're under my umbrella or outside consultants, financial advisors, business coaches, or my employee, my husband. It's been so joyful to share my creative evolution with others who can contribute to and support that. My wish for you is that you are surprised and delighted by others who help you to build out your vision for your work in the world.

For further inspiration, be sure to click through and listen to the episodes from today that most resonated with you. If you'd like to know how I can join your team as your business growth partner, message me at samanthahartley.com/super. And with that, I'm wishing you a profitable and joyful consulting business.