When To Hire Help For Your Candle Business

#029 The clearest sign your candle business needs help isn’t a feeling, it’s a pattern: you’re saying no to great markets, customer emails are slipping, or sales have flatlined because you’re out of hours. We break down a practical path to hire with confidence, protect your quality, and regain capacity to grow without jumping straight to a full-time payroll commitment.

We start by separating working in your business from working on your business, then pinpoint the first tasks to delegate for quick wins: wicking, labeling, vessel prep, packing, and booth setup. From there, we walk through building part-time production support and training market staff who can tell your story, explain wax and fragrance choices, and sell with your standards. You’ll also get fulfillment shortcuts that boost customer satisfaction immediately—Pirate Ship labels at home, free USPS pickups, quick UPS drop-offs, and using local pack-and-ship stores to cut your errand time to minutes.

Looking beyond your neighborhood, we share how to leverage virtual assistants and creatives for customer service, social media assets, basic Shopify updates, and email scheduling. You’ll learn why solid SOPs and a clear brand guide are the secret to consistent results, how to test a $50 design batch before you commit, and which roles to keep in-house until you can replace them with equal or better skill, like wholesale outreach and partnerships. Throughout, we focus on ROI, time saved, and momentum gained—so you can buy back hours and reinvest them where growth actually happens.

Ready to stop turning down opportunities and start compounding wins? Hit follow, share this with a maker who needs it, and leave a review with the first task you plan to delegate. Your next stage of growth starts with one smart hire.

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Transcript

Why We Resist Hiring

SPEAKER_01 0:05

Welcome back to the podcast. I'm Sebastian Garza, the host here. If we've not met yet, welcome to the Candle Business Pro podcast and YouTube channel. I'm happy that you're here. Today we're going to talk about when is the right time to start hiring help. So hopefully this is going to be relatable for many of you as we go on this journey of starting a candle business. When is the right time that we need to hire other people to come in and help us? As a candle business owner, we are doing all kinds of things. We are wearing 50 different hats. We are doing the scent creation. We are doing the production, the testing. We are doing the marketing, the social media. We are updating the website. We are then fulfilling orders. We are doing wholesale to expand our business channels. We're doing the markets on the weekends for us and many people inside of our inner circle. People are doing fundraisers to grow their business. So many different opportunities out there, but we can only wear so many hats at one time and do so many things. So today I want to talk about when is the right time to hire someone, talk about some of the obstacles that you may face, and hopefully clear up some um things to help you move forward with hiring your first uh teammate to help you in your business.

SPEAKER_00 1:22

So let's get into it. So let's first talk about why we struggle to hire someone.

