Ep 571: Who to Hire to Build an 8-Figure Business | Jen Kem Episode Recap
RV (00:06):
Welcome to the Influential Personal Brand podcast. This is the place where we help mission-driven messengers, just like you learn how to build and monetize your personal brand. My name is Rory Vaden and I’m the co-founder of Brand Builders Group, a hall of fame speaker, and New York Times bestselling author. And this show is to help experts learn how to become more wealthy and well known. I know you’re gonna love it. Thanks for being here. Let’s get started. There’s an African proverb that says, if you wanna go fast, go alone. But if you want to go far, go with a team. And if you are an entrepreneur or you’re a small business owner and you’re trying to grow your business, you are definitely going to need a team. And in this video I’m gonna share with you exactly who should you hire first. As one of the most common questions that we hear from people is they say, I don’t know when to hire and who to hire first.
RV (01:08):
And what I’m gonna share with you may surprise you because I’m gonna say that the first people you should hire are gonna be people that support you in your personal life more than your professional life. So you’re gonna need people to work inside of your company too, but you’re likely gonna need to start at home first. Now here’s the high level concept. A high level concept is that you need to hire people who will take things off of your plate. So if you’ve ever felt like I’m doing so many jobs, or I’m doing four people’s full-time jobs, you probably are. That is what it means to be an entrepreneur, especially a solopreneur. And so, as fast as possible, you need to get those jobs off of your plate. But the simplest and most direct positions to hire for are the ones that I think we hear the least about, and that is hiring people in your personal life.
RV (02:02):
So who would you hire in your personal life? The very first hire that I would make is a house cleaner. These are easy to find. There’s a lot of people who offer this service. If you are still cleaning your house, then that means that’s time that you’re spending there instead of spending it on your business. And that’s the big idea here, is anything that’s taking your time, we have to get off of your plate. We have to outsource it, we have to delegate it to somebody else. So I’m looking for the most tangible and tactical and practical things to get off my plate first. So I would start with the house cleaner. It’s also something that you don’t have to be a millionaire to hire a house cleaner. And you can use platforms like care.com, which is one of our favorites. We use care.com to hire, uh, house cleaners, pet care, elderly care, and childcare.
RV (02:51):
Um, you can even get people to cook for you, right? So you go, what, how much time am I spending on mowing the yard? I need to get someone to do the landscaping. How much time am I spending doing handy work around the house? You can, you can use, uh, Thumbtack or, you know, there used to be tackle. I don’t think they’re around anymore. But there’s, there’s all sorts of, uh, platforms and apps you can use to hire these people locally. Not only do you free up your time, you get them a job and you’re providing income opportunities for the people around you. So anything that is taking time around the house, I would start with first. ’cause that’s gonna give you your peace of mind back. And many times those are some of the most tactical universal skills that are the easiest to hire for next inside of your business.
RV (03:38):
The very first thing that I would, the very first position that I would hire is an assistant. You need an assistant to do basic things for you. Like, um, schedule flights, you know, these are people who can do expense reports, they can filter your email, they can schedule appointments on your calendar and deal with the back and forth with that. They can take the, all the things that come into your inbox that don’t really need your attention, and they can start processing those. In my case, my assistants have access to my inbox. I’ve always done that. And you go, well, what about privacy? And I go, well, if it’s anything that’s super private, then, you know, set up a private email inbox for that or a text message. But, uh, your business email
RV (04:34):
Like, that’s an important part of the job, but it’s, it’s not rocket science to solve that problem. But you need an assistant, you need someone to filter out spam and, and just everything. And also a personal assistant. So this could be the same person, or it might be someone else, someone to do your grocery shopping for you, someone to run to the dry cleaner, someone to do go buy Christmas presents, somebody to wrap the presents, somebody to meet, meet the maintenance man, take the car to get an oil change. All of these things that suck up your time, that is time that you could be spending either on your business or with your family or doing hobbies. Those are the easiest things to hire. After you get your assistant, then typically the next person that you hire in a, in inside of your business, I think is someone who can do marketing for you.
RV (05:22):
So marketing is another tactical skillset that you, that takes time and it’s things that people can learn, right? It’s a very straight down the, the path. There’s things you need to learn how to do. Now as you get lar bigger and your brand grows, or your company grows, you may need multiple marketing people. Specifically, there’s three skill sets you need. You need someone who can write something, copywriter. You need someone who can graphically design something, and then you need a video editor, somebody who can edit videos. Those are really, really common roles. Um, but in the beginning, you might just have a marketing assistant if you’re posting on social media or they’re helping make updates to your web pages, or they might even just be a project manager who’s managing your vendors. When you’re first starting out in your business, chances are you can’t afford a bunch of a bunch of employees.
