Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools

SNM155: How to Grow Your Team

June 12, 2017 Jonathan Green : Bestselling Author, Tropical Island Entrepreneur, 7-Figure Blogger
Artificial Intelligence Podcast: ChatGPT, Claude, Midjourney and all other AI Tools
SNM155: How to Grow Your Team
Show Notes Transcript Chapter Markers

The first time I built a team I did everything wrong and each new staff member became a burden sucking money and energy out of me.  I made all the wrong moves, so that you don't have to.  Please learn from my mistakes.

The post SNM155: How to Grow Your Team appeared first on Serve No Master.

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how to grow your team. Find out on today's episode. Today's episode is brought to you by digit. Save money without thinking about it. Get paid $5 just for signing up at serve. No master dot com Backslash digit today. Are you tired of dealing with your boss? Do you feel underpaid and underappreciated? If you want to make it online, fire your boss and start living your retirement dreams now then you've come to the right place. Welcome to serve no master podcast where you learn how to open new revenue streams and make money while you sleep. Presented live from a tropical island in the South Pacific by best selling author Jonathan Green. Now here's your host. One of the biggest challenges for a young growing business is when your time gets full and you begin to have tasks that you need to get done. But it's not efficient for you to do them yourself. There are certain tasks that take a lot of time, but not a lot of expertise there, more mechanical. Once you master them, you can easily teach them and pass them on, and it's time to expand your team, and there's several ways to do this, and it could be very challenging. The first time you looked. Hire new staff and I want to take you to the process that I use that ever find over years of growing my business, the place to find good staff always changes. For a long time. I worked with a lot of interns and men toward a lot of people in that process is very effective for many years. Then, for a long time I hired people in my community or hire people through Other resource is. But lately I've shifted Thio a really good outsourcing platform, and outsourcing is where you hire people in other countries, and you get to take advantage of the difference in living costs in other countries. You could hire someone at what would be a very low wage in America, but that is a very high wage in another country, and this is what most large corporations do. Watch the news and you'll see that Disney, Google, apple, they're all doing this. They're always looking to hire the most skilled people for the lowest wages they could get away with. This is how all businesses operate. My favorite platform these days it's called Outsource Lee. I've got a link below. If you go to serve the master at com backslash outsource Lee, they'll give you $100 to use to hire staff, and that's more than you need. A basic membership costs $19 a month, so using my coupon, you get five months, and that's way more time than you need. What's great about aren't source Leah's. You find someone on, then you hire them directly. Don't have to pay them through the outsourcing platform. It's simply an introductory platform. I discovered it recently about three months ago would have hired all my recent staff through this platform, and it's been very effective for me. When I posted AD, I get anywhere from 100 to 300 applications. I know that seems like a lot, but gives me a lot to work with. One of my biggest challenges in dealing with my vision is that I can't spend much time in the computers I used to. So I switched completely to dictating all of my books. And in fact, I'm looking Thio start dictating my block posts as well. To really be very effective with my time, and I've talked about this process a little bit recently because it's a big part of my life. But before I went through this, I also hired a social media manager throughout source least the person who is running on my social media accounts form. It's helping me organize Instagram organized YouTube. Organize the Facebook page, all of that stuff. I found her throughout, seriously as well. The next time I hire someone, I'll use this platform. What I like about it is that you could post the job. You're looking for you. I'm looking for someone part time or full time this many hours week. This is what the job is. This is what the pay is. So people go in knowing exactly what the job is. Unlike up work, which I really got tired of using because you get you just get a lot of bad applications and bitten switches and a lot of problems. Platform. Ever since they stopping, he lands here. It's not people looking for contract work, its people looking for a full time job, so you get a lot of applications from people that are looking toe work with you for months or years. When you're putting together your at when you put it together, your job offer you want to include a test task. I transcribed a short section from one of my books and that I had everyone who passed my first round of transcribing auditions. Then go transcribe that same section. I look to see who got it right and who did better than me. I don't want justice goes me. I want better than me and underthrew who did better than me that I negotiated. Well, how many hours a week can you do? How fast can you do with this rate? What can we accomplish together? And you have these really great conversations with people? You can really connect on what they need, what you need to begin to develop a strong working relationship I pay weekly, which allows me to pivot if it's not the right fit. So every Friday I pay all the people who work for me. This is very helpful for people that have had to wait two weeks. Haven't wait a month, and it's not the right fit. Then I can Hey, it's not the right