Signs You’re Ready To Add Help

Working In Vs Working On The Business

SPEAKER_01 1:40

Usually it's because we don't know. We don't know how to set that up. We don't know what exact roles to hire them for. And also we as creative people, we like to have control, right? We want to make sure that we have 100% control of what is happening in our business. We want to make sure that we're not putting out something that our customers may not want. Uh, we want to make sure that the social media posts are going to roll late with our customers, the emails that we're writing are accurate. We like to have control. And that's just how it is for us, at least, and hopefully that's probably uh related well for you. But here's the problem is we end up burning ourselves out or not being able to take on anymore. When you start to turn down opportunities, that means you are ready to hire. If you know of a really good market, but that weekend you are going to be just too busy either doing fundraisers, doing pouring parties, or just doing production to get up to speed with what needs to be fulfilled to ship out to your customers. This means it's time to hire someone. If your customer service and your communication is lacking, that's a real really another tail that you probably need to bring someone on. Um also if your growth has plateaued. So if you started out, when we start out, we we can go on this nice little um rise in our sales, right? We're gonna start out at zero, and then we're gonna start out, you know, bringing in a hundred dollars a month and then five hundred and then a thousand and then fifteen hundred and then two thousand. And you're gonna get to a point where you're gonna start to plateau. Your growth is plateaued. You're keeping up with orders, you are fulfilling everything, your customer service um is still at 100%, but now you can't grow anymore because you don't have the capacity to take on uh any more work. And that's a sign that you are ready to hire someone. You need to bring in someone to help you. Um, also the mental load. The mental um load that we take on, if you're starting to feel burnt out, that's another sign that you're gonna have to hire someone, you're gonna have to pivot where you're gonna kind of have to clean up, I say, uh clean up your business. You know, maybe you're putting way too much time into a sales channel that's not working for you right now. For instance, when you first launch your website, it's gonna take quite some time for Google to crawl it and to start analyzing the data about how people, customers are using your website, right? So instantly you're not gonna start getting sales. Now you need to optimize it for SEO. We talk a lot about that in the inner circle. I actually have a workshop that you can take inside of there uh to get your website optimized. Um, but it's not gonna start, you're not gonna get sales overnight. It's going to take time. You need to have um tenure C on the internet. And so Google is going to monitor your page, is gonna crawl it every 14 to 28 days and analyze the data. And then based on the results of that data, you may just keep moving up higher and higher on Google's results. Um, but what's nice about doing SEO and doing your website, do it right away when you first start your business. And it you don't have to make a lot of changes to it. Let Google take its time and realize it's going to take time. So you do not have to make all these changes up front. But get that out of the way. But there's other things that you do have to work on all the time. Social media posts need to be going out every day or every couple of days. You need to be in contact with your customers uh through email once or twice a week. You need to be continuously reaching out to do new fundraisers, to do pouring parties, depending on what uh type of business foundation you're building off of. There's all different ways to go to have a candle business. So um, you're gonna get to a point where your mental load is you're gonna be burnt out. You're gonna hit that growth plateau. Uh, and then now you're spending time on tasks that actually doesn't move your business forward. You'll hear people talk about working in the business versus working on the business. So if you're not familiar with that term, working in your business is doing that day-to-day stuff, making candles, packing orders, responding to the emails, writing the social media. Those things are working in your business. Those are the day-to-day activities that you have to do to stay afloat. Those things aren't growing your business. Growing your business is going to be doing wholesale and reaching out to um potential um new retailers and boutiques to get your candles in front of new customers. It's going to be reaching out to organizations to do uh fundraising partnerships with. Those are working on your business. You're working on growing your business rather than working in your business to keep it where it's at.

SPEAKER_00 6:26

So that's the difference between the two there.

