Hi, I'm Samantha Hartley, and I want to welcome you back to the Profitable Joyful Consulting podcast. Today, I want to talk about building your business with a team. First, let's travel back to my senior year in college. I was directing a play, my senior play, the one that we did for graduation. Incidentally, my lead actor was with my future husband, and everything was going amazing, we had this incredible process and all the actors loved each other, we were doing the Seagull by Chekhov. So it was really this wonderful, magical experience right up until performance and I realized that I had not done anything to secure the props and we had scenery and costumes but there were all these props and things that were supposed to happen, a couple of other details and I was about to have a panic attack.

And sitting next to me was the girl that had been given to me by the theater department as my stage manager and, you know, she'd been there all along, kind of in the shadows and, you know, I'm embarrassed to say I kind of didn't really give her much to do or pay much attention to her. I wasn't sure what to do with her, I was used to doing things on my own, so I didn't really need much help. And I was freaking out that we were about to go into performance and I didn't, I had like a ton of these props to find and hadn't even started the process and then I heard this voice beside me say, I've already done all that. And I literally, like, turned my entire body to face her as if seeing her for the first time and I was like, You what? You what? She completely saved my behind. Right before we were about to go into performance, this person who had been responsibly all along the way, you know, taking note of the of the process and what needed to happen during it had actually gone and done something that was probably part of her job and really saved the show and saved me from, I can't even imagine what kind of a panic-stricken 3:00 a.m. search for props I would have done.

I tell you that because not only is it a formative delegation and person management story for me, but it parallels so much the experience that I've seen with entrepreneurs. They're so capable and multi-talented and bootstrapping you know, they've gotten themselves to where they are with pretty much their own, mostly their own efforts that they rarely think like, do I need additional people or who else could I rely upon? Now, that's not everybody's story. Plenty of people get to the point where they can even start working with me or they talk to me about growing their business and they've had a team all along. But many times I meet one person, businesses, consultants who have managed to go all along and then suddenly they hit a wall and they realize, I think I need somebody. And so as this bootstrapping young director, what you can see is like I had everything under control, except that there were details that inevitably fell through the cracks and those kinds of catastrophic details had I not gotten that problem solved by somebody else who saved me right before the last minute. So I want you to think about, as we're talking today about the team. If you have a team, awesome, maybe you'll hear something today that will give you some new ideas and insights. If you have one person instead of an entire team, that we'll talk about today will definitely help you have a perspective on where you can grow. And if you have resisted hiring a team up until now, then I hope I'm going to make some arguments that will be persuasive for how that can really benefit you and help you to grow your business. Remember, the theme of season 2 is Business Growth Strategies and growing with a team is really an amazing way, remember you are the talent in your business, you're the genius and everything we can do to take care of you and free you up to do your genius thing that is what we want to do.

So how can we do that with a team? Well, first of all, this bootstrapping idea is a problem. But what if you bootstrap well and you don't really feel like you need a team? I know two-ish, three million dollar consultant who has no team, probably has no team. Now, the truth is, he does have a team, he has hired one company who handles websites and CRM, his e-mail newsletter, and does social posting and things like that, but everything else he does himself. So even though he's saying he's a very lean enterprise, there's no one resource for him, but everything else he does himself and I've mentioned before things like invoicing. Sometimes people love that. If somebody gets a book sent to them in the mail, he's shipping that thing out so, think about your personal tolerance for doing those kinds of tasks, you may not need a team. I'm going to give you some suggestions today about what's possible with one but if you're like, dude, I do fine on my own, I'm not going to change, I don't want to change that, like, don't fix it if it isn't broken.