fit. Let's move on now. Haven't had that problem yet, but I like having that option and you can give people weekly task to kind of manage things there. Our couple of areas where I'm looking at expanding again the next time I hire people, I'm almost think about hiring a full time editor, someone to full time, take my transcriptions and clean them up for Matt them to the next level. I'm not sure I'm going to make that decision because I do love through that part myself. I like making sure my voice is strong, but if I could get the right person, it will really accelerate my business again. It will triple the speed at which I can generate content, so it will be very valuable for me. I'm not quite ready to pull the trigger on that. I'd have to find the right person and go through a lot of process. But it's something I'm thinking. But I'm also thinking about hiring AH website manager, someone to do the tack right now. Every image you see on the block, every piece of design, everything in the corner, on the side bar, everything. The members area, all of that and I can't ad pages as fast as I want. I want do new things and clean up new things and make things better. So possibly having someone who's good attack might really help me there. I don't want to go too fast. I don't wanna hire 20 people and try to manage 20. People have to hire one person. Spent a long time really interacting that, making sure that the fitness super tight before I move on to the next. But these are things I'm thinking. I love this platform. It makes it very easy. When I posted an ad for social Media manager, I got about 100 150 applications for transcription stat get over 300 depending on the type of task you're looking for. It may be more valuable for you to hire someone from the Philippines or India or Bangladesh will give you 40 hours a week for a low number. Someone who it seems low to you. But you're actually paying them doubled in the national wage. So you're really doing something good without it breaking the bank kind of finding something that you can afford. The reason we want to hire people is to increase your profits I made a big mistake when I first grew my business about three years ago, and I began to hire people at really high wages, and every month I would have anywhere from 10 to $20,000 in payroll I had to cover, and that meant I had to generate that much money. People working for me and they cost more than they generated. That meant I had to work extra. Hey, there's dollars. They weren't covering the cost of their own salaries. And that's not what you want here with each of my people. I can set them up with the salary that I can afford right now, based on how the business is going. I have to leave a lot of buffer, especially because of the medical issues with my wife. But then I said them with goals and tasks and graze to generate revenue for the business that if they hit those goals, then they get bonuses. So there's a bonus structure. Place all of these pieces, allow me to hire people and put golden from them and not put too much pressure on the business. When you have staff, that's quite expensive, and if you hire someone of West and hire someone America, especially if you live in America. You have to deal with taxes and a lot of other complexity. Once you pay someone more than $600 in the US, you have to start dealing with W nines and forms and all of those things. So I prefer not to hire people from America just because it's really hard. You have to do this additional paperwork. We hire someone there, you end up hanging a great deal of money, and it's a big risk. When you're small businesses of your very small business, what's your larger? You get 10 or 20 staff, adding one Maur. You already got your systems in place. You're on boarding in place. But because I don't I would rather start a lower numbers, lower risk and build a relationship with people on my team. It's very tempting to form a patroller relationship or familial relationship with my team, and I used to do this and it led to people not working very hard. I got too close to my team and now I've learned it's much better to keep people at a distance. I know a little bit about their lives and their needs and more focused on our pure business relationship and that keeps relationships much more professional. It's better for everyone evolved when you're expanding, you want to make sure that the work you need done is worth what you're gonna pay someone. That's the ratio for me I look at. Are they gonna generate more money, or are they gonna stake me more time? If they could do either of those things effectively? That's big for me, especially time saving. Right now I'm or hiring based on time saving than anything else I brought in transcriptionist because I can't spend as much time on the computer, which makes me much faster. She gets my books all the way through the first rough draft base. If I can get someone who could turn rough draft into first draft or even rough drafted almost ready to go, that would be another accelerator. I'm not quite sure I'm ready to pull the trigger that I still want to get things perfectly tight with my transcriptions. I want to get to the point where we're way ahead right now. I have 45 books dictated that haven't been transcribed. Yet that's very possible that in the next week to 10 days, the lobby transcribed and suddenly all have a huge number of transcribed books that are stuck at that face because I can dictate and transcribe way faster. Then I can add it and clean up. As you're looking here processes. There will be things that you realize you're taking a huge amount of time. Perhaps you're spending huge amount of time. Formatting your books of formatting takes a long time for you. It's very challenging for you, bringing in someone else to the formatting. Training them can be really valuable if you're spending a lot of time doing road graphics work. I'm designing some physical