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What does growing a team look like in your business? How do you know when it’s time? In today’s episode, I’m sharing three important questions you should ask yourself to determine if you’re ready to hire!

Determining If It’s Time to Hire (1:35)

1. Do you have enough inquiries and income to hire? (2:15)
2. Do I have work to give somebody else? (3:22)
3. What potential is there in my business to create growth if I had extra help? (6:58)

Types of Positions to Hire (8:20)

Links

layleeemadi.com/shop

Review the Transcript:

Welcome to so here’s the thing where we share candid conversations that lift the veil on what it takes to find success, even if that means sharing a few unpopular opinions. I’m your host Laylee Emadi, grab some coffee or cocktail, and let’s get real. Hello friend, today we are going to be talking about a very highly requested topic. And that is how to know when it’s time to make your next hire or your first hire in your business. And I get it, this can be such an overwhelming topic. We’ve actually tackled this a little bit on the show before we did an episode with Rebecca rice about growing a team. And I just wanted to take some time and answer some of your questions that I’ve been getting about how to know when it’s actually time to make that hire, and how to even begin. So before we dive in, if you’re listening to this, the week it comes out, that means that it is officially time for our Black Friday sale, it’s Thanksgiving week, Happy Thanksgiving. And I wanted to let you guys know that over at Laylee mati.com/shop, there is a huge sale going on, including a sale on our hiring Guide, which is the perfect place to start. If you’re not sure about how to actually go through the process of making a hire. We’ve got templates in there, we’ve got questions in there that are samples, for actually conducting all of your interviews, I could go on and on. But make sure to go check that out. And hopefully you can find some help if you’re ready to make that first hire, but you’re not 100% sure about how to go about it. So on this episode, we’re going to be talking about how to determine if it’s time to actually bring somebody into your business.

So if you are a solopreneur, you’re doing everything on your own right now, this is definitely for you. But if you have, let’s say a small but mighty team, that’s what I call my team, maybe you’ve got a VA or a couple of contractors. And you’re not sure if you want to move forward by expanding or bringing somebody else on maybe actually changing the way that they work within your business, this episode could be helpful to you as well. So let’s talk about this as though you are a solopreneur, who never made a hire in your life, I have a couple of questions for you to run through to make sure that you’re actually ready for the commitment of bringing somebody into your team. The first thing I’m going to ask is do you have enough enquiries, enough income and of profitability to actually pay somebody to come in and help you in your business? Now, a caveat to that is that you probably won’t have to pay as much as you think you’re going to have to pay right off the bat. Even if you can bring somebody in for a few hours a week to help offload some tasks. I mean, it could definitely be worth it. But the real question here that I just wanted to start with is do you have enough money coming in to be able to have money going out to somebody else, because when you do make a hire, you really want to make sure that you’re able to follow through on your end of the deal, and provide an enough work and be able to pay the person who you’re bringing in? So that’s the first question is can you actually afford to do this? And really, that’s something that you your CPA, your bookkeeper, you can take a look at and really kind of gauge like, how much can I give to somebody else and be able to then prepare for the hiring process of okay, so

how many hours? Can I actually take somebody on for? The second question that I would love for you to ask yourself is, do I have work to give somebody else? Now hear me out? Because I’m going to pretty much guarantee that the answer to that is yes. If you own your own business, and you’re on your own, that means you’re answering every single email that comes in, you’re answering every DM, you’re answering every inquiry, you are dealing with every single aspect of customer service, whatever kind of business you run, you’re gonna have people coming in and wanting to talk to you. And that’s amazing. And I think in the beginning, when you might not have like a massive client roster, that’s totally doable. But once you reach a certain point, you might notice that you’re feeling like maybe you’re spread a little bit too thin, and you’re becoming resentful of any time your inbox dings. And you have to answer another question that you’ve already answered 100 times. And of course, there are ways around hiring somebody in this situation. But let’s say you’ve already done all those things. So you’ve taken anything that can become automated, and you’ve automated it, you created canned responses, and templates to be able to answer questions easily and effectively. You’ve done all those things already. But you’re still overwhelmed at the volume of work that you have on the admin side of things.

