Most coaches wait way too long before they hire their first team member and they get to see burnout and they get to see stress and they end up with a lot of symptoms that they could avoided if they just understood that hiring your first team member early is going to help you gain momentum way faster.

So today's episode, we are moving into your first hire, who to hire, what is the right time to hire and how do you hire that first person to take over so you can get out of the overwhelm, the burnout and get more time, more energy to do the things that really move the needle inside the coaching business.

Yeah, we talked about this before we started recording and you said some really, really great things.

Can you please repeat what you said to me before about where is the problem for coaches when not hiring soon enough?

But when you start up in your business and as a solopreneur, but it kind of is in it, you are solo on the job.

And the job, since it's a business, it have a lot of different parts to do.

You need to know to do marketing, you need to do the sales, you need to do the bookkeeping, you need to do the admin, you need to do the delivery, you need to make the trainings right.

You need to do all of those small things in between.

And on top of that, a lot of coaches also have a lot of perfectionism in them, which means that all of the things they're doing touching needs to be great.

Like, there's no way you can do all of that without getting to a place of burnout and overwhelm.

And I believe at this stage, a lot of coaches are just thinking, you know what, it was so, so much easier to just get a job.

It's not even worth it for me to work this hard.

And I love that.

And it's because of the personality traits.

I would say that we end up in that place like this isn't for me.

And we end up in a place that feel that this isn't for me because of the different personality traits and the values that we in some way connect to.

Oh, it needs to be perfect.

This is how I work.

This is the way I am functioning.

No matter if it's perfectionism or, or if it's procrastination or if it's a pleasing mentality that everyone needs to love what I do.

Whatever it is, we end up in a place believing that, oh, this isn't for me.

It would be much easier getting a job.

I like that.

And one thing that stood out or That I thought of now when you were saying that the thing that people are actually quite good at outsourcing fast is the financials.

Because that's what you should do according to professionals.

And you should do that.

But I think that's interesting though, because if you understand that bookkeeping you should give out.

I also believe that you are a decision making like what can I do myself and what can I do myself?

Rather than what should I do and what shouldn't I do do myself.

We absolutely do understand.

Well, if I can't do bookkeeping, it's not a good idea for me to do bookkeeping.

But then I also get stuck with all the things I can do myself.

I should do myself.

Exactly.

And I think that's a really great point because here's the real problem.

People believe they can't do bookkeeping.

They can.

It's pretty easy.

You can Google your way to figure that out pretty fast.

But I also think that there is a societal structure that helps you to understand that you should outsource it because it's going to be sent to the government.

It needs to be in the right way, it needs to look a certain way.

And that is the reason why a lot of people outsource bookkeeping.

But it's not that it's hard.

You could do it yourself, but you're doing the absolute right thing to send it out.

But it's the same thing with all the monkey style tasks that you're going to do in your business, especially when you're up to speed.

And you know that this is the, the way I'm going to execute in my business.

So I'm going to run this funnel.

So this is how I'm doing in my marketing, this is how I transition marketing into sales and this is how I make paying clients out of my sales calls.

When we know that we can figure out a thousand different things that literally a five year old could do, those things are definitely not something that you should do.

And if we could add the mentality of I'm not doing my bookkeeping myself, then I think we would do a lot better, feel a lot better, and also get a lot further in our business if we apply that kind of bookkeeping mentality.

Because I do believe if you're doing your own bookkeepings in your business right now, outsource it because you didn't become a coach to to handle your own books, does that mean you shouldn't know what's going on in your books?

Of course you should.

You should have your bookkeeper tell you what's going on in your financials so that you could read your business, but you shouldn't execute on the details.

The same thing is for your first hire.

So if we open up the conversation slightly, what do you believe is the number one position that you should look for when you're making your first hire?

Before I get to that, can I just take one step back?

Because I believe that it's easy to say you should do your first hire.

You should do this.

I believe the people who are actually listening to this right now, who's in the position where they know that burned out and overwhelmed, are also struck by a lot of fear and anxiety about that.

Fear of shit, I don't know how to pay that person.

I'm not making enough money to pay that person.

Where should that money come from?

I can't put myself in a position where I need to pay another person.

I'm not even getting the salary I want right now.

The second thing I think that is happening to a person who is listening to this in this stage is also, I don't have time to hire another one.

I mean, I already work 10 hours a day.

It is so much faster to.

To me to just do the damn job myself instead of needing to find someone else, train them, help them, teach them.

I don't have time for that.

For a long time I had a hard time outsourcing and delegating, but I wasn't in this case, when I hired my first virtual assistant, it was the best decision that I ever made.

