None of us (though some try to make it look like we do) have enough time in the day to get everything that we want and need to get done. We need to add in some help somewhere, whether with our businesses, home lives, or both.
But practically the only self-employed women who don’t have horror stories about trying to find good help are the ones who haven’t tried.
How do we navigate the paradox? We need help, but finding the right help is something that is so time-consuming and frustrating that it falls right into the category of the type of thing we’d like to hire someone else to do.
Making the Decision to Take the Plunge & Understanding Why You Need To
At Chris Guillebeau’s solopreneur business conference this year, Pioneer Nation, there were dozens of inspiring moms and women building and sustaining businesses that enriched and changed both their lives and the lives of others, and one, Laura Roeder, founder of the Creating Fame school and head of LKR Social Media, took the stage to talk to everyone about getting the help they need.
I’ve always been clear that I wanted to build a life of a lot of freedom. Building a business to me did not mean something that I would have to be a slave to. I was clear from the beginning that I wanted to build something for myself that would allow space, even to take a spontaneous weekend trip with my family, which I am proud to share with you I just did for the first time.
Your team needs to profitable, not a drain on your resources. Everyone you hire needs to be a return on your investment. They should not just cover themselves but add profitability to your business. When you have a contractor run Facebook ads, we can run numbers and it’s very easy to see how that adds income. But often people add income indirectly. A lot of people say you set your hourly rate for your time and anything below that, you shouldn’t do it, but sometimes the ROI is in keeping you from being frazzled; it’s the mental space. We’ve all spent time there in that place where we feel like we are constantly running and we never have time to think. Some of us are living there all the time. And it’s clear we’re not in the vision space for our companies.
I find that a lot of people are willing to spend money to learn, but when it comes to doing stuff rather than learning stuff, people say, “No, I’m broke.” I challenge you to allocate some of your learning budget.
If your business is not progressing it’s because you need to spend more money to get other people’s time. I don’t think any one here is short on ideas. I don’t think we sit around looking for more ideas on which to spend our time. Growing your business means finding ways to do those things you haven’t had time for, so you have to hire others to grow your business.
We have this fantasy that if we’re only clever enough or read enough time management blogs, the hours will somehow expand. But there’s this cool trick how every other human has their own 24 hours, and if your project requires more than your 24 hours, you can buy someone else’s!
Identify the Right Areas to Outsource
In Tim Ferriss’s now famous book The Four-Hour Work Week, it seems like outsourcing one’s business is the key to self-employment success and sanity. Ferriss outlines where and how he finds help, and even some ways to troubleshoot, but one of the biggest issues for self-employed women is that we are used to being on top of everything and it can be hard to let go.
There is a common misconception out there that you should be outsourcing any work that can be done by someone else for less than your hourly rate.
In theory, it’s great, but in practice, it’s a gross oversimplification.
What about tasks that would take you so long to explain to someone else how to do them that you still end up spending your own time anyway? What about tasks that are below your hourly rate, but you draw energy from because you love them or they give you valuable down time from more focused creative tasks?
Common culprits here:
- packaging products for shipping
- childcare, especially of special needs children
- cooking
- tidying the house
On the flip side, what about tasks you would have to pay someone a lot of money to do—on par or above your own hourly rate—that you just hate doing or are really bad at yourself? Some ideas:
- designing or maintaining your website
- writing blog posts
- social media
- invoicing
- responding to repetitive inbound emails
How to Create Your Perfect Team
As you start to outsource tasks in either your life or business, you’ll find that things that you couldn’t imagine passing off to others are sometimes (often even!) the things you are most grateful you did. And, in many cases, things that you initially never thought you could let someone else do have become things you are happy to hand off.
Being a leader of a team or a boss, whether to a part-time employee or a contractor or two, is a skill set of its own that needs to be developed with time.
When Roeder hired her first part-time employee, the stay at home mom was everything she was looking for skill set-wise, but had been selling scam vitamins because that was the work she had found that fit her time, location, and availability constraints. It reminded her that there are many very talented, very capable people looking for flexible part time positions who need positions like the one she had in mind.
The same is no doubt true for you.
I highly recommend bootstrapping with consulting or service if that works for you. The first person I hired was $500 a month 10 hours a week. She had a great background in marketing and PR and she was looking for a fulfilling job. She started answering email for me, doing autoresponders, and things that needed to be done.
And then I had this big dream. I was a conference and someone talked about a project manager where you just tell them your ideas and they make them happen. I thought someone like me can’t have a project manager, but I found someone part-time and paid 1000 a month, because the ROI to me was very clear. Over time she became an integral part of my business.
It’s easy to think, what if I spend all this time hiring someone and then they leave?
You don’t own them. They’re not your slave. I don’t have this idea that people are going to stay with me for life. But I get to give people new skills and enrich their lives.
It’s easy (enough) to see the benefit to yourself of bringing on help. But when you take into account that there are highly qualified people who are looking for a position just like the one you have in mind, and that you can help them provide for their families, taking the leap becomes that much easier.
And, hey, if you don’t have the time to find someone good, you can always outsource that too! There’s dozens of staffing firms that would be happy to connect you with pre-interviewed and background-checked candidates.