Staffing Markets And Brand Representation

Moving To Structured Roles And Faster Fulfillment

Shipping Shortcuts And Pickup Hacks

Local Vs Virtual Help: Where To Find Talent

What To Delegate First And Why

SOPs And Playbooks That Scale

Empower Your Team And Iterate

SPEAKER_01 6:34

All right, so let's talk about the different stages of your business to where you're going to need to look at bringing on some help. Uh early stage help. This is going to be packaging, labeling, pouring parties, cleaning out the vessels, prepping wicks. That's the easy thing. We can have friends, family members, and neighbor to come and help you with those type of things. They don't take a lot of work. You can teach them what you know, you can teach them how to do it, and they can replicate that over and over again. So that's gonna be rather easy to hire for. You don't have to commit to an ex uh, you know, extended amount of time with them. It can be more of an on-call basis. You have a family member, hey, come over and help me out for a couple hours this week. You know, that is gonna be the easy early stage help. Now, the established stage help, this is gonna be more of the uh part-time production assistance where you're having people come in and actually helping you make candles, right? Whether it's five hours a week, 15 hours a week, it doesn't matter. Now it's more of they have to understand a lot more, right? You can't just teach them in an hour how to do those tasks. So that's gonna be uh seasonal help for your markets. Um, if you're doing markets and you want to hire someone on to help you do markets, so you can be in one city and they can be in another city. This is a fabulous way to grow your business. But the people that you have in those positions that are gonna be out representing you, they need to be part of your brand. They need to understand your business in and out. You can't just find someone, you know, uh in your in your social space to just take on that role occasionally. It has to be someone that's dedicated because we all know how markets are. When you are doing markets on the weekend, we are building a relationship with people. We are talking about our story, we're talking about how we started our business. We are talking about the ins and outs of the candles. Like, what is this candle made out of? What kind of wax is it? What kind of oils is it? Is it all clean? Is it natural? Is it vegan? All of those selling points that we might be using when we are promoting our products uh potentially we have to have someone in a position that is representing our brand where we're not there that is doing our brand justice. Um, for a couple of reasons. For one, we want to make sure that whoever is representing our brand is doing it to the standards that we set. But also, if they don't know the questions to the answers people will ask them, they're likely not going to be able to sell those products as well as you would. And if your sales aren't going to be to where it would be if you were doing it yourself or close to it, it might not be worth the cost because there's a there's going to be a market fee. You have to pay the person to uh you know be out there and sell, whether you're doing it on an hourly basis or a commission or a draw system, lots of different ways that you can pay someone when you hire them to do a market, but you want to make sure that they are representing your brand um in the best light possible. Uh so something to keep in mind there. So this is part of the established stage where you're bringing on people that need to be in the business and understand the business more than just your neighbor that is putting labels on candles. Okay. Uh, and then we're gonna go to the, or that was the growth stage if you got to that's the growth stage as we're going through. Uh, then you're growing and you're having people helping you out here and there, but more on a regular basis, but very part-time. And then the next stage is going to be that established stage help. This is where you're having people on a structured schedule coming in and helping you, whether it's for production, uh, whether it is just to handle all of your customer service, uh, all of your fulfillment, you can have someone that is just come coming in when there's order, fulfilling your orders and getting them out. That's actually one of the areas that holds a lot of people back because I know several candlemakers that are inside of the inner circle that their traveling nurses or their teachers, they don't have the capacity always to go to the post office or UPS every day or schedule a pickup. They don't have, or they're they're traveling with for work. And if you're traveling with work, it's gonna be hard to fulfill your orders. We we can't expect our customers to buy from us and have a week-long leeway for getting those orders fulfilled. In the day and age of Amazon, Macy's, these businesses that will ship out the same day, um, we have to compete with them. If I go to a website and it's gonna take seven days before they're shipping me a product, I'm I'm gonna go look elsewhere for it. That's just the reality of our shopping shopping habits these days. So keep that in mind. You've got to be able to fulfill right away. Uh, so bringing in someone to help you with just fulfillment might be uh something for you to look at. If you are a um, you know, you work from home and you can't have distractions, but you work too late to get to the post office, you may want to hire someone just to come by and grab your stuff and take it. Now, with us