365: How to Find Your Zone of Genius and Hire the Right People with Emily Perron

A big thank you to Clarity for sponsoring the Food Blogger Pro podcast. You've heard me talk about Clarity before. It's a tool that we're building and using for Pinch of Yum, but also a really powerful tool for anybody who's focusing on content. It's kind of one of the main vehicles for growth or revenue for their site. And we've been working on Clarity for a couple years, but it hasn't been until recently that we've started to bring other people in to, to sign up and become a part of it. We're doing an offer right now that we're calling 25 forever. So the first 500 people who sign up for Clarity will get their account at $25 a month. Forever. We're still in the early stages of offering this, but we'll cap it at 500 people. So once we have 500 people who have signed up, then we're going to cap that. We're going to move to a different pricing for Clarity. So it's still in the early stages. You know, it's not going to be the kind of thing where we're at this point where we'd cap it and say, hey, you can't sign up. Uh, you've missed your. Missed your chance. But slowly and surely we're moving to that 500 mark. So if you're interested in, in joining and checking it out, now would be a good time to do that. Um, there's no commitment, there's no plan that you have to join and can't cancel. So you can check it out. You can, you can see if it's a good fit. And how do you know if you would even be interested in it? Well, Clarity is for anybody who's focusing on content and also starting to focus on optimization of their existing content. So we have this belief that any and every site is going to be suboptimal right now. There's going to be broken images, broken links. There's going to be posts that don't have internal links that could or don't have external links to helpful resources. There's going to be images with missing alt text. There's going to be content that's starting to perform worse that if you looked at and kind of improved and enhanced, it would increase rank. We're really just thinking about that for Pinch of Yum a lot. What are the ways that we could improve the content that's currently on our site as opposed to just creating new content? And we're using Clarity as the tool where we track that and make those enhancements and improvements. One of the things that comes along with that is you can join the Slack community that we have of other content creators. And this just came up the other day. Somebody posted, posted, and they said, I had no idea that it had broken images on my site, but somehow those images broke. So I need to, number one, find out how they broke and then, number two, fix them. But they were just saying that they noticed that because of clarity and some of the filtering that they were able to do. So they created a project, they filtered first and said, show me all the broken images on my site. And then it was like, oh, there's some broken images. Then they filtered. After filtering those, they created a project that was fix broken, broken images. Now, you could then have somebody on your team go in, make those improvements, make those enhance enhancements. Or if you don't have somebody on your team, that can be the type of stuff where maybe once a week, once a month, you kind of have this maintenance or kind of like spring cleaning mindset where you go in, you block the day out to make improvements, make enhancements. You're not creating new content, you're just going in and optimizing and improving and paying attention to older content and making sure that it's at 100% as opposed to, you know, 70%, which, if I were to guess, I would say all of our sites, pinch of Yum included, would probably be operating at like 70% of their true potential value. And we want to find ways that we can improve that. And we're using clarity as the tool to not only discover those things, but also to organize the tasks and projects that go along with improving them. So we're still in the early stages of it. We're excited about what it's going to be and what it's going to grow into. And we're also excited to learn from you in the process of what you would want it to be. Which is why we have that Slack community that we will welcome you to if you are interested in signing up. So you can go to clarity.com food C-L-A-R-I-T-I.com food if you're interested in signing up. All right, that's a wrap for this little ad read. Let's go ahead and jump into today's episode. Hello. Hello, this is the Food Blogger Pro podcast. Excited for you to be tuning in to this episode where we have a conversation with Emily Perrin. She's going to be talking about some transitions that she's had in her business. We're going to talk about those a little bit. And for those of you who have listened to the Food Blogger Pro podcast for a long time, you know, we had a conversation with Emily all around recruiting and building a team. And she's still in that general sphere. It's still what she's focusing on, but she's really focusing in on this idea of building a team structure for entrepreneurs and people like yourselves who are creators, that really empowers them to do their best work. We talk about this idea of different zones and how do we as entrepreneurs get to our zone of genius and make sure that we work with people who can help us support kind of our efforts to get to that place and allow other people to work in their zones of genius and really how you can go about structuring your team and building a kind of organizational chart of different people who can support you as you continue to build your business. Because if you've been doing this for any amount of time, you know, there is a ton of work, there's a ton of effort, and the list is endless. We could really be doing this work day in, day out, 24 hours a day. So what's the anecdote to that? It's figuring out what you're really good at, what you're uniquely skilled to be working on, and then working with others who are uniquely skilled in the areas that maybe you are competent at, maybe you can do, but aren't the most important thing for you to be doing. So she's going to be talking about not only the transition she had in her business towards that place and how that allowed her to, to work in her zone of genius, but also how you can be thinking about that for your business. If you want to join in on these conversations, you should join the Food Blogger Pro Podcast Facebook group. You can do that by going to foodbloggerpro.com Facebook and we have a growing group of podcast listeners that are part of that group, asking questions ahead of time for certain guests and sometimes even engaging in some conversation after. So if you notice that you have questions coming out of podcasts, sometimes we'll have follow up conversations in that group for the guests. Guests that are a part of the Food Blogger Pro podcast that we interview. I'm excited to share the details, the specifics, the ins and outs all around building a team that allows you to do what you are uniquely skilled to do. So let's go ahead and jump into this interview with Emily. Emily, welcome back to the podcast.

