Avoid These Hiring Mistakes While Scaling Your Business (That Cost You Thousands $$)

This week’s episode is a little different, while I’m off gallivanting around the south of France, I’m bringing you a guest-style feature from one of my clients, Ericka from Boss Babe Reset and trust me, this is a conversation you need to hear.

• Learn more about the Reset Room membership: reset.bossbabereset.com
• Follow Ericka & listen to Boss Babe Reset for more on building your business while working a 9–5

We’re diving into the real reason most entrepreneurs struggle to build a team—and spoiler: it’s not your budget.

If you’ve ever told yourself “I can’t afford help yet,” this episode will challenge that belief and show you what’s actually holding you back from delegating, scaling, and stepping into your CEO role.

In This Episode, We Cover:

• Why delegation is NOT about having a big budget
• The real reason outsourcing often “doesn’t work”
• How poor documentation can cost you thousands
• Why you “can’t outsource chaos” (and what to fix first)
• The concept of micro-delegation and how to start small
• How to buy back your time—even with limited resources
• The difference between hiring for tasks vs. hiring employees
• Why cognitive bandwidth is your most valuable currency

Key Takeaway:
Delegation isn’t a money problem—it’s a clarity problem.
If your processes only live in your head, you’re not ready to scale yet. But the good news? Fixing that is simpler than you think.

Resources & Mentions:

• Learn more about the Reset Room membership: reset.bossbabereset.com
• Follow Ericka & listen to Boss Babe Reset for more on building your business while working a 9–5

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Hey y'all, so we have a special episode for you guys today because guess what? I'm on vacation. I'm actually in the south of France as you're listening to this, drinking Provence wine, eating stinky French cheese, and gallivanting around. So, yes, you should be jealous. Um, I have a client named Erica with a podcast called Boss Babe Reset. And she did an episode about what nobody tells entrepreneurs about building a team on a budget. And listen, we're all scaling, that's why you're listening to this podcast, and you're gonna have to build a team. She is like the perfect person to talk about how to hire a team, how to fire a team, how to lead a team, and how to build a team. And I was like, Erica, can I feature your podcast on my podcast? Because I think you guys need to hear directly from Erica. So enjoy this episode. You're gonna love it. And if you love Erica, you would love her podcast, Boss Babe Reset. Especially if you're like still have a nine to five and building your business. Like, God, that's the perfect podcast for you. Anyways, enough of me. I'm gallivanting in France and y'all enjoy this episode.

SPEAKER_01 1:03

Okay, so I've been sitting on this topic for a while because every time I bring up delegation, someone's first reaction is Erica, I can't afford that. And I'm like, okay, but can we just pause there for a second? Because I had a moment recently. I was literally building out an entire workflow for one of my executives at work. And I'm like mapping it out. I'm screen recording, I'm writing the SOP. And I caught myself thinking, girl, why am I not doing this in my own business? Like, I do this for other people's companies every single day. And then I go home and I'm acting like my business is too complicated to hand this off. No, the math is not mathing, the continents are not meeting. And that's when I realized that the problem isn't money. I truly believe the problem is that we haven't built anything documentable yet. I don't even know if that's a word. You can't delegate chaos. You can't hand someone a mess and call it outsourcing. So that's what we're gonna be talking about today.

unknown 2:16

I'm the first girl to promote a track.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

