When Should You Start Outsourcing Hiring?
So I love this question because the answer is deeper than just 1 year or 3 years after starting your business. In May 2021, I graduated from Harvard. I also made $33,000 in my business (that month). After being full-time in my business for a year, I took time to reflect. I recognized that betting on myself and going full-time was the same energy I needed to bring into hiring. I needed to bet on myself and trust that I could:
Hire the right person
Train the right person properly
Trust myself to make the money needed to fund their salary
Now, just because I had this reflection a year after going full-time doesn’t mean I went out the next day and started posting job applications. Honestly, I was afraid. These are some scary decisions, especially because I’d never hired anyone in my business before! But I did it scared, and I also enlisted help from some hiring and HR professionals.
When it comes to hiring, you need to hire for your next milestone, not the milestone you’re at. So when your next money milestone is a six-figure year, you might be doing the hiring yourself. You’re probably the one writing the job description and figuring out where to post them. You’re reviewing the resumes.
When your next money milestone is a six-figure quarter however, I believe you should start outsourcing hiring and hire an HR consultant. That’s actually what I did, and it gave me so much more confidence in the process. Because here's the thing, I'm a former principal, so hiring and interviewing was not new for me. I've done that before. And, I didn't want to invest the time in it. Honestly, I'd rather spend time making money in my business and pay someone else to write the job description.
Obviously I give feedback and get the final say, but the HR consultant posts the job description, sources the resumes and does the first run interview so all I have to do is review the chosen candidates and run the second and/or third interview.
So I share that for people that are working through the fears of hiring their first employee. If your next money milestion is a six-figure quarter, I highly recommend you outsource it to an HR consultant. In my experience, it really brings down some of the anxiety, because you're working with a trusted professional.
I worked with an HR consultant to hire my first full-time employee, my EA. And let me tell you, I don't know what I would do without her. I love her so much. She keeps me in line and keeps me together. I wouldn’t have Sammi if I didn’t decide to trust myself to make her salary, let go of the fear, and reach out to an HR consultant to help me hire.
Look I’m gonna be real with you for a second. You don’t get to six-figure months without a team. You cannot let fear keep you from your wealth, and holding back on hiring your team with slow you down.
In the book Good to Great, Jim Collins talks about the flywheel effect, where basically each turn of the flywheel gains a little bit more momentum until you get to a point where the momentum is smooth and it only takes a fraction of the strength you used to get started, to keep going. That flywheel is your business, and once you take the necessary steps to build your team, it won’t take nearly as much strength as you needed to start, to maintain momentum and build momentum. I’ve had a team for two years now and we’ve been gaining momentum. We've been building and I can’t wait for us to hit our next money milestone.
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