“When something is broken or not working and you don’t know how or have the time to fix it, hire an expert. When you personally don’t have the time to learn a skill and just need someone to get it done, hire an expert. Or when you and your team want to learn a new skill and want the best teacher possible, hire an expert.” -Veronica Yanhs, CEO, Business Laid Bare
Episode Summary:
In the online world, it seems that the answer to everything, when you’re growing and hitting capacity, is to hire a VA or a virtual assistant.
Spoiler alert! That’s not always the right answer. Just because it worked for your friend’s business or your business role model’s business, doesn’t mean that it’s the answer for you. That’s the biggest trap you can fall into.
In this episode, I give you my top two things to consider when deciding between hiring help or hiring an expert to ensure you actually satisfy your business needs. I also share my best advice for making the onboarding and collaboration phase as smooth as possible.
I’ve been wanting to create this episode for a while because, as a digital operations agency, our first and most important pillar is people. When you get your people in the right areas, executing in their zones of genius while leveraging good systems and processes, business feels so pleasurable and delicious, and the pressure is off of you. You get to breathe. You get to relax. I can’t stress that enough. It is so important for you to take care of yourself so that you can take care of your business and your team.
Before we dive into this episode, I’m going to give a shout-out to my friends at Boxx Bar for sponsoring this episode. Boxx Bar is a place where you can find toys, clothes, and jewelry for all women with a hint of kink. So do yourself and your pleasure a huge favor and go to boxxbar.com and go make yourself happy.
What You’ll Learn From This Episode:
- [03:07] Is hiring a virtual assistant right for your business
- [03:37] Identify your needs so that you can find the best solution
- [04:09] Know your and your team’s skills and expertise
- [06:17] Systems make for smooth executing
- [08:46] How to make your time with an expert invaluable
- [09:44] Things to consider when hiring help in the form of an assistant
- [13:44] More about Business Laid Bare
Connect with Us:
- On Instagram | @businesslaidbare
Resources Mentioned:
- Book a consult call with us at businesslaidbare.com/consult
- Thank you to our friends at Boxx Bar for sponsoring this episode. Toys, clothes, and jewelry for all women with a hint of kink. Go to boxxbar.com
“Create systems for whatever you need your assistant to execute so they can do it well and do it consistently. Give them all they need to succeed and if you’re like, what’s the system again? Our definition is a collection of people, processes, and tools working together to achieve a specific result or goal repeatedly.” -Veronica Yanhs, CEO, Business Laid Bare
[00:00:00] Veronica: Hey, I’m Veronica Yanhs and I’m obsessed with backend, specifically your business backend your operations, and I’m the CEO and founder of Business Laid Bare. We’re a digital operations agency that builds well lubricated and Orgasmic Operations ™ so that your business is pleasurable, productive, and ultimately profitable because when you feel good, everything else feels good too.
Like your team, your customers, and your bank account. I mean, who doesn’t want to consent to that? This podcast gives you the tips, interviews, and mindset shifts on how to run your business and its operations so that it’s immensely pleasurable, productive, and profitable.
So ready to whip your business into shape with me? Let’s get it on.
Hey, before we dive into this episode, I’m going to give a shout-out to my friends at Boxx Bar for sponsoring this episode. Boxx Bar is a place where you can find toys, clothes, and jewelry for all women with a hint of kink. So do yourself and your pleasure, a huge favor and go to www.BOXXBAR.com and go make yourself happy.
In the online world, it seems that the answer to everything, when you need help in your business, or if your business is like growing and hitting capacity is to hire a VA or a virtual assistant and spoiler alert. That’s not always the right answer.
Just because it worked for your friend’s business or your business role models business doesn’t mean that it’s the answer for you. That’s the biggest trap you can fall into. You are not your friend. You are not your role model and your business is not the same as theirs, and even if you all had the same identical business, it ultimately goes back to you are all different people with different skill sets, strengths, weaknesses, experiences, needs, and goals, and ultimately where you want to take your businesses is not the same.
So in this episode, we’re going to have a little chat about when you should hire, help, like an assistant versus when you should hire an expert for your business because having the right people in the right seats and doing the right things are going to help your business run more efficiently and it’s going to free you up from a lot of headaches that we see a lot of our client’s experience when it comes to working with a team.
