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Hey everybody. Welcome back to the Journey podcast. Today we are doing a special Journey episode where I am giving away some of my work smart frameworks just for you. My dear podcast listeners, we are going to talk about a few different things. If you are growing your business, if you want to get to the next level, if you want to level up, if you want to be able to hire your first employee, your second employee, or frankly, if you just want to get out of the weeds entirely, this is the episode for you. So we're going to go through three separate concepts. I am giving you all, all three of these concepts for free. If you love this, if you want more, make sure you're pre ordering my book. I got my numbers back from my publisher and although they said the numbers were good, they're not good enough for me. So I need your help. If you love this podcast, if you have gotten value out of the lessons, the learnings, the methods that I've been teaching you, if you enjoy my voice, my tone. Yeah, y'all, I gotta go record this audible real quick. Okay? So make sure that you are supporting. I really appreciate everybody who's already bought the book, who sent me the DMs with your receipts. I love seeing that. So make sure you pre order morgandabon.com My book is called Rewrite your rules. All right, let's get into it. Hey everyone. I'm Morgan debon, a passionate entrepreneur and life advisor. With the Journey podcast, you'll discover that success isn't about the destination, it's about the journey. I'm sharing stories of amazing people who've taken control of their lives. Join me on my own journey to discover the secret sauce behind reaching success with permission from no one else. One of the things that's really important when you're thinking about what do you outsource, what do you delegate? What do you potentially hire for? The best way to start is by looking at your data, looking at what you actually do on a day to day basis and separating those tasks into your CEO task and your operating tasks. So your CEO tasks are tasks that only you can do. Things that are key to your business success. Things like strategy, pricing strategy, thinking about maybe closing new clients, things that either you're the best at, or things that only you can do, or sometimes just things you really enjoy doing that you want to hold onto, regardless of whether it's efficient or not efficient for someone else to do. It's okay if it's what makes you happy as well. Those are your CEO tasks now, your operating tasks Are tasks that you're like, I know somebody else could do this, but it's a team of me right now, right? Or it's me and three other people and somebody's gotta do it. So this is like accounting, invoicing. These are things like maybe social media, you might say, you know what, I really am not interested in posting on Instagram every day and posting on TikTok every day. But I know that I do this now, but at some point I want somebody else to do it. Operating tasks are often things as well that you might feel resistant to where you feel like, I know I have to do it, but I don't enjoy this. And so you find yourself procrastinating, resisting. And that is a good sign of tension that it's an operating task and that you should figure out how eventually to get it to somebody else. So I'll give you an example. For me, I remember when I was first starting Blavity, I had my Blavity job. I'd quit my full time job, but Blavity didn't make any money and we were spending a lot of money and it was mine. I bootstrapped the company when I first started. And so I had to go get a consulting job. And I loved the consulting job that I had. It gave me freedom to work remotely, which at the time was not a thing. So I was working remotely. I was making a lot of money. I despise paperwork. Like, I will let paperwork and mail just pile up and pile up and pile up. And I still, to this day, I'm not interested at all in opening mail, organizing mail, sending out things like invoices. And I went an entire year of not sending out an invoice for this consulting gig that I had because I felt guilt at the prices that I was paying. I felt guilty that I was, you know, doing two different things. I wasn't fully dedicated. I felt guilty of just like typing it. It just. I was so. I had so many limiting reasons why I did not send that invoice. It was nuts. Like, it was to the point where they're like, can we please pay you? We will write the invoice for you. Like, we have to pay you. And one of the first things I did when I started to give myself that freedom, when I started to just accept myself for who I am, what I like to do, what I did not like to do was that I hired somebody to just do my invoicing. And then just like that, I got paid every month, right? And I was able to use that cash to invest in blavity, to grow the team to actually have more freedom. And I didn't feel bad, right? I didn't feel bad every month when somebody's sending me an email saying, where's your invoice? Because that didn't happen anymore, right? And it wasn't like it cost me that much money to delegate this task. But this is why it's really important when you're outlining your CEO task versus your operating task, that you are listing out every single thing you do. So you can look at your calendar, you can look back at your email, you can, you can look in your notes app at all your TO dos. And I want you to go really, really broad on every single thing that you do on a weekly basis, a monthly basis, et cetera. And then once you do that, you're gonna separate your CEO task and your operating task. Once you have your task list, you're gonna separate it into two different lists. So let's do it together. Let's say you are a creative production company, you're a video production company. So you're gonna write out on post its and you're gonna say, all right, what did I do? I edit videos, I gotta send out invoices, I've got to schedule the pre production meeting with my upcoming clients, right, etc. Etc. So you keep going on all the things that I've gotta do as a creative production agency