You might not need a VA after all | GB59

In this episode, we discuss the crucial first steps in hiring and why starting in the wrong place can lead to problems. We explore the difference between what you want and what you actually need, and how to avoid wasting time and energy in the hiring process. Tune in to learn how to make smarter hiring decisions for your business.

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Good Business is hosted by Illana Burk, CEO of Illana Burk Consulting llc and strategic coach and advisor to entrepreneurs, creative leaders, and industry disruptors the world over.

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Transcript

0:41

All right, welcome back to the Good Business Podcast, everyone. Today we are talking about hiring. One of the things that comes up all the time as your business grows is how to deal with finding help for all the things. So today we're going to talk about the fundamental first steps as you approach the process, why most people tend to start in the completely wrong place, and how to proceed knowing what you're actually looking for. So that's what we're covering today. There's lots more facets to hiring and being a boss, and I'm going to be covering those at a later time. So we're just going to keep this tight to what are you actually looking for? And it might not actually be a VA. That's usually the first thing people look for, and it might not be that. So we're going to dig into that today. So generally, hiring questions first start to arise when we feel overwhelmed in some way. When we used to, it's like when you used to handle things with ease or you did them over and over again and pretty soon they just start to feel like too much. It doesn't even necessarily mean it takes up too much of your time. Sometimes it can just be ordinary resistance that arises from doing repetitive tasks of fuck a million times, right? Or it's when we know or think that there's something that we should be doing but haven't done yet. A lot of that looks a lot like I really should do something on some social media platform, or I really should get a YouTube channel, or I really should do xyz. So it, those two things tend to go hand in hand. I have some tasks, and I have some shoulds. And usually it's some amalgamation of all of those things. And that's the first problem. Because when we're buried, we tend to assume that we just need a shovel to dig ourselves out. We think that we need a great assistant who can solve all the things. Hence a shovel, right? Let's think of the assistant as a shovel. Sorry assistants out there, I hope you don't mind the comparison. We want somebody who will magically be able to dig us out with their magic multitasking shovel. That knows how to do absolutely fucking everything. But in reality, when you're buried, there's actually a lot more to consider before you grab a shovel. You might need water to hydrate before you start excavating yourself. You might need wood to shore up a tunnel. You might not even need a shovel at all. For example, if you're buried between, beneath a bunch of rocks, a shovel might not be the tool for you. So first you need to determine what you're buried under. Is it mundane, repeatable tasks? Is it a total lack of systems in place to support your work? Is it that you have absolutely no idea how to make your social media work better for you? Or maybe it's that you just want someone to take over your socials all together because you just have fucking had it with social media all together and you just think that hiring somebody for 20 bucks an hour is just going to solve all your problems. The problems arise when the answer to this very complicated set of questions is, I just need a great VA who can do all the things. There's several reasons why this is a problem. We're going to dig into each one. First, you're looking for more than one thing, and that's Totally unreasonable to expect of a VA to be amazing at all the things on your list. That's thing number one. Thing number two is if you only know what you want and not actually what you need, your expectations won't line up with what's possible and reasonable. So if you just want outcomes, if you're like, I just want to have a social media thingy and I just want my systems and I just want, right? But you don't actually know what your business really needs, then you're focused so much on the outcomes you want to get from somebody else that you've lost sight of the outcomes that you want in your business. So that usually means that you need something different. So the third problem is that someone who can do all of those things would be very, very expensive because they would have a ton of experience and a robust skill set. And typically, when you're hiring your first couple of people, you don't have an abundance of financial resources available to you, which would allow you to pay the hundred plus dollars an hour it would take to hire someone who can literally do all the things and has that level of expertise. Because chances are, most of the people that have that much expertise are teaching other people at that point, or they've sort of leveled up in their business, and they're not VAs anymore. So consider that as well. So when you, the fourth thing is that when you don't actually understand the realities of what you're looking for, you'll waste like mountains of time and energy searching and hiring and firing all the wrong people, and your narrative about the whole process will eventually become, it's just impossible to find a good VA. So what do you do instead? First, if any part, this is like the most important thing, so I'm going to like slow it down and make sure you're actually listening for this bit. So if you're like jogging right now, stop jogging for just like a second, okay? Because I just, if there's one thing I want people to really absorb from everything that I'm saying, it's this. If you, any part of your wish list includes words like advise, guide, show me how to, start a, right? If it. If any part of your wishlist starts with those words, or has those words included, you need an expert, not a VA, for those tasks. You're looking for the wrong thing. So you need to parse out what's on your plate that needs an expert for, and then what is on your plate that you legitimately need stuff for a VA for, right? VA tasks are the things that you already understand and know how to do. They're the ones that you know how long they take, you know what a great outcome should look like, and you have repeatable processes in place that can guide their completion. Those are the things that you should be thinking about subbing out. If anything, expert tasks are the ones that you have no fucking clue how to solve. They're the things that you feel like you're in the most in the weeds about. So it's understandable. It's completely understandable to wanna hire one person who knows how to do everything. Wouldn't that be fucking gl? And those people do actually exist, but again, they're going to cost way more and they're going to be in a place that you're not looking because you're not ready for that yet. So easing into your first hire should go a lot like this, right? First, you're going to figure out your VA level tasks and your expert level tasks. If you have an abundance of financial resources, start with the experts. They will advise you on your best next steps. And when I say experts, those are the people who are experienced web designers. Right? Instead of, I'll hire a VA to spiff up my website. Those are two different things. It's, frankly, somebody like me. If you