Thanks, Bjork.

Yeah, it's gonna be a fun conversation. We had chatted before, before we press record. We were just reflecting. Last time we chatted, it was peak Covid. Peak chaos in the world. I mean, it feels like that's kind of been years of that. It was like, you know, election. It was our daughter had just been born. And here we are a couple of years later having a conversation again. It's so interesting to do a podcast or do any type of work for a long period of time and have relationships where you can look back and see like kind of timestamps along the way. And I feel like that's true for the interviews that we do. But what's great about it is we're able to check in, have conversations with people and inevitably what happens is people continually evolve, Their businesses continually evolve. People level up their skills and understanding of their specialty. And that's proven to be true for you as well. So for those who aren't familiar with that interview that we did, it was released in January 2021, recorded in 2020. Can you give a little background of who you are and what you do and the work that you do on a day to day basis?

Yeah. So I've been working with bloggers and content creators over the last few years to help them build their teams. And it came out of a place of being a solo entrepreneur myself as a career coach and just really struggling to find good people. Like people just weren't meeting my expectations. I couldn't figure out what I was doing wrong. And so I really set out to understand the hiring process and to understand how it's different. Right. I had a corporate background and I thought that would prepare me. I had a master's degree in industrial and organizational psychology. So I had all these things and I was struggling. And so I just figured out the process for myself and started sharing it with other people. It led me into working particularly with food bloggers, where I was actually recruiting and building their teams. And since then, now I've really honed in on ways to empower them and teach them the methods rather than actually doing it for them. Because I found, yes, I could find a freelancer, but they didn't always know what to do with that person or, you know, they were kind of missing that, the skill gap of hiring and for the longevity of their businesses. I found it's just so much better when they can do it themselves.

It's like fishing for them versus teaching somebody how to fish. That classic example.

Yeah, exactly, exactly, exactly. And so I found, like, if I can just get the right roles and the right job posting put together for them. They can be so much more successful on their own.

Yeah. So when you talk about process, you talked about method. What, what is when, what is that process and method? Not necessarily like what is the process and the method itself, but start to finish, like what are you helping? What is the transition or transformation that people are going through as they learn that process or that method?

Yeah. So usually people come in when they're working with me one on one and we're developing their organizational strategy. They come in with some ideas. Right. They know they've got some things they want to outsource, they know what they want to get off their plate, but they're not really sure who they should hire. Like which roles should they get out of all of these things. Right. Because none of it standardized. There's no standard roadmap. Like this is how you build your business and this is the, you know, these are the jobs. Like it's so individualized. And so then I come in and I learn more about who they are, their strengths, their personality, what the, what their business looks like. Because even among food bloggers and bloggers, there's so many different styles and mixes in terms of revenue and content and things like that. So yeah, that's kind of where I come in. So I really get the right roles set up and then I focus on getting the responsibilities and the qualifications for each of those roles outlined and written out so that the business owner, the blogger can then just take that and run with it. They can run the hiring process. Because if you get, like I said, if you get those couple of things right, you're.

Yeah.

So much more likely to be successful.

In those couple of things that you need to get right.

Or what specifically it's, it's the responsibilities and the qualifications.

Yeah.

So what is this person going to do? And yeah. Who are they?

