Episode 198: It's Never Too Early to Think About Your Team

On today's episode of the podcast I talk about hiring a team and why it's never too early to think about hiring, even if you aren't ready.

I've previously spoken about hiring a team, for example when I interviewed Ashley Ebert on episode 178 of the podcast. While it may be too early to build a team, it is never too early to think and plan for that day. The first question is what that team will look like. It's not several full-time employees, it can be just one contractor, and those contractors can be broken down into two types of contractors - internal and external.

An internal contractor is someone I'm working with on a regular basis and I pay them monthly for an indefinite period of time. I have weekly meetings with them and treat them as a member of my team. I also have external contractors, which are contractors that I'm hiring on a project-basis such as redoing your website or setting up your Pinterest account. When we talk about building a team, we're talking about people we are working with on a regular basis.

In my second year of business is when I started listening to podcasts and diving into business books, but always disregarding the content on team building because I wasn't even making enough money to pay myself. I went on to join a mastermind and read the book "Traction" by Gino Wickman that talked about project management and team building for small businesses.

By paying attention to hiring and team building information, it got me in the frame of mind that I needed to be in to hire people and view my business as an asset. It helped me consider myself as a member of my own team inside the business, even if I was the only one, and not that I am the business.

Often people think they could hire someone to do something, but it would take too much time to train them to do it and you could just do it quicker. That's not a very scalable frame of mind. It may take you longer the first, second, or third time but as they get in the habit of doing things, it would be totally off your plate and you would save time in the long run.

In "Traction" it's recommended you go through each role and define what it is they do and the department they would fall under. When we think about building a team we think about what would fall under marketing, under operations (for example, client on-boarding, communications, editing, etc.), under the back-end and systems. Start thinking about what you don't like doing in your business and what you would do if you outsourced that and had more time to do what you really love doing in your business.

I'd love for you to screenshot today's episode of the podcast and share to your Instagram stories with what role you would hire first. Be sure to tag me @bradenadamdrake