I found in my personal business that once it got started to get tech-heavy, meaning CRM handling an email newsletter service, handling website changes, wanting to put up sales pages rapidly, things like that. That was when I started to say ok, I want to have somebody who I can rely on on a regular basis to do this for me, I had done it myself before then it was pretty easy you know I can't figure it out this is the trap for many, many capable consultants, I can figure it out, I have figured it out or I've already done that. Do you want to do it ongoingly? That's the thing to think about and I will tell you, once you have a program that's got customer service attached to it, you are going to want to quit your job as customer service rep because handling customer service is tedious and dreadful. People have lost their passwords, they want a refund, they don't like a thing, all kinds of things like that and most people who are rude in customer service emails would be gems in person.

So, customer service from both sides really tends to bring out our worst selves. So you are definitely going to want to have a customer service person to handle that kind of thing. If you, for example, develop an e-course, an e-product, ebook anything e that you're going to want to be selling online and you're going to have a lot of customers for, you're not going to want to handle that yourself I believe. So, When at what point should you consider bringing on a team or if you have somebody already who is helping out with the small things, when should you consider expanding your team? Well, I think when you feel that there is a constraint on your growth so you don't have enough hours, there's nowhere to put new clients, you're already doing as much as you can or you find yourself doing too many heinous tasks. We talked a few weeks ago about your joy and genius zone. Your joy and genius zone, Joy things that gives you energy, Genius things you're better at than anybody else in the world and those two come together to be things that give you energy, they make you smarter as you're doing them, you learn from yourself and get even better at it, when you're doing too many things that are the opposite, either not your genius zone like those tech things and not a joy zone like the customer service stuff then that is the time to bring on somebody who says I love doing that stuff and I could do it all day long, that's your person.

And really, if you're in a situation where there's just too much learning curve and you find yourself spending time learning how to do things that are not necessarily revenue generating, or they would be revenue generating, but you've got to have a genius who's doing the strategy. So, for example, if you find yourself trying to manage all of your social media stuff and postings and website updates and things like that, and it's just a constant ongoing learning curve instead of you just saying what those posts are or what those you want those images to be or something like that. There's got to be a balance between you doing your genius stuff and then learning new things. I love to be learning things in my business. I'll be honest, I'm always interested in software and things like that, but I'm learning it and then I'm giving it to somebody on my team to implement, does that make sense? I don't need to know the entire ins and outs of the plan only, I need to know what it does and how it can help me, and then I can give it to someone on my team to use. The other thing is e-courses like I'm sure you're a learning junkie like me, like I buy almost everybody's courses because I'm interested in learning everything. However, at a certain point, you've got to stop purchasing the things to learn new stuff and now what I do is I buy those things and if I can delegate it to someone on my team who can implement it why do I do that? I know I can't implement it, I do not have time to be implementing all of these courses. I was going to name a few but, you know, someone's LinkedIn implementation plan or someone's social media plan or someone's content marketing training. I learn the piece of that that only I can do, which is the strategy piece and very much the content piece and then I'm going to give that to somebody on my team who is going to tell me what they need from me so that they can implement that.That's how I want you to think of the team, think of how liberating and uplifting it is for you to have a team who supports you and doing more of your genius work.

Now a crazy thing that happens when you get ready to hire a team is that you are going to get flooded with all of these amazing limiting beliefs. Or just generally like all of the beliefs you have about the team and they can be everything from it feels awkward for someone to work for me and for me to pay them. I remember the first time I had a driver because I lived in a dangerous country and they didn't want any of the foreigners to drive themselves around because that was a liability for the company that I worked for. So, I had a driver and I was like ok cool, weird, because I sat in the backseat, you know, the whole thing. So it brings up kind of our hierarchical ideas about that. What I decided was we're all equal, everybody in this car has a job, my driver was the cool guy, I was fine in the backseat and we did our thing. It helped me to be more productive, it helped me not have to deal with traffic on the way to work. And I was a better version of myself for having a driver. So you might have that same association with I don't know, somebody is my admin or someone is doing things under my name, like posting to my social media as if they're me kind of thing. So there are some things that we have to, I wouldn't say get over but align with in our own minds. So we feel comfortable with it. A big belief that will come up around team investing in the team is I can't afford it.