locally, you know, we live in a in a in a it's a small city, but it's it's a city to where the post office uh comes and delivers to our house every day. Uh that that's all free. If you're shipping USPS, you can schedule a pickup from them for free. We use Pirate Ship, um, is the app to do all of our shipping labels. And right on PirateShip's website, uh, as soon as we buy the label and print it off, it asks if we want to schedule a pickup. And you can hit schedule pickup. For USPS, it's completely free. Uh for UPS, it's like a$3.50 charge. So keep that in mind. But if you are having packages delivered to your home often, generally, your UPS driver does not mind taking those packets that you have ready to go out to them. Luckily, we're to the point with our storefront now, we have UPS coming about every day. Uh, so they're always stopping by just to pick up packages, even if they don't have anything for us, because if they're not at our store, they're going to be at one of the stores uh surrounding us. So that's one of the benefits we have now. But you can do all of your fulfillment printing of all your labels at home, have USPS pick them up from you. And then for your UPS packages, just take them to the UPS store. Uh, walk in, cut in front of the line, and then just drop them off right at the counter. Keep in mind, you do not want to have your package uh postage paid at UPS or the UPS store. That's gonna be so much higher than doing it at home off of Pirate Ship or Shopify shipping. Print, package everything up yourself at home, and then just take it to them and then just drop it off. You can cut front of the line, say, I don't need a receipt, set on the counter. They'll take it from there. They're completely fine with that. You don't have to wait in line to go through the whole process of weighing it and asking how you want it shipped. Do all of that at home. Go in there and just drop it off. We also here in our town, we have a lot of other, there's like pack mail for here in our town. Other the business is called the shipping department. These are small businesses that all they do is packaging stuff and shipping it out, right? They actually get paid a small percent or a small fee for collecting packages on behalf of UPS, FedEx, and the Postal Service. So they love our business of us just going in there dropping stuff off. And then they're gonna turn around and get it to those places. So that's free. And it's closer for us than going to the UPS store. So something to keep in mind. Look up like Pac Mail, I know is like a national chain. These are all places that are just like the UPS store, but they're not tied to a specific uh shipper. Um, even uh Staples may check with Staples and Office Depot in your town and see if you're allowed to just drop off packages there. It doesn't cost anything whatsoever when these are receiving companies that are gonna you know get them to where they need to go for you. And they're actually getting a little cut, a little, that's how they create revenue. If you wonder, gosh, how does that business that's just packaging our stuff out, how do they get paid? Well, they're getting paid for holding and delivering from the USPS, UPS, FedEx, DHL, all of that. So look and see if you have one of those local to you that you can drop them on for uh as well. So a few little uh areas there um for fulfillment. Um so what is the shift? So the shift for us from going from just running our business ourselves is looking at what can what am I doing day to day that I can outsource? What can I give to someone else to do? And when you hire someone, don't think about just hiring someone locally. Don't just think about your neighbor, your family member, someone necessarily in your community. You can be hiring someone online as well. You can be using uh websites like Fiverr or Upwork. I I prefer Upwork over Fiverr, the the the workers or the the um consultants on there, I I feel are generally a little bit more um filter. Um and I think that there's some requirements that are um need to be fulfilled for them to be on that platform. So I just had much better luck with Upwork over Fiverr, but depending on what the task is that you need them to do, um, it may be beneficial, you know, just to go on Fiverr if it's gonna be really inexpensive. So, what would I use those uh websites for? Social media would be a really good one. If you don't have someone locally that can do your social media, and that is, you know, creating your images, um, your captions, putting all that together, creating videos for you, um, even photography. Um, there's all different ways of using one of those consulting services that they can do the work for you. I'm not great at creating social media images and videos. Now, Chad does ours now because his workload has been less as we've hired on people in other areas, and we'll talk about that in just a moment. Um, but when we first started out, we hired people on Fiverr and Upwork, and for$50, they would create 50 social media assets. Now, the quality wasn't great on all 50 of them. We probably liked 25 of them, maybe. Um, and I in fact, we still use some of those uh to this day. Uh well, we repurpose social media stuff over and over again. It doesn't always have to be fresh. So we have stuff from three years ago. Uh, in fact, for our classic line of candles, that we have social media designs um that people created on Fiverr for us that we will, you know, just post out there when we don't have anything to post, we want to stay top of mind. We're gonna post that. So you can get work on these