And before I dive into this episode, I just want to say that if you hire a virtual assistant, especially those outside the United States, like in the Philippines, please pay them a decent wage. As if they live here in the States. Seriously, we need to stop glorifying cheapness. And I know that many of the major online entrepreneurs and influencers talk about how great it is to hire VAs for three to $5 an hour. And while the work might be good, it’s like, we are not energetically providing the right compensation that we should be doing and you know what? We can be better. So I’m not going to go into this any more than I need to right now, because this is a whole topic for another time, but I just had to say it otherwise, I wouldn’t feel right about it.
So into the episode, we go. So the reason why we want to look at when you should hire help versus experts is because it relates to your ability to give direction and lead. And also because it relates to the operations and systems you need to create to set everyone up for success. The operations and systems and processes you create for your help category is much different than the experts. Right? But before we jump into any of that, let’s talk about what do you need in your business?
First, there’s a reason why you want to hire whether that reason is a pain point or goal that has to get documented. So like a pain point could be I’m spread so thin doing all this client work and feeling exhausted that I don’t have a weekend to myself. Or you can say my client onboarding is a huge mess.
Two goals. Like I love to get a kick-ass, social media strategy going, or I love to increase my client capacity by two X in three months. Like whether it’s a pain or a goal, jot them down. That’s like the first step.
Number two. Now, look at yourself and your team. How does this goal or pain point relate to your skillset or your team’s expertise and skillset? If your expertise isn’t design and you need help with creating operations and hopefully Orgasmic Operations ™ at that to run your business more efficiently. Then you are not the expert, right? Because you are an expert at design or if you’re like a visionary type of person with big ideas and big picture ideas. And what forward-thinking things you want t, implement into your business down the line. And you know, the operations are not your thing, even though they’re needed. You’re also not the expert.
And I know it sounds really obvious when I say this, but here it goes anyways, when you’re not an expert, that’s when you need to hire a person who’s an expert in the subject matter that you need to hire for. Because if you don’t, it’s like the blindfolded leading the blindfolded. I don’t know what I don’t know. And it’s like saying if my expertise is operations of what I need help with is marketing. And I know nothing about bringing on a virtual assistant or a marketing assistant, isn’t going to help me. They are going to be looking to me for directions. They are going to be looking to me for guidance and I’m not going to be able to help them really well because I don’t know marketing. Right. I know operations, I don’t know marketing.
So the best thing I can do is hire someone who knows marketing and won’t have to depend on me for guidance. If anything, I’ll be depending on them. Me and my team will be depending on them to give the strategy or the strategy and execution to make whatever it is we need to happen. And this is the trap. Many business experts say that your first hire needs to be an executive or a virtual assistant. And that may not be the best case for you. And I’m not saying that they’re right. I’m just asking you to do your own due diligence so that you truly understand what is it that you need to hire for without being biased because your favorite entrepreneur said to do X, Y, Z, that you need to hire a VA first.
It may be that you need to hire an expert first so that when you hire your assistant or help, it’s going to make things so much more smooth. So let’s take the design agency as an example. If your goal is to bring on designers so that you can offload work to them and you don’t have to be doing all the client work because you want to step into more of like the CEO creative director role, you don’t want to bring them into your chaos. So if you don’t have any good systems set-up to onboard them, to make sure that they know what they’re doing, and to make sure that they can actually execute the work that you want them to execute to your standards and that you can trust them to do that. That requires having good onboarding training and just overall project management and delegation systems ready to go. Because if you don’t and you bring them into your chaos, it’s like, you’ve hired them. You’ve onboarded them -ish. And now it feels like instead of them helping you, you’re like a glorified babysitter who has to maybe follow-up with them too much, or you have to redo the work that they do.
So a good way to mitigate that, and what our clients have done, is they know that they’re ready to hire an operations person, or operations manager, an assistant, whatever it may be, or another designer, but they hire us to make sure that their systems and operations are sorted and good so that when we bring in the new team member, everything feels really smooth and well lubricated.
So generally for me, it’s when something is broke or not working and you don’t know how or have the time to fix it, hire an expert. When you personally don’t have the time to learn a skill and just need someone to get it done, hire an expert. Or when you and your team want to learn a new skill and want the best teacher possible hire an expert.
And when I say teacher that can show up in different ways, like for instance, in Business Laid Bare we have two ways in which we can work with our clients after the backend assessment. We could do it all for you by creating the operation strategy and framework and also implement it. That’s the done for you. Or, we can take a more teaching route where we work with our client’s operations team or point person and let them execute the strategy we come up with so that they can be hands-on to get the experience and to learn how we think and strategize and to also learn best practices from us. So it’s like a teacher slash mentor role as well.
