When and how to hire help to grow your online business

Read Time: 6 minutes

Welcome to BE THE EXPERT! In today’s issue:

• When and how to hire help to build your business
• New features in ACCELERATE
• Cross-posting between FB/IG and Threads

When and how to hire help

There’s always more to do than we have time for.

Planning and growing an expert business isn’t a “4-hour work week” by any stretch of the imagination.

When faced with this challenge, we are told by gurus that we need to double down on personal productivity and quickly hire a “virtual assistant.”

In this issue, I’ll show why that is 100% backward and actually slows you down.

Then, I’ll show when and how to hire help the right way (even if you have zero budget…)

Forget personal productivity (for now…)

I worked at Microsoft for a long time, and the quote below attributed to Bill Gates is something I live by:

The first rule of any technology used in a business is that automation applied to an efficient operation will magnify the efficiency. The second is that automation applied to an inefficient operation will magnify the inefficiency.

Bill Gates

The same holds true for personal productivity. You can be a ninja at capturing tasks, organizing them, executing them, and marking them off your list—doing them as quickly and efficiently as humanly possible.

But what if they are the wrong tasks?

When I talk to coaches, creators, and solopreneurs, especially folks in their first year of business building, many of them are spending a lot of time on things like logos, “branding,” domain names, taking five or more courses, and looking at dozens of tools.

Notice some missing items?

How about attracting an audience? Testing an offer with them?

Making a sale and generating some revenue?

Those are kinda important for business success… 🙂

Forget virtual assistants (for now…)

Few of us have the luxury of 20, 40, or 60 hours of time each week to work on our businesses.

Especially in the beginning, most of us have full-time jobs and other commitments.

After we’ve squeezed as much “productivity” from our time as we can (again, typically on the wrong tasks), we start hearing and dreaming about the magic of virtual assistants.

$5/hour resources that can do anything we tell them to do!

We’re business owners, darn it; we should have staff to take work off our plate!!!

“mange my email!”, “make my travel arrangements”, “organize my files”

Notice some missing items?

Yep, nothing about audience, offers, or sales.

“But if I have the VA do all the low level stuff THEN I’ll have time to work on the good stuff”

Except you have to train the VA. Manage their time. Review their results. Fix things.

Especially the lower you go on price, the less capable they will be of high-quality, independent work.

Folks on this path are not only working on the wrong things but PAYING someone to work on the wrong things while not freeing up any of their own time.

When to hire help

It’s critical to your success to hire help as soon as you possibly can but ONLY after these two milestones are completed:

1. You have systemized your business plan
2. You have tested and validated your marketing, offer, and program

If you don’t do these first, you wind up hiring help for the wrong things and like Bill G said magnifying the inefficiency…

Let’s break those down quickly:

You have systemized your business plan

I’ve covered systemization in detail in other newsletter issues. In summary, that means figuring out, writing out, and (soon) delegating out all the processes that need to be done in your business.

Think marketing, sales, and delivery/support.

There are six others I’ve covered as well but these are the most recognizable and align to the customer journey I talk about which is:

• ATTRACT
• CONVERT
• ASCEND/RETAIN.

These are the most important systems in your business. These are FAR more important than logos, “branding”, “managing emails”, etc.

Determining the core activities needed for your business to succeed helps you gain clarity on what you should be focused on and what can be delegated.

That is the “figure it out” step. Answering questions like:

• Where and how will I attract an audience of my ideal customers?
• What solutions will I offer to help them?
• How will I deliver those solutions?

In all of those areas, you then ask, “What needs to be happening daily, weekly, and monthly for those to be successful?”

A simple version might be:

1. Publish content weekly with a lead magnet call to action
2. Run a webinar monthly with a closing pitch to join your program
3. Deliver your program as a course and group coaching

Step 2 is writing out what needs to happen for those to be successful.

For the content that would include planning, creating, editing, repurposing, and publishing. That is your content system.

For the webinar, it would include planning, creating, delivering, tracking, following up, etc.

For program delivery, this would include creating course material, running coaching calls, tracking student progress, upselling other programs, etc.

Now, you have a set of systems and processes defined at a high level.

The final part of the “figure it out” stage is further breaking those down.