uh services-based websites for pretty inexpensive. Um, so we would have that for creating social media. Uh, you can hire people to help you with your website. Now keep in mind, one of the big things that I always stress is if you don't know how the website backend works, you need to at least learn that because if you use one of these websites and you have someone build out a website for you, you pay them a flat B, which is usually gonna be pretty high. Usually it's over$1,000,$1,500 just to have someone build out a storefront for you on Shopify. In a couple of months from now, when you need to make adjustments to your images, your titles, your descriptions, we're optimizing it all the time for SEO. Um, if you don't know how any of that works on the back end, the admin side, then you're gonna have to hire someone again to make those changes for you. So it's gonna be an ongoing basis of hiring someone. So it's one of the very first workshops we do inside of the inner circle is I did a three-part where I built out an entirely brand new candle brand uh website and took you through step by step how to connect with your bank account, how to uh get your EIN to put into your Shopify store. And then I also showed you how we build our back end of our Shopify store as far as like tagging our products. So this is how you create a collection. And this is why I did it. I did it like this because we have fall candles, we have uh winter candles, we're gonna have uh different scent notes, and we want to be able to create a collection around those. If you hire someone off a five or a pork or somewhere, they're not gonna understand the intricacies of how we want to operate a candle business. So they might not be able to build that for you up front or recommend it to you. And the reality, we don't know what we don't know. These are all things we're gonna learn on the journey. So I would recommend coming in and hanging out with us for 50 bucks inside the inner circle, whatever the rate is, just to get that one workshop and build out your own website versus spending you know a lot of money on that. So keep that in mind. You can certainly have someone um build it out for you. There, there's a lot of services there, be more happy with those services, but you may want to learn that skill long term. If you don't want to learn the skill of making social media assets, totally fine. There are plenty of people to hire to do that. Inexpensive, plenty of people that that can run that for you. Some other areas that we are now going to outsource. Um, we outsource a lot of our customer service in our business of checking our email. So we have a virtual assistant that works very part-time for us, but they are making sure that we're not dropping the ball on anything customer service related. You know, we're we want to give the best service to our customers. So we have someone keeping an eye on that. They can filter through our emails, making sure anything that's high priority, we get. You can use websites to find a uh virtual assistant as well. Um, so that's something you can reach out to me and I'll give you the recommendations that I'm using at this time. I've gone through a few different ones. And when I hire a virtual assistant, generally they're going to be from the Philippines, or I'm using a business now where the reps are from Latin America. And I'm having good success with that, um, mainly because of the time, the time zones that we're on. We're we can communicate easier when they're on the same or close to the same time zone as us. With my VA that I've used from the Philippines, the work was good. There was a little bit more of a language barrier there and understanding our thought process behind how why we communicate a certain way with our customers. So for writing emails on our behalf, it was a little tougher. Um, but the big obstacle was just a time difference. Um, you know, when someone is working at, you know, 8 a.m. their time and it's 6 or 7 p.m. my time, it's taking up my time in the evening that I want to dedicate to me and to my family and to my dogs, right? So something to keep in mind there. Hiring a VA is fantastic. Um, the rates are usually pretty generally um affordable, uh, and and they are good and they are skilled. So something to keep in mind there as well. And what's nice about hiring a virtual assistant is generally they're fractional, meaning five hours a week, 10 hours a week. If you can hire a virtual assistant that's really good at creating social media assets for you, also knows the basics of Shopify, also understands how Facebook, um, Instagram, whatever social media platforms you're using, if they understand all of that stuff, that's a win-win because they can create your assets for you, they can send them over to you, you just say yes, approved, and then they can go in, they can schedule them for posting, um, you know, in whatever cadence you set them up on uh inside of all your social media platforms. They can also update your website for whenever you're running promotions, things like that. So getting a VA, which most of them, most of any VAs that I've worked with, they're gonna be um pretty good at using Canva, or some of them are gonna have like actual like Adobe and Photoshop and those type of skills as well. Um, you're gonna get what you pay for. You're gonna have to pay a little bit more for some of those, but hiring your VA is not that expensive. It's definitely um less expensive than hiring someone locally in your community is going to be.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

