Are You Ready To Hire Help?

Are you stuck in your business? Every week, I meet entrepreneurs that feel "stuck" in their businesses because nothing seems to happen without their time and effort.

In this week's video, I cover the topic of hiring help and some of the common objections I hear from entrepreneurs. I share three important metrics to help with making this important decision.

Transcription

Hi, it's Xavier Chang, Principal of XC Consulting.

It's my job to help entrepreneurs and executives streamline their operations and empower their teams.

And I do that with documentation, setting up processes and implementing new solutions and tools. Today we're back with another episode of Xcel with Xavier, and we're tackling this subject of, "are you ready to hire help?"

A lot of times when I'm talking to small business owners, executives, we come across this bridge where I ask them, "are you ready to hire help?" Are you ready to put somebody on your team to handle some of the administrative duties, to handle some of the mundane tasks that essentially you shouldn't be handling anymore?

Sometimes, I get pushback on the reasons why they can't do this. It can include, "I can do this myself," "it's too expensive." "If I were to hire help, what will I do?" And a lot of this is driven off of fear. As entrepreneurs, we are very, hands-on, do it yourself, figure it out, do it the cheapest way and the cheapest manner, possible.

But at some point, if you want to grow, you can't just do it by yourself. You really need a team. You need some help. Before we dig into each of these kind of push backs on an individual basis, I like to go through some of the numbers that you should be thinking about.

The first is time. How do you spend your time on a daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, yearly basis? You can break that out between sales and marketing, admin, getting new clients, nurturing relationships, whatever categories you want to create, you should know how you're spending your time.

There are simple time tracking tools that are out there that allow you to do that very easily. That would be the first thing.

Next, our financials. Next to some of the more obvious ones like revenue and expenses, think about your billable rate. What is your time actually worth? A lot of entrepreneurs don't know this number.

I typically would tell them, look at your revenue and divide that by your time. So that could be all of your time for the year. It could be things that are purely related to generating revenue. But have a billable rate in mind, know your worth and know, what you're trading off [for your time].

Next, related to that, is opportunity cost. If you could delegate some of the work, some of the admin work, maybe it's social media, maybe it's bookkeeping that could free you up to do other more interesting things that maybe generate more revenue.

Right? So that could be business development, that could be nurturing leads. Whatever that may be, think about the opportunity cost.

The last thing are other KPIs, marketing and sales. Know what those are and utilizing the tools that are out there, track these metrics. Know what those metrics are and how that plays into figuring out if you are ready to hire help.

All right. Let's go into some of these one by one and I'll give you some reasons why you should think about it a little bit differently.

"I won't have enough for him or her to do." This is one I hear quite often. The good thing is that you've got online marketplaces that allow you to hire folks, freelancers, contractors for fractional, part-time basis.We don't have to figure out everything from the get-go, this could be a short-term, part-time engagement. For example, you can start with five hours and then increase as you go.

"I can have my 17 year old son do that." As an entrepreneur, you want to get the family involved. You want to keep it in the family, keep it cheap. I remember when I was 17 and I don't know if I would hire my 17 year old self. I push you to think about that, as well.

"I can't trust someone else to do that." The good thing about delegation, you don't have to delegate everything out. If there's certain aspects of your business that you really don't feel comfortable delegating out, either if it's dealing with, secret sauce or proprietary information, you're dealing with sensitive information, maybe it's HIPAA or it's financial information, then don't, just delegate out what can be delegated out. You don't have to give them everything.

"That's too expensive." This is a big one. So once again, go back to that billable rate; know your billable rate. If your billable rate is a hundred or 200 or a thousand dollars an hour, is it really worth your time to do a task that you can delegate out for twenty-five dollars or 20 or $30 an hour?

"I can do it myself." At some point you can't, because if you want to scale, you want to grow, you can't do everything by yourself.

"I don't know where to start." Going back to the time tracking, you can see where you're spending a lot of your time, right? If it's an administrative things, if it's on bookkeeping, if it's on marketing, social media, there's ways to cut some of that work down. With freelance marketplaces, they're just something for everybody out there. "

If I hire help, what will I do?" This goes back to the point of the opportunity cost. If I free up five of your hours to do something, where will you spend that time? I would spend it on things that are value-add, revenue generating, as an entrepreneur myself. There will always be things to do or you can start your next business.

So, hopefully you thought this was helpful when you're ready to hire help or you're contemplating it. These are some of the things you might be thinking about. Know your numbers, run the numbers, and then start to tackle this a little bit more analytically, and then maybe that will help.

Thanks for watching.

Please subscribe to my channel and I will see you for the next one. Thanks so much.