The Hiring Mistake That's Costing Business Owners Thousands

 Thinking about hiring a virtual assistant or making your first hire? Watch this first.

A friend recently asked me how to hire a virtual assistant. By the end of the conversation, we realized he didn't actually need one.

The problem wasn't hiring. It was how he was spending his time.

In this video, I break down the exact conversation we had, the questions every business owner should ask before hiring, and how to know if it's actually time to bring someone onto your team.

If you're a cleaning business owner, entrepreneur, or small business owner looking to scale, this framework can save you thousands of dollars and help you make the right first hire.

In this video, you'll learn:
✅ Why most business owners hire too early
✅ How to audit your time before hiring anyone
✅ The difference between busy work and revenue-generating work
✅ How to identify the best first role in your business
✅ Why your first hire should create more revenue, not just save time
✅ The biggest hiring mistake that keeps business owners stuck

THE TRUTH: Hiring won't fix a broken business. Before you hire anyone, you need clarity on where your time creates the most value. Once you understand that, making your first hire becomes much easier. 

Register for the FREE Remote Cleaning Masterclass: https://www.cleaningbusinessmasterclass.com/?el=Youtube-clientsfast

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Transcript

A VA Question Turns Into Clarity

SPEAKER_00 0:00

So a friend of mine called me, asked me how do I hire a virtual assistant? By the end of the call, we talked about the reasons he didn't need one. The thing that changed his mind wasn't the questions that I asked him. It was his thought process around hiring in general. If you ever thought about the answering, that you ever thought about the answer to your stress was hiring somebody, this is for you. If you guys don't know anything about me, my name is Anthony Hartzog. I'm founder of Cleaning Business University, where I've helped students make over $21 million in their own businesses. I've generated over $3 million in one of our businesses. We also have a digital education business as well that has scaled to the tune of some money. But overall, we've helped people, I've hired VAs, I've worked with virtual assistants, I've worked with recruiters, we've hired setters, we've hired coaches, we've hired closers. We've also wasted hundreds of thousands of dollars doing the wrong thing at the wrong time. Some of that's hiring. But the thing is, when people ask us the question on how to hire, I don't start with where to find people or the role. I usually start with a few things that most people skip. So I want to start with telling you guys a story of that conversation I had with my friend. I've had a similar theme conversation over the last week or so, where people were focused on the wrong problem in their business, right? But this was the most recent conversation I had. So my friend called me. He was like, Hey, I want to talk about hiring a virtual assistant. If you guys don't know what a virtual assistant is, pretty much someone who could help you run or manage a business virtually, meaning from anywhere in the world. Our team operates completely virtual. So our operation manager, who's been with us now five plus years, she operates solely in Jamaica. She's from Jamaica, she lives there. That's how she helps us run our business. We have other team members in Barbados. We've had team members in Jamaica, Barbados, we've had people in South America, Central America, we've had people pretty much in the Philippines, so all over the world. Our team operates from different time zones, but we all operate in our central location. Central time zone, excuse me. So anyway, he came to me, he was like, listen, I need to hire a VA. Can you break down the steps and thought processes behind it? Before we dived in, before we dove into that, I said, listen, before we start talking about the process, procedures, all that stuff. What

Define The Role And Outcomes

SPEAKER_00 2:14

do you want the person to do? So I want you guys to think about before you bring somebody in, what would you like them to do? Not only the task, what would you like the outcome of this role to be? Don't hire someone for today. Think about what their role will be down the line. So when we really broke it down, he wanted someone strictly for admin things. So bookkeeping, emails, management, stuff like that. Which is great to start. You always want to think about what is a low-level task that should be gonna off your plate. But more importantly, I said if the person came in and did this task for you, how much time would that save you? Think about it. How much time would that save you if the person that came in and did the thing, they took that off your plate? So think about that as another question you need to ask yourself. If you don't know, you need to do a time order. We'll break down what that is. But he's at a couple, he said 20 hours a week, 15 to 20 hours a week. I was like, okay, let's pause for a second. This admin work you're talking about, it takes a person 15 to 20 hours a week to do that. He's maybe closer to five to 10. I was like, okay, we went from 15 to 20, which is okay, that's a decent amount, down to five to 10 hours. That's a completely different task, completely different amount. He's like, Yeah, I think I over I overthought that process. So we went from 15 to 20 down to five to 10. He was like, it's probably closer to five. So I was like, we're really talking about one hour a day. You want to hire somebody for one hour a day in your business, which is great, but that's not enough to sustain some sustain somebody's income. We have to think about the longevity of that person being with you for this role. Not just in this season, but think about them a year from today. Will this role grow into something else? But for now, what else can they do? We realized five hours a week was just the bare minimum that he needed. It wasn't the top end, it wasn't the bottom end, but it was enough to have a person busy. So once we broke that down about one hour a day, I said, if you got that one hour a day, what would you do instead? He said, Oh, that's enough to do this, that, the third. I was like, does that drive the business forward? Does that move the needle? He said, not by much. I was like, so the task you're thinking about hiring someone to do won't help you move the business at all. It won't even pretty much give you much time back. So why are you hiring for? He said, I think that's kind of what I need. I was like, ooh, okay, now we're talking about something. But here's where the conversation