Yeah, really clearly outlining. Here's what this person needs to do. The, the day to day activities that they're going to do. Here's what they need to be good at. Like you know, somebody who's artistic versus really detail oriented. Um, not that you can't be both, but oftentimes you might find somebody who's artistic, great photographer, really creative mind, might be less detail oriented and not love like project management in the same way that like a videographer or photographer might. And explaining that really clearly, because one thing I found, and I'd be curious if you find this to be true as well. Like the more vague you get the more people think that it's that position applies to them. Like great Pinch of Yum is hiring for communications assistant and you need to be like kind and you need to be like good to work with. You need to understand email and know how to use Microsoft Word and people are like awesome. I love that that's for me versus if you get really specific and you would know better than I would what those would look like, you start to filter out people where they're like, oh, actually like I don't have a passion for project management and love creating lists. This maybe isn't for me. Is that kind of what you're doing is filtering out to get people who are a good fit?

Yeah, we're getting that right. We're getting the level of detail and vagueness right. And usually I am encouraging them to get more detailed, get more specific and really making sure those specifics line up with the role. Because it's so easy for people to, you know, throw in some extra things. Right? You're hiring a social media manager and then you want them to write your emails and schedule your blog posts. Like yeah, those things don't really go together. And that's, that's what I can bring in too is then that perspective like you don't, like you don't have to know what all these roles do in the marketplace, but I can help you craft it so that it makes sense and so that people apply. Because if you, like you said, if you go really vague, you tons of people will resonate with that.

Right?

And then it becomes even harder for you, the business owner, to filter through all of that. Right? Like who actually wants to do the specifics. So I think the more specific you can get in that job posting, the better.

How about for somebody who's early stages where let's say they have a few different things they need help with social media, scheduling blog posts and then let's throw in a random1 updating WordPress and plugins. Like it's a little bit more technical outside of expertise. Personally. One of the things that we've navigated is like the question of do you hire multiple people for specific roles in a part time capacity where suddenly you have maybe four or five people who are working part time doing really specific things that they're great at. But then there's kind of some complexity around how many people you're managing and to what extent you're actually managing them, maybe up near versus one person who's maybe not as good at all the things, but it's like one single touch point and communication is happening from 1 to 1 versus like 1 to 5 and it gets complicated. From that perspective, do you have any insight or kind of decision making frameworks that you have around, like when to split a role?

Yeah, that's a great question. I think one thing I look at is some of the ease versus pain in this. Sometimes it's easier to have those multiple people until it becomes painful. Then you have to start maybe looking at blending these roles together. I think it also coordinates with the edge of contractor versus employee. Not that we have to go deep into that. I know we talked quite a bit about it in our last conversation, but just like that employee, you have a lot more control over where a contractor is more of a specialist that is going to bring in a very special defined skill set. And so once you're getting to five, it might make sense to get more of an employee and that could do that can do more things.

But yeah, that makes sense.

I usually look at that ease and pain piece. Right.

Like can you explain a little bit more about that? What is. Yeah, like does point being like you think it's actually helping, but then it just creates more problems and that would be pain. Whereas ease would be, hey, this is actually making things easier.

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Well, and I think it like when you're thinking about like you don't. When you're just starting out with hiring, I always recommend picking the easier things to outsource. Like if it is easier for you to outsource the web plugins because you're not good at it, then start there. But then there might come a point where the ease now has become the pain. Right. You have 10 contractors and I would say five is not that bad. But once I see like seven to 10 contractors reporting to one person, that's when it really. I've noticed with bloggers that that's where it really becomes overwhelming and painful because they can't handle all of those people coming to them. And then at that point then they can bring in a project manager or a business manager to help to help with that as well. So there are some specialized roles to help with that communication piece. And you can change the reporting structure in your business as well.

In that case it would be somebody who has maybe all of those five, six, seven roles are important, but they've gotten to the point the creator, the blogger, the publisher has gotten to the point where they're starting to notice what their role is, is actually manager, which doesn't feel good. So then a hire could be somebody who comes in and kind of oversees those roles, project manager or whatever you'd call it, kind of operations focused. And they would. That would allow then the blogger creator, whoever it might be, to work more in their kind of zone of genius, which is a word that you have used before. So can you talk a little bit about that? Because I know one of the considerations within this as something grows is that somebody's role changes. And I just had this conversation yesterday. We have somebody we work with who's a personal finance person. We had our biannual meeting and we're talking about business. And what's fun is that he owns his business. And so he was talking about a personal finance conference that he went to. And it was somebody who was talking about business growth in the personal finance world and the correlation to happiness. And what they found was that for personal finance professionals, people who own a personal finance business, their happiness went up. In correlation to the increased revenue of the business until it got to a million dollars a year and then it actually started going down. And so the more they made, the less happy they were. And I asked, did he talk about in this presentation why that was? And his understanding was that at that point it was kind of this tipping point for getting away from the thing that made them the most happy and the reason that they got into it in the first place, which was like being able to. My assumption, being able to work with clients, doing personal finance work in that million dollar mark was apparently the tipping point where it became less about doing the work and more about managing a team or like all of the things that come along with growth. So any of that context for that around, like intentional decision making as we think about who we are as business owners and potentially putting in some artificial constraints around our growth in order to keep us in our zone of genius. So can you talk about what zone of genius is, how we know what our zone of genius is and then how we use that tool?

