Business
My company has produced 15 retreats so far, over 140 courses and counting and countless emails and live streams in multiple niches and brands and helped people come out with their book or podcast as well.A recent retreat has had me hire a local assistant, two performers, a personal chef and catering from my favorite Greek restaurant (best falafels ever), field-trip restaurants have been picked out (I love researching where to eat), renting an event space, booking transportation, and much more.And an expert that puts on the event and writes all the copy and speaking.It's literally impossible for me to do all that. I have to have a team to make it happen.And that's been one of the biggest items to my success, hiring people.When you first start your business, yes it can just be you, but you need a team to leverage your business.The faster you can do this the better.A successful real business is a team that gets things done. No matter how messy it is and making it less messy as the team gets better at it.I've used multiple systems to help my team gets things done and the tools I loved weren't necessarily the ones that I could get multiple people to use in my team.Right now my workflow stack is Slack a team communication tool and Google apps Gmail, google calendar and google drive.I personally use Trello an effective project management tool, as I love it, but my team doesn't use it. I use it to track what I should work on and then when I have something sharable with the team I just tell them the file in Slack in the appropriate channel so they can work on it.My team members are given assignments and most have a written procedure or a video walkthrough.Let's go over an example.So when I finish a podcast episode I give my podcast editor the audio file in Slack and he turns it into a broadcast-able episode and loads it up on the Internet.Another team member creates a marketing graphic for it because she does all my graphics (she's good) we also have a template we use so she just needs the episode title to do that.Then I have it posted. I actually do this until I am comfortable with it and then I have a team member help me with it.I'll write up the copy for the social media posts, groups and forums to put it. Plus email copy for the appropriate list.I put it all into one Google Document and share it with the team.The more often you do it the fewer questions there are, the better my google document template is, and the more I can focus on strategy and less on the technical details of getting it all out there.In the last month, I've had several of my past consulting clients contact me about hiring their first assistant.Hence why this episode.If you have this question then your business is probably making money and you're really busy and can't do everything done.Congratulations.It's a great sign that you're successful.You need help to leverage your time.I found when I hired my first assistant back in 2000 that a right-hand person assistant was really helpful. I could think much clearer and everything got easier.That along with the best accountant you can afford (even if that is H&R Block) is your essential base team and you can add additional team members that specialize on certain things as you grow.I took my hiring process I've defined since I first hired my first assistant back in 2000 and put it into a mini-course with a mini price up at my company's store. shop.blisslifepress.comIt's a mini-course that will take you about an hour to complete.It includes the job description I used to hire my current assistant. I used it and posted it on Upwork.com. You can have your job post up in less than an hour.I explain in the mini-course how I screen people and then try two or more out and see by actually doing a small project with them and picking out the best person for continuing to work on additional projects.With my past assistants I found out that slowly over maybe three months, they went from part-time work to full-time with vacation days and regular work hours.The right person will be obvious when you go thru this step by step.I also have a procedure template that is the key to making sure your assistant focuses on getting work done.I will literally say "Here is the audio and run so-and-so procedure on it. Let me know when you've finished".I will double check quality for the first few times to make sure it's all good and then over time I will just trust my team and have them publish it.I have a new additional assistant that came in this morning and worked for 33 minutes and then left for the day as that is all I have him doing is one particular procedure. I have plans for additional procedures for him.If you don't have an assistant yet then you'll want to grab my mini-course over at shop.blisslifepress.com--Again thank you so much for joining BlissLife Business show where I share what has worked for me and my fellow lifestyle entrepreneurs.Today's homework is for you to get my hiring your team mini-course at shop.blisslifepress.com (link is in the show notes) and put your job posting up today.It's super actionable and you'll be up and running in about an hour.Don't get hung up on whether you can afford it as you can have someone do an hour of work a day. It'll cost you about five bucks a day minimum. And you can increase that as business requires.Write another procedure and then they have two things to work on. Next thing you know they are full-time getting a ton of things done.Then you just have to refine and tweak as you go.Until next time have a wonderful week.SUBSCRIBE TO PODCASTPodcast Feed | How To SubscribeToday's SponsorThis show is supported by BlissLife Press. Your transformational self-development publisher. Hire BlissLife Press to publish your next book, podcast, author website or your own info-product. Come join the BlissLife Press family of authors and experts and get your voice out there.