this. Welcome to the thrive by design Podcast, episode 406. Hey there, it's Tracy Matthews, chief visionary officer of Flourish & Thrive Academy, and the host of the show today. And I'm excited because this is one of my favorite topics, talking about reducing your overwhelm by hiring a new team member. Now I see a lot of people who struggle, they end up getting to a certain point in their business, it's what I usually see, it's usually around 150 to $200,000, where maybe they've done some things really well they started selling their collections that are crushing it. And obviously, this depends on your price points. If you're selling fine jewelry, that might be a little bit of a higher marker. And if you're selling low end jewelry, it might be a slightly lower marker. But you've gotten to this point where you're doing everything yourself. And at a certain point, you just can't keep growing without outside support. And I see people like you listening to this podcast, very resistant to hiring virtual assistants or a team member or team members. For a variety of reasons. Some of the things that I hear come out of your mouths are things like, I don't want to have a big team or, you know, I really like making the jewelry, that's my favorite part of the business. And not that you don't have to do that. Or, you know, it's just easier to do it myself, like these are all things that I hear people say over and over again. But what ends up happening is they feel extremely overwhelmed. They feel pulled in many directions. And the first marker of this is that they start hitting a profit or growth plateau. And the second marker of this is that if they continue in the state for a while, their business might start backsliding. And then eventually, they might start to suffer from burnout. And I mentioned this because if you are resistant to hiring a team member or you have a team and you've been struggling with how to lead and train them, and or maybe you haven't hired a players and all those things, then you're going to love this episode, I hope so whether you haven't hired anyone yet, and you're thinking about it, or you want to know what's on the horizon, maybe someday when you want to hire, or you're someone who already has a team, and you're thinking about bringing on more people, or wondering how you can do this more efficiently and effectively. Let's dive in, this is going to be a great show. So over the years, I've experienced all of the things that I just said earlier, the overwhelm the growth plateau, feeling like my business is backsliding or my business actually backsliding because things got really disorganized inside the business. And I was like messing things up myself. Because I, you know, I know I have my skill set. But I don't have every skill set it takes to run a business. And the truth is, when you're just starting out and kind of building your business on a shoestring, which a lot of people do, you have to kind of be the doer of all things, you have to learn all the functions of the business. But at a certain point, your time is much more leveraged if you can get things off your plate. So your first hire might be a virtual assistant of some sort. It might be someone to help you with operations. It might be someone who helps you with shipping or help you make your jewelry. It might even be some sort of contractor or manufacturing solution or an agency even for marketing. But in any of those solutions, you need to be thinking through this hiring process, so that you are properly training people so that you're not frustrated throughout the process. And so that you stop using these words. It's easier just to do it myself. I want you to remove that from your vocabulary, because at a certain point, it is not going to be easier to do it yourself. It does take time and patience to hire great people. But at the end of the day, when you have people who are bought into your vision and excited to support your business, you're gonna watch how your business can thrive and grow. And if you're already in that spot where you've been hiring people, but it has hasn't quite worked out in the way you expected. You're going to love this episode too. And I made an amazing free download for you that goes with this episode. You're welcome. It's called The Ultimate marketing and social media VA hiring template for jewelry business owners. And this template is basically a step by step guide on an A checklist and a sample job description, where you can basically swipe it, edit it to fit your needs, and go, you're going to love it. So head on over to flourish, thrive academy.com forward slash hiring template, and make sure that you download that right now it's only going to be around for a limited time. So get it right away. I'll also have it in the show notes over at flourish thrive academy.com forward slash 406. All right, so today, what I wanted to walk you through are the steps to hiring. I've identified nine steps to successfully hiring an awesome team member. So let's dive in to what these look like. So the first step of this is to define the role. And more importantly, to determine what needs to be delegated. Here's what I mean by that. A lot of times we bring someone on, but we're not really clear what we need them to do. Or we have a bunch of stuff that we need to get off our plate. But we haven't like clearly, you know, made a do ditch or delegate list like anything where we can like write down, okay, these are the things that I love doing. These are the things that I don't love doing. And so what I want