products right now that turning into the graphic part. It's very copy and paste ones have the text written. I have to copy and paste it 52 times in a row to an image that takes a lot of time. I'm still in the testing phase for that product, but if it goes as well as I think, I'll have to bring in someone to do that because it takes me about an hour to copy and paste. And it's not a good return on investment for my time. It's really worth bringing in a staff or bringing in helpers at an affordable rate that can handle your road task. Your time intensive tasks handle the things that you're not good at and organized things that you're not good at. One of my biggest challenges or weakness is his organization. I'm not hyper organized person, and maybe I'm just being too hard on myself because I'm successful a lot of areas, But I would love to be more organized. I would love to have more structure to my organization. I would have to put things in place to really help me with how I want to organize certain structures of my business. But I'm more of a person who likes to organize what I'm gonna work out today and then work through that pattern. That's really how it works. I got a lot of things done. My part exchange every single day, but sometimes within my projects I feel like they're pieces that aren't organized. That could be especially with how I've organized my email structure. I always think I could be doing better there. I could be doing better there So look at areas of my business where I think I could improve. And really, that's something that I couldn't outsource because it requires a great deal of creativity, video of decision making. But if I can get people handling these other pieces of task for me, it really opens up my time. It really allows me to focus on the area. I want to focus on more. So these are some of the things I'm thinking of hiring my own staff when you're thinking about Is it time for me? You wantto wait until your probable from your business, but once you're making a couple of $100 a month or a couple of $1000 a month, you can start thinking about which tax am I doing that. Doing faster would make me more money. And as long as the time acceleration of the time saved, it's worth more than salary. It's worth doing when you're going through the interviewing process. As you sent out your ad, you'll receive lots of applications, and a lot of people will message you. It's very tempting to jump the gun on the very first person to send you a good resume you want to do more than that, You want to go through a bit of an interview process, which means talking to the people and sail. Here's a little bit about my business. Tell me a little Tell me a little bit about you know. Part of it is to see if they'll actually reply. I look for our couple of key things in the messaging process. First of all, I look for copy paste messages that obviously not read the job I posted. There are certain people that just copy and paste, and they use words like, Oh, I could tell by reading your job description that I'd be a perfect fit You for your business would be the perfect fit for this position. We could work together and do some amazing things, and I could tell. Well, none of those are specific words. You haven't mentioned what the task is or what your skill set ISS. After that, I go on, look at the person's description. What's really great on Outsource Leah's. Every single person has a list of the things that they're good and they're ranked on skill. One of five. So for a transcriptionist, I look for people that were four or five on the transcription skill level. I also looked for people that have really good English grammar scores. It really good editing scores, really good writing scores and typing speed scores, those air skills that all lead towards a better level of transcription that I'm looking for. I speak and run on sentences, as you can tell, by listening to this podcast episode and people find those very annoying and books written. I need to be more succinct, have shorter sentences and a little bit clear messaging. That's a and and so all the time having transcriptions who added a little bit on the fly and clean up my language a little bit. It's really gold for me, really helps a lot. Read through each resume. Or take a quick scan through before your message. People most where you read there message. Make sure they have the skills that you're looking for. They have the experience you're looking for. You may want to hire from specific countries or avoid specific countries and click a little search buttons inside. About sources say I don't want anyone in the Philippines or I only want a heart from the Philippines, and that'll help you sort. People will continue to respond your application, even he say Someone's been hired. I still get Maur and Maur applications every single day. Once I've read someone's resume. Once I've been read their message to me and I can tell they've actually read with the job description is which means they know what the pay is. You know what the task is? They still want it. I then go into the process of interviewing. First thing I do as I send them a task to do. I want them to demonstrate that there quick on responding that there serious about job. That's what I'm really looking for, someone who can really do next level headed. People respond. You message them back. They've already sent applications without the people that ever apply to you, so you can quickly sort them out. I only start responding people that have responded to me. So once I set my first back to responses, then the list of people I'm focusing on is much shorter, and you can go through as complicated or simple of an interview process is you like some people like to send a really long, complicated survey to find out a lot about the person. It depends on the type of task and what level you're looking for. If you're looking for like a business manager, yeah, you