So if you’re hiring an expert, do yourself a favor and create systems and document processes that make their time with you invaluable. Whether it’s asking them to show you how they do something with a quick loom video, or if they give you templates and swipe files to make doing the thing they were hired to do easier store them in an easily accessible place.
Or if you’re hiring a marketing expert to get you more leads, do everyone a favor by creating an awesome client onboarding system so that your leads can actually become clients with ease. And that all the work the marketing expert did wasn’t wasted because you hit capacity too soon, or didn’t know how to handle an influx of demand. And like the majority of the leads that the marketing person got for you ended up. like just going somewhere else. Or saying they didn’t want it because it took too long or that you just had no demand or that you had no capacity to bring on a hundred percent of the leads and only could do like a fraction of it.
And then on the flip side, let’s talk about hiring help. If we go back to the design agency’s example, if the pain point or goals you’re trying to solve can be done by adding another designer than what you’re hiring for is help because you are the expert in this matter.
Or you’re doing too many admin-related things that’s taking away from doing what you need to do hiring help in the form of an assistant makes a lot of sense, because technically you could do it if you had more time. If you had more time, you could do more design work. If you had more time, you could do more admin work. Pretty much you are the expert and could do it if time wasn’t an issue.
And yes, it’s totally okay that the help you hire is an expert in their field. Yeah. Let me repeat that. It’s totally okay and encouraged that the help you hire is an expert in their field. You want to hire people who are awesome at what they do. My goal is always to try to hire people who are better than me, because that’s just who I am.
Like. For instance, I brought on my operation strategist, Terri to help me execute client work because I was getting buried. So, because I was already an expert in operations I just needed help doing more of what I was doing without burning out. I love that she’s an expert at what she does, because it means that I a hundred percent trust her to do excellent work, meet and work with our clients, run with my and her ideas, and also help improve Business Laid Bare’s operations as well. And I also have my assistant Mekaila, who is in the help category, because she helps me execute things on the backend that while I could do isn’t the best use of my time. And I also trust Mekaila to do amazing work as well.
She also helps out Terri as well when needed. And I feel like we all three work and communicate together really well. Ultimately, I don’t feel like a glorified babysitter and I don’t want that for you either. I love that if I tell my team, I need something done, It gets done. Or it gets done without me even having to ask because there are good processes in place and there are good systems and procedures that everybody could follow and improve upon.
So, create systems for whatever you need your assistant to execute so they do it well and do it consistently. So, if you hire somebody to handle social media posting, create a system for that. Give them all they need to succeed. And if you’re like, what’s the system again. Our definition is the collection of people, processes, and tools working together to achieve a specific result or goal repeatedly.
So if we go back to social media posting, like write down the tools and apps that you use. Write down the process from A to Z of how a post gets created and scheduled. Or record a Loom video. Record a video and have your assistant turn it into a checklist later, but create something so that things get done the way you want to.
And put this all somewhere that everyone can easily access it if they need because your social media assistant could leave. Or you can bring on two more social media assistants to help your current social media assistant. So you don’t have to become a broken record and keep training them if that process is already there and you can empower your first social media assistant to train the new ones so that it’s not all on you whether or not your business succeeds or not, and you get to do what you do best.
So there you have it. I’ve been wanting to create this episode for a while because, as a digital operations agency, our first and most important pillar is people. And when you get your people in the right areas, executing in their zones of genius while leveraging good systems and processes, business feels so pleasurable and delicious, and the pressure is off of you.
You get to breathe. You get to relax and I can’t stress that enough for how important it is for you to take care of yourself so you can take care of your business and your team. And if after listening to this episode, operations are on your mind and you need an expert like Business Laid Bare to give you a roadmap of what systems you need to implement in prioritized order you can book a call at www.businesslaidbare.com/consult.
And finally, thank you to our friends at Boxx Bar for sponsoring this episode. Toys, clothes, and jewelry for all women with a hint of kink. Yes, please! Go to www.BoxxBar.com .
I’ll see you all in the next episode. Thank you.
Thanks for listening to The Business Whip, hosted by yours, truly Veronica Yanhs CEO, and founder of Business Laid Bare. If you enjoyed this episode, spank that subscribe button in whichever podcast app you’re listening in and share this with your friends.
Your support means everything. So thank you from the bottom of my butt, because let’s be real. It’s so much bigger than my heart. I’ll see you in the next episode.