I hired this person to make myself responsible, to make sure that there is work for this person to do when they show up.

They worked 10 hours a week, which was a lot.

I suggest when we are talking to our clients, we have a very specific kind of task list and SOPs to give to their VA.

But when I suggest this to my clients today, it's about six hours a week to start out with.

I think that's a good thing to understand from the beginning.

You don't need to have one full time.

You don't need to hire anyone to be an employee in the business.

They can come in as freelancers and just a few hours a week.

I love that.

That, yeah, because we're hiring a virtual assistant.

So someone that can assist with a few different things and if they're doing a good job and if more opportunities open up for more work that you shouldn't do yourself, then you could have that person get more hours.

So I love that because I didn't even Think that that was a problem.

I hired my first VA 10 hours a week before I got my first real client, and it ended up being 40 days before I really kicked off and started doing big events and stuff.

And to be honest, it helped me so much structurally because I had someone to take care of, I had someone to pay salary to, and it helped me to step up and prioritize my business on a different level.

Also, it saved up a lot of time so that I could focus on all the different stuff that I had to do on my own the moment I hired her, that my business actually started.

Yeah.

And I want to say that I wouldn't have gotten as far as I did as fast as I did if I didn't make that decision.

Yeah.

I think it's coming from a business of maturity you have, because you've been running businesses for a long time and you used to having employees.

But for the person who's just starting up, I think it's harder to make that decision and get into that because it's like an identity.

Believe that I will save time, I will save money, I'll put myself in a better position when I hire.

I think that it takes a lot of maturity to actually take that decision.

I love that you say that.

And it's not because you're feeding my ego, even if you do.

But, like, here's the thing.

I didn't recognize that business maturity.

And like I also mentioned very, very fast.

I've always had a hard time delegating stuff.

Yeah.

I've always been the one working at the worst time.

For months, I averaged 20 hours a day, seven days a week, and I literally.

I slept at the office.

And when we delivered our first program in my previous business, I was so behind and I had a lot of team members to delegate to, but I didn't have time to give away the work so that I get it done.

I believe that.

Sure.

I learned something from going through that period.

Absolutely.

And that's why when I started this business, why I hired this person this fast.

So what are the things that I'm doing on a daily basis that consumes time?

But it's literally procedure.

I'm doing the same thing every day, all the day, every time, week in, week out.

At the moment we have that list.

Then we have the work schedule for VA that could do it for you.

Even if we're working in Sweden.

You're Danish, I'm Swedish.

And if you are a European coach that doesn't speak English, then you could still hire a VA that speaks English because a lot of the tasks doesn't need the preferences of language.

You don't need to know the language that you're speaking.

So if you're speaking Hungarian or Germany, whatever the tasks that we're talking about, English speaking, cheap VA could still do a lot of these things to save you time.

The reason why you start by saying that you should hire before you're ready is also that you're higher in a place where you are not in complete stress and overwhelm.

Because once you get to that point where you are so burned out from trying to do anything on your own, you're also making poor decisions because you are getting so stressed out with everything.

So it's better to do that higher before you get yourself to that place.

And it will never feel ready.

Most decisions you'll do in your business, I believe you're not going to feel ready for them when you need to do them, because once you feel ready, you're kind of late.

But first of all, if you take a look at this is exactly the reason why you won't and the reason why you will do the hire.

The reason you won't is because there's so many things to do.

You're spending 10 hours a day doing admin tasks that we're talking about right now, right?

I don't know how much time you spent doing that, but I just want you to remember also those 10 hours a day or 10 hours a week you're spending doing these admin is also time taking away from spending sales during marketing, during delivery to your clients.

Like literally things that you make money doing are postponed because you're doing admin stuff.

And then as you said in the moment when you already overworked and everything is so busy, it feels like I can do it quicker myself.

Yeah, you can probably do it quicker yourself today.

But if you invest like 2 hours, 3 hours to onboard that person, that will mean that you will be able to save 10 hours a week.

From week two, you already start seeing the results.

So you invest a little bit of time right now, extra time to get that one started, even though it feels like it's quicker for me to do it myself.

But if you do it yourself, you need to continue do it yourself.

I really loved what you said invest three hours today to be able to get 10 hours a week back every week.

Yeah, I love that.

Because there is a statistic that isn't that funny or that encouraging.

But it's really important for all business owners to know 19 out of 20 problems that you have are going to solve themselves or disappear if you just leave them alone.

Because what's tied to every problem in your business is also when you solve them, there is an opportunity to gain from solving that problem.

And because things are exchangeable and moving all the time, what it means is that if you don't solve a problem fast enough, the opportunity or the gain from solving that problem will disappear.

