In this blog post, I’m going to talk about how to hire a VA or a staff team member to deliver marketing funnel work for you to your customers.
You’ve hired in the past and it was a disaster
If you’re looking to start hiring a team or maybe you’ve hired in the past and it was an absolute disaster, I know how you feel.
I’m going to show you my process for hiring people to deliver marketing work to your customers so you’re freed up to focus on sales and partnership building and kind of the strategic and bigger vision of the business while other people deliver the work to the customer.
In order to scale you need to get someone or something to do the work
One of the big problems that a lot of agencies and funnel builders face, that I actually address in my first book from single to scale is that in order to scale, you need to get someone or something else to deliver the work to the client.
I’m not saying it’s easy and I know a lot of funnel builders struggle with this but you have to get someone to give the work over and deliver the operations to the customer in order to free you up to focus on sales, marketing, admin, and the biggest strategic vision for the business.
Hiring cheap
A lot of funnel builders make the mistake of hiring cheap. That’s not to say that you can’t find people who are affordable to do good work for you. But the reality is if you’re looking to deliver a specific service to a customer, it’s not hiring cheap, that’s going to make it.
It’s not hiring cheap that’s the right route to go down. It’s actually making sure that you’ve invested loads of time and effort into the process that you’re going to be outsourcing.
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Have a process
Before you hire anyone, you need to have a process. You need to have documented outcomes and results that you want them to achieve.
Now, in my book, I actually talk about writing out list by list and item by item those tasks.
That’s actually quite a good idea to start with. I don’t think you need to go into the individual steps. In fact, you can actually get someone to do that for you.
What I mean by this is if you want to hire someone to deliver marketing funnels to your customers, which means that you sell the marketing funnel to the customer, and then someone else delivers the work.
Maybe a designer, developer, a marketer, a WordPress power user, another funnel, builder, a VA, whatever. You need to have a specific outcome that you want them to achieve.
That outcome is probably going to be tied to the proposal but you’re also going to have a set way of doing it. Make sure that they have a list of tasks that they’re going to accomplish
The more time you spend thinking about “how do I want someone to do this”, that’s how you know that you’re going to take an enormous weight of the unpredictability off their shoulders and off your shoulders and landing it in the area of following that process.
If you don’t have a written document of what you deliver to the client, I suggest to get writing one.
Even better as I mentioned, you can actually get someone else to do it for you but you need to get really specific about the types of outcomes you want that person to achieve.
It’s not enough to say “I’m going to hire someone to build marketing funnels so the outcome is they build a marketing funnel”.
How quickly do they build it? What do you get out of it? Do you not need to check it or does it mean that you’re going to be allowed to go off and do your core function?
Why are you hiring someone else? How do they know that they’re going to be successful? That’s what I want you to think about in terms of outcomes, is asking the question, how does this person know if they’re going to be successful?
If you’re not explicit and if you don’t know how they’re going to be successful, they don’t know how they’re going to be successful.
Spend time to hire the right person
You need to spend time hiring the right person.
Hiring is a bit like selling. You’re probably going to need to start with a big pool of leads first and work your way through eliminating people by their skills, by their values, by how they communicate.
Be clear about who you want to hire, the types of values that you want, the types of skills that you want.
For example, I’m not very detail orientated, which is why I hire detail orientated people. I’m not interested in hiring big strategic visionaries at the moment because we don’t need them within the business.
What we need is specificity. People who are detail orientated and love that kind of stuff.
I pay less attention to CVS and more attention to how well we’d work together.
One of my favorite questions to ask is, ” If you had to give three pieces of advice to a younger version of yourself, what would that advice be?”. That tells you a lot about their values.
A lot of younger guys who come into my business they say, “It’s about the grind. It’s about working hard. It’s about focusing on what’s right and health and fitness.”
Anyone over the age of 30, they’re typically more focused around long-term health and family and understanding that the real things that are important.
In a funny way, I’d rather hire based on what advice they’d give someone because it tells you about what their values are.
For example, if I hire someone, I want them to be detail orientated. I’ll ask them, “What type of advice would you give someone in this role? What type of advice would you give someone who’s looking to take this job role?”
That’s a really interesting question and they say, “You absolutely categorically need to make sure that the details are in place and make sure that nothing gets sent out until it’s a hundred percent complete.”
Now that goes against one of my core principles of just publish it and we’ll figure it out later.
Take action and change it later but it is an extremely useful value for someone who’s going to be doing very detailed orientated work.
Therefore, spend time hiring the right person and asking them a lot of questions.
Hire by the hour/day
You also don’t necessarily have to hire like immediately a full-time member of staff. You can hire by the day and by the hour.
Now, in fact, there’s a lot of jobs that suit people who are only looking to work part-time or work certain days, you don’t need to go full time from day one.
List out the tasks that you need to get done and start dividing them into daily, weekly monthly, quarterly, yearly, and triggered tasks.
Use that as a template for hiring against and people will say “I could do all of this within a day.”
As that list grows, maybe expand your team or expand their hours. You don’t need to go full time from day one.
If you have a stop list of tasks that you want other people to do you’ll find that you don’t need to hire full time.
Eventually, that person’s role grows with the role of the company.
Lots and lots of trainings
One of the last pieces here is you’re going to spend time and you have to spend time training people.
You have to spend time training people on your processes, your methods, your tasks, your business, your values, your customers.
I’ve talked about this in previous videos about hiring anyone is all about communications. The more open and communicative you are about the work, the better job your team will do.
Something that I learned really valuably last year and this year is the more I have communicated with my team and the more I have shared with them, the better that they have done.
They’ve able to take ideas and run with them. It also means they’re actually able to think outside of their job.
In a funny way, because I tell them more about here’s what’s happening with the landscape, here’s what’s happening with our campaigns and our plans, the more I’ve given them about what’s in my brain and in my head and out there and what I wants to be happening, the better they’ve done.
You’re going to have to spend an enormous amount of time training people. Training every single day probably for three to six months.
That’s not because they’re incompetent, it’s because people need time to ramp up to the job that they’re capable of doing.
If you haven’t got a list of resources they have access to like ideas, your company values, your objectives, your mission statements, your strategies, your plans and all of this stuff going forward, if you haven’t got that, how do you expect them to pick that kind of stuff up and run with it?
Even people who are doing small daily infrequent tasks need this level of communication from you in order for them to feel like they’re growing alongside the business.
The more you invest in them as people, the more of a return you’ll get back.
Start small and work up
List out the basics and work from there.
I have a stop list which is basically anything that isn’t creating content that I’m doing.
Anything else that’s not creating content, I write down and we see if we can find someone in the team to do it or hire someone else to do it.
Start with admin, repeatable tasks, and the simple things that can get done then scale it up from there. Hosting, set up emails, this kind of stuff.
These types of tasks take time and yes, the first two or three times it would be faster for you to do it, but you’re investing in someone and what you want them to do is to take it and run with it.
I have found every single time I’ve thought this will be faster for me to do it. It means I haven’t really thought about what the training process is so I’ve gone on Loom, I’ve recorded myself, I’ve sent it over.
The first few times it’s a bit shaky and then bit by bit, they’ve got better at it. Now, in many of the cases, they are better at delivering some of those tasks than I am.
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