need a business advisor and you're just not sure what to do next, you hire a business coach or a business consultant. If you want to develop a particular social media profile, you look for somebody who's a professional in that. I, for one, am not a LinkedIn professional. I know that if somebody needs LinkedIn, I know what that looks like and I can say, Hey, you're going to need to go hire somebody or do a shit ton of research on LinkedIn because that's where you belong. But I'm not the person to teach you because I'm not an expert in that. I know what it looks like to need that. That's what I'm an expert in, right? So everybody has their own areas and a good professional knows what those boundaries are. One of the potholes that is very, very common is that VAs tend to want to please you. They want your business and they're going to say, yes, I know how to do that. Yes, I know how to do that. Yes, I can. I can totally do that. And what they actually mean by all those yeses is, yes, I have done implementation on that platform for other clients. That doesn't mean that they're the right person to strategize how to implement it in your business or even whether or not that's a good idea. So those yeses mean two different things, and you have to know that going in. They might have tons of experience on a platform, that doesn't mean that they're a strategist on that platform. Nor does it mean that they can advise you on whether or not it's a good thing for you. Okay, so you have now figured out what your VA level tasks are and your expert level tasks. Then, if you can hire the experts first, they're going to advise you on what the next best steps are, so it makes a lot more sense to start with the big guns, because then they're not going to want to do the implementation. They're going to advise you and then send you on your merry way. So that's where you go find a VA who's familiar with whatever platform you just got advice on, whatever strategy you just got advice on. Somebody who has experience implementing the strategy that someone else created for you. It's going to be far more fruitful. Because then you know what you're hiring for. You're not hiring somebody to advise you on LinkedIn and then implement those changes. You're hiring someone to advise you on LinkedIn and then you interpret what you want from that and then you assign that to somebody who's going to actually help you implement. That's how that should go. Right? If you do not, however, have an abundance of financial resources, Then you have the harder road. That's where you need to dig into understanding the expert level tasks. Learn whatever you can. If it's important enough to hire help for it, it should be important enough to invest time in learning as much as you can about it. This will also save you money in the long run, guaranteed. Like, if you're going, I know I should be, I'm going to keep using LinkedIn, because this was an example from a group I was in, so I'm going to keep hammering on this, and it's a good one. There's a lot of people kind of, this is a common one, right? I, it's like the people that are like, I totally understand Facebook, I know I should be on LinkedIn, because that's where business y people are, but I don't understand it, and it's boring, and eh, right? So that's why we're kind of harping on LinkedIn, but, if you legitimately want it to be a place that you're going to spend a bunch of your time, then you owe it to both yourself and your business to learn absolutely every fucking thing you can about it. And there's so much to learn for free, right? Like anything in business, it's going to take time or money or a little bit of both. And anybody who's followed me for a while has heard me say that about a thousand times, but this is absolutely no different. Time or money. If you don't have the money, then you have to invest the time. Because if you don't understand the ecosystem that you're trying to invest more time and more energy and more willpower, more communication power through, then you're going to hire somebody at some point. And they're going to tell you stuff that you won't know if it's a good idea or not, because you don't understand the landscape, because you didn't do your homework. You tried to outsource doing your homework by hiring an expert. Hiring an expert is never a substitute for learning. And that's one of the hardest things to learn. Because if you don't learn, At least the baseline, understand enough to get yourself really confused and then hire an expert because then you'll know what they're telling you. You'll have some context, you'll have language for what exactly they're doing and what they're saying to you. This is one of those things that I learned in business school that it was like I, oh my god, it was so hard to learn how to read a balance sheet, but the most important thing you can do as a business owner is understand how to read your balance sheet. For one reason and one reason only, because someday if you're going to have an accountant, you need to know if they're stealing from you or making mistakes. That's it. Right? Of course, there's a million other reasons why having, having that knowledge is useful, but at the end of the day, you need to know where your money's coming from, where your money's going, and if somebody is making it leak where it shouldn't. These things that are critical and central to how you are showing up in your work, you gotta really understand. Now you have a sense of what task you should be looking for for your VA, right? If you're gonna go look for help, you know what you're looking for, you know how long it should take, you're only giving them tasks that you understand the outcomes of. And then you, it's going to be a whole lot easier to articulate exactly what you're looking for when you're looking for the right people. And you're not asking them for stuff that they're just going to say like, Yeah, I totally know how to set up a YouTube channel. And you're going to be like, great, you'll know all the things. And you're like, and they're going, yeah. You're going to tell me all the things and then I'll set it up, right? And that doesn't happen till later. And then that's a really uncomfortable conversation where they're like, Oh, I thought you were going to tell me all the things. And they're like, No, I thought you were going to tell me all the things. Pretty soon nobody knows any of the things. So focus on making sure when you hire that you're hiring the right type of person for the right service provider for the right things. And I promise you most of the time when you're hiring for the first time, you're putting too many things in the VA bucket. And it's going to make you a really shitty boss. Now, I have lots more to say about hiring, and I will be covering more about hiring in my newsletter. If you're not on my list already, please sign up. You can do that at yourlifesworkshop. com. You'll find all of the subscriber pages. And I will also be releasing a course on hiring in the future. And because I think that it's really, really important for micro business bosses to learn how to actually be good at this. It's one of the most valuable and important skills of any successful business owner, and frankly, most people absolutely suck at it. So don't be in that category! Be in the category of being a really well educated and experienced boss who makes sure that people aren't telling horror stories about you afterward. All right, everybody thank you all for tuning in. It was a pleasure as always, and I look forward to seeing you in another couple of weeks. Bye!