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You don’t need a team of 10, or even one full-time employee to be able to begin outsourcing and releasing your workload capacity. I started with someone who would join for each project, helping me edit my photos, then hired someone to help with inbox management for a few hours a week and the best part was, I paid them for their time which ebbed and flowed with each season.
The beauty of working for yourself means YOU create your hours, schedule, and days, and you can also choose the tasks and projects that you can offload from your plate a few hours a week to a contractor when the timing is right.
So, let’s get into it and walk through the exact steps you can begin taking, today, to get an exceptional support team in place for your business to thrive—and for you to have the capacity to dream, rest, build, and breathe a little easier again.
Map Your Tasks
One of the very first keys to knowing who and how to hire support is getting really intimate with ALL of the processes in your business. If you’re a solopreneur, odds are you already have a heavy hand in all the moving parts of your biz… but have you ever taken the time to sit down and map out each step and system?
This process is called a couple different things; you may have seen it touted as “process mapping” or “standard operating procedures” but essentially, you’re looking at all of the main, overarching tasks within your business and breaking each one down to evaluate alllll the little, mini tasks it takes to complete the larger ones.
So inside my business, you could look at a bunch of bigger projects like producing the podcast, managing our courses, running launches, publishing blog and website content, or creating an email or Pinterest plan.
One of the biggest mistakes or mindset blocks I held when it came to hiring was that because I COULD do things, I thought I should. But as I’ve hired experts or people who are far more proficient at things like audio editing or search engine optimization, I not only am getting a better quality end product, I’m also supporting other people’s passions and their proficiencies!
If you can not only identify the big projects that take up most of your time, but break down your tasks in your business and look at each step of execution, I bet it’ll be suuuper clear right away which big and little tasks you:
- LOVE to do and would never-ever even consider giving up.
- Would prefer not to do, but you’re pretty good at them and can manage them fairly easily.
- And those tasks that you HATE doing, aren’t good at, avoid and hardly have the time for.
If you think about it, if you truly dislike doing something, doesn’t that usually mean it takes wayyyy longer for us to complete ourselves? Whether there’s a steep learning curve or you just procrastinate the bejeezus out of it, you probably find yourself shuffling your feet when it comes to those hate-tasks, when instead, if you hired someone whose genius spot ALIGNED with those things, they could likely get it done in way less time and for less money than your time and frustration spent on it is worth! Plus the time you save by outsourcing gives you more time to market, dream up new ideas, serve clients, and make more money.
Your Priority Hiring List
After you process-map your business’s tasks, make sure to write down at least 5 things that excite you, that you’d never give up, and that fall within your expertise.
Follow that up with a priority list of the things that are the bottom of your list or eating up too much of your time and prioritize from 1-5 in the order of what you’d like to release first and hire help for.
From there, you can establish exactly where you’re going to need some help. See if any items you need to outsource can be grouped into a similar category so that you can build a position around it.
So for example, if writing sales copy, email content, and social media captions just is NOT your thing or you always run out of time to get it all done, you’re probably going to be in the market for a copywriter or content writer.
If it’s more administrative tasks that weigh you down like responding to emails, offering support, and providing community help online or in your Facebook groups, then maybe a virtual assistant or online business or community manager might be the best hiring move for right now.
If it’s a toss up and you need help in several areas or could potentially build multiple positions out of your needs, don’t fret! I find that sooo many entrepreneurs are visionaries and end up needing high-quality support in several arenas, and that is completely normal. Even if it’s just 1-2 hours a week in each area, there are likely people who can support the specific needs you have. It might feel overwhelming to think of hiring a bunch of people straight out the gate, so lean on you priority list and build up the confidence in making wise hiring decisions one by one.
Every single time I’ve traded money in order to free up my time, my business has grown. It’s in making those calculated moves and choosing those right hires that has allowed me to dream, learn, grow, scale, and expand in so many different ways. The more I hire, the more the business tends to earn because we have the right people in the right places so while you may be thinking about the added expense, think about the saved time and what you can do with that extra time to move the needle forward.
Build a Resource Library
Even if you’re just starting by hiring a virtual assistant for 2 or 3 hours a week… you’ll find that training that new hire and any future new hires is soooo much smoother when you have clear systems — even if they can be streamlined in the future — that you can just hand on over to them when they’re getting onboarded.
Creating a resource library and brand standards, even before you have a single person on your team, will not only give you more clarity on your processes, but it’ll also give you the opportunity to find any holes or inefficiencies to improve before handing things off to new or future team members. AND, it creates a super-clear guide for new hires to go through and get to know your brand, business, and procedures so that there’s easy-to-understand training resources right from the start of their time working with you. Win win, all the way around!
A couple easy and efficient ways to do this is by recording a bunch of screencasts or looms walking through your projects. If you’ve never used loom, OH MY GOSH, let me be the first to introduce you to this amazing tool, and might I add that this is not sponsored… I just love it so much and use it all the time. Go to loom.com, it’s basically a screen recording tool that allows you to record yourself on video or audio walking through a process on your computer screen.
Another way is to just have one designated spot as the master home of all resources for your business—like for example, even a google doc will work with links to different logins or pages with different step-by-step walkthroughs for various tasks and projects.
The key is to organize it well so your team can have a simple and clear spot to land if they need help and to eliminate the same questions over and over. Your goal is to just have all your processes and procedures in ONE spot so that they can visit and revisit as you bring on new team members and get them trained on your systems. Even if you have NO team or a team of 1 or 2, creating a setup like this early on is soooo beneficial for when you do grow and allows you to maintain consistency across the board, no matter who’s handling what.
Introduce Everyone
Once you’ve brought on a couple of support team members, be sure to connect them and introduce them to one another in person if possible, but virtually if not.
That way, they know who and how they can collaborate with each other on certain projects, and you won’t always have to be the in-between person managing communications… which honestly, can bog down your time in and of itself. And that soooo isn’t a goal of bringing on a support team; we want you to be spending LESS time on small details and communications, and more time thinking of genius new visionary ideas to expand and grow. There’s so much power in connecting your team instead of having them always work in their own silo.
The Big Picture
I know it might feel scary or like a heavy lift to begin bringing on a team… but in the end, you deserve to focus on your genius spots, and allowing yourself the capacity to do so will only benefit your business greater in the long run! Your time is valuable. Your energy is powerful. And one of the best ways to protect both is by letting loose the reins a bit and bringing in the right people to support and uplift your business, so you’re empowered to take things to the next, and the next, level.
No one’s meant to do this business thing alone—or life, for that matter! So begin observing your holes and weak spots, and craft a position from there. Stay open to new ways of doing things and collaborating from a distance, and I have ZERO doubts you’ll be running a knockout team that lifts you, and your business up in no time!