Yeah, that study also. I know that, I know your question and I'm also like. But that study is so fascinating. And I completely believe it because at about the million dollar mark in blogging is also where I see people shifting into hiring employees and having more mix of freelancers and employees. And so it seems that that, yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Yeah. And for some people it might be a great fit. Like you might really like that role. But my guess is the reason people get to a point where they are is because they're really good at a thing and it feels really good to be good at a thing. And then if you potentially stop doing that, it maybe doesn't feel as enjoyable the work that you're doing, even though you might continue to grow. So, anyways, great.

Yeah. Interesting. Thank you. Yeah. So back to zone of genius. So zone of genius comes out of a framework called the four zones of work. It was developed by Gay Hendricks. He wrote. He's a psychologist and he wrote the book the Big Leap. That's where I first read about it. And the way I've seen him usually depict it is that there's these four zones of work and they're depicted as a circle with like four quadrants. So it's broken into four equal parts. But that never really resonated with me. And so I've been thinking about it more as a pyramid, where each zone, like, as you move up, the pyramid gets smaller and more focused. So the bottom of the pyramid is a zone of incompetence. And that is everything you're not good at doing. Then comes competence, which is everything you can do. This is the one that trips up a lot of entrepreneurs, especially bloggers, because you're creative, you're resourceful, you can do a lot of things. And so if your mindset is, I can do this, like, you are going to eventually burn out. Yes, you can do a lot of things. There's a lot of things you can do. And so that's also where this is the hardest area to outsource as well. So when I talk about, like, pain and ease, sometimes it's not the easiest place to start with things you can do to hand off. Because, because you can do them. It's, it's, it's a hard one.

Yeah. Versus incompetence, where you, you know, you're not good at it. Like, I would be incompetent if I was doing our end of year tax returns. Like, I just wouldn't be able to do it. Like, the complexity. And even if I did figure it out and really I wouldn't enjoy it. Um, but like, right now I wouldn't be able to do that. So it's like, oh, obvious. Like, we're going to hire a CPA to help with that. Bookkeeping would be another example for us. But when you say zone of competence, that moves into like, hey, I can actually do this and I trust myself to do it. My guess is that's part of it too. And what you're saying is sometimes that can be an issue because we get stuck there. Is that right? Like, yeah, because we're competent because we can do it. We think we're going to continue to do it even though we don't love it. Is that the key differentiator between like the other zones is our enjoyment with it or is it just even like. Cause I see the next one is zone of excellence. Like, it's like we're kind of good at it, but we don't love it. Is that essentially what zone of competence is?

Yeah, yeah. You can do it. You don't love it. Usually there's a lot of procrastination involved.

Sure.

You know, you don't. Because you don't really want to do it. Yeah. I think of it like enjoyment versus skill level. Like if you kind of make a, like a math chart, I'm kind of nerdy like that, you know, like the math. Yeah, yeah. So if your enjoyment. And even if your skill level is, you know, if the skill level is kind of medium, if your enjoyment's pretty low, that's. Yeah. More competence.

Got it.

Yeah.

And then so income zone of incompetence. And then that's kind of the bottom of the period. Zone of competence. Like, I can do this. I may be procrastinate on it. I don't necessarily love it, but I can do it. I get it done. Um, so those are kind of the, the first base and then the second layer. What's the third layer?

Yeah, then the third layer, zone of excellence. And I think this is another tricky layer because this is like, you're better than most people at it, but it's draining, it doesn't energize you. And so again, if you're spending all your time there, it can be just burnout. Right. Because you're just not getting, you're not refueling yourself with your work, you're only depleting yourself. And we only have so much time. And so it can be hard to have enough time outside of work to refuel yourself.

Yeah. Interesting.

That's the challenge with excellence.