Time Audit Before You Hire

SPEAKER_00 4:20

flipped, right? So step one was ordering your time before you buy back your time. So the how many hours would save you moment was the time that was a point that flipped the conversation. Most people don't have a hiring problem. They realize they have a time accounting problem. So one thing we used to do was time blocking. So we would block out a moment in time every single day for us to do a task. So let's say I'm doing a podcast. I know from 12 to 1 I'm doing a podcast, it's on my calendar. What happens after I do the podcast? Okay, I pick up my phone, I do another time block. Do this for about a week before you say you need to hire someone so you can actually know. That's how we were able to go from 15 to 20 hours that he said he was using down to five to 10, closer to five. But here was another thing we pointed out, right? Even if he got that five hours a week back, it wasn't gonna be much he could do with it.

Find The Highest Revenue Tasks

SPEAKER_00 5:08

So I want you to think about your highest revenue task. This is the next question we went down to. I said, if you got those five to 10 hours a week back, if you had more time back, what would that task be? What is something you're doing in your day-to-day that if you had that time back, you could start generating revenue? Sales marketing is going to be the money makers for most business owners. Sales marketing, those are the things that drive the needle forward. Sales marketing, most of the time, you as a solo business owner, you as a small business owner, you as a solopreneur, you're gonna be doing most of the sales marketing yourself. So that's going to be the highest leverage task you have to do. So we said, if we got you about three to five hours back, maybe a day, maybe three hours a day, what would you do? He said, Oh, I would go out and get more accounts. I said, Okay, if you had three hours a day, you would get more accounts. Is that guaranteed? Absolutely. I would do door knocking, I do cold calling, I have some systems in place. This would get me doing the most important part of my business, but then also I'm really good at it. You as a business owner, you're going to be really good at probably the sales and marketing because no one knows the business like you, especially in the beginning. So that's gonna be the last thing you're going to delegate. So I said, instead of delegating the sales and marketing, what can we get back in our day that doesn't involve that? You can train somebody else to do it. Once he figured that part out, here's what we discovered. He would be getting back three to five hours a day by outsourcing a lower leverage task that anybody could do with just a week of training. Literally, a week of training. So I said, if we brought somebody in, how can we get them into business as fast as possible? He said, Oh, we would train them. We would probably do some role playing, we might do some shadowing to do this role. I was like, okay, how long do you think it would take someone? He's about a week. That would give you about three to five hours per day to go out and get more contracts. Most people hire to do something that they escape, but also something that they hate. You want to hire to free up your time for something that actually pays you. So we went from, I'm gonna I'm gonna backtrack a little bit, we went from 15 to 20 hours a week doing a task that didn't exist down to one to five hours, but we realized that wasn't even the highest leverage task. The highest leverage task would actually get him about three hours a week back. So what he actually needed was someone to cover the task that was blocking his revenue work. I'm gonna repeat that. The thing that we had covered was something that was blocking his revenue work so he could go do that actual work. So different person, different role, totally different outcome.

Skip Perfect SOPs And Test Fast

SPEAKER_00 7:29

This is where things unlock. So once we discover what that role was, for you, you might say, I need an admin. Okay, admins are great. Do you need somebody to handle your customer service? Do you need somebody to handle handle your phones? Do you need somebody to handle your emails, your text messages, whatever it may be? Do you need somebody to handle your marketing? You handle the sales. What's the highest level leverage task that you could bring back that allows you to go generate more revenue? Once we unlock that, I told him, write down a job description for this role that frees you, not the one that annoys you, which was the paperwork stuff. Because most of us want to get rid of the task that annoys us, the customer service stuff like that. But let's find the task that gives you back the most time that generates the most revenue for you. So once we found that task, here's how we decided how we're going to find the right person. So most of you guys, most of us, we're gonna sit down, we're gonna write our SLPs out because we don't want to bring anyone in. The conversation is you don't want to delegate before you do. You don't want to del you don't want to do before you deliver. So you want to deliver, do, delegate. But before that, we got to understand what those tasks are. So he said, I'm gonna go sit back, draw up these SLPs, come back and figure this out. I said, No, we're not going to do that. I want you to literally, this is a task that's not going to be behind the computer. You have a very forward-facing business. So most of the work is going to be done in person. So why are we trying to delegate? We're trying to delegate, we're trying to automate, we're trying to systematize it, we're trying to SLP for a role in your business that's going to be people-facing. So, how do we get them in front of people to find out if they're good or not? That's the only way you're gonna know. Like, even for our cleaning business, when we started hiring people to do phone calls, you can train them, you could SLP them to death, you could go through the documents, but the only way to know the person's good is actually having them get on the phones, having them talk to clients, having them talk to cleaners, right? For cleaning business university and education side, having people do sales, having people have conversations with customers, finding out what we could do better, finding out where things are challenging. That's the only way we're gonna do. Even me, my best work is going to be in front of the clients. Sometimes it might take like this, right? Doing a YouTube video, doing a podcast interview, doing a conversation with a student. You can document, you can automate, you can systematize, but some of the stuff has to be done by the owner. So I said, we don't need an SOP, we don't need this, we don't need that. That's going to be a trap that you're going to put yourself in

