In this episode of Entrepreneurs Rising, host Carl Taylor discusses the key roles you must begin considering to fill in your business as it grows. He talks about the progression of key hires — bookkeepers, assistants, a marketing head, an operations head, a sales team, and ultimately, a CEO so you can fully extract yourself from company oversight.
Building a synergistic team will allow you, as the business owner, to transition from merely managing day-to-day tasks to embracing your peak role as a top-tier leader. Hiring people will free up your time and allow you to focus on other equally important business and personal matters.
So, what roles do you need to fill next to create more time and financial freedom? Join us in this episode to get valuable insights and tips!
IN THIS EPISODE, YOU’LL DISCOVER…
- Why some people don’t want to build business teams (00:32)
- The first step in shifting toward business leadership (01:26)
- Who should your second hire be? (02:16)
- How to move out of client delivery (03:26)
- Hiring a head of marketing (04:19)
- Hiring a head of operations and a sales team (04:51)
- The final step: Hiring a CEO (05:47)
QUOTES
- “Your role as best as possible, as quickly as possible, is to get to the point where you’re the leader, rather than the manager.” – Carl Taylor
WHERE YOU CAN FIND CARL TAYLOR
Automation Agency
CarlTaylor.com.au
LinkedIn
Facebook
Twitter
TRANSCRIPTION
There’s a lot of people out there who, don’t want to build their teams because they’re equate managing staff with pain.
Hello, and welcome to another episode of Entrepreneurs Rising. I am your host, Carl Taylor, and this is the show for you. If you’ve been an entrepreneur for a little while now, you’re not necessarily just starting up and you’re looking to get more freedom of time, create more financial freedom of wealth and money, and ultimately live a better life with rocking relationships and just rise the tide for you and for those around you through your entrepreneurial journey.
Now, today’s episode, I want to talk about hiring of roles. Well, there’s a couple of schools of thought. There’s a lot of people out there who don’t, want to build their teams because they equate managing staff with pain. And I’ve done previous episodes talking about that, but I’ll just quickly touch on it. If you’ve not listened to that episode before, at the end of the day, pain comes from managing staff. When you are the one stuck managing them and you’re not aligned to be a good manager, you should be in the leadership phase. So your role as best as possible, as quickly as possible, I should say, is to get to the point where you’re the leader rather than the manager. And if you’re stuck right now in that managerial phase, this is some of the key roles that I’m going to be talking about in today’s episode that you probably need to put in place to make that shift out of there.
So let’s start with the basics. If you’re self employed right now, maybe you’ve got zero team or a bit of a lean team. I want to make sure that you are hiring a bookkeeper. That is a role that you definitely want to fill. Even if you are great with numbers, I really recommend getting you off the tools of doing your own invoicing, reconciling your accounts. You need to get that to someone else. To fill the role of the bookkeeper, you can fill that with an agency. You can fill that with overseas team members. You can fill that with, local team members. But you definitely want to get rid of the bookkeeping role from your responsibilities as the entrepreneur as quickly as possible, as either one of your first hires. Or if you’ve already got a team but you’re still doing that, it should be the next thing you let go of immediately. So they’re kind of the basic essentials.
The next one for you as a business owner is to bring on maybe some sort of a virtual assistant. Executive assistant. If you’re doing under $200,000 a year in revenue, probably not right for you to get an executive assistant. That’s just my personal opinion. I don’t have a specific rule about it. I just think that if you’re under $200,000 a year, you really need to just be focused on bringing in more income and not spending money on things that might make you feel good, feel important. Unless you are finding so much of your time is being sucked away in answering emails, managing your calendar and appointments, then that would probably be a good investment of time. But my experience is I didn’t need an executive assistant and truly get benefit from that until a lot later into my business career. So an, executive assistant or virtual assistant who can start doing some of the grunt work, research, those kinds of things is also a great early hire as long as you’ve got the revenue coming in. If you’re needing cash, then don’t waste your time trying to hire and train up a va. Just focus on cash building activities. All right. So they’re kind of the bare essentials that I think you really need to get.