I'll switch up the feet of the drunk. Welcome and welcome back to Boss Babe Reset, the podcast helping women working in 905 while building their dream business reclaim time and energy so their side business can become their main business without burning out. I am your host, Erica Nicole. Make sure you're following this show on whichever platform you're listening on right now. Share this episode with a fellow Boss Babe because we do not gatekeep over here. Now, let's get right into the conversation. If you are building a business while working full-time, the reality is delegation is not about being fancy. And it's actually not even about having a big team or a big budget. You would be surprised how much we get done here with very little. Like at Boss Bay Breeset, even at like our peak team capacity, there were only myself and three other people on the team. And you would think we had like a full production marketing team behind us, and that was not the case. Okay. Bougie on a beer budget. And then same thing with Silken. Outside of myself, there's only like one or two other key people who are really driving the business forward. So when we think about delegating, especially when you have other obligations, and by other obligations, I mean a whole entire job that is paying your bills. Delegating is really about buying back your time. And time is a resource that is very finite. And even outside of buying back your time, you are buying back the one resource that you cannot manufacture, which is capacity, literally cognitive bandwidth. You would be surprised how much outsourcing or delegating, so to speak, opens up your brain to be able to breathe and be creative and do the things that you need to do in your CEO hours, which we talked a little bit about last week, to continue moving your business forward. And most of us aren't delegating not because we can't afford it. There are many affordable options, affordable ways to delegate. More on that in a moment. I think we hesitate to hand things off because we haven't built anything clear enough to hand off yet, right? And I feel like I saw this very clearly, at least for myself most recently, actually building out the reset room membership for our boss babe reset community. Me building out this membership was really me doing something one I never thought I would do. Because even though I have this podcast, I never really saw myself as a community builder until so many of you were like, girl, we listen to you. Like the girlies are writing for you. Like this is community. So building out a membership was just so far-fetched out of my mind because I never viewed myself as a community builder. So TLDR, it was just something that I never saw in my future. So when I decided to pursue this path, there was just so much to learn because there was just so much new. Like, what platform are we going to use? What systems or website are we going to use to like do all the back-end stuff? What back end do we use? Like there were just so many things up in the air that I really had to figure out how we're going to do it. And the thing about being an entrepreneur, at least for myself, I am a team player. Okay. If I can hand something off to someone and have them just do it and me not have to worry about it, that is the option I'm going to choose every single time. And it may be because, like in my EA space, I watch high performing executives buy back their time all the time. And I see how valuable it is. So if I have the option to pay for convenience, and this is even outside of entrepreneurship in my real life too, I will absolutely do it. Do I Instacart my groceries? Absolutely. Am I going to buy the skip the line extra$15 speed pass at the airport so I can just like get right to my gate and get right through security? Absolutely. I am someone who pays for convenience a thousand percent. But in this particular case, what ends up happening is I began hiring freelancers. I used to be a fiver girly, but now I'm an upwork girl. Hiring freelancers on Upwork, and we're like just asking them to do all the different parts of the membership that I felt like I needed. So someone to help me build out the back end, someone to help me build out like our forward-facing funnel, someone to help me like build our website and get the community set up. And what eventually ended up happening is I gave them like this chat GPT brief of what I thought I really needed. And they did it, they executed it, they brought it back to me. And the reality is I had to end up going back, and even though I paid them, and I paid them because like they did what was on the brief, they did what I asked them to do. But I ended up having to go back and do so many things myself because it just wasn't, it's not that they did it wrong. It just wasn't what I would have done, or it just wasn't what I wanted. Okay. And the reality is that one, I lost a lot of money. I paid freelancers to do things. I either had to pay somebody else to redo, or nine out of 10 times I ended up redoing myself. So to be honest, I could have saved all that money. And we're talking about thousands of dollars here. We're not talking about hundreds, we're talking about thousands of dollars invested into getting this community, our reset room membership up and running that I had to go back and do myself. It's a mix of many things, right? We've grown, evolved, pivoted, even though it's only been like a two-month span or three months behind the scenes because we started building it out at the end of November, two months front facing. Like there's been a lot going on behind the scenes. So we've pivoted a lot and things have changed. But it wasn't even just me making small tweaks. It was literally me rebuilding out entire things, right? Like I had someone build out our community, realize I completely hated the community platform that we had chosen, and switched to a whole nother one. But like now I'm out of money because I already paid you to build out this community and now I can't afford to pay you to build out this community. So guess what? Now I have to become an expert in this specific platform so that I can build out the community. And same thing with the back end. I we had certain workflows set up, ended up not liking the copy, and things needed to be changing, and things weren't communicating to each other because we switched the platform. Girl, it was a hot