Hire For Opportunity And Move Fast

SPEAKER_00 9:45

to never get to the task. I said the quickest way to get this role out into the world is to talk about it. Talk about it to friends, family, co-workers, your network, people around you. Talk about what you need someone to do. Here's what I'm building, here's what I have built. I'm looking for someone to do X, Y, and Z. So even for my people watching this, you might have a you might have a small business. Hey, I do a I'm a I'm a personal trainer. I need someone to help me with my admin task. I need someone to help me just pick up the phones right quick while I'm training customers. If you have a digital education business, I need someone to just answer the customer emails. I need someone to make sure people have logins. If you're a cleaning business, I need someone to help me handle the customer communication. I need someone to help me handle the sales calls. These are things that you're going to have to get out there and just start putting out into the world. Let people know who you are and what you're looking to accomplish. So we sat down, we said, listen, friends, family, coworkers, your network, start there, right? Find them fast, don't overthink it. I said, you're you have a great network where you are, just let them know, hey, I'm looking to do this role, I'm looking to fill this role. Then from there, once we find somebody, we start building a job role, we start having conversations with people, what they want, what they don't want. Then from there, we decide, okay, what's going to be the pay to rate pay rate, you guys negotiate. Because everything's negotiable, right? You obviously have how much you could pay, they have how much they're willing to work for, you guys negotiate, figure it out from there. But the biggest block was feeling like as a business owner, we got to do everything ourselves. I was like, you don't have to try to figure this out by yourself. You bring somebody in, they could help you build that role while you're doing it. They're not gonna be perfect, you're not gonna be perfect. Set the expectations up front, let them know that this is a new role, you're trying to figure it out along with them. It's opportunity here. Can we show someone a bigger opportunity than what they have in front of them? So every single person we hire in our business, we let them know there's a bigger opportunity here. Not just what you're doing today, but what you can be doing tomorrow. But as long as you're meeting the opportunities for today, there's always gonna be something available to you tomorrow. We have our own internal successes around it, right? We have some CBU members who do great and go on and start coaching. We give them other opportunities inside of our program. Like, hey, you are really well spoken on these calls, you seem like you really help people a lot, you really enjoy this. Do you want a coaching spot? We're always looking for more CBU members to level up, to help other people. It takes some of the pressure off of us. But then also, like our operation manager, Chanel, we talk about her all the time. She's been with us, like I said, five plus years. She started off as a virtual assistant, worked her way up to managing a few people. Now she's the operations manager of what we do. We use her story as other people's potential successes because we've seen it, she's done it. So bringing somebody in, hiring fast, you don't need the perfect system to hire your first person. You need clarity, willingness to build along with them. So perfect systems are how our people, perfect systems are how people don't make progress. I'm gonna repeat that. Perfect systems are the reasons you don't make any progress because you want everything to be picture perfect. So I want you to audit your time as a business owner before you hire anyone. I want you to find your revenue generating tasks. So whatever you do that generates you money, sales calls, marketing, code outreach, emails, DMs, hire for a role that frees you to do more of those tasks. Move fast, let the systems grow as you build it. So again, my friend called me to hire a VA. He left with something better. Clarity on what his time was actually worth. Three to five hours a day can now get you another contract a week, another few contracts a month. You might need another hire. You might need to just look at your process a little bit more closely. How you're spending the hours you already have. Audit your time this week, find your money task, hire for freedom. Those are things we're gonna do. So step

Steps Recap And Listener Ask

SPEAKER_00 13:25

one, order your time before you buy the time. Step two, find your highest revenue generating task. Step three, hire for role, not the panic. Just because the house is on fire, right? Just because the house, let's say a a small part of your house is on fire. You're not gonna break down the whole house. No, put that little fire on, move it along. Find someone fast, don't overthink it. Fire fast, then hire fast, fire even faster. Hire fast, fire even faster, right? Don't overcomplicate this process. We all gonna make mistakes. We all gonna figure it out as we go along. But this was a good conversation to have with a friend. I told them that I would definitely put this up as a podcast. I think it's a great learning lesson for all of us as we were having that conversation. If you found you found this episode to be enjoyable, you like the format, let me know below. We read every comment. We want to support you guys, however, we could do. If you're listening to this on Apple Podcasts, leave a five star review. Helps us get more listeners, helps us grow more. Show some love, man. We appreciate it. We'll see you next time. Peace.