One of the most powerful things you can do in your business is to get support from people who want to see you succeed. There are cheer leaders that will toot your horn and tell people how amazing you are. That is wonderful, but it isn’t the main support you need in your business. What you deserve to do is hire someone to join you in serving your company, your clients and you!
The people you want to add to your team first are people that you can hand off and delegate the tasks that you are not meant to do. Why did you start your business in the first place? Are you spending most of your time doing only the things you love to do (money doesn’t count here and I will talk more about that later) and the reason you started your business. Not likely if you are a solopreneur just trying to make ends meet. Finding someone to do some of the work for you whether it is part time or full time, virtual or live, paid or bartered will be what takes you from not being paid as an entrepreneur to making a decent income that you can pay your bills with.
Here are a couple steps you can do to prepare yourself for getting the support you deserve in business.
Step 1 Delegate
Discover what you can delegate:
- Write down everything you do in a week. (You may need to write everything in a month to get the full scope of what you do for your business.)
- Then highlight all the items you personally love to do that will make you money and keep you connected with your clients.
- Everything else on the list are the items you can delegate to someone else. Now you have a list of what you can delegate.
Want to dig deeper into the topic of delegating? You can get my eBook Taking the Solo Out of Solopreneur – 50 Tasks You Can Delegate for $4.97 and it will walk you through all the steps to what and how to delegate…
Build a list of tasks and jobs:
5-10 items that you can let go of and let someone else do for you.
Design the system it takes to complete each task:
- What are the steps you do to complete the task?
- What you specifically do and say to accomplish.
- How long it takes for you to accomplish the task.
- What time of day or month do you do the task?
- Does anyone else need to be involved with the completion of this task?
- Are there any passwords or codes that will be needed?
Learning what you can delegate and what it takes to hand it off to someone else to do is a key to building success. So often entrepreneurs hire someone to do work for them expecting the person you hire to know exactly what needs to be done. They might have done something similar previously but they don’t know your business, your customers and your expectations. You might not yet even know your own expectations so how do you expect to make sure someone else knows them.
You have to train people to do what you want them to do and you have to inspect what you expect as well. If you don’t know how long something takes to do how can you plan on hiring someone for ex amount of hours without knowing if they can complete the tasks you assign to them in the timeframe you are asking. I hear this statement a lot “I hired someone but they could never get everything done and they were always asking me how to do it”. Of course they are asking you, it is your task. Who else did you want them to ask? Yes you have to put something in place so they can succeed at working for you. If they have to keep waiting for you to tell them what you want, it slows them down and slows down your business to. Then you get to have the excuse that “hiring someone does not work” or one of my favorites is “I was tired of babysitting them”. Those are excuses that come out of the mouths of people who do not want to put the work in for being a successful entrepreneur! You don’t babysit adults and hiring the right person and training them the right way does work! Just ask me as I have around one hundred employees working for me. I would not be where I am today if I had let those kinds of excuses get in the way.
Step 2 – Creating Your Success Team Strategies
Set Clear Expectations
- What do you want done?
- When do you want it done by?
- How do you want to be notified when it is complete?
- How they can get support from you if they need it
Know Your Business Boundaries
Be personable, not personal – You are in business, and you are hiring for work to be done. Therefore, be clear that you are not asking people to apply for a position to be your friend. Even if you hire friends to help you make sure you are clear of the business/friendship boundaries before you put them to work.
Set time boundaries – Time can be moved around a bit by setting time limits or by setting project limits. Some people pay by the project and others pay by the hour. Decide what works best for you and your support team. Set timelines on when things need to be completed.
Here is a tip: Always give yourself a couple days or more for a project/task to be completed by. If for some reason it is not completed on time, it gives you time to make it happen and deliver what you promised your clients or accomplish your goals on time. Timeline buffer is huge if you stress easily about keeping your word when someone else is in control of an outcome.
Set the boundaries in place that will support the success of your team and still keeps you as the “leader, CEO, boss” in your business. Think about boundaries you may need to set. Why would setting them be important to your business? Why would they be important to you? Why do you think they would be important for the superstar you bring in to work alongside you? No matter what you answer to these questions, you are probably correct.
Create a Clear Communication System
Setting up a clear communication system is so important for your sanity as well as your business. Who is doing what in your business and by when helps you know that everything will get done? Without a good communication system, you create more chaos, stress, and frustration for yourself. Aren’t you reading this right now to try to reduce one of those things? Communication about the tasks, the systems, processes, and everything else you want others to help you with is the only true way you can get help. You want those people helping you to feel like they are part of something bigger. Without a communication system in place, they won’t know what your vision is and they won’t be able to step in to help you with a goal when you are too overwhelmed to ask for help. When you all are communicating well, each person can see what you want the end result to look like and they are willing to step up if you are falling behind!
These are just two of a five-step process I have for creating your business success team blueprint. Both of these are the key pieces that you will want to put into place before you hire someone. If you already hired someone, this can still be put into place and you can make a bigger impact with them moving forward. These two steps are what we can turn into your training manual and make it easy for a new hire to know specifically what you want when you want it and how you want it. I wish someone had taken the time out so many years ago when I started the business to tell me all of this information. Once I began putting all this in place the business was able to grow and scale to create stronger profits and happier staff.
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