Go And Grow! Hiring Successfully In A Coaching Business

I’m a huge advocate of creating a support system so that you can “have it all” in your life…

BUT you need to make sure that the support system is adequately supported, or else you might find yourself in a worse situation.

Hiring creates expense, both in time management and expenses - hiring is often positioned as the solution, but it’s an incomplete solution if you don’t have the processes and planning in place to make sure you are making:

- The correct hires

- The correct role definitions

- The correct budgeting to support paying the roles

Often it’s the feelings and emotions that lead to emotional decisions, without the strategic decision-making and processes. 

For my consciousness-based coaches out there, think of it as balancing the masculine and the feminine…

For my science and business-minded coaches - think of it as balancing the structure and the flow of the business.

Listen to the episode to get one of the biggest lessons in my business when it came to getting quality team support.

Come learn more in this week’s episode of The Coach’s Plaza Show.

Join the CEO Coach Community at The Coach’s Plaza at www.thecoachesplaza.com 

Get the full vlog, transcript, and mp3 at https://bit.ly/3Mcb7li 

Go And Grow! Hiring Successfully In A Coaching Business

Transcript of Podcast - May 13, 2022

Yeah, Amanda here. And it's been another week. I hope you are having a amazing one. Let's get into it. So it's really early on a Friday and I had another week where we did so much, we've got our team growing and we've been really very intentional in the coaches Plaza about our growth because so many company is when they are growing.

They are not paying attention to a few cue, cue, cue, key factors when they're growing their business. And I thought I would talk a little bit about when you're wanting to build a coaching business, like what matters when you want to go and grow, because I have unsuccessfully grown my company a couple of times, and here's a couple of the mistakes I made.

The thing that really got me in the first couple of attempts to grow my company was I felt so much emotional overwhelm. And I mean, just like raw emotion, baby, you know, like the anxiety, the depression that came from anxiety of just feeling like I couldn't do this. I'm just being real with you. You know, a few years ago I had,

I had so much opportunity. I saw so many people that would benefit from my coaching. I knew I could do it. I knew I was smart enough. I knew I had the coaching, the training, the mentorship. I had people all around me saying, you can do it. I even had like, you know, mentors that then, you know,

gurus that I really respected looking me dead in the eye saying like, you've got the staff, you can do this. And you know, I had the proof in the pudding even of, you know, clients that were paying me really, really well, but I still have like the feelings, the feelings that what if it doesn't work. And I love the quote that wherever you go there you are,

you know, such a, such a good quote, because I think one of the things that no matter what you do or tactically, how you do things, your identity and your thought patterns can still has sabotage your intentions and where you want to go with your business and your life and your company. So I still had like that imposter syndrome, that anxiety,

that like everything was still going to fall away, even though I was still circumstantially succeeding. So with all of this going on, I shared this with some of my mentors and they said, well, you know, what you need to do is you need to get a virtual assistant. You need to get some help. And I think that that was actually reasonable advice,

but it was incomplete advice. I think that it's a good idea to have support system in your life. I'm a huge advocate for support system. I've got kids, I've got, you know, my husband, we've got the house, we've got everything. I think you can have it all in your life. But I think the way that you get to have it all is by creating the support system to enable you to have it all.

And so I'm a huge, huge advocate of creating support system, but building a support system without knowing how that support system is supported is really where that was an incomplete piece of advice. I basically was like, cool, I'm just going to hire like a full-time virtual assistant. And then I hired a part-time virtual assistant. So I had a full-time virtual assistant who was based in India.

And I had a part-time virtual assistant who was based domestically. And the reason for those two hires was one was like lower costs, but had language barriers, the other was higher costs domestically located didn't have the language barriers. So could do like copywriting and things like that seemed like a good idea at the time, but it actually added a whole bunch of stress because you know what I didn't do,

I didn't think through what the roles would be for those virtual assistants. And I didn't think through what exactly was I going to have these virtual assistants take care of? And what I created was actually more of a problem. I ended up putting more of a to-do list of now I've got to manage these people on top of the existing, overwhelming to do list of what I was already doing in my business.

And now I had more of a problem because now I had to create more revenue. I had to create more business and I create more to do list and manage the people on top of all of this. So this created a pressure point situation in my business that my business almost failed in that period of time. And I went from being so stressed to mega stressed,

and I see it all the time. I see, I see people hiring team. I see people hiring, you know, agencies. I see people hiring coaches sometimes at work, getting into program sometimes thinking, oh, this is going to save me. This is going to get me out of the feeling and the identity that I've had of being overwhelmed by what it is that I'm trying to accomplish and do.

