3: Work Less, Keep More Profit and Escape the Hiring Trap

You've hired to get your time back and somehow ended up with less of it, more payroll pressure, and a team that still needs you for everything. This episode is for the founder who's stuck in the weeds and wondering if the next hire will actually fix it or just make things worse.

I'm a CPA and business coach, and I fell into the hiring trap at my own firm before I figured out the sequence to get out of it. I'm walking through why hiring first almost always deepens founder burnout, what you have to sort out before you post another job description, and how I now run my practice with fewer people, more profit, and half the hours. 

00:00 - The Hiring Trap and Why More People Rarely Means More Freedom

03:58 - What I Changed in My Own CPA Firm

05:00 - Role Clarity: What You Want to Be Doing Every Day

07:31 - Offer Profitability and Aligning What You Sell With What You Love

12:29 - The Five-Favorites Exercise and Running a Tiny Experiment

14:47 - Why Saying No to Clients Is a Kindness, Not a Retreat

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Founder Get Your Life Back. I'm your host, Jennifer Todd, your profit and performance expert. And today we're going to talk all about the hiring trap. Founder, have you ever been stuck in the weeds and felt like if you just had that right person that could help you find a little bit of freedom in your business and a little bit of extra time and you would be able to do all the things you want to do. And then you find when you hire that person that what you have is one more person to manage and make sure they're doing their job and one more person to answer questions for and to problem solve for and to troubleshoot and to micromanage. How would I know all these things? Probably because I've done the same thing. But there is a way that you can hire to get yourself out of the weeds, but there are a few things that you have to do first in order to make it work out well and not trap you further and keep you stuck. I can think back about a client that I had about 10 years ago that had a one-on-one business model. And what I mean by that is they would see one patient at a time. And they got burned out very quickly. They had been doing it for a long time, but it didn't take long to get burned out on the one-to-one business model. So they ended up trying to hire themselves out of burnout. And it's really hard to do that when you have one practitioner servicing customers and clients, patients, and you have two practitioners, you need to pay. So we can't always hire ourselves out of a trap. Sometimes we need to look at the business model itself. And if your business model is a thing keeping you stuck, or is it a profitability problem? Or is it an offer problem? Or is it your team? Maybe you already have the team you need, but they're just not stepping up. So today we're going to talk about all of these things and the right sequence that you need to do in order to make it all work out for you. I can attest to this myself. I've been stuck in my practice. I had, you know, several CPAs working for me and several bookkeepers and admin people. And nothing ever got easier. As a matter of fact, the more people I had, the more pressure I had to say yes to all the wrong things, work harder, work more on marketing, feel like I had to bring in more revenue because there was never enough money to go around to pay not only myself, but everybody else that I had on payroll. So that put me in a scarcity mindset where I had to not turn away bad fit customers. It did not free me up. It did not get me out of the weeds. It buried me further. And eventually I ended up having to use debt to pay for some of these people that I also didn't have the mindset to delegate properly to. Well, now I have a lot less staff and a lot less offers because I had to align it to what my nervous system could handle and what I really wanted to be doing in my business. And so that's what I encourage all my founders to do. We have to figure out what role you want in your business, how you want to show up every day, and model the business model to protect you as the founder. You're the one who has all the skin in the game. You're the one who loses sleep. Ultimately, everything falls back onto you. I often say it's lonely at the top, and that is one of the things I mean because there is a pressure on founders that nobody else in the team feels. They can see it on us sometimes as founders, but they don't feel it. We feel it. So what I suggest that you need to do is first figure out the role that you really want in your business. How do you want to be showing up every day? What is it you love doing in your business? What's the thing that's going to make you jump out of bed every morning and look forward to the business day? And then who do you need around you to support you? What do they need to be doing? When I say who do you need, what roles do you need to support you in doing that role that you desire to have in your business? So we craft the roles first, but we also have to align our roles with the offers that make us the most money in our business. So we have to look to what the customers really want from us. So if we go back to my um doctor example, you know, that's a one-on-one business model by default, but it doesn't have to be. There are a lot of different ways to do those types of business models. Now they have direct service providers where you'll pay a monthly subscription and then you get certain access. So we have to align what the customers actually want from us with the role that how we want to show up and service those customers and clients, and then the supporting roles underneath of that. None of this is possible if we don't understand the profitability of our offers, what it's going to cost for us to fulfill our offers and have the team buy in. Those are the three big things that I work with my founders on in our advisory is understanding profitability, aligning our offer to what the customers really want, and then getting the team bought in, having them autonomous, and having them accountable. And when you have all of those pieces in place, you are out of the weeds because you're doing exactly what you want to do every day when you show up at the office. So what often happens, like I said, is we hire people without understanding those things. And that's exactly what I did in my practice. I didn't even think about what I really wanted to be doing. I just knew I was burned out. I was tired. I knew I wasn't making enough money. I couldn't even think past the business model I was in or my offers or the customers we had or the customers we really wanted because I was too busy in the day-to-day. What we have to do instead is remember where we want to show up and start there as the founders. How do we want to show up in our business? What is it we really want to be doing? What roles do we need around us to keep us in our genius zones? And I'm going to challenge you on that because it's hard to think like that when you're struggling to pay the bills, when you feel underpaid, underappreciated, and you know maybe you're not paying your team as much as you could be or as much as you want to be. I know it's hard to think in a visionary way when you're under a lot of stress, but that mindset shift is what's going to free you and allow you to get started, moving in the right direction. So you have to