So this would almost be, I think of Andre Agassi. I haven't read his autobiography. I think it's called Open, but I talked to my father in law who read it and just said it was just like the best book ever. And in it he talks about how much, I don't know how long this season was for him, and maybe it was in general his kind of tennis career, but he talked about how much he hated tennis for a while and it was just like, you know, top 10 or number one player in the world. But it just had this like, weird relationship with it, where I think it probably was a version of burnout. But then you're also one of the best in the world, so you continue to do it, obviously. Zone, great example of zone of excellence. He's awesome, right? He's so good. But is. Doesn't have a good relationship with work. It's not energy giving. It's not like he was excited for matches that he had coming up, even if he won, even if he was at the top of his game. So I can see that in the creative world too. You know, I'd imagine for some people it might be writing. Like, people are really good at writing, but it drains them every time they get to the point where they have to write. They know they're good, they know they're going to connect with the audience or photography. Somebody's really good at photography and they've tried to have somebody else help with it, but, you know, it's not quite as good. And so they continue to do it even though it's draining for them. What do you do if you're in this zone? Is that something that you outsource or hire for later on? Like, is part of the zones you think? Like incompetence first, then competence and then excellence. Is that kind of how it goes?

Yeah, exactly, exactly. Because it tends to. That's also how the, the easiness goes too. Right. Like, it's going to be hard, a lot harder to outsource your zone of excellence if you're trying to start there. Especially if you are so good at. Can be hard to stop. To stop doing that.

Yeah. And as you're thinking, well, let's talk about that last zone. So zone of genius, my guess is the top. It's really focused. My guess is it's the thing that you are really good at and really love doing. Like, when you look at your day and you have this activity, it's like, yes, this is the thing I get to do today. Is that zone of genius?

Yes, yes, exactly. That is zone of genius. It lights you up, it makes you come alive, you're excited about it. It's what you get out of bed for. And you know, I've been experimenting in my own life with this. Like, what's the right rat? I would say Corporate Emily was maybe 20%, 10 to 20% in my zone of genius. And so that wasn't right. Right. So I left that. And then even as a career coach, I was hitting about 50% and I was experimenting with outsourcing. But lately, in the last year or two, I've been closer to 80%. It's unbelievable. Like, I am so much more productive. I feel fantastic. I have more energy for my family and my life outside of work.

Yeah, it's just.

It's. It's truly bad. Like, I get goosebumps when I talk about it because it is. It's been such an incredible shift to me, and I had no idea the potential of it. And that's why I'm almost like an evangelist now. Zone of genius. Because there's not a lot of help out there around this. I mean, even. I mean, in Gay Hendricks original book, his advice, his story is that he reflected for a week. That was it. He reflected for a week and knew his zono genius. And it made me so mad. So, you know, he was probably like 55 at that time. I was 32, trying to do the same thing, and it did not work. And I was like, well, no wonder. You had decades more of life than I did. So of course your process didn't work for me.

You were frustrated because it felt like he was able to be like, and then I wanted to do this thing. So I took a week and then I did it and I made the changes. And la di da. There I was versus you. You're. You're saying your story was a little bit more drawn out to make that transition from 80:20 to 20:80 or 20:80 to 80:20. Like 80% of your time now, Zone of genius. But that took you a few years to get there? Is that what you're saying?

Yeah, exactly. And. Yeah, exactly. And that's what I want to share more about.

Totally. And I think when people hear that, especially if they're in that place of 20% zone of genius or less 10%, and they hear you saying, like, man, 80% of the time, I feel like I am doing the work I want to be doing and feel really great about it. How did you do that? Like, how did you make that transition? And were there tools that you used along the way, like journaling and reflecting or even how do you go about. You know, you have these zones. Incompetence, competence, excellence, genius. Is there kind of a process for looking at your day and saying, like, hey, when I do this meeting, I love it, and it's a 10 out of 10. And when I do this meeting or this work, it's a 1 out of 10. So therefore, it goes in this zone. So I guess, how do you filter your activities and even understand where things go within the different zones?

Yeah, yeah, these are great questions. So I think for me, when I was at the 20% zone of genius in the corporate world, it really started with more of a vision. I hadn't even heard of Zone of genius yet, but I did have this vision that I could work differently, things could be different. It didn't have to be this way. And so I think that that's an important. Right. That's the call, right. Are you familiar with Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey?

Just in concept at a super high level, but can you explain it for me in the audience?

So I'm not super deep on it either, but it starts with this call and then that brings you out to the, like, your journey, the story, and then you come back a different person. I am not explaining that well at all.

Sure, we can link to the Wikipedia page in the show notes.