And really what's going on dressed is your ownership over the situation and being the general, being the Admiral of the fleet, being the one that says this is where we're going, being the captain of your fate. So what I learned from that experience is ironically enough, something that I should have known because I was actually an organization design consultant for big companies.

But for some reason, when I went from doing all that org design stuff for the big companies, when I was a consultant, I just like, for some reason thought that it didn't apply to me when I was a small business owner. It does. It totally does. And when you do for a big company, the way we did it is we said,

Hey, what are the roles? And what are the processes that need to get completed here? And you hire people into roles to execute processes. So it's not bad that I hired virtual assistants. What was bad was that I didn't know the role that they were going to execute for me. And I wasn't clear about what was the workload that was going to come off of my plate when I hired those people into my world.

And how was that workload going to generate more revenue for the company or free my time that I could generate more revenue for the company? The other thing that was really, I think, challenging was at the time I was a purely private coach. So every time I made a sale, it tied up a lot of time and I didn't have systems set up for follow up,

follow through. I didn't have like a smart system set up for how I was managing my private client load. So I'm a big advocate for having group programs and using video curriculums and smart systems for delivering your programs. But even so, even if I had stayed as a private coach, I wasn't being about delegating, for example, the scheduling processes or delegating,

for example, the follow-up processes or automation or the marketing, or, you know, the, the back office processes. I hadn't standardized and built standard operating procedures that I could delegate down to a virtual assistant, what needed to happen. So looking back, it wasn't so much that I hired virtual assistants. That was the problem. It was that I wasn't owning what those activities were that I could package those things up,

that I could have a very clear definition of what those activities specifically were and what the value of those activities were. That when I looked at the compensation that I was paying out as an expense to those virtual assistants, that I was like, oh man, you know what I'm paying them is a fraction of the benefit of the work that those, that,

that those individuals were doing for the overall business, because then I can turn around and I can generate so much revenue by having clients coming in because I'm spending so much more time on the marketing and the sales for acquiring clients that in retrospect would have been a much smarter way to handle the whole hiring of the same situation. Right. So that's how I would have done it.

So nowadays, when I go about doing hiring, I think about it completely differently. I think about what are the activities that occur in the business and how much time do those activities take and what is the value of those activities to the bottom line of the business? So there are three categories of the activities, and we look at the fulfillment, we look at the sales,

we look at the marketing and those, and then of course we have the operations of all of those different things. And so when we're paying out payroll and we're thinking about the expenses and all of those different things, now, when we go to do hiring decisions or we're investing in technology, or we're making really any kind of investment we're looking at, how does that help the company to attract clients or create better value for the clients that we have that we're going to either retain clients have a better reputation with our clients,

or, you know, create referral business from clients or retain clients that they're sending up to, you know, other products that we have, or just do a really excellent job that we're building reputation in the, in the marketplace like that, that's the lens now when we're doing hiring. So now that we're hiring team and we're bringing team members in nowadays,

that's like completely changed our relationship with hiring because it means too that when we go to do recruiting or we're doing interviews, we're not just looking at like a warm body coming into the coach's Plaza. We're looking at what's the culture fit of this person. That's going to be working. How are they going to be representing our brand and how are they going to fit in with the team?

And are they growth minded like everybody else on the team? Are they also really excited about the mission of the company? Are they really excited about creating success for the community at large, at the coaches Plaza and the clients? And so like the whole mindset of it goes from being like the scarcity place that I had a few years ago, where it was like,

I'm dying here and I need help. And I've got to hire people, went from that scarcity mindset to this abundance mindset of, wow, we're building something amazing here. And is this person who's going to be joining the team? Are they as stoked and is excited about building this thing and being a part of a team that's building this thing and fulfilling this particular role to build this thing as we are.

And if the answer is a heck, yes, then they're joining the team, right. If, if we're going through the interview process and we're getting the sense that it's like just another pain check or it's not, you know, it's not something that's really making sense as a good synergistic kind of stepping stone, then, you know, it might not be the best fit and that's okay.

Right. So anyway, I hope this is like a helpful conversation. And maybe you're at a point in your business where you're not hiring yet. I hope this is still helpful conversation to just like, think about your hiring in the future. Or maybe you're going to put hiring, you know, off for a second, or you might just hire out a job at a time instead of bringing on somebody that is going to be working with you full time.

Or if you are hiring, maybe this is a conversation that is helpful for thinking about how you might want to approach it. This is what I'm thinking about. And I hope you really enjoyed this week's blog. We'll see you later.