Ep 45 - How Not to Fall Out of Love With Your Business When Hiring your Team

Power Up Your Team Podcast

Welcome to this episode of Power Up Your Team podcast. This is your free resource with tips and tricks to build a high performing team.

If your business is growing and you are an entrepreneur with just a few part time resources, you sooner or later have to delegate larger portions of work that you used to do yourself. That is if you want to keep on growing.

It’s easy to let go of administrative tasks such as:

• booking appointments
• keeping your CRM system up-to-date
• writing and posting social media content for you

Most likely, you have an array of business partners who provide support services such as accounting, legal support or IT services.

But what if, despite all outsourcing and delegation, you are at your capacity limits?

Maybe it’s time to start building a full-time team!

You have covered all major parts of the business yourself: Business Development, Client acquisition, design and delivery, billing, correspondence. You name it.

And you realize that, while you are in the weeds focusing on execution, you don’t have time to think about strategic stuff anymore. You are rushing from one task to the next and still feel constantly behind.

No time to design and build the next program because you are busy delivering the current one.

No time to focus on new clients because your long standing clients are keep in you so busy.

So, the key question is:

Where do you start?

Who do you bring on board, first?

Here’s an approach I invite you to consider: Make your weakness your team’s strength.

Start with what you least enjoy doing, the stuff where you feel out of your zone of genius.

If you don’t like administrative tasks such as billing, bookkeeping, organizing things, creating process flows or work instruction, then maybe it’s time to put someone in charge of that.

If you don’t like to connect with new people every day, maybe it’s time to hire someone who focuses on business development.

To build a successful team, you have to be clear on your strength and know what jobs you are hiring for.

And it's equally important to do some soul searching on yourself.

• Are you willing to accept new ideas from that person?
• Do you need a thinking partner or just a person who executes?
• Does this person have decision authority or is he/she following instructions?

You have to be clear on “how much leash” you want to give your first team member. Maybe not from the get go but over time.

Over my career, I have built many teams and I realized that it is important to recognize when someone is more skilled or talented in an area than I am myself. It’s important to acknowledge that and create a trusted, respectful climate.

By nature, I am an operations person and like to make sure things run well and there is a clear line of sight between activities and results.

On the contrary, I never liked to go out and have networking conversations or join industry groups to solicit new business.

And guess what, there are people who loved just that! I put those people in positions to navigate our stakeholder landscape in and outside the company and let them run that show.

We aligned on purpose, intend and strategy. But that’s it. In our check-in meeting I viewed them as equal partner in pursuit of business success.

The first few hires are the most crucial ones because you are hiring 50 % of your team with the first hire and 33 % with the second and so forth.

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