you to do, after you listen to this episode, if you're not driving, and you're wanting to just do it right now, I want you to make a list of all of the low leverage tasks that are outside of your zone of genius, or that are outside of the things that you actually love doing. And I say low leverage. And what I mean by that. These aren't things that number one you have to do as the founder of the company, a lot of people want to outsource sales as the first thing, I think that's a bad idea. There are things that are taking up your time that are busy work, administrative tasks, and things along those lines that are not necessary for you to do. So when I think of things like this, I would think of, you know, shipping your products like you could have train anyone to pack your boxes, and ship them. And that's something that you could hire a high school intern to probably do and come after school a couple times a week. So that's one type of role or function of your business that you can delegate, maybe it's social media engagement. And while I do think that this, this is an important function, to get your social media posts out in the feed, you could potentially hire a social media intern who can go and post your content. And then make sure that she's engaging with your followers and other people's stories, and commenting on the posts and responding to the DMS in a timely manner. That that's helpful in a lot of ways because it helps get your, your posts in front of the people who want to see them. So make a list of all the low leverage tasks that you want to get off your plate immediately. And set that aside. Now the next step of this is to write a job description. Now I want to be clear that unless you're hiring, like a multifunctional virtual assistant, you got to be realistic about what someone can do in your small business. For instance, one of the mistakes that I made when I was first hiring people, when I had my first jewelry company, is that I tried to make my production manager slash head designer, a salesperson. And even though she had a strong desire to start her own business jewelry business one day, she really wasn't adept at sales, but I was like, well, she makes jewelry, she knows about the product, I could bring her on the road and help me sell the products. Well, every time I would bring her, it actually ended up doing the business a disservice because she doesn't, she didn't feel comfortable getting in front of people and selling the product. Instead, she would just stand in the booth sound really shy and felt embarrassed. So that's like a good example of how you can't necessarily cross function roles. Like for instance, your shipping person probably isn't going to be your salesperson, or your admin bookkeeper is probably not going to be you know, making the jewelry. Does that make sense if you're bringing someone in in the office for those types of things, so get clear on the things that you want to delegate, and then turn that into a job description, the kind of functions of the business that are similar. So if you're hiring someone for general, all around office assistants, or something along those lines, that type of person can do a variety of different things often and they might be able to like do the shipping, maybe do some bookkeeping, organize the orders for production, like things like that, that are more administrative work. And so think through that type of thing. Unlike what is the big function of the business that you want to get off your plate right away and hire for that, then once you have that job description, you want to post it on job boards, internship sites, schools that might have the type of people that you're looking for LinkedIn, social media, and other hiring sites like zip recruiter, or indeed, there's lots of them out there, you can Google them. There's also a great website. I haven't tried this yet. But I've heard some of my colleagues posting on Create cultivate for jobs in more creative veins. So if you're looking for someone for marketing, that might be a good place to start to look for a candidate. Now, step number three, is to pre vet an interview the candidate. So one of the things that I like to do is I write a job description, kind of like what we would do for a sales letter, like we're basically selling the candidate on why they would want to work for flourish and thrive, then what we do is at the bottom of that job description, there is an application form where they can apply on some of the different job posting sites, you have to position this a little bit differently. Because you can't just put a link to an application, they're going to require you to request a resume first. So what we do, so that's just a side note. But if you have this posted on your website, and you're driving traffic to your website, you can have a link to the application right there. And that application, gives them instructions on how to apply and gathers all the information you need. So I call this a hiring hurdle. So we want to capture all the unnecessary information. Similarly to like you would do for a custom jewelry client, let's say you need a lot of information about to to determine if they're going to be a good fit. You want to do the same thing here. So you ask them a bunch of pre vet hiring questions, you ask for personality assessments, maybe a few little mini tests in their different things that are going to really support you in understanding is this a candidate going to be a great fit for you and your team? And this kind of helps you narrow down the pool