that focuses on video. So now that you have written out on your stickies or wrote it down in your notebook, whatever you're doing, we're gonna put it on your CEO task versus your operating tasks. So CEO operating fun fact. Did you know that I almost became a teacher and that was my potential career? Obviously my handwriting is not that great. All right, so task number one, meet with prospective clients. That a CEO task or an operating task for a small business? I'm going to say it's a CEO task because relationships with new clients are really important and you're probably the best closer in your company over time as you scale, you can let other people close clients and you build a wholesale function. But for now, we're going to keep it over here. Creating a pre production checklist for an upcoming shoot. All right, we already know that's an operating task. You do not have to do that. Right? Someone else can probably create a checklist, you can review it, but you don't have to be the one who creates it. Send invoices to clients. Nope, that is operating task. Edit client videos. This might be when you first start off, it's over here. But as you scale and you grow and maybe you don't even like editing. Boom. That is a potential operating task that you can delegate. If you're able to charge $150 an hour as a director, creative director, and you can get someone to edit the videos for $25. Boop boop. This is why it should go over here. Scouting research locations. Boom. Operating task. Creating a marketing reel. Let's say you're trying to grow your business and one of the things that you set up in your step change growth statement is I need to be proactive at marketing. You might want to set this as a CEO task because it is something that is setting the vision, the brand, the story of how you're going to market with your clients. That's CEO task. Become drone certified. You know that if you want to increase your revenue as a video production company, you want to get aerial footage. Well, you need to be certified. Only you can do it. Or you could hire a drone certified person, which would become an operating task. But for now we're, we're not trying to add more costs, so we're going to get it ourselves. And then last but not least, you need to set your prices for next quarter because we decided in our step change growth that we are going to raise our prices. So you need to do that analysis and set those prices for yourself. So this is an example. If you look at a week of a CEO of a creative production company that focuses on video of what this person might put for their CEO task and their operating task. Now you should do this for your business and really push yourself to ask yourself, do I really have to do this or can it go over here? Am I the best person, the most qualified person to do this? If not, put it over here. Do I like doing this? I don't like it anymore. I don't want to do it. Put it over here. It's okay for this list to start getting really, really long. And that doesn't mean that overnight we're going to hire all these people to do these things. But it's important that you know and you have line of sight on where you're building towards. And then always keep in mind that we're going to replace the time from not doing these things anymore with things that are going to drive growth and that step change growth specifically in your business. In this exercise, we're going to talk about how to build an organizational chart for your business. Org chart, Organizational chart, Same thing. An organizational chart. What is it? An org chart is basically a visual diagram of who reports to who in your business. And it helps people understand where they fit in the organization and have clear reporting structures. So that as your team grows, there's clarity about ownership, responsibility, who the supervisors are, and how teams are growing in relation to one another. So we're going to build an org chart together and I'm going to show you a really good example of what one could look like for your business. So the first thing that I want you to do is just make a diagram of what your business looks like today, what your org chart looks like today. And I want you to include all of your full time employees and your contractors. Because most likely if you're early in your business, it might just be you and two to three other people that you work with. Sometimes when you have big projects, if you're a little further on in your business, you may have two or three full time folks and then a variety of contractors who work with you on a daily basis. Or if you're kind of where I am, I have over 100 employees and over 150 contractors. And so our org chart literally doesn't even fit on one page anymore. It constantly expands and contracts depending on what season we are in the business. Like during Afro Tech season, our org chart gets a lot bigger because we're hiring contractors to work on the conference and then it tampers down after the event ends. Right. So org charts are also fluid depending on what's happening in your business and the time of the year. So let's go back to our creative production company. You'll see you have your creative production company. This is a business that creates videos. It's a video production company. Create videos for clients, businesses, brands, nonprofits, et cetera. So you've got your CEO and owner who's also the creative director. And so this person's setting the vision. He is closing all the deals, he's making sure that the clients are happy and also making sure that visually on set that everything is working well. As the director, then we have a creative production manager who's full time in the business. The these different colors represent orange is full time, yellow is contractors. So he has full time production manager. The production manager is taking over some of those operating tasks of making sure that the pre production checklist is set, making sure that the equipment is ready on set, producing and working with the clients, with the talent, and making sure the whole project runs smoothly from end to end. As a creative