Let’s take the monthly webinar example. There would be steps needed to pick the topic, create announcement emails/posts, choose a tool or platform to use for the webinar, set it up, create a slide deck, etc.

If you do that for the other areas, you now have a rough systemization of your core business.

This only takes a few hours and is the single most important thing you can do to guide all your business decisions.

The test for whether you have done this correctly and to the right level is by asking this question:

“Would my business be successful if just those systems and processes were in place and being executed every day, week, and month?”

In this example, if you published content, got leads, delivered webinars, gained customers, and retained them, your business would be successful (yes, it will take multiple iterations of each to get there, but your focus will be in the right areas).

Testing and validating your marketing, offer, and program

Now that you have systemized your business plan, it’s time to test and validate your work.

The way to do that is to execute all of the systems and processes once and document the steps as you do them.

Using the example above, you would create some content, assemble a lead magnet, run a simple webinar (it could just be a Zoom meeting), make an offer, etc.

This is the validation phase, where you need to learn whether your message, offer, and program resonate or not with your ideal customers.

Do this BEFORE you build it, spend tons of money on branding, and so on.

This phase is where you will likely need help as you may not know HOW to do all of the steps above, but you now have the RIGHT steps and priorities identified.

How to hire help

Most of us have been conditioned to assume that our first hire should be a virtual assistant to take low-level tasks off our plates.

This is not great advice. Most of the low-level tasks should be ignored.

If they aren’t on your critical systems and processes list, forget about them for now.

To answer the question of HOW to hire help, a way to think about it is to ask what type of help would bring the results I need with the best return on investment in terms of money AND time.

People default to VAs, but there are many different ways and models to get help.

YouTube/AI – If you have no budget right now, you can learn a lot from free content and AI and leverage as many free tools as possible. This is issue #57 of this newsletter, so there is a ton of valuable content here and free training in our Facebook group.

Courses – you could learn and do it yourself. This may be the lowest cost, but it takes your time to learn and implement. (our ​Solo to Virtual CEO DIY​ program has a suite of courses covering the major systems)

Coaching – you could hire a coach to show you how to do things. This has a higher cost and still takes a lot of your time since you have to learn and do the work. (our ​Solo to Virtual CEO DWY​ program includes courses AND coaching in all of these areas)

Virtual Assistants – Yes, VA’s can be great (we have awesome ones), but they typically are only capable of doing PART of the major systems in your business. Most are generalists, and the quality varies greatly, and you have to allocate your own time to manage them and correct things.

Freelancers – A freelancer is typically more focused and experienced than a general VA. They are also typically higher-cost. You still need to manage them, but they will be much more self-sufficient than a generalist VA.

Agencies – There are agencies of all sizes that focus on different areas of online business. Examples include content, marketing, sales, support, etc. There are agencies for all of those. They are typically much higher in price but can take on the entirety of many areas in your business.

Fractional Teams – This is the model most people don’t know about. It’s the model we use in our ​Solo to Virtual CEO Done-For-You​ program to help clients. In this model, you SHARE a team of experts. Instead of trying to find a unicorn VA or freelancer who knows everything (they don’t exist), you share a team with all the different skills you need (tech, design, editing, marketing, etc.) This model includes an online business manager who manages the day-to-day activities so that you can focus on the most important activities.

Once they learn about it, most people see the benefits of the fractional team model, but they assume it is very expensive.

It doesn’t have to be!

Since you are SHARING a team, it is possible to hire a fractional team for the same cost as a full-time VA but get a much higher output level since you are tapping into specialists.

So, the most important question related to hiring help is what type or structure would provide the best ROI for your available budget.

The way our services are structured is DIY, DWY, and DFY so that we can support all budget ranges and provide the highest ROI possible within them.

Take Action

When is it time to hire help? As soon as you have systemized your business plan and validated your offer.

If you don’t know how to do those steps, reply to this message, and I’ll hop on a call with you to map that out.

Once you have mapped out the key systems and processes your business needs and validated your offer, it is time to hire help to accelerate getting all of the critical pieces in place and generating revenue.

Finally, when you do hire help, consider which MODEL will provide the best ROI for your time and money.

Whether it’s resources like VAs or freelancers, you manage yourself, an agency, or one of our fractional teams, where we handle the work and the management.

The key is hiring help to get the MOST important tasks done in your business, not the least important ones…