need a really complicated instead of tasks. I also like to check to be sure they have the correct tools where I live. I used to hire a lot of people on my island, but it was challenging because no one has computers every. Neither has phone smartphone or tablet, and that's not good enough for most of the tasks that I need done. You can manage all their social media really well from your smartphone, but you can't manage someone else's social media really well. That way you'd have to turn off all of your accounts. Only have my accounts on your phone, and most people don't want to do that. So having a laptop is a requirement to working or any type of computer having high speed Internet connection being available, having the time to work on the job, these basic things or things I do have to look for. If you want someone a hand of graphics, well, then you need them to have the graphics programs that you want. If you need a lot of photoshopping done or a lot of InDesign, make sure they have that. In addition to experience, sometimes people this happen anymore. Outsource Lee tapas. You weren't on up work that outsource Lee, but people will message me and they say, I don't have that software Have to buy it for me. I've had people say Oh, give me a computer, that software, I'll do the job. That's how it works. I'm not gonna send someone a $2000 computer and hope they can do the job. I need people who have the tools are ready and who can work those things. So if it's anything technical, but anything that's required their computer, I say let me know what software you have that's good for riding and editing. If you're doing graphics were graphic suffered You have, well, graphics experience, yet what are you good at? And outsourcing again will list how good they are. Photoshopped how good they are different software programs, but I still like to make sure they have them, and when people really understand the task bill, list the programs you want to hear about. So I really look for people that mentioned Graham early and their response to the writing job I posted. I want to find people who can deliver something really wonderful and who really understand where I'm coming from it. The transcription of Surrey With now she mentioned Graham early in her applications at all. That's a good start. Some of the other things in the application We're really good at looking transcription of scores. Sure, Western country, all wonderful things. Those are what I look for, what I'm hiring a certain type of staff now for things that don't acquire language, I can begin to look at other countries. I gave a lot of people opportunities to do the application process and fill out the demo program to do a demo. Transcription and non native speakers were making too many mistakes, they said. I've been transcribing for a long time. I look in this Alice to make mistakes here. I needed perfect. I don't want to have to go through and fix your mistakes. In addition to editing, I need someone who could take it as far as possible. I'm looking for the best finished product I could get in the timeline I need. But for something to do with Tak or dealing with graphics, it's so important. Then, if the person knows where periods and semicolons and spaces go, it's no longer is critical. And so as I move forward, I'll begin to look at people more and more from 90 English speaking countries because I know that the wages I offered to get started are really valuable for them. When you're ready to grow your business, when you're ready to free up more of your time, I do recommend taking a look at Outsource Lee. It's my favorite platform. It's really helped me find some great staff. I love how many applications I get for jobs. Just having hundreds of applications means I can sit and find some real diamonds. I always wait to hire people until I could do the task myself. I used to try and hire people to do things I didn't know how to do yet, and I discover that people you hire that way you don't know if they're doing a good job badge up. You don't know a lot about the tasks that they're doing. You don't know about their performance levels and so you could hire someone who's doing a really bad job and you don't know because you've never done it yourself before. I knew how to do all the graphics on my website so I could hire someone to do it that I build my website and did it myself. I know how to edit right transcribe books. I've done all those tasks myself. This really frees me up with the assessment process. Sometimes you hire people who don't even bother checking their work cause you know you don't know how eventually they'll figure it out and the quality that work will drop. You want to have your eye on the ball as you're hiring people, and perhaps you've run companies that match. People are matched out before, and you know more about this than me. But it's a little bit different when it's your own money. Every dollar I spend on staff is a dollar that I can't spend. My kids are dollar that I don't spend my wife or my family or food or toys. That means I'm very cautious with how I spend my money. I want to be sure that I'm getting a positive return on investment. When you're ready to grow your business, having the right people at the right price can accelerate your growth and free up a lot of your time. That's why I love using Outsource Lee Thank you for listening to this week's episode of Serve No Master. Make sure you subscribe, so you never miss another episode. We'll be back tomorrow with more tips and tactics on how to escape that rat race hit over to serve no master dot com forward slash podcasts Now for your chance to win a free coffee of Jonathan's bestseller Serve No master. All you have to do is leave a five star review of this podcast. See you tomorrow. Thank you for Listen to this episode of the serve. No master podcast. Join me on my Facebook page at facebook dot com. Backslash serve no master