A (0:00)

Welcome to Shiny New Clients, the marketing podcast that helps you attract shiny new clients to your business. We'll talk about social media, what makes people buy, how to go viral, and marketing psychology all in 20 minutes or less. Whether you're a coach, a stylist, or a wedding planner, if you've got a service based business to sell, this is the show you need to fill your calendar. I'm Jenna Warner, your new marketing coach, and this is Shiny New Clients. I put this in my top five most embarrassing moments as a business owner. So I was about two years into business and I was hiring. I put a listing up on the Internet and so many people applied and I had booked an entire day of interviews of these candidates. I believe at the time I was hiring a social media writer, someone to join my team and help me create the content for my clients. I had my questions laid out and I was grading each of their answers and I was really focusing on not falling in love with the candidates because, and I think I mentioned this in a previous episode, but I had made a mistake hiring before, where I hired someone because we were so similar and we got along and it was like, oh, we could easily be best friends. And that's not how you want to hire. You want to hire people with diverse backgrounds, diverse lived experience, diverse skill sets, people who didn't grow up like you did, people who weren't raised like you. Otherwise you are duplicating yourself. Instead of expanding the potential for your business, especially in a creative role, like as a writer, I want people who aren't like me. That's the goal. Highly capable, but not like me. So I was trying not to fall in love with these people. Trying to be really, like, systematic. Ask the question, get the answer, grade the answer on my piece of paper, and then do like a round of callbacks. Is it callbacks when it's a job? I don't know. I grew up in the theater world. It's a. The. It's called a callback if it was an audition. Anyway, I'm auditioning all of these writers and I get in there with this one person. I asked about their, like, experience writing and they said, oh, you know, not that much. Like, I kind of do it for my own business. But like, yeah, not a lot. And I was like, okay, weird answer. Moving on. Okay, so what platforms are you familiar with? Well, like, we used to do Pinterest. Didn't have like a huge amount of success with it. Like, okay, every answer this girl gives me, I'm like, do you want this job. I love the honesty, but this is weird, right? I was starting to, like, lose my niceness because I feel like we're just wasting each other's time here. Like, did you just want to meet? I didn't say that, but I'm like, this is clearly not the job for you. Like, why did you even apply to this? She has no confidence writing. She has very little experience writing. And then we get into talking about her business, and she has a highly successful online course. I think at the time, I can't remember if she had, like, hit half a million or a million dollars in revenue. Like, it was, like, a really successful course. And it was at that moment that I realized I was supposed to be conducting a sales call, and this was someone who was applying to work with me to have me manage their social media, not applying to get the job as the writer. This was a perfect lead for my social media management services. My face is heating up just thinking about this. This was such an embarrassing moment. And the second it clicked in my head, I, like, tried to pivot the conversation. Spoiler alert. She did not hire me. I was the one being interviewed. Oh, my God. It was so embarrassing. It's funny, though, you know, Thinking back to this time makes me recognize another mistake that I made in hiring. And I made it again and again and over and over and over, which was so, okay, so you're looking at your business. You're like, who should I hire first? Who should I bring in here? What's the next step? To grow this thing bigger and make my life easier. And because I was always up to my earballs in delivery, right? Creating the content, making the content, managing the accounts for my clients, it seemed natural to me. Despite everything I had learned with all my business coaches and everything, it seemed natural to me to outsource some of the work I was doing. And because I was really protective, I'll say, of the work that I was doing, even when I outsourced it, I micromanaged a bit in, like, reviewing all the content before it got to the client. I can admit that I always wanted to review it, and I wanted to check for typos and all of that and usually made a lot of changes. So it. Even when I was outsourcing my deliverables, I was still doing a lot of work on it. But that. Well, that's not even the mistake we're talking about today. It's that a few years into my business, I laid out the entire business to a, like, coach, and they pointed out that all of the people I had hired, I had like a team of six. And everyone was, in one way or another, delivery based. They were all delivery and I was delivery and. And then I was every other role in the business. And there's so many other roles in a business. It is not just about delivery, especially when you're trying to grow, right? So think about all the administrative tasks, the sales and marketing committee, all the client onboarding and offboarding and organizing our time, and the supervision of all of these people. I had built a team to help me deliver the actual product to my clients. So someone on graphics, someone writing, photographers, whatever, but I was still doing so much work. Like that was actually the easy part. The delivery was the easy part. The thing that was really taking up the most time that I needed to pass off was every other job. Now cut to today. I have such an exceptional team that I just went on vacation for three weeks and we made like $20,000 while I was gone. Some of that might have been old payment plans, but like sales were coming in, other people were handling the sales conversations. When someone got onboarded, all of the connections and the tech stuff was like put together by somebody else. You know, like all of these things. I still worked a little while I was on vacation. But so much of the business is being run by other highly capable people, not just the delivery. Maybe you've already had some realizations listening to my story from like the team that you've built around you or some gaps that you might want to fill. Or maybe you are still working on hiring that very first person. You're still a solopreneur. I think most people listening, you're still solopreneurs. So who's the first person you should hire? Well, you have to get really real about your week and your time and where your time is going. That might involve time tracking, looking at your week and time tracking. And in order to do that and to be really realistic about where your time is going, I find you have to separate what you're stressing about with what's actually happening. Because a lot of the time we think we're busy because our brains are busy. So we think that a task is stressful or going to take a long time. But most of that time ends up being spent stressing about the task or thinking about how we're going