Can you afford to do these things yourself or do they allow you to be more productive doing things elsewhere? I worked with somebody who was doing all of his own bookkeeping, it made him quite miserable. And he said the bookkeeper I would outsource this to is a hundred dollars an hour like for a hundred dollars an hour I'll do it myself. The thing was, that the bookkeeper and for one hundred dollars an hour could do all the bookkeeping but he was taking three hours to do the bookkeeping. So it's actually costing him 300 as opposed to 100, so think about if you can't afford it, can you truly not afford it or do you not see an ROI on it?

If you're just playing, I haven't got enough money to afford to outsource anything, well get some more clients and then outsource when you have some more but the truth is, like most of us can afford to invest in someone who can do something better, faster, cheaper than we can. There is the belief of if you want something done right, do it yourself and the saboteur episode we talked about this is, that's not only my belief that's a family belief I had and the way that I was able to shatter that belief was I was looking at who I wanted to hire and I thought, who are good examples in my past, in my life of someone who has done something better than I could have done it myself.

And I came up with a few examples, and the girl who is the stage manager from my year in college was one of the starring ones, like her role in my life, which I think is amazing. Our soul contract between her and me was that she was able to show me, hey, you're going to need someone to support you. You're going to need to trust someone in the future to support you, you're going to rely on them and they're going to not let you down. They're going to take care of you. So she was a huge part in shattering a long family belief that you can't really rely on anybody, you shouldn't rely on anybody, you should just basically look after yourself, you can do it yourself. So that was a really helpful new formation of a belief for me by working with her and you nobody's better, I can really do everything better than anybody else. I think we all know that, that is a protective belief that we hold, which isn't true and it will keep the business small. So I want you to look at how those limiting beliefs might be sabotaging you from growing your business, if you were freed up, gosh one of the people I hired one time, this was before I had gmail filters and things like that. So I was able eventually with technology to do this myself. But I hired her to handle my email and one of the first things that happened was like five hours of a week, five hours in a week, freed up I was like, what an insanely profitable investment in someone. She took five hours a week that I was wasting processing email right away several years ago and I was just, again, eye-opening how profitable a team member can be.

So some of the things that I've heard from people who hired a team and then were disappointed is one of the first things is like it wasn't worth it, it's too expensive, there's no ROI. And I had that experience in the beginning when I tried to hire people and what I would say is, if you are looking at the end of the month, you feel like you've paid all this money and you've gotten this and that wasn't really worth it, I feel like you're probably not leveraging them to do something that has good ROI, so you're not using them right. So the first thing that needs to be they need to be taking things off your plate that you are not doing and can therefore use that time for revenue-generating activities or for time off for goodness sake, because taking care of yourself is a very high return good investment.

The other thing is you might not know what they need to be doing and they might not know they need to be doing and whatever it is isn't actually vital or profitable. So that usually comes down to not really having them do things that needed to be done in the business. And you can either let them go and start over or you can sit down and say, not like hypothetically, but literally, what are the things that I'm doing that I don't want to be doing that somebody else needs to do? Because these things need to be done so that you can feel the effect of those tasks going off of your calendar like the email processing went off of my calendar, freeing up five hours a week. So either figure out what those tasks are that are costing you time or figure out, these are the revenue generating activities I would be doing like, outreach on social media, connecting with past contacts, keeping in touch with your email list, for example. Can that person be doing those things or helping you to do those things so that you do see a return on them? When I pay the team, it's the happiest money I spend every single month. I'm delighted every time you know, I pay people individually through Venmo or PayPal or however the bank cuts in a check. However, I'm paying them. I'm seeing each one of those because I always pay my own people and sign my own checks, it's a great way to keep up on top of your business expenses and also avoid embezzlement.