Um it's so that's some that's an option for you uh there as well.

Start Small With Contractors And Keep It Simple

Closing Resources And Community Invite

SPEAKER_01 23:16

All right, so you've decided you're gonna hire someone and you've decided what role you want to hire them for. And whether it's two hours a week or 40 hours a week, you've decided, hey, I want to offload this task because it is taking up too much energy, mental space, or just time for me doing it, and it's not allowing me to put my time into other areas. For me, it's let me offload production so I could focus more on wholesale and growing my wholesale business. I can't hire someone that's gonna do it as good as I'm going to do it in the method I'm doing it at. It's it's it's just simply how I feel. Um, it's we actually what we teach inside of our mastering wholesale course. I'm good at doing it. It's gonna be hard for me to offload it to someone else. Eventually I could get a salesperson that is skilled at doing that, but it's not a it's not a position to train someone on. A sales is a position that they need already have that experience or qualities. I can't just even with, you know, we have uh nine people on staff in our stores now. I'm not sure any of those, they all have very great skills in their respective areas, but I'm not sure any of them have that sales experience. I can say, hey, can you take over the wholesale uh growth department and growing our wholesale account? It's something that I want to take on. So I decide I'm gonna keep that, but I'm gonna offload production, I'm gonna offload some social media. How do we get them set up for success for them and for us? So for me, it's simply having a checklist, writing out, document everything that you're doing right now. When you are, okay, I'm gonna create a social media asset. Okay, what goes into that? Okay, well, I take a picture, okay, of my products, and then I upload them to the computer, and then I drag them into Canva, and then I make the edits, and these are the fonts that I like. This is here's my brand guide. You should have a brand guide for all of this. Uh, another plug for this uh for the inner circle, we do brand guide creation in there. Um, you give a checklist of exactly step by step by step of every single step in your process so that you can just hand that checklist to someone and say, Hey, here are the steps. Go through these steps, let me see if you understand this. And give it to someone that you're not hiring. Give it to give it to a family member and say, Hey, can you do this for me? Let me see if this works for you. And keep refining that, keep adding in the answers to all the questions they're going to have until you have that checklist. For us, we also call these SOPs because we do this for everything in our business. When we hire someone in, now that we have store friends, we hire someone in, I say, okay, I'm gonna teach you how to make candles. Um first thing I do is I have them go through our candle making course at Candle Business Pro. So that gives them the foundation. They that's solid. They can now leave, they could quit and now go and take the skills somewhere else and go and make candles if they wanted to. But there's gonna be difference of how I'm gonna end up making my candle, the process. What's a process going to go in my stores? Okay. So I want my melters to turn on at 9:30 a.m. You know, staff arrives at 10. So, you know, they're all everything's on smart switches. I'm going to spend the first half hour cleaning out the vessels. So we have a whole SOP, which is a standard operating procedure. You probably heard of SOPs and any of the workplaces that you may have worked at before. It's just a guide of how to do it. I hand that to them after we do our orientation on day one and say, go through this, see if they make sense. I want 20, or I'll start with even the six. I want six of this candle made. See if you can go through this SOP and make six of this sugar lemon candle. Let me know if you have any questions. And it's going to help to show them where everything is, right? Because they're going to need to know where all the supplies are. They're going to go on the whole journey of making candles. And then any questions that they have that come up, um, I will add those to the SOP. So every time there's a new person that I need to train on this, that SOP just gets better and better and better. Eventually, it's to be to the point where I can hire people into my business and I could work from anywhere. And I could hire someone in, and we could have a call, and they should be able to go through all my documentation and run the business. That that would be the ultimate goal. Now, of course, there's going to be a lot of hiccups going from working in a store every day to not working in a store. There's going to be a lot of phone calls and things that are going to happen. But and I'm sure and I'm explaining this on a on a much larger scale than maybe what we're working on right now with just hiring someone in. But document everything. You're going to be so happy that you didn't. In fact, one of the other things that I would recommend that you do when you're, especially when we're first starting out, because what happens is do this when you're first starting out. Because what's going to happen is you're going to get into such a routine of creating and scheduling social media or setting up at markets or uh producing candles. You're going to get into such a routine that you don't even think about those small little steps that you're actually doing that you're going to forget to tell someone else. If you think that you may hire someone at some point, even if you don't think that you are going to, um, to let's say set up and sell your candles at a market, create an SOP for that. Create an SOP that says, hey, this is how much I will generally bring for any size market. This is a standard. This is how many candles I want six of our top five sellers, you know, or uh 12. I'll have a whole box of our top five sellers and then a half a box. So six of our next top five sellers, right? Whatever the breakdown for markets are gonna be for you. And then here's a market checklist of everything you got to bring from pen and paper to your your card reader, to tissue paper, to bags, to a stamp, to business cards, to the accessories. If you're gonna have USB lighters, wick trimmers, uh, the table, the tablecloth, all those things. We've all forgotten something, right? We've all shown up at a market and said, oh shoot, I forgot X, Y, or Z. And we're in such a routine of doing it that we just we didn't even check again, but we forgot that we took the card reader out of the tote, something like that. So having a checklist, uh, and then a step-by-step, hey, here's photos of how I want our booth set up when we do these markets. You should be able to create a standard for your business to where you could hand, you know, a sheet of paper or a few sheets of paper to someone and say, hey, this is how we operate. This is how I do a market. Now you could book two markets, right? If you're confident in that person that's gonna sell on your behalf, you now have a playbook for them to go out and do that. So creating SOPs or playbooks for your business is gonna be huge. That is what I recommend doing there. Um, let them go through the process and it's going to help them feel more confident as well, right? Whether it is the person that's just creating social media for you every week, or do you have a copywriter that you want to hire to do all your emails and get all