As if you’ve been listing for a long time, as you’d know. I then believe that one of the next things you need to be focused on is how do you get out of the delivery of what you do. Unless you are a high price consultant yourself, where you earn big bucks for you personally showing up, there’s a whole different model. We would look around, extracting you out of the business and leveraging your time better. But if you are, doing things like manual labour, if you’re a trade or an agency of some kind, then what you want to be looking at doing is how do you get other people to do the delivery component of what you do. Sometimes that requires a model shift. Oftentimes, though, it’s just a matter of letting go and start bringing in juniors who can start doing the junior work while you oversee the more senior work. And then eventually you train up those juniors into seniors so you can step away from the delivery completely. And that’s where you want to get to. But once you’ve got yourself out of delivery, that’s not where it ends.
This is where the next part of the role you’re going to need to start thinking about is you’re going to need a head of marketing, someone whose role and responsibility is to be the head of marketing. They may not be the strategist, they may not be the ideas person you may need an outside consultant, or maybe you are the person who’s providing that direction, but you need someone who’s responsible for marketing. They’re looking at the analytics, they’re responsible for navigating and working with all the different team members, whether they’re outsourced or internal, to pull together graphic designs, emails, campaigns, all the different things you might be doing as part of marketing.
One of the other roles you’re going to need is a head of operations. If you’ve got someone else or a team of people doing delivery, you’re going to need someone who’s in charge of general operations of day to day business. And you might find that your head of marketing actually reports to your head of operations at some point, or you might leave them on a tier that’s similar and then they ultimately report to the CEO. So you want the head of operations you’re going to need ahead of marketing. Depending on your business model with sales, you’re going to want inbound salespeople, these people who are doing inbound phone and email and maybe sell by chat. Again, it’s going to depend on your business model whether you need large sales teams or whether you’re keeping sales quite customer servicey and keeping it small and tight. Whether you’re going to really need ahead of sales. You might be able to get that to be under the head of marketing role potentially. There are pros and cons to that. I’m not advocating for that, I’m just talking out loud. Ultimately, the final stage if you really want to get out of the business completely is you’re going to need to hire a CEO. if you are currently the CEO, you’re going to need to put someone else in the role of CEO. And that’s not an easy decision. It’s not an easy step to make, it’s not a step that I personally have made.
So I’m not going to pretend to say here’s how you do it. I know a number of people who have done it and most of them have then had to step back into the role within twelve month period. So it’s not an easy thing to do, but it is that final step. Now one way you can do that is you could sell the business and you install the new CEO by giving a new owner, that role. But if you’re wanting to hold onto the business, you’re going to go through the process of trying to either take someone internal and step them up. More likely going to be someone who is head of operations. You’re giving them the strategic level of CEO, or you’re going to bring someone external in to be the CEO so you can step out.
So I just wanted to highlight some of those key roles that if you haven’t thought about filling, they’re the roles that I would be looking at. So no matter where you are in business, you definitely need to have a bookkeeper, you want to be looking at bringing in an executive or virtual assistant to take some of that admin, load off you. But only do that when you’ve got the cash flow to support it because it is not a cash flow producing role. They’re not going to put more money in your pocket, but they will free up your time as long as you use that time wisely to bring in more cash later in business, it doesn’t have to bring in more cash, it can just free up time. It can be an investment in giving you more time as you grow and we’ve got you out of delivery, we want to look at how do we get someone else to be responsible to marketing? You should already have various people doing things, but how do you get someone to sit over that and be the head of marketing? You’re going to need someone who’s going to become head of operations. Their job is to really run the company, the day to day operations of the company, so that you can report to that person and cheque in and they report back to you. So for me, my head of operations runs the whole show at automation NC and all I need to do is cheque in with her every two weeks, sometimes longer. But we just cheque in and see how things are going and she’s taking care of everything day to day from the delivery side, from the marketing side, all of those parts of it. So I’m going to leave it there in today’s episodes again, a short one, and get you thinking about the different roles that you need in your business moving forward.
Outro:
You’ve been listening to Entrepreneurs Rising. Thank you, dear listener for tuning in. I appreciate your time and look forward to connecting in future episodes if you would like show notes or any resources from today’s episode, you can find them at rising.show rising.show you can find the show notes for this episode and all other episodes as well as links to socials and or the ability to reach out and connect with me make your suggestions for future episodes. Until next time, keep up the journey.
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