production manager, then he has another full Time person who's a director of photography. Now this is a role that Joshua decided to add as another role in his business because it helped him be able to scale up the ability and the complexity of the types of shoots he was doing. So if he was doing a two camera shoot, because he said, okay, I'm gonna take my business from 100, $200,000 a year to $400,000 a year, which means I need clients with bigger budgets which need more complex shooting and I need more complex and more visually interesting sets of content. So I'm going to add a dp, a director of photography onto my staff so we can offer their service on a regular basis. Then he's got a bunch of contractors and freelancers that are in and out depending on the project. But it's also really helpful to have your roster because sometimes it's going to make sense, man. If I'm paying this person a lot and you can calculate how much money you're paying them on a monthly or weekly basis based off of your volume, it might be cheaper to put this person full time in your business. So things to consider when you're looking at this. Now, this would be Josh's org chart today, right? And that's how he got there. Then we're going to build his org chart for his step change growth. So in order to double or triple in revenue by the end of the year, what is the team that he requires to be able to get that work done? How many clients does he need to be able to run projects for per week, per month? What if he has two shoots per day? Is he actually capable of doing that within his business? So making sure that his org chart is in alignment with his step change growth goals and also is removing some of the operating tasks from your CEO task and operating task exercise that hopefully you've already done. So you'll see here we know there's two openings that are going to be important. An account manager. Because as his clients roster grows, who's building those relationships? Who's upselling clients? Not only will he have to close new clients, he's going to have to rebook and bring more clients back, which is usually cheaper than getting new people. And two, now he's got a lot more administrative things to get done. He's got timesheets, he's got payroll, he's got to send out invoices, he needs to do scheduling, he needs checklists. Because the production manager is now super busy. So some of her tasks are moving over to the ea. So adding an executive assistant who maybe is paid slightly less than a production manager or the creative director is going to help be an efficient additional role to add to his company and to his business so that people can continue to do their best work. Everything else is staying the same. But these two roles are going to help Josh drive more revenue and also be more efficient with his time, which then will help him make more money. Now, that is really important. When you're looking at your org chart again, you always want to think about what is the closest to the bag. So when you're thinking about who you're going to hire, first hire the person who's going to help you make more money because they are closing more money for you or they're giving you the time and the space so that you can go make more money. And that's going to help you also alleviate the stress that you may have when you're like, oh my God, I do not want to be responsible for all these people's salaries or this payroll because it is a lot of pressure to have that payroll hit every two weeks. But if you know that you're hiring someone responsible for bringing more dollars in, they should be bringing in, call it 2 to 5x what they cost you. So if you're paying them 2 to $3,000 a month or 2 to $3,000 a week, they should be closing 2 to 3x that 5x that so that you feel comfortable about your profit margins and making sure your cash flow works out. Because as we know, just because you sent out an invoice doesn't mean somebody's paying you right? So you also want to start to make sure that as you scale your business, you, you're tracking your cash flow. And we'll talk more about this throughout the Worksmart program. You can ask questions about who to hire and when. This is why we're here to help you figure this out. But starting with designing your org chart, writing it out, and then sharing it with your team is going to be really helpful at you having total alignment within your business. Okay? So hiring for success is so important for your business because hiring the right person can absolutely change the way you run your company. Also relieve a lot of stress for you, and make sure that you can also still get a lot of work done even if you aren't working now. The challenge with hiring sometimes is if you make the bad hire, make a bad hire, then it can cause you to be more stressed, to slow down, and also lose the time that you were anticipating having more help on board and so I know that sometimes it can be a lot of anxiety with thinking about who do I hire, is it the right person, how do I make sure I don't mess up? And that's why I, a lot of folks avoid hiring, are just really slow to hire. And I do agree that you should be slow to hire. You know, it takes a process to make sure that you're hiring the right person. But I wanna give you a couple of tips on how to make a successful hire so that you get it right more often than not. Tip one is that I wanna make sure that you have a great job title and a job description. So before you can even go to market and start posting things, you have to write a job description on. What is this person going to do, what is their title, what is their level, what kind of benefits are they going to have? You want to attract a really high quality candidate and being clear about what you expect from someone is going to help them know and kind of pre qualify themselves for applying for a job. Now that being said, you might be asking yourself like, okay, what do I write? So I want you to actually go to your CEO task versus your operating task. And then I want you to look at your operating task and start to group them together by things that are similar. So