So many entrepreneurs are solopreneurs. They don’t have a team. With this blog post, I hope to encourage you to consider getting a team.
I’ll share my story.
I recently hired a personal assistant to help me with the day-to-day things: my email, scheduling, and some of my social media.
I already had a team of 10 people who took care of a lot of my business’ operations, but this personal assistant was more for the personal things that I needed help with items such as inbox management, scheduling and travel arrangements.
Hiring my new personal assistant made me recall my experience in building the team I have now.
I’ve had my business for seven years. Two years in, I started thinking I needed someone to help me.
If you want to scale, you need to hire
Back when I made my first hire, I went to local colleges where I live in Denver and hired a couple of interns. One of them actually stayed with me for several years.
In order to scale, move forward, gain more clients, free myself from having to do the day-to-day operations in my business, and most importantly, to be happy with what I do, I realized that I needed people who can help me with all of these projects.
With all the background tasks taken care of, I can focus on the big picture: finding new clients, being the face of the company, business development, speaking engagements, strategy, new projects, and new businesses.
For a proficient team, use a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP)
But to scale your team, you first need to train your team. And training requires a process.
I use a Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) in my business so all tasks are documented and all new staff go through the SOP before working on any projects.
Our Standard Operating Procedure (SOP) posted in Trello. That’s also been a critical point in growing my team, because before I had standard operating procedures, I couldn’t really train people or do it very effectively.
A lot of entrepreneurs don’t have standard operating procedures, which makes it very difficult to train new hires.
Without an SOP, you have to take time out of your schedule to individually train each and every new hire. With an SOP, it’s so easy to onboard someone. Everything’s spelled out in one cohesive source. They can get started immediately and just consult the SOP when they run into a question they need answered.
Your SOP can be a document or a collection of videos and demos that serve as instructions for the new person to reference with regarding their new role or tasks.
SOPs are very useful when your team is growing, people leave or you have to hire a new person.
Be intentional about delegating
Delegating is not, “Oh, let’s delegate because I don’t really feel like doing stuff.”
It’s more about what you want to do and how you want your day to look. This gives you insight on what to delegate.
Ask yourself these questions:
- What do you want to do?
- Where do you want to take your business?
- How can you make it all happen?
- And on which parts of that process do you want to personally focus?
- What drains your energy?
- Where do you see yourself, and also what are the things you wish you had more time for?
That’s what it was for me. I decided that I don’t want to be doing the day-to-day operations of my business. I wanted to be doing more podcasts, strategic projects, and bringing in new clients. I wanted to focus on sales and business development. I wanted to do speaking engagements and creating content and courses.
These are the tasks that I decided I wanted to do. This is how I wanted my day to look.