When Should I Hire As A Coach?

As a business owner, you wear many hats. But at some point, you may need to bring in help to wear some of those other hats. When is the right time to hire a coach? Here are a few things to consider…

• What are you already doing well, trained at, and good at, that you can do easily without having to learn a new skill?
• What’s your start-up budget like, and how much cashflow does your business have available to affordably invest in support? If you say “I have NOTHING”, then it’s time for a big reality check - no business has nothing, there’s always opportunities for reducing expenses somewhere and finding revenue somewhere else!
• Start small and grow steady with clearly defined investment of support - it would be nice if you could hire out everything all at once, but as we discuss in this episode, part of the puzzle of business ownership is deciding where to allocate your resources!

Join this week to hear what we focused on first, and why, and what we’d do differently if we started all over again.
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/3xQpUMx 

When Should I Hire As A Coach?

Transcript of Podcast - June 24, 2022

Hey, Amanda here and welcome to my weekly blog this week. I wanted to talk to you about when is the right time to hire people for your coaching business and what should you hire first, second, third. How do you do all of that amazingness? So hiring in your coaching business is a kind of smaller decision than I thought it was when I very first started.

But I have to tell you that it's maybe something that you shouldn't take lightly because you are going to be on the hook for some expenses, but it can also save you a tremendous amount of anxiety, a tremendous amount of time, and it can lead to enhancing the bottom line of your business, which is of course, the profit of your business. Often when I'm saying profit,

a lot of people get a lot of anxiety because they're like, does that make me a money? Grubber? No profit is just the measure of whether your business is performing. Optimally profit is something that you want to make sure that you have in your business. And I know when I was very first starting out my business, I was treating profit like this mystery number or like this number that I needed to make as big as possible.

And the truth is is that you want to have a healthy amount of profit. One of my favorite books on this subject is profit first by Mike McKelway. And it is a really good general primer on the subject. I recommend that you read the book and listen to it on audio at the same time, because he does a really good job of talking about what profit actually means and how to have a really positive attitude towards it as a business owner,

no matter what kind of business you run. Okay. So when it comes to bringing up profitable business, which is a good thing, cause it just means that your business is healthy. I think that there is a very broad way of thinking about hiring that has helped me in the longterm of running my business. The, when I very first thought about hiring,

I thought that I had to like hire a full-time employee for everything in my business. And that kind of freaked me out. And it probably should. That's like a healthy reaction because it's a big responsibility to bring on an a full-time employee, but you can hire on services. You can hire on contractors, you can hire on what I call micro outsourcing,

where you have specific jobs or that you get another company to take on. And those kinds of jobs, yes, they cost money, but it's worth it because you can trust a specialist to take care of those activities so that you can do what you do best as a coach. So how do you know what you should hire out and outsource and what are the things that you should keep for yourself?

Well, again, my attitude, when I was starting, my business was like, I need to save every single penny. I should definitely learn how to do everything all by myself because I w I should, I should save like all of it. And the thing is I wasted so much time. Time is the most precious commodity that you have. And already as a coach,

you are spending time. You're spending time with people in your programs, even if you are delivering a course or a hybrid program like we do in the coaches Plaza, where you are doing, you know, a curriculum-based program. And then you have support model where you are doing, you know, coaching calls and you're answering questions. There's still, it's a time intensive type of a business.

So if I'm spending time in doing bookkeeping or I'm spending time in, you know, things that I should be getting a lawyer to do that doesn't make a lot of sense. So think about, is this something that would benefit from having an expert do this thing and also think about how does it minimize or reduce risk in your business? Something like having bookkeeping done that is going to be compliant is going to be in your best interest for filing your taxes appropriately.

It makes sense to have an expert do it, and even spending a few extra dollars to have someone who really knows what they're doing is a good idea, because it can save you so much in the longer term, finally, you know, spending money on my education and my mentorship and training has been such a very smart move for me personally, because I have learned so much about how to run my business in a way that gives me peace,

how to make decisions that are going to have a longer term positive benefit for my self, for my family, for my business, for my clients. And it really took me making positive decisions about that investment. So hiring people that I trust, hiring people that are creating community around me, that is where the positive was a really good move for me.

I know a lot of people are hesitant to do that. And I know I was in the beginning as well. I was like, I can Google that, but information is not transformation. And so when it came to hiring people, me to really support me in my support system, that was another investment that I made that I consider to be part of the sourcing of,

of support system and, you know, team that I have around. What about team members that you're bossing around? What kind of hiring should you do there? Well, that's a really great question and that's going to be unique to every business and you are the boss. So you're going to have to make the right design decision for you. I would say for most coaching consulting and,

and high ticket businesses, one of the first hires that can make the most sense is going to be a virtual assistant, simply because they can help you with things like scheduling emails with managing your time and calendar scheduling, social media posts, handling the recordings for your programs and your clients, and kind of taking the burden of a lot of those tasks that need to be done,

but are, you know, low, low difficulty tasks, high repetition tasks, and a virtual assistant. Typically you can get them to, to agree to do those tasks for relatively low cost because of the high repetition nature of those tasks. And they're happy to do it because they want like a high operation task and it's for a relatively low, low cost to you with a high time return benefit.