really concentrate on what it is you want to be doing every day, who it is you want to be working with, what are those offers that you love delivering to your customers and that your customers love buying from you and paying top dollar for? How can we deliver those profitably? And which offers drain you? Which offers do you want to take off the table? So I wasn't even in that mindset when I was feeling so burnt out. But once you realize that when you get a very clear picture and understanding of your profitability and your offers and you really connect with your customers and what they value, that empowers you to start moving the needle in your business and creating the business that you really want. And then it gives you the mind freedom to start dreaming bigger and better for yourself. When I say dreaming bigger, that's what I'm talking about bigger profits and more cash. So if you're today finding yourself already at capacity, your first move is not to hire somebody. It's what? Figure out what you want to be doing. Get that really clearly in your mind, and then figure out the roles that you need to help you stay in that position. And then the second thing is to figure out your profitability. Give visibility on your profitability so that you will know how to make the money you need to fill the roles that are going to support you in your genius zone. An exercise I have all my customers do in the beginning when we start working together is to look at your offers and look at your customer list. It depends on what type of business you're in. So you can start with your offers. If you have a large quantity of customers and it's like the customer list is overwhelming, or maybe you don't even have a customer list because of the type of business you're in. Look at your offers and decide which of those really light you up. Which ones do you and your team really enjoy offering to your customers? That's your first clue. That's also where you're going to start getting alignment with how you want to show up in your business. If you've got a smaller customer list, start looking at those customer names. Figure out who it is that you really enjoy working with. Why do you enjoy working with them? What is it about that customer that you enjoy working with? Is it that they value what you do? Is it they pay top dollar? Is it that they aren't squeaky wheels? Or what we call in the accounting industry, PETA clients, pain in the, you know what? What is it about these customers that you enjoy so much? And then I want you to kind of do the opposite. Look at the offers that you have that you don't enjoy. Those should be the first things on the chopping block. If you can chop them without losing your favorite customers, same thing with your least favorite customers. They're going to be the first ones on your chopping block when you start adding better customers. We can't get rid of customers and we can't get rid of offers until we nail down our profitability and our value proposition and we know exactly why our customers buy from us. But you could make a tiny experiment. That is one of the things I advise my clients to do is to experiment in small ways to see, you know, the outcome. We don't want to commit to things we're testing. So you can create a tiny experiment where maybe you say an offer is off the table for a while. You just stop selling it. You still have it. You don't stop giving it to the customers that are already purchasing it, but you don't add new customers for that offer. So you limit the incoming customers that want to buy that one offer that you just don't like or it's not profitable. If you know for a fact something isn't profitable, I would say eliminate it. But if you don't know yet and you just don't enjoy that offer, take it off the table for a little bit. Give it a tiny experiment. See what happens. See if that doesn't open up a little bit of capacity and a little bit of freedom for you. I know it's hard to say no when you've been busy saying yes to all the things, but saying no is a kindness to yourself, your team, and your favorite customers. It's also a kindness to the customers that aren't your favorite customers because it's likely that you're not serving either one of your customers very well if you're unhappy or you're frustrated or you're stressed out. And so when you create a little bit of extra capacity in your business for yourself, it's a kindness because you're letting go the bad fit customers, the bad fit offers, and you're freeing up room for what fulfills you and your team and makes you happy. So saying no is a kindness, setting boundaries is a kindness. It feels hard at first. I'm a recovering people pleaser. I know for a fact it's very hard to say no when you're used to saying yes to all the things, but I highly recommend it. One of my favorite sayings is say yes to less, and it is a kindness to you. So don't think of it as you're copying out or retreating, think of it as refining. Your business is a diamond in the rough, and you're a fine jeweler, and you're cutting one small facet in the diamond, and you're refining that diamond in the rough, and eventually one day it's going to be a very high-valuable jewel. So think of it that way. You're in a refining process. I'm going to close today by just reiterating that I stopped trying to hire my way out. And now I enjoy the freedom of knowing that when I hire, it is by choice and it's strategic, and that those hires are going to be the ones that support me in the role that I want to be in in my business and that my customers will pay profitably for me to be in. I got honest about what I wanted to build, and I encourage all my customers to do that because you can't be happy unless you are doing what you love doing every day and making good money at it. Right now I have two fewer professionals on my team, and I have just as much, if not more, revenue and way more profitability. It can happen. It can happen when you're strategic about it. And I made a ton of mistakes along the way. And that's part of the inspiration for my podcast is to help people do this strategically in a way that you avoid all the mistakes I made. So for me, hiring is optional now. And I want it to be optional for you. I want it to be strategic for you. But that's what the right sequence does for you. When you know your profitability, you know your offers are well aligned, and you're working in your genius zone and you are saying yes to less, it's going to happen for you. So again, your action is pull your client list, pull your offer list, take a look at it, start getting the feels, understand what it is you love. Find five favorite customers. What do you really love about them? What is your favorite offer? What is it you love doing? Start thinking about those things. If you write them down, it makes it more concrete. And I would invite you to share them with me. I have a phone number that you can text me at. Come straight to me. It's 1-804-599-4400. That text message will come straight to me. And if you text me and tell me what it is you want to change about your business, I will respond back. And I'd love to hear your input. I also want to hear what landed for you in this episode. If it felt familiar, if you're in that frustration where you want to hire, you're not sure you can afford it. Let me know what your frustrations are. And I wish you the best of luck. It's time for you to get out of the weeds founder. Get your life back.