mess. Anywho, because I didn't have things documented, I really had in hindsight these freelancers, these people I was delegating to, basically trying to act as mind readers. And that wasn't their job. And it really took me looking in the mirror because I, you know, just took a really good look at my credit card statements and was like, oh girl, we went a little, we went a little overmudgy with this whole membership build-down thing. And it's because I had to like respend on doing things over again. And I had to have a really hard look in the mirror, like it was not their fault. I paid these people to initially help me buy back my time, but I did not give them the tools and resources to really set them up for success. And as an entrepreneur, as a founder, that's not their fault. That's mine. So what I really learned from this experience is that delegation is a documentation problem. I can't afford help usually means I don't have anything documented. And like I said earlier, you can't outsource chaos. So before you can bring someone in to help you, the question that you really need to ask yourself is if you had to explain your process to someone tomorrow, could you do it? And if you could do it, is it repeatable? Is it repeatable? How are you documenting it? Are you screen recording what you're doing so that you can just put a link to the Loom video and say, hey, this is how I do things. It should be very straightforward. Are you writing things out? Are you creating these SOPs, so to speak, for your own business? Your brain is not a filing cabinet. You can't expect someone from the outside to come in, look through your files, and do something the exact way that you would do something if you haven't shown them how to do it. I'm gonna let you sit with that. And then the other flip side to that is I think a lot of people struggle with once you have your SOPs, then you actually have to do the delegation. And it's so hard to delegate when, again, your business is your baby. You are slaving it on the slave ship in your nine to five to have money to invest in your business and hiring people and delegating is in fact an investment because we are spending money to change on these people, right? So I think a really great place to start there is with micro delegation. You do not need five, 10 grand a month to start a team. And I think that's where a lot of people go wrong. So instead of thinking it's hard for us to do because we're also employees in like in like the other half of our life, but you can't think of hiring these people as employees. You have to think of it as task-based. What is it that I need you to do? You're not putting these people, well, depending on your situation, depending how long you need them for. I was gonna say you don't put them on retainer, but depending on the project, you might do that. But again, it's like it's task-based. You're not offering them benefits, you're not giving them a W-2. What is it that you need them to do? So that could be hiring a VA for five hours and they just help you with inboxing and scheduling and researching. And there are so many affordable options for VAs, especially if you go overseas. There are so many talented people overseas that can really help like automate certain parts of your life. Again, this isn't something that I automate, at least for me personally, because like I just I'm not at that volume yet. And because I do it so well and so quickly, it's just not something that takes up a ton of my time right now. But just trust and believe, once it becomes a need, it'll be delegated. Upwork will be getting a payment from me. Okay, quick pause. Odds are if you are listening to this episode, you are either working a full-time job while building something meaningful on the side, scaling a business that is finally taking off, or accelerating in a career that you actually care about, which means right now you are probably pushing through exhaustion, carrying constant mental pressure, and forcing yourself to keep going even when you are depleted. And sure, that might work for a while. I mean, it's gotten you this far. But the reality is left unchecked, it almost always, always, always turns into burnout, decision fatigue, procrastination, and eventually resentment toward the life you have worked so hard to build. And that is exactly why I have created the reset room. It is a private membership for ambitious women who want to grow, earn, and lead at a higher level without burning themselves out to do it. Inside the reset room, women are reclaiming 10 to 15 hours of their time back every single week, not by working harder, but by running their lives through systems that actually support the level that they are building toward. That means clearer decisions, stronger boundaries, less mental load, and a week that finally feels manageable instead of overwhelming. Because every week that you stay overloaded is another week your income, your impact, and your momentum get quietly delayed. If your ambition has outgrown the way your life is set up right now, this is where that changes. You can learn more and join us at reset.bossbabe reset.com or click the link in the description. Now back to the episode. So, yeah, like that could be getting a VA. Even with this podcast, I have an editor who helps me with things on like an episode basis. We have an arrangement where we release a certain amount of episodes per month. It's not a full production team, right? It could be a tech setup contractor where like you have someone build out your tech in the background and it's just a one-time thing. And maybe if things change or things break or things need to be evolved or updated, you bring them in for another project. So I think a really good way to think of microdelegation is if you had to ask yourself, what's the one task that I keep doing over and over again that someone else could probably do in half the time, especially if it's not revenue generating, that is the thing to delegate. And to go right along with that, it's very important to document as you build. And I say that because then eventually there comes a point in time where your business may blow up or you may have a peak or a busy season, and then you realize you actually need support in all these different areas. And you're like, oh, sugar, honey, iced tea, I have nothing documented. And now you're trying to go back and like think through all of your