So I pay all of them and I think about them as I'm paying them and I'm thinking every time, oh my gosh, thank goodness for Lisa, thank goodness for Aaron, thank goodness for Jackie and so with my whole team, I mean, I'm so uplifted by each of them that's why it's important to make sure that your people are doing things that are really serving you. Another way that people get disappointed is "well, the person, she couldn't really understand my needs. It's been too hard for me to explain things to her." That probably comes down to communication issues from your side. So being very clear about what you want to be done is key here. Helping them to understand how their work plugs into your work so that you can do your thing and then clearly communicating with them. I think we all secretly wish that people would just read our minds and I think it's really important just to say this is a smart person doing her best and so I need to set her up for success by being clear about what I want. Now, if there are endless misunderstandings and it's never going change, go ahead and let them go and try again with someone else. But very often I feel like what entrepreneurs, how they can sabotage a new person by not giving them enough information and not being clear enough with that new hire about what they want. And the last thing I hear when people are disappointed is I hired a V.A. and she was really, really amazing in the beginning and then, you know, now she's just not as good.

What sometimes happens in that situation is that they've hired somebody to do a specific kind of job or kind of work, and then they've expanded that into all of these other things like they're like, well, she's my right-hand person. I want her to do all this stuff and that can expand right out of that person's genius zone or joy zone, which means that they're going to be doing something and not enjoying it because sometimes they can start to resent you for or resent the work in general. So I love to hire for a very finite fit so I have a social media VA, I have a marketing writer, I have a copywriter, I have a content writer,I have a project manager. I have a VA who does CRM software billing everything to do with software, she's a total genius. She is a genius and I know that she has clients for whom she does all of the tasks, all of the jobs. I don't want that from her, I want her to do the thing that she is super genius about in all the land, right? I advise rather than having a small team of one person who's playing many roles, I like to have three people or in my case, I don't know, it's about 12 people who are each doing the thing that is their specialty.

Yes, one of those people is managing the team to make sure everything gets done so that I don't have to manage 12 people. So I want you to think about, in your case, what are the jobs that you need done? So is there a social media VA? Is that the same person who's going to design things? Are they going to write the content? Or is there going to be a writer who writes the content and then someone else who's going to be putting that onto the social media. So, you can hear that I'm talking about basically getting these tasks down? So, you know to whom to delegate when you're ready to delegate and all of that stuff.

So the last thing I want to talk about is which tasks require a team member to do them? Which kind of tasks are you going to let go of? So there are 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 in 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 tests 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 is 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, and 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 or it would 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, loveable, 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? That's 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 ok, those are two really good options that you could be doing instead of figuring out how to put your newsletter into constant contact.

So, again, four kinds of things you can delegate or four kinds of tasks or the ones you can keep in, the ones you can delegate. So the first one is revenue-generating if you can delegate that, certainly do, because 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 unless all things are tasks that are repeatable. So to wrap up, I thought I would go through the list of who is on my team so you can kind of hear this, 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 in the future episode, I'm going to talk about hiring more deeply, about managing team, and especially managing remote team, because 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 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 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 backups can be you, I don't want to learn those jobs. So I have a social media VA, I have that amazing CRM billing software VA. I told you about it. 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, if they could talk to you about how I drag my feet, even getting going 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 in who you need and want to bring on, maybe completely different but I think I'm 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 interacting with my team. And so if you think of a team as a heavy thing, I just want you to potentially 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, that I think you can transform any beliefs you have and if even if you have a terrific team now constantly building new beliefs about how I can rely on people, my team is amazing, my team makes me a better version of myself, those are the beliefs that I want you to nurture and cultivate in yourself and if you do so, I know you'll be a more profitable and joyful business owner.

Listen, before I go, I have a really cool download for you, which is all the tasks that you could delegate. It's a worksheet that you can use to figure out what you should delegate in your business so you can find it in the show notes. Just take a look there and go and download that. I hope that's a good resource for you. I want to give you as many resources as I can because I want you to be profitable and joyful. Take care.