of people into a smaller pool of people? Now, you might be asking, what do you do about a resume. So we do collect resumes, just to preview them, but we don't necessarily hire on resumes. Resumes don't tell you that much about people, except for maybe their work history, the types of companies that they work for, you don't really know how they work until you experience them working. And I'm gonna explain what I mean by that a little bit later. And I also want to mention that we're coming up on a sprint, in our momentum program, we're going to be teaching this whole hiring process, top to bottom, and I'm going to be showing you exactly how we do it, and how we've got gotten great candidates in the process. So you may collect a resume, but it's not the thing that I would necessarily hire on this, these interview questions are extremely important. Now, the fourth step to this is to vet and test the top talent. So from that interview stage, where you're pre vetting, and gathering information about the candidates, you select three to eight winners from there, and then you start narrowing it down to the vetting process. Once you have this narrowed down, you're going to pick three candidates, and check their references and ask your candidates to do a test project. Typically, the Test Project is something that they will be doing in their actual role. So it's about five to 15 hours of work, maybe a little bit more for a senior position. Basically, you know, you don't know if someone's going to work out work for you if you don't see how they work. And anytime I've skipped a step, even in the higher level positions, it's really bitten me in the ass. And I'm going to be honest about that. And so you pay the person for this test project, they get paid basically close close to or at the rate that they will be making for in their role. And this is just a, a way for you to see how they work and the kind of content that they deliver. Now, let me share an example of why this is so important. We recently hired an operations manager over here at flourish and thrive. And we had probably about 50 people apply to the position. We narrowed it down to about three to five key people. And the top three people that we interviewed. One of them was someone that actually my integrator knew about Danny she knew her before. So it was an interesting coincidence when they got on the call and had their interview. They're like oh my gosh, I know you before. And then there was a candidate that came referred by someone else on my team who was completely 100% qualified for the role and on paper would look like the perfect choice to make. Then we had someone that was also a referral from someone else on my team. It was interesting that all these people kind of came in semi or referred from other people who did not have direct experience, who wasn't a natural fit for the role. And it was interesting, because I, you know, we went, I kept an open mind, we brought everything to the final interview. And Danny spoke to them, I spoke to them. We had our normal behavioral interview questions, we talked a lot, and then we put them all through a test project. And what was fascinating to me is the person who was the most qualified for the role, had an insane salary request requirement. Basically, she wanted to get paid what the CEO of a major corporation wanted to get paid. And my little business couldn't afford to do that. But I also was checking like, kind of gauging personality type. And I realized that CNN how she worked, her work was excellent. But I knew that I probably wouldn't work well for her. And even though she said that she would come in at the, at the salary that we were offering for this role. I know when someone has like an exorbitant salary requirement or desired salary that they want to make. And that's kind of what they're presenting upfront to you that more than likely, they're going to leave really quickly. Hiring someone who requests a lot more money isn't necessarily doesn't necessarily mean that they're better for the position. And I can give you multiple examples of this, in my experience, that you other candidates were willing to come in at the at what we basically had budgeted for this. And we also offered them a bonus compensation after their first 90 days based on some markers and milestones that they're supposed to hit. So this was interesting, because when we got all the test projects back, the person that came in referred by our integrator, I thought that she would probably have beaten out the other, the other candidate that we were considering hiring, but in fact, when I saw the work from all three candidates, it was very clear who was going to be the best for this role. And it was the person that we ended up hiring who had the least amount of direct experience in this role. So and she's doing a great job. She's been with us for a month. And I'm really excited to see where we go with the business because she's on top of it. She is humble, hungry, and smart. She is kicking butt with all the things and we're going to be moving really fast, real soon. And I'm excited about that. And so I just want I want to mention this, because it is really important to do your due diligence. And this vetting stage is extremely important and selecting the right person, for your team. On paper is just on paper, you need a personality fit, you need someone who's going to be a culture fit, you need someone who is resourceful, hungry, humble and smart, as I mentioned, and someone who is aligned with the goals of your company. And if