That is a huge indicator that it’s time to bring somebody into your business to take that off of your plate. Again, this is something when I’m talking about this particular situation. It’s something that somebody could come in and just a couple of hours a week, knock out all of those like customer service emails and client touch points of just answering people’s questions for you. And that frees up so much more time for you, the owner of the business to be able to really dive in and do the things that only you can do. So how do you know if you’ve got work to give. One exercise that I love to talk people through is taking note of everything that you do for a week of time. So take a week and just track every single minute you spend in your business. I know that sounds overwhelming, but there are ways to make this easier. So of course, you could do the old school paper and pen, a spreadsheet, whatever. I like to use toggle, it’s free. It’s online to ggl.com. And you can just track every minute that you spend in your business. And over the week, you’ll see how many things that you do on repeat how many things there are that somebody else could easily take off your plate. And the reason I think this is so important, because it might sound really extra to some of you listening, like I am not tracking every minute of every day for a week. That sounds so extra. But the reason this is important is because a lot of times as the person who is in our own businesses day in and day out, it is very difficult to recognize that there are things that somebody else can do just as well as us, or that there are things that we’re doing that are not a good use of our time. So I think it’s a really, really good exercise to go through, track what

you do for a week, and then take some time reflecting on those tasks. And seeing what is it that really only I could have done in that moment. Like for example, maybe you went live on Instagram for an hour. That’s definitely something that only you can do if you are the face and the name of your business. But maybe then you spent two hours responding to inquiries in your inbox, just hitting copy and paste or plugging in templates and changing some names around. Let’s be honest, that is not something that it’s only you can do, that’s definitely something that someone else can do taking your canned responses and tailoring it to come from your team. So that’s the second thing you want to ask yourself is, are there things that somebody else could be doing to free up my time? Again, the first question was, can I afford to bring somebody in? The second question is, Do I have enough work to give them? And the third question that I would love to encourage you to ask yourself, what potential is there in my business if I had extra help, and I could reclaim some time and some freedom in order to create actual growth. So this is kind of a thought exercise that I’m encouraging you to do, I would honestly take a piece of paper, open a Google Doc and just brain dump all of the things that you see as potential for growth in your business. If time were not a factor, because what tends to happen in our businesses, when we are working in, not on but in our businesses day in and day out, we’re doing every single task, every single hat in the business is being worn by us, we tend to run out of time. I mean, it’s that’s just simple math, right? We’ve only got 24 hours in a day, we’ve got families, we’ve got sleep, we’ve got things to do. And so really, our hands get tied. And we don’t see a lot of forward momentum after a while, maybe you were seeing really significant growth in the first few years of your business. And then after a while things just kind of tapered off and they’ve kind of become stagnant. And maybe ask yourself is this because I don’t have enough time or freedom in my business, to pursue new dreams to add in new revenue streams, because it’s just me, and I’m doing it all on my own. And again, like I mentioned at the beginning, even if you have some help, maybe it’s not enough, maybe your VA isn’t enough of help. Maybe it’s time to bring in an integrator or an OBM, an online business manager, maybe it’s time to bring in experts in other facets.

Like let’s say you have a podcast, maybe it’s time to bring in a Podcast Producer instead of editing every episode yourself and writing out show notes on your own. Maybe it’s if you have a YouTube channel, it’s time to bring in a YouTube strategist to help you, whatever it may be. Time and freedom are two things that you probably had in mind when you started your business. And something that you probably realized really quickly, are rare when you’re trying to grow a business and you’re trying to really get that forward momentum going. So that’s something I really want to encourage you guys to do is have that thought process and that thought exercise of Where Is there potential in my business that could be fulfilled if I were able to offload some of the work that I’m doing day in and day out to a new hire. So hopefully these three questions were really helpful to kind of get your brain moving to see if you’re ready for your next hire for your first hire. And again, if this is something that you want to pursue, I love chatting about this this slide into my DMs on Instagram at Laylee_Emadi. And if you know you’re ready to start hiring, but you don’t really know how to start or you don’t know the process. Go ahead and head to Layleeemadi.com/shop And we’ve got a hiring guide for you there that I just love. It actually comes straight from my experience of hiring contracts and part time employees over the past few yours and just all of the things that I’ve learned along the way, so hopefully that helps you too. I’m cheering you on and I hope that you guys have an amazing week I will catch you on the next episode For show notes and resources mentioned on today’s episode head to so here’s the thing podcast.com And if you’re enjoying the podcast, I’d love to read your review in iTunes. Thanks so much for listening, and I’ll catch you in the next episode.