of those sent out? Or is it a photographer? Anyone that you are going to possibly bring in, you want to give them the playbook, give them um all the tools needed to complete the job at the level that you want them to do it at, but then also give them some freedom. If they are, if you brought them on for social media, let them have some creativity uh freedom. Or creative freedom there to kind of present to you different ideas that might not have necessarily been something you had thought of. A lot of our growth isn't just from me saying, this is where the business is going to go and this is how we get there. We keep the blinders on and don't look around. It's at least allowing. Okay, usually I do do that. Usually I'm like, this is what we're doing, this is how we're going to get there. But I'm always open to feedback and I always want to make sure that my team feels empowered to come to me with feedback. We have a VA that would help with getting our emails to our if you buy our course, um, if you go to one of our courses or in the inner circle, I'm sending out emails all the time and just scheduling those and getting those out. You know, it's one thing to have a virtual assistant that would help schedule and get those out. But if you have someone that feels confident in that role to where they see some typos that I made, or I type fast and the autocorrect doesn't always work. So having someone that feels empowered to say, hey, you know what, Sebastian, you you, this is wrong, or hey, you messed this up, or hey, we should take another look at this, or hey, what are your thoughts about this or that? Or, or you know what? I don't, I don't like the way that candle, that blend smells. I think it's too strong on the cinnamon or it's too heavy on the lilac. Our team feels empowered to they know what the expectations are of us, but we want their creative input on the business that we're building together. So keep that in mind. Um you want to um make everyone that you bring on want to stay with you and want to grow with you. When we first start out, we only need them for two hours a week or five hours a month. But we want to make them feel good about that small role that they're doing for us, letting them know that they are making an impact on our business because that's who you're gonna want whenever you can scale up. When you can hire someone full-time, you want it to be one of those people. They already have spent time with you, they already understand how you operate your business, and they're gonna be the perfect person to step in and hit the ground running. So I would encourage you to take a moment, look at all the tasks that go into hiring someone. What are the tasks that you don't have to have the candle maker skill or creativity to do? Is it writing your social media copy? Is it writing emails? Is it updating your photography on your website? Um, what is it that you can outsource? And how long does it take you to do those uh tasks? For me, it might take me an hour to create that social media graphic and the copy to go along with it, but I could hire someone that's a lot more proficient than I am, and they can do three in the amount of time it takes for me to do one. That's gonna be a good hire because then I'm buying my hour back that I can invest in other areas of my business. So take a look at your business, see where you would be thrilled with offloading and make sure it's those tasks that take a lot of time, but not moving the business forward. You know, doing uh wholesale outreach, fundraiser partnerships, pouring party outreach, all of that is growing the business, and you should probably hang on to doing that for a while. But there's so much, uh so many other tasks that don't necessarily um need to have someone that's in the business all the time. In fact, if you're terrified to outsource your production, meaning your blending of your wax and your oil, you're stirring for X amount of time, you're heating it to a specific temperature, pouring it a specific temperature. I get why it would be terrifying to just outsource that right away. But I can outsource easily someone to wick 200 candle vessels, which might take a few hours. Let me outsource that, pay someone that would be more minimal pay than actual the responsibility of full production. Uh, I can hire someone to do that. I can hire someone to come back after I've done the production, uh, you know, neighbor, family, to label all my stuff. Let me show them how it needs to be done, and I can trust that they're gonna get all done. Now the labeling the front, putting the stickers on the bottom, boxing them up if you need to be putting them into, you know, on under your shelf if you have a shelf where they're storage, or are you putting back into the vessel boxes they came out of? Whatever it might be, I would be much more confident in them doing all of that, but not doing the actual production part. So take a moment, look around, see what you can what you can outsource, and give it a shot. Just try it. Hire someone for$50. What's$50? Is that going to be three hours of work? Is that two hours of work? Whatever that might be, or think, you know what, I'm gonna go out to Fiverr up work. I want to see what kind of social media assets I can get back for$50. So go through, search, we'll look at some of the results people have um uh shown in their portfolio, some examples of the work that they've done. And they're like, oh wow, they're gonna create 10 social media assets for 50 bucks. Let me see if this is legit. Even if 10 aren't great, if five of them are great, now you've got five media assets for 50 bucks. That's in a week's worth of posts. And again, with social media assets, it's one of those things that, okay, in six weeks I can run those all over again, right? So you don't need to think about hiring that on for forever. You can have you can reuse that over and over again. Like I said earlier today, we are still using social media assets that we bought from someone on fiber well over three years ago. So hopefully this is helpful. Hopefully, this makes you think outside the box of just um going from just you to you and someone else running the business full time. You don't need to bring on someone full time for that. Um, you can you don't start very, very small, start, increment, and grow as your business grows. So you're doing fat fantastic. Another thing to keep in mind is you can hire people as we wrap up here. You can hire people just on a consultant type of basis, right? They're at 1099. Uh, I don't want to dive into the payroll aspect of everything, but you do not need to worry about all the ins and outs of bringing someone on as payroll until they are an actual employee of your business. Look at this hiring consultant, um, task by task type of roles to keep it not complicated whatsoever. So hope this has helped you out. If you've already started hiring people, comment below what the first task that you hire someone for was. That's gonna help um myself, all the other uh viewers and listeners to see uh some ideas that I have not brought up today of what are some fantastic roles for us to start uh outsourcing to other people. Thank you so much for tuning in today. As always, you can visit Candle Business Pro.com and check out our free downloads, lots of free resources, and a blog out there for you to get a lot of knowledge from. And you can also check out our courses. And if you're interested in joining that inner circle, you can check that out as well. Have a fantastic day.

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