to do the task or whatever. So we want to look at the concrete, what's actually happening and where your time is going. And then as all the experts say say, you want to think about three things Automate, eliminate, delegate. Look at the things where all your time is going. What is a repeatable task? Repeatable tasks are going to be the first, easiest thing to delegate to a virtual assistant or VA or some sort of an assistant. And they don't need to come into your business full time. They could just come a couple hours a week. What is repeatable? Do you have a clear onboarding system for when you bring in a new client that's going to be repeatable? Maybe they need to sign a contract, fill out an onboarding form, book their first day with you. So if you're always sending out those packages yourself, that's a nice repeatable task that can go to a VA if you spend, you know, it's a task that I always ignore that should be a va. At the end of the week, I have a task in my project management system that says take all the receipts that came into your inbox this week and put them into the accounting folder. And I never do it. And at the end of the month or the quarter or whatever, my husband bookkeeper is always like, hey, I'm missing 10 receipts from you. And it keeps happening. So that's a really good repeatable task. Go into your inbox, take all of the receipts that you see and put them into a folder. Get really real about those tiny tasks that are taking up time. The repeatable ones are the easiest ones to outsource a couple hours a week. So that's on delegate, eliminate. Is there stuff you're doing that is not bringing in revenue and is not contributing to bringing in revenue that you can just stop doing while you're taking a look at your week to see who you should hire next? Also, just like get real about if there's stuff that you can skip. And then we've got Automate and hey, maybe your first hire is going to help you look at your business and automate things? That would be great. I feel like we should also say structure, Automate, eliminate, delegate and structure. But because a lot of the times tasks that are done willy nilly feel like they're taking up way too much space in your brain and taking up way more time. But all you actually need is a recurring task on your calendar that says do this thing, do this thing. So that instead of trying to remember the thing, your calendar just tells you to do the thing and it takes way less energy. Okay, so another thing to think about. When you're sitting across from this person you're thinking of hiring, you want to be really clear on the skills that this person needs to have, and they don't necessarily need to have experience if they have the skill. So let me give you an example. One time I hired someone and I needed them to be able to help run Magic Marketing Machine calls. So that's like, let people in, keep people happy, moderate the chat, we produce our calls. Magic Marketing Machine is my signature program where I help service based business owners get clients from Instagram. And when we do our coaching calls, really produce them. So like, we want them to be a fun experience, we want them to move quickly, we want to make sure everyone's questions get answered and everyone feels like they got attention. That's always been something that I value. And because I grew up from a performance background and a lot of people come and work with me because I make this stuff fun and easy. So it's important to us that those calls be fun and easy. So this next person that was going to be part of their tasks, right? And this person had never worked in online business. They'd never worked for a coach or an online business owner like me. They'd never even worked in social media. But they did work for a big Canadian, like, TV network that hosted robust online meetings. And one of the things that they would do is say a new TV show was about to be made. It was during COVID during the pandemic. And so they couldn't do a table read of that show in the room together, so they started hosting the table reads on Zoom. So different people need to have the floor. There would be waiting room music, like all of these different things, and they would produce these live calls and help run the live calls. Turns out she knew how to use Zoom better than I did and like had all these cool things we could, we could do with it to make the calls even better. That was an example of not having the right experience but having the right skill set. That was a pretty like, blatant example. Sometimes they might be a little more nuanced than that. But you want to know the main skill required to get the job done. Well, in terms of the person you hire being different than you, like, this is what diversity, equity and inclusion is all about, right? If two people come to me and they're both equally qualified and they both have all the skills that I need and one is just like me. They grew up in a middle class household in a white neighborhood. They've got a bit of a theater or comedy background. It doesn't behoove me to hire that person that's exactly like me. It's it behooves me and my business and my client base to hire someone who has a different perspective and who's had a different life experience. Like, even Marissa, our program manager, is a mom of four. So even just the fact that she is different to me in that way, I'm not a mom. I don't have children. I definitely don't have four. She has some that are young, some that are like, grown adult children. Oh, my goodness. Just. That gives her a completely different outlook on life than I have. And do you know what else? She's our program manager, and she's. She's basically in charge of client success and client, like, happiness, making sure our clients know where they're supposed to be, when they're supposed to be, and they're happy. And she's way better at it than I am. Way better at it because she has this beautiful maternal soul. And she's really good at supporting people, and she's really empathetic and hearing people out. And so she has that skill. She's great in that role. That's another thing about hiring. As they say, ideally, the people you hire are going to be better at that role than you would be at that role. And that's. That's how you really know you've. You've nailed it. All right. I hope this helped. If you're hiring right now, there's. There's my brain dump on some of the mistakes that I've made and some things to definitely look out for. This is an exciting time in business. It is always a scary move, but we have to believe that the person we are hiring is going to make up their. Their income and more in the sales and streamlining that they bring to your business. So it's scary at first for later gain. And honestly, like, I can't emphasize enough, I just went away for three weeks and my business continued to run by itself. And I came home and said to the team, you guys are. You guys are freaking amazing. I don't think I ever really believed that we would get to this. This point in the business where it can just do that, where I can step away and it can run smoothly. Like, it's. It's goals. It's fantastic. And it's out there for you, too, if this is what you want. Okay, I love you. I'll see you in the next one.