RV (06:11):
So what you do is you hire contractors, you hire vendors, but you try to have one person who is on your team who can project manage multiple vendors until you can scale up and afford to bring people on your team, which is expensive. And then they want raises, and you want to give ’em raises and they need benefits and like they have to provide for their families. But you, you grow together, but you don’t have to wait to be able to afford employees to start delegating and hiring things off of your, your plate. You can do that right away with all of these apps. You can do it with, uh, hiring contractors, but you kind of do need somebody at home. It’ll start as an assistant. Then maybe there is an, a marketing assistant. Um, another early role that you’re gonna hire in your company is gonna be an accountant, a bookkeeper, right?
RV (06:57):
You’re gonna need someone to deal with quick QuickBooks or whatever software tool you’re using to keep track of your expenses. A lot of times you can, you can find, uh, retired accountants to do that. You can find people who know QuickBooks. You can find people with, you know, basic level education, maybe not even a college diploma, but who have experience in accounts payable and accounts receivable. It’s a great side job. And you’ll notice that all of the jobs, all of the roles that you’re hiring early on are tactical, not strategic. Strategic roles tend to be more expensive. They tend to require more experience and they’re more artistic. The easier roles to hire are the ones where it’s like, it’s a task and here’s a task and here’s an instruction manual for how to do it. And you can just like put anyone in that, in that seat.
RV (07:46):
As you grow, then you need to bring on more strategic people because there’s complexity that will be added to your organization, um, after you hire a bookkeeper and you get that in place, the next thing that I would be looking to hire is what we would call delivery. Somebody who can actually do client work for you so that you don’t have to do the work, right? In any type of business, even if I’m a, you know, if I’m a high school kid, starting a a, a, a mowing, a yard mowing business, there is delivering the service and then there is selling the service. And you have to separate those two tasks. You’ll make more money if you’re selling the service than if you’re delivering the service, right? So you go, I can make more money selling people $10, a $10 service to cut their yards, and then I can find people to mow the yard for $5 and then I’m gonna keep the five.
RV (08:40):
That’s how you really become an entrepreneur, and that’s how it starts. So in order for you to be able to sell more, you gotta open up your capacity, which means you need more people who can deliver. So you gotta get other people trained to do a good job. And that becomes a really hard part. The, the more people driven your business is, right. And so services like ours at Brand Builders Group, we do personal brand strategy. So the people that we hire are personal brand strategists. They have to learn our curriculum, our methodology, our philosophy. They have to hold our values and we spend a a lot of time training them. And, and we also look for people who come in with some experience so that they can work with clients at a lower rate of pay than somebody would have to work with me or my wife and our CEO my business partner aj.
RV (09:26):
Um, so you need to get delivery off of your plate, and that is where the business starts to become scalable because you can sell more and more and more as long as you can deliver that service and you have other people who can deliver it after that. The next thing that we typically start to outsource is sales. Because when you start the business, you are usually the top sales person, but sales is a tactical skillset and it is something that can be delegated and it can be farmed out. And this is something that we did in our past life, was train salespeople. We have inside of brand builders group curriculums for both how to sell and for how to recruit, train, hire, manage, and motivate salespeople. Um, the other thing that’s great about hiring salespeople, and sometimes salespeople you actually can hire earlier, is salespeople often can and want to be paid on commission.
RV (10:18):
If they’re good, they’d rather be paid for their results and they’d rather be paid a percentage of the business they bring in than a flat stable, um, stream of pay, like in a salary or an hourly rate. Well, when you’re starting a company, salespeople can really be great because you don’t have a lot of consistent revenue. You can’t take the risk of hiring employees. But if you find a salesperson who’s willing to work on commission, you can hire as many straight commission salespeople as you can keep up with because it’s on them to go out and sell and you wanna support them and help them. But commission-based salespeople can be one of the very first, uh, positions that you hire in the company. After that, it starts to get more strategic. Uh, in brand Builders group, we have a curriculum called Eight Figure Entrepreneur, and we talk about how do you grow your business from a six figure business to seven figures, multi seven figures, and ultimately eight figures.
RV (11:13):
That is something that my wife and I have done six times. Six times. We have started multi seven figure businesses and twice we have built eight figure companies completely from scratch, from zero, uh, with, you know, no, no venture backed money. We don’t use bank debt. We’ve built it from revenue, from customers in graduating the teams up. Now, when you get to that level, we talk about the eight departments of every business. Every single company, whether a small solopreneur or a Fortune 100 company has eight major functions. Marketing, sales, delivery, customer service, HR, operations, and IT administration and finance it. Every business has those functions. The reason you’re overwhelmed as an entrepreneur, as a solopreneur is ’cause you have to do all eight of those things. Marketing has to generate the lead, sales has to sell, the lead delivery has to fulfill on that, uh, promise and deliver to the customer.
RV (12:17):
Customer service has to deal with any customer service questions or cancellations. HR has to hire all of the people to do of those things, operations. And it has to create the tools and the systems to support all of those people doing those roles. Administration deals with the, the strategic, uh, parts of the business as well as the legal parts, um, and, you know, taxes and legal structure and filings and all that. And then, uh, finance deals with counting the money of all of those things. Those eight functions exist in every business. And as you start to scale, you’ll start with these early positions, and then over time, you’re gonna need someone to head up each of those departments. And then from there, the sky is the limit.