The Visionary Files

Identifying Who Your First (or Next) Hire Should Be

• Adriane Galea • Episode 75

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Are you ready to take the leap on your first – or next – team member? Hold up! A question I often get asked is around who the next best hire is, and most people who have never heard me speak about this are surprised by my answer.

In this quickie episode, let's dive into what I'd recommend you look for when you go to hire – especially if you don't want spend more time making decisions with this person than it would've taken you to just keep the tasks for yourself ;)

Quick overview of what we cover: 

  • Why I disagree with the way a lot of business coaches recommend hiring
  • The VA debate: should you bring on a low cost assistant to alleviate some basic tasks once you can afford it?
  • Why innovation vs replication makes allllll the difference when you hire
  • How to decide if you want to bring on a team member who will make you money vs one who will make your life easier
  • The power of intuition and discernment when you hire



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Speaker 1:

your first hire should be someone who's going to make you money, and that might be a VA. That might be hiring a VA to do lead gen, if you have systems behind it. So I want you to hire someone who's going to actually pay for themselves is what this comes down to, because I'm going to assume that you don't just have all the money in the world to just burn. So we want to hire someone who's actually going to be able to pay for themselves. Welcome to the Soulpreneur show, a podcast for a new generation of leaders, visionaries, disruptors and trailblazers who want to do business better. Our goal is to provide you with stories and insights into the strategy, systems and soul behind scaling, service driven, impact first, human centric businesses to help you create time, financial and lifestyle freedom. We want you to have a business that you not only love and pays you well, but that prioritizes what you want for your life, so that you can take actual unplugged vacations, you can step away from social media and you can spend your time doing things you love with the people you love. Let's get to it. So something that I will get asked frequently is who is the best team member that I could bring on to help me scale? How many times have I been asked that question who could I bring on to help me scale? I want to make my life easier. I want to make more money. Who would make the most sense to bring on to the team to help me do all of the above? So where this starts to get interesting for me is I have different advice than what I've heard a lot of people give who are also working in like the online business coaching space, which is really that's the space that I'm more or less in, but that's not how I think about this. So the big thing that someone who is like an online business coach, what they probably are going to say is a VA. A VA is the thing that makes the most sense, and I probably would have said this a couple of years ago.

Speaker 1:

When I first got into online business, I was in a trauma response, in a way of having to let go of my business, of like my brick and mortar business, and so I was like wash my hands of all of it, want nothing to do with it. I'm doing something completely different, etc. Etc. And what I was hearing was you want a VA, and I was like that makes sense, the logic tracks, and for me it was like well, online business is different enough, like. I understand that doing business online, providing a service online, is different than running a brick and mortar business and it is but fundamentally, business principles are the same all the way across the board, and so it won't like the logic wound up not tracking.

Speaker 1:

For me, when you want to grow sustainability as a company, I don't think that hiring a VA just because you've got a little bit of money to spend is necessarily the move, because what you are doing is you are essentially putting money behind something that isn't validated and that's tricky. It's essentially like I will say don't spend money on ads that you're not willing to lose. It's not exactly the same as that, but it's along the same lines, like when you don't have something that's validated, you have to be prepared to lose money, because essentially, you would be hiring a team member, hiring a service provider, whatever that looks like for you. If you're going onto someone's website and you're saying I want to hire you as a VA, and you schedule a discovery call with them and you have a chat, like you are hiring a service provider, you're not. You're hiring someone onto your team. But it's not like hiring an employee or a contractor that is a team member. I think of those three things as separate things. You've got employees, you've got contractors and then you've got service providers. So if you are going and you're hiring a service provider, or even if you are hiring a contractor, where you are interviewing them, you're setting the rate, you're determining the scope of work, etc.

Speaker 1:

Either way, like you have to be willing to, you have to at least understand that you are going to put money into something where you potentially might not get any of it back, and that's probably the goal. You would be hiring someone because you're trying to make money back. So for me, I'm not going to go down the road of your first hire should be a VA. I do want to talk about this in the sense of like who your first and who your next hire should be. But I wanted to preface that that if you've never hired before, I think that hiring a VA could cause a lot of problems. Or if you have hired before and you hired a VA, we could maybe talk about why you had those problems. Because essentially, you cannot expect someone. You can expect to hire someone who is a low cost service provider or a low cost contractor or even a low cost employee that probably has a relatively general, simplified skill set. That doesn't mean that they're not valuable and that doesn't mean that they're not a great human, but it means that they have a more generalized skill set. That's probably a more simplified skill set. It's not a high level skill set.