processes, which is taking up so much cognitive space in your brain, and it's exhausting. So every time you do something, record it if you can. A screen record doesn't take away any more time from your day. So think of using Loom. I know if you have MacBook, you can use QuickTime Player. I use it all the time. You can put it on a simple Google Doc. If you want to get super, super simple, I was gonna say all of us have iPhones. If you don't have an iPhone, I'm so sorry for you. Um yeah, my my condolences, best wishes to you. Um, I'm sure there's probably like a feature on what do they even call non-Abble phones? Is that like an Android? Like Google? Ooh. Anywho, no shade to my Android people. I know, yeah, but like a voice memo, right? Just talk through what you're doing. So I'm starting here, I'm going here, I'm gonna put it in this folder, I'm gonna share it here, and I'm gonna add it to Notion here in this folder. It could be that simple. It does not have to be fancy. You can literally create a Google Drive folder of just SOPs and just drop your voice memos in there. If you want to get extra fancy, again, at least on Apple, because I don't know about that whole, I don't know about the whole Android thing. But at least on Apple, you can from the voice memo, export the transcript, drop it into the AI software of your choice. Again, y'all know I'm in between chat and Claudette and Claudette. Claudette is swindling me. Claudette is, she's she's nice. She's she's she's winning me over. Um, just put it up there and be like, hey, this is my SOP, help me put it in text format. Boom, SOP done. It doesn't have to be this like long big thing. Screen record it, checklist it, save it, that's it. You are literally building your SOP library in real time, and it becomes so much easier than you think. And then I just think we have to just change the lens of the way that we think through the cost effectiveness of delegating. Again, we talked about it a little bit earlier. Overseas versus US labor both have a time and a place. And it's really understanding that nuanced difference. There are some occasions where I prefer to have someone in the US, especially if it's a project that I need done very quickly, very well. At least for me, it's very helpful if we're on the same time zone. So, like that's something I may pay a premium for because of like how time-sensitive the project may be, versus something that may be like a reoccurring task, which I could be a little bit more loose on that might be overseas. Again, thinking about the structure of your pricing. Is it project-based? Is it retainer? I always, always recommend starting project-based until one, you know the volume and two, you know the person. Because I have gone through many a people trying to find good people. Good, you know how they say the saying is good talent is hard to find girl. It really is. So when you find someone good, when you find your people, treat them well, hold on to them, go above and beyond for them. That's a life lesson right there. And then like create one-time systems if you can, like, understand is this a one-time system or is it ongoing execution? Sometimes you pay once and it runs. Other times we're gonna have to, you know, be on some type of retainer. And then get really grounded on your numbers, like really make sure that you're getting an ROI on your investment. And when I say ROI when it comes to delegating, it doesn't always necessarily mean money. It could also mean time. Because if I'm paying someone to do something for me and I'm buying my time back, what am I using that time to do? Hello, CEO hours. Right. Hopefully, revenue generating, operational things, visibility things continue. So again, understand like what those numbers are. So ask, what is one hour of my CEO time actually work? Figure out how much money you're making a month from whatever it is that you're working on and divide that by how many hours you are actually spending on your business. That'll kind of give you like your hourly range, so to speak, and see if there is some type of ROI there, again, whether it's in dollars or whether it's in time. And the the last thing I kind of want to touch on is just like really understanding that capacity, cognitive bandwidth is real currency. It is a real currency. Delegation, again, isn't always about money. Sometimes it's just about mental overhead, being able to clear up your mind to be creative, to give space for those ideas that that help you run your business. Like those are extremely important. Run your business, having hard conversations at work, negotiating salaries, like any of those things that you do in your day-to-day, whether it be in your nine to five or in your business, mental space. Mental space is extremely important. We are already building somebody else's dream at our corporate, and we need to be able to have something left over for ourselves so that we can build our dream. Because every task that you hold on to is brain space that you are not using to grow. So the reality is the goal is not to have a big team, the goal is to have efficiency so that the goal is a little bit lighter than the mental load. So, a great question to ask yourself here is what is still on my plate that is not actually CEO work? I said it last week and I'm gonna say it again. Just because you're good at something and something is your superpower does not mean that it should be on your to-do list. So I'm gonna leave that there. If you've been telling yourself that you can't outsource yet, I just want you to sit with the question of whether it's actually a money problem or whether it's a clarity problem. Because those have two different solutions. Okay. If your process only lives in your head, that's probably a great place to start. Get it out there. Okay. Not with a VA listing, not with a budget conversation. Get it out of your head with a screen recording, a voice memo, and a Google folder. You do not get extra bounty points for holding the whole thing together by yourself. Build lean and building smart still counts. If you enjoyed this episode, then please leave a five-star rating and review. It is truly the best way to support this show so that we can continue having these valuable conversations and help the nine to five girlies build the business of their dreams. I will catch you in the next episode. And remember that the best part of today is you.