if you have a lot of administrative tasks, start grouping those together. If you have a lot of marketing tasks, social media tasks, group those together. And that's gonna help you build a baseline set of job descriptions for actually the roles and responsibilities of this person. Now one of the mistakes that I see often is that some small business owners try to hire for, I call it like a vanity title, like, oh, I really want a CMO, I want a chief product officer, I want a VP of marketing. But if you really only have four or five people in your company, or maybe even less than 20, you don't need folks with that high of a title. You might wind up attracting someone who's really in for the ego and not going to actually do the work. And if you're a small business owner or early entrepreneur, it's important that you have people that are really excited about growing with you and growing with the company that, that are in it because they want to see success, they want to see you build your product, get it out into market, they want to see you expand and grow and they want to grow with the company. You want folks who are motivated by more than money, but are motivated because they're in alignment with your mission, your vision, and they are excited to get their hands dirty, that they want to be in the weeds, they want to get the work done, they want to get the experience. So make sure that you are leveling your job titles in a way that's going to attract that type of person. I'm gonna give you another example of something I see all the time. Let's say you're like, I want someone who can help me really get out of the weeds and kind of replace me on the day to day. I want someone who's thinking strategically and you title it like strategic development manager or something like that. What are you really attracting? That is a job title where it's like, well, who's really gonna apply for someone who's like, I wanna be a strategic development manager. What does that even mean? So make sure you're titling your roles with things that are practical, that are gonna actually drive the interest from people who are executors and doers in your business. One way, if you're like, I still, Morgan, have no idea what to title this, go look at your competitors and look at what they have. Go search them on LinkedIn. And on LinkedIn you can click on people and you can see the job titles of folks who work at that company that might help inspire you to title something the right way. And you can also look at if there's other people that you know, they're like, oh, I like what they do. I want one of those. But for my business, go look at their LinkedIn and look at their resume and see what job titles they have. There's no shame in copying. Like, in fact, that's a big hack in business. Go look at what they're doing and apply that to yours. Okay, so once you have the right job title and you have the right job description because you're writing out the results and responsibilities, then you're probably like, where do I post it? So this is how I recommend that you figure out where you post your job descriptions, where you post your job openings. So if you're looking for someone who's more professional, who is more corporate, who is going to have potential prior years experience working in that job, you are going to have a lot more success on LinkedIn than say maybe Instagram. Someone on LinkedIn who's hanging out every day, who is liking people's job promotions and their announcements and reading all the LinkedIn articles, you know, that is someone who's going to be a little bit more corporate, more structured, who's going to be able to bring to the table that prior experience and that desire to be a professional person, right? This is someone most likely who wants to work at a company who does not aspire to work for themselves, does not aspire to start their own business and be a freelancer and kind of float around. This is going to be a more structured person, all right? So go to a place like LinkedIn if you want that type of candidate. Now, if you're like, I am the structured person. I'm the operator. I'm the really, like, I got Gantt charts, I got everything. I need someone who's creative. I need someone who's gonna help us strategize on the creative marketing and go to market differently or create videos or create content. Okay? Then you might wanna post on TikTok or you might wanna post on Twitter. You might wanna post on Instagram, because that's where creative people hang out. So you want to go where those people hang out for their professional work. Their portfolio's on Instagram. Then they're looking for work on Instagram, right? So you can post there, post in your stories, post on your feed. The other place that I really like to hire is with people who already love my product. So I put my job descriptions in my newsletters because my newsletter is someplace where if you're a super fan of Blavity or you're a super fan of my work Smart podcast or Dubon and Company, you may just be following because you are inspired by the work that we do and be just lurking like, oh, man, I would love a chance to work there. I would love a chance to be a part of this product or this service that I love using. So posting in your newsletter is a great place to actually attract highly qualified and motivated candidates who might be interested in coming on board in your business. You can also ask for help. So you could also put in your newsletter, hey, I'm looking for this role. And your super fans are going to be like, oh, my gosh, this is awesome. And then ask them to post it on their LinkedIn so that you're widening your network of people who are looking and helping you find the right candidate. So I hope these tips help you get your job description together, title it correctly, and then post it in a place that's going to attract you the right candidate. Thanks for listening to the Journey Podcast. If you enjoyed this episode, make sure you leave a review and head to our Instagram and YouTube to leave a comment. I look forward to hearing how this podcast has made an impact on your own Journey.