Speaker 1:

You are bringing someone like this on to fix a problem that you haven't figured out how to solve yet, that you, as the leader and the owner of the business, haven't solved. So how do you expect to pay someone $10, $15, $20 an hour? Or, if we get into, like your hiring overseas service providers or contractors who are from countries that have extraordinarily low cost of living, like some place like the Philippines or Thailand or Nigeria or something like that, there's nothing wrong with hiring those types of people. It's something that I've chosen not to do. I've intentionally made the choice to not look for team members in countries like that, just a personal choice. I've passed no judgment on anyone else who chooses to do those things, but if you are looking for the cheapest labor that you can get, so I wanna spend like, yeah, you could go and find someone in the Philippines to work for you for like $4 an hour, 100% possible. What are you getting for that? And like this isn't even getting into, like the horror stories of how I've heard people get treated who are working for very, very low wages, like that that's a different debate. But if you're going in and you're expecting to just like get the bargain team member, why would you expect to get high level results from that? I mean, like, really think about that. What exactly like, what type of magic are you expecting someone to solve, when you yourself haven't figured it out yet?

Speaker 1:

And just because there's someone who's saying like I'm a VA, I can take administrative tasks off your plate, or I'm a VA, I could take lead generation off your plate, it doesn't mean that they are a strategist. This is I frequently talk about. Like you wanna hire someone to replicate, not to innovate. There's a big difference between replication and there is over innovation. You cannot expect to hire a strategist for $5 an hour. You really can't expect to hire a strategist for like $25 an hour. It's just it's not gonna track for you.

Speaker 1:

So I instead come at this from the standpoint of your first hire should be someone who's going to make you money, and that might be a VA. That might be hiring a VA to do lead gen if you have systems behind it. So I want you to hire someone who's going to actually pay for themselves is what this comes down to, because I'm gonna assume that you don't just have all the money in the world to just burn. So we wanna hire someone who's actually going to be able to pay for themselves. So and the exception to this, I think, would be if you are hiring someone with financial help. So it's all like it all comes down to money in some way, shape or form. So if you are hiring like a bookkeeper or an accountant, I think that that would be the exception to the rule. But in general, you want to hire someone who's going to make you money.

Speaker 1:

So if you already have a system for generating leads, hire a VA to do your lead gen, because you can pass that system on to them and they can essentially replicate, not innovate. They can replicate what you have been doing and you can give them clear guidelines for them to be able to do that job for you. And then, all of a sudden, they're making money and you're not having to put your own time into doing that specific task. If you know that you are getting a lot of traffic, if you know that people are joining your email list and you know that those people are converting into sales and it all starts with Pinterest, because you've got a fantastic presence on Pinterest then hire a Pinterest manager or a Pinterest VA or whatever that looks like, so they can replicate what's already working for you to make more money. So we want to replicate what's already working.

Speaker 1:

It doesn't make any sense. Like, how many times I've heard that somebody wants to bring on a social media manager because they're sick of creating content. Well, that's fine if you've got money to burn or if it's working for you, because you cannot expect someone to be a strategist when you are essentially only willing to pay generalist rates. It just doesn't work that way. So that's for sure, your first hire, your next hire very likely is also going to be someone who's going to make you money. This just comes down to where are you in the scheme of things in your business? Like, what are you really looking for? What's the outcome you're looking for? So I think that the first several hires in your business should be people who are going to make you money. But the other side of this is hiring someone who's going to make your life way easier.

Speaker 1:

So the example that I use here is earlier this year I knew that I was ready to hire probably more than one person. I only had one person who was working on the team at that point and I knew that I was ready to hire more. And I really went back and forth and back and forth of do I want a project manager? Because I know that's what I needed. That was going to be the thing that was going to help make more money, because it was going to help the internal systems. But what I really needed was a copywriter, and I knew that a copywriter could also make me money.

Speaker 1:

Either one of those things are they would have been essentially money producing tasks in different ways, but they would have been money producing tasks. It would have been internally, helping contribute to repeat clients and having a great client experience, and then getting retention, which is still making money. Retention is still making money. Or copywriting, which is more likely going to help make money externally, from new leads, from marketing and sales leads, to lead generation in that way, but also it could go to retention as well. Either way, they were going to be money driven hires.

Speaker 1:

However, I knew that what was going to make my life the easiest was going to be a copyrighted, because I hate copywriting. Now I needed both of them, but I wound up choosing copywriter because I dislike copywriting. I don't mind project management. It's not something I really want to be doing. It's not something I need to be doing, but I don't mind doing it. I really don't like copywriting.

Speaker 1:

So that, for me, is what made sense. But your next hire unless I have a conversation with you, there's no way that I can come up with who your actual next hire should be. But you want it to be someone who is either going to make you money or it's going to be someone who's going to make your life easier preferably both, unless you're at the beginning and you don't have money to burn. If you are like I really don't have money, like I can't really afford to lose part with this money, but I'm willing to take a risk because I know that this is an investment, start with your money. Hire Like look at where your business is already working well and hire someone to replicate that. So I hope that was helpful and I'll catch you next time.

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Adriane Galea

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