So, I think this is a great question because it really speaks to a fear that many entrepreneurs have when it comes to hiring. Now that fear is real, but I bet you wouldn’t guess that it goes back to your interview process. Stick with me here…If you’re struggling to hire employees that are efficient, taking a step “down” so to speak and trying to hire contractors that are efficient will probably also be a struggle for you because it all goes back to your interview process. 

The employees or contractors you hire are all a result of your interview process because if you aren’t asking the right questions for your business around efficiency, communication, deadlines and how the interviewee handles these things, you’ll never be able to determine how they’d handle those things for you and your business. 

And here’s the thing that I always get so excited about, many of us have already had the experience of hiring as educators. As a principal, I can not tell you how many people I hired or managed. I already have the toolkit, because I had an instructional leadership team of 12 people. I'm ain’t even talking about my teachers or my financial secretary in that number either! 

I know how to manage folks, do check-ins, coach people, get feedback, do performance evaluations and document what needs to be documented. And I say all this to say that, if I have all of these tools as a former principal, you as an educator, probably have all, most, or more of the tools you need to run your business too. You just need to update how you apply those tools to your business. 

And maybe you don’t have all those tools yet and you’re still working full-time. That’s perfect! It means that you can start learning new tools while you’re still in your full-time role. This is also a great way to work through some fear of the accountability of being someone’s boss and source of income. A great role to work through that and strengthen your toolkit would be being a department lead or department chair, or PLC lead or PLC chair because that's going to flex the muscle that will directly translate into your business of leading and managing a team and hiring employees. 

Now for me, once I realized I had all of the tools, the scariest thing then became the logistics of everything. Especially when it came to hiring full-time team members. Then I got into it, realized that it wasn’t actually that bad and brought on my first team member. They started as a 90-day contractor, and transitioned to a full-time employee after. And I did that three more times in the following six-months to grow my team. Let me tell you, there is nothing like having a full-time team member dedicated to your business and your business alone. 

I’ve seen it in my own business when I brought my first full-time team member on. It really made it clear that my continuous hiring of contractors became a bottleneck in my business. I couldn’t properly level-up while having a few contractors work 15 hours here and 20 hours there. And I think when someone continues to hire contractors when they really should be hiring employees, that there’s a bit of a scarcity mindset. It’s almost like…Now I might hurt your feelings with this, but you might need to hear it…It’s like when you continue to buy cheap shoes that break every year, instead of buying a $200-$300 pair of shoes that’ll last you 5-10 years because you can’t stomach the price point even though the ROI is way greater with the $200 pair of shoes than the cheap shoes you’re used to grabbing annually. So you can either keep having shoes that break, and yes I am talking from my own experience, or you can invest in some shoes that’ll last longer than a summer. 

Leveling-up in your business costs money, but the ROI is often greater than you could imagine when it comes down to it, and part of that scarcity mindset is choosing the cheapest option because you believe it’s safe, when really, it’s stifling your business and its potential growth. If you want to scale your business to six-figures and beyond, you have got to have employees. 

So, when it comes to hiring efficient employees in your business, it’s about your interview process. You also want to be sure you’re using all of the tools you’ve learned in your previous or current positions to build up your business, and please, please, please, stop buying the cheap shoes and invest in some high-quality shoes to go with your high-quality business. 😉

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