And when the gain disappears, the problem also disappears.

Because then you don't need to solve it at all.

If you feel that you have a thousand things to solve, you literally only have 50 problems that you need to solve.

All of the other problems, it's you predicting that it will move your business forward.

What it comes down to is that you can work with a 5% capacity and still keep your business as on the place where it's at.

Then the next step is to figure out, okay, what moves the needle.

It's not the other 19 problems out of 20.

So the problems that are going to move your business forward is probably three problems that needs your focus right now.

And you can pause that, invest three hours, like you said, one week to gain 10 hours back every week.

So yeah, how to navigate this and more importantly, execute.

This is like I said, write down a list of the stuff that you do on a day to day basis.

And then when you have a week summarized, you can qualify the list by seeing if you are doing all of those things the next week or if there is any other thing that you would like to add to the list.

Because if you're very, very specific, if you are earning less than €20,000amonth, you need to be present on your social channels, you need to have an organic reach to the people that you want to influence, the people you can help and coach.

In order to do that, we need to take care of that social media channel and like posting content and warming up your algorithms and warming up your social media channel, making sure that you're using it the way it's meant to be used and fulfilling the purpose of the tool.

At that place alone, you could find six hours a week to just outsource to someone else, start conversations with people who interact with your content, warm up your socials, post your content and all of those things is something else that stands out to you.

I would clarify first of all, what are the tasks I'm doing during a week?

I write down every task I do during the week and then I look at it.

Is this a task I need to do?

Be the one who's doing or could someone else doing that and all the things you could have someone else doing if you just taught them how to do it.

Put that on the list now then we can talk about.

So who is the first hire?

Well, I would say the first hire is the va.

And a va, it's a virtual assistant, meaning that virtual assistant can do a lot of the tasks that you have.

Because the task you want to give away first are tasks that will not be directly correlated with you closing deals because you, you should not give them away in the beginning.

So it's low hanging fruits, it's really admin stuff and it's things like commenting on other people's content, posting your content and stuff like that.

Now when you start chat sequences, well it just for not making you confused here.

A lot of you also understand the one who's normally chatting or doing chatting on your your behalf is what we call a setter appointment.

Set setting appointments.

But at this early stage in the business you don't need to have a full appointment set up, but you can have a va.

Not maybe during the complete chat sequences, but at least start them.

Because all chat starts the same way.

And that means when everything is done the same way, we can give it away because you don't need to think a lot, you just need to do the same thing.

A lot of copy paste work without copy pasting that is.

So now you have a list of all the things you don't need to do.

You can have someone else to do and you spent a few hours training that person.

So how do you train that person?

For me, like it's slow if I need to write everything down.

And today with AI it's literally so easy.

So you can do two different things.

Step number one, you could take and video record and speak into a microphone.

Every time you do those tasks, just like go around, do your thing on social media, have a loom or zoom or something else recording your screen and you just tell what you do and then you give the video to that VA and you tell that va.

So this is how I do it.

Can you make this into a guideline or into a sop like standard operation procedure on how we do this thing.

So this becomes the training or you literally just take this video and you upload that to ChatGPT and you, you tell them that you are the operational manager for your business and right now you are going to upload a video on how to do a performance specific task.

This task is to be outsourced to a va.

Please write out a complete detailed SOP on how to do this task and ChatGPT would write out an SOP for you to use and you give that to the VA together with the video and just have them follow the SOP from the ChatGPT and match it up with the video.

Am I doing it the right way?

This is the fastest way because you're still doing the same thing but while you're doing the same task as you would have done either way, you just also training that person.

So it's not even an extra work.

That is what Tony Robbins called net time.

No extra time spent.

I love it.

Let's wrap it up.

So last things.

One of the things that I believe coaches would benefit the most from is treating their business like a real business, taking care of it and seeing it as something that that is meant to grow.

And if it's meant to grow, you shouldn't be alone doing that.

So if you identify with being a solopreneur, then be a solopreneur but do it with a perspective that allows you to hire someone that can help you.

Because we all need help and we can't it on our own.

It's just too important that we don't do that because we're never going to grow without help.

So if you've loved this episode, if you have any thoughts, leave them below us a comment and we'll make sure to that you get your answers.

Also, if there is something in your coaching business that's going on that you would love hear us talk about for about 20 minutes then send us a suggestion and we'll take it into the pool of future episodes.

And until we meet again, we are going to drop a new episode every Wednesday.

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Have a ton of resources on how to run a coaching business.

Business in the early stages, up to €20,000amonth.

So with that said guys, thanks for tuning in and see you.

See you next week.