How Growing My Team Helped Me Reach A Six-Figure Quarter
When it comes to creating a sustainable six-figure business, you’re going to need a team. Point-blank-period. Now, I know the idea of hiring can be scary, so I want to share my experience with the team I have and have worked with over the years of my business to get it to where it is today: a seven-figure business.
I ain’t gonna lie, you could get to a six-figure year by yourself and maybe with a contractor. But you can't get to multiple six-figures without a team. And there are some people who might tell you that you could do it with just contractors. No shade, but that's like having a team of substitute teachers.
And look, I've known some bomb substitute teachers... We had this one substitute, bless his soul, we’ll call him Mr. Z. So Mr. Z was an amazing substitute teacher, he was so good the students didn’t even realize he was a long-time sub, they straight up just thought he was the teacher. He did everything a teacher would. He participated in PLC meetings, and he communicated with parents. He was amazing. And as a substitute, I can't dictate that he stay after school and wait for buses. I can't require him to come in early. I can't dictate how he spends his time.
It’s the same thing with contractors. They can be amazing and incredible and efficient, but you cannot tell a contractor how to structure their time with you. You're limited with how much you can work with them. You're at their mercy and if they say they can't get to something until Friday, then you got to wait till Friday. It is what it is.
So, when I first started out it was just me, then I hired a part-time VA who then became my online business manager. She is still a contractor for the business and supports us for around 60 hours/per month. Later, I hired my executive assistant who was also my first full-time employee. After that, things really started to heat up. In 2022, I decided that I wanted to have a seven-figure business, and the first thing that needed to happen to get me there was to hire a larger team.
Initially, I had a social media manager. We went through a trial period and decided it wasn’t working for us. Not the end of the world at all. We off-boarded her and kept it pushing. I share this because I want to remind you that part of hiring and growing your team is also knowing when to make certain decisions of onboarding as well as offboarding. In working with a social media manager, I also got a lot more clarity on where our team truly needed to grow and decided to focus on growing our program team.
I hired two client success coaches to support client delivery. That was huge for us, because part of growing and stepping into a multiple six-figure, driving towards a seven-figure business, is that you've got to delegate client delivery. You're getting to a point where you're growing the number of clients that you're serving, and your responsibilities as CEO will start to shift. You won’t be able to spend the majority of your time in client delivery anymore because now you have to begin to reallocate your time into the planning and systems of your business as CEO.
When I say planning and systems, I mean the structure of your business. This includes departments like:
Financials
Operations
Legal
For example, one of the things that had to become a huge priority for me in Q3 and Q4 of last year was to get even deeper into my business finances. I already had financial systems and partners, so while I wasn’t the one who could tell you how much income we had coming in and how much our expenses were, I could tell you who on our team could answer those questions.
Now, I am very clear on how much money I have coming into my business and what we're spending our money on. I'm extremely clear. Me and that profit and loss statement go TOGETHER okay?!
When you're in the multiple six-figure to seven-figure phase, the additional clarity that you need to have around your financial systems is really about your future financials. So you’ll need to work on your financial projections for your business. You’ll need to think about how much cash on hand you need to have in 3-6 months to grow your team by 1 or 2 positions. Once you know that number, you can backward plan to determine the revenue you need to make quarterly, monthly, and even weekly.
I share all that to say that I wouldn’t have been able to do any of that planning without hiring a team. I also hired an additional operations employee full-time and that made a huge difference. Each person on my team has a role, and each person has taken something off of my plate to give me time to work on the structure of my business OR they are taking something off of a team member’s plate to help make the business even more efficient.
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