Now, one of the biggest mistakes that people make when they're hiring virtual assistants is that they don't have processes defined for their business and they don't have the tasks defined and they don't have standard operating procedures defined for that. For that role, I made this mistake. I hired not one but two virtual assistants thinking that it was going to save me a whole lot of time and energy in my business.

But what I ended up doing was creating roles in the business that I had to manage. I felt really embarrassed and ashamed that I had hired people that I really was under utilizing, and then I had to pay for it. So then it ended up adding a whole bunch of hustle to my, to my requirements for my business. And so I ended up really stressed out,

trying to support these hires when I really needed to just solo my role, slow down and go, wait, what are the key activities? The key tasks that need to be completed for these roles to make sense about a virtual assistant is they very rarely are going to be a revenue generating role. So that means they're not likely to do things that are going to necessarily be making the business money.

They are going to save you time, which is going to help you to spend more time doing the things that make money in your business. Like if you could spend more time on high value activities, like doing things that are in front of a camera and doing things in front of your audience and doing the high value writing copy and, and w you know,

building your marketing campaigns and having sales conversations that turn into kind conversations. Those are things that you're very unlikely to be able to give to a virtual assistant and have them be able to do because they're more complex, complex tasks. And those are things that are likely to be still with you in the early stages of your business. So when can you get the marketing off your plate?

When can you get the sales off your plate? When can you just do the thing that you want to do, which is maybe your genius zone of coaching or writing your courses or your content, or doing the things that only you can do. And that is really the dream, isn't it. And for a lot of coaches, it's something that they just really want to do as soon as possible.

And what I'll tell you from my personal experience is that it is very, very challenging to get someone, to be able to love your stuff. Just as much as you do for a low price point, right? No, one's going to love your business the way you love your business. You need to be the one that really carries that mission forward.

And if you're paying a low amount of money to someone, they're going to do a low amount of effort towards the thing. So whether that's getting them to do the copywriting, to make the website for you to do the tasks, your low investment with them is going to be a low investment in return. So if you're looking to get somebody to run sales for you,

or to do marketing for you or to, to do branding for you, and you want to hire that out, but you want to keep all of the profit and revenue for yourself because you're doing it. You're the talent. I just want to do a reality check with you, right? To really get people, to run sales for you. They need to believe in your programming.

They need to believe in your mission. They need to be a part of your team. And it's my belief that your coaching, your program, your mission, what you're doing, the marketing and the sales and everything that you're doing in the business processes should be really an extension of all of that. All of it works together. So those additional roles are not just going to come in and rescue your time and rescue your ability,

rescue your ability to do those things. Rather think of it like you're building this, this larger machine in this entity, and you're bringing in people that are going to be a great match for the company culture, a great match for the mission and that they really want to drive this whole thing together. I almost think about those, the rowers in a boat,

and they're all rowing together for the same cause the same mission. And they're, they're wanting to do and build this thing together. And that's how I think is a better way to think about hiring. So if you are looking to bring on people that are going to do sales for you, then that's how you want to look at it. If you want somebody to come in and write one sales letter for you,

be prepared to pay that person quite a lot for that job. And if you're looking to have someone come in-house to be your copywriter, be prepared to pay them a reasonable salary for that. You're wanting to bring on people that are going to be an extension of your team and your mission. And so I would really think about when you're making those hires,

think about staging. It's such that you're going to do it in a revenue generating responsible way, and that it's going to be an extension of something that you've proven out as you're building it as a business. So I hope that this health, and obviously, you know, this is something that we work on on a very high level in our mastermind, the advantage mastermind,

and we help coaches do, if you're at all interested in that, just, you know, reply to the email that you received from us, or reach out to us through messenger. If you join us in our group, the coaches Plaza, we're very happy to have that conversation, but it's a conversation that people talk about a lot like, oh,

I just want to hire this out. I don't want to have to bother with doing the marketing or the sales. And I thought I would answer that question this week on the blog. I hope you have an amazing day and we'll see you soon. If you have found a lot of value in this show, be sure to check out our other episodes.

And you know, if you're finding a lot of value in this conversation about building a business in balance as a coach consultant and high ticket course trainer, be sure to refer a like-minded friend to the podcast, to the show and just spread the love. You know, we love helping coaches build a business. That's real. We'll see you soon.