Building a team to help reduce the workload?

I was having a conversation last week and someone said this to me during the conversation.

Doing this alone is becoming overwhelming, I want to build a team to help reduce the workload. Any advice for me?

As your business is growing, you will realize that you can no longer do everything yourself as you used to and that is because you either no longer enjoy doing those small works or you have clients to deliver results for or your clientele has grown and you need more hands. 

Whichever the case may be, here’s my advice for you. 

In building your team, you need to first ask yourself to understand the areas you need a team for and in what capacity you currently operate. 

1. Are you looking to build a team that will work on your business operations and marketing?
2. Are you looking to build a team that will deliver on clients’ work and results?

This is the first thing you need to be clear on before you decide to build a team

With this clarity, you can know how and where to look and the approach to follow. 

Building a team for your brand 

Before you start to search, you need to be super clear on what you need to take off your plate 

Exercise

Step 1 – Write down everything you do in your business, day-to-day activities, and everything else that helps your business function properly.

Step 2 – rule out the ones no one can do for you

E. G. – as a coach, no one can go on coaching calls with my clients, that’s a job only I can do at least for now.

Step 3 – Highlight the task you shouldn’t be doing because they take your time or you don’t enjoy doing

E. G. – for me, design takes my time and I don’t enjoy doing it, so I will highlight that

Step 4 – Now from the highlights, aetheric the ones that are not an integral part of your business and that you can outsource without necessarily hiring full-time.

E.G. – promotional video editing is something I need once in a while so I outsource it and pay based on the number of videos.

Now you’re left with those parts that you need and are an integral part of your business. Meaning you need a full-time hire (remote or on-site). 

Step 5 – create different roles from these needs and see how you can give names to the roles with clearly defined job descriptions 

Step 6 – Look for the right people to hire (more on that soon)

Building a team to work on client brands

This is a little different and tricky and it also depends on how often you get clients.  

If you’re a coach/service business who does different things for different clients you can consider hiring a team for each client (like a client manager). 

Alternatively, you could build a team of different talents focused on working solely on your clientele’s results 

Again, you will need to be clear on what area you need help with here so that you can find the right people. 

If you’re a media agency for example and you want to hire more media buyers to help you set up campaigns for clients, you still need to break down your process of  setting up campaigns for clients and see the areas you need help with

E.G. – the ad creative process, campaign funnel process, audience creating process, pixel and other setup processes, campaign setup process, campaign optimization process, etc. 

Let’s say Optimization might be your bread and butter and where you cannot outsource, so this will be something you do yourself. 

Now, you need to now look at the other areas to create roles and have detailed JDs and with this, you will be able to hire people with different strengths in your team instead of just saying you are looking for media buyers 

You will have a mix of creative people who can write ad copies really well, ones who can come up with video script ideas, ones who are good at audience setup, and so on

With this mix, you can solidify your team. 

If you are not at the capacity to have a full hire yet because you’re not always getting clients, you can still build a team by partnering instead of hiring. 

So, highlight and identify the areas you need to fill and look for other solopreneurs or freelancers that you can bring on board and whenever you have lots of work to do, you can outsource to them or when you get a job that requires something you don’t do but comes as a compliment to what you do, you can charge clients for it and be the person who takes up the job but you outsource that part to your partner (you both must have agreed on a term or fee that’s beneficial to both parties). 

After outlining all of these, your next step is hiring/partnering and onboarding.

Want me to share some tips in the hiring/partner and onboarding process that will help you build your dream team?

Tell me in the comments below.  

P. S. – If you need my help deciding what roles to hire for? You can book a Clutter to Clarity Session with me let’s see how we can work together on this.