Yeah, perfect. Yeah, but it's what all movies are basically based off of. Especially Star wars is like the really classic example of it, that there's this call to action. And anyway, that was me, right? Because even hearing you talk about Andre Agassi, I really like feel the depression in that. Right. And maybe not like a clinical depression in like a mental health sense, but it's still like feels very depressive.

Right.

That he had to endure that. And so I think noticing those things. So it did for me, it did start with a lot of journaling and like addressing the feelings piece and. And starting to clarify what I wanted. And then we get into more of the actual tools. So I did use time tracking, and I love time tracking and I use it with my clients as well. If they aren't clear, if they come to me and they don't know.

Sure.

They don't have a solid idea. Just like tracking what you do for a week for work and then taking those four zones of genius and labeling everything you did with one of those labels.

Because then what did you use for that? For time tracking? It's really specific, but it could be anything.

It could be anything. I used a piece of paper. I don't even have download or anything. Like truly just a piece of paper every day. And. And I think as detailed as you can get is better. Instead of just saying, like developed a recipe, really start lining out what were the steps in that recipe development that day? Like, did you have to get groceries? Did you. You know, like really tiny and detailed because that's where then you can see, like, because even recipe development, a lot of people I work with say that is their zone of genius. But I still wonder. Okay, but there's still a lot that goes into that. So which specific elements.

Yeah.

Really light you up. Is it doing the dishes at the end? I mean, I don't know. I don't see a lot of bloggers posting about that part.

But it's part of the recipe development process. The point being, get specific. Because if you're just like, recipe development, and then it's like, oh, actually, and there's recipe prep and grocery shopping and dishes and cleaning and like, all of the different elements that go into it, it's important to point that out in. My guess is because if it's dishes or grocery shopping that might go in zone of competence, like, you can do it great. Like, most people can wash the dishes, but it's not something where you're like, and now I get to wash the dishes. And if there's more dishes in the world to wash, I would be even happier.

Right, exactly. Because then you would probably be a dishwasher. And on the other side of that, too, I have clients who have hired kitchen assistants who come in, they do the grocery shopping, they do the prep. And so then this, like, these kind, these kind of bloggers have really zoned in on which parts of recipe development they really love.

Yeah. And so for you, as you think about, you know, your stories, you've gone kind of switch that, flip that. And I think it's inspiring for people to hear that part of it was time tracking and saying, like, great, what am I actually doing in a day? Then it's categorizing those and saying, in a week, here's what I did. And would you say a week is enough to give you an accurate read on what you do?

Yeah, I'd say a week to two weeks. I wouldn't go longer than that. I don't really, personally, I don't love time tracking. So you're not really into it. A week is enough just to give you a sense so you can start categorizing things.

And then once you categorize those things, my guess is then you. And you said this before, you start to focus in on zone of incompetence. And then does that. Well, I guess for your story, as you tagged those kind of zone of incompetence things or zone of competence, it's probably a little bit of both. Then what, like, what did that look like for you? And what were some of those things that you started to shift and change?

Yeah. So that's where outsourcing came in for me, was to hire. Hire some help. And I hired Pretty early because of my corporate background. So I left my corporate job in 2015 and I hired my first contractor in 2016, which is fairly unusual. Right? That's not a typical. Most people don't hire that fast in their business. But I was also hiring a virtual assistant for about three to five hours a week. And so it cost me $100 roughly. And it was worth every penny because I was able to outsource. I was able to outsource some social media captions. I was able to also outsource editing. In hindsight, I should have hired a writer and not a virtual assistant. But she also should have been a writer and not a virtual assistant. So somehow in this, like she kind.

Of was a writer. You did hire a writer just under the title of virtual assistant.

Exactly, exactly. And she is a writer now. Like after working with me, she realized she really was a writer editor and has been, I mean, what, for the last six or seven years now. And so yeah, it really starts. Once you start to see those things that are in, especially incompetence and competence, usually you can blend them together into a role. So like, you know, a lot of the social media stuff would kind of come into this admin. You know, it kind of is a blend of those, those two layers.

This is what you're saying?

Yeah, for me, for me. And I think for other people too. It's, I think it's for everyone, especially these initial roles as you're just starting to hire your first few contractors. It's. It's kind of universal.

That makes sense. And so you identified a few of these things, social media related things. Kind of some admin stuff that needed to be taken care of that were either like, hey, this isn't stuff I'm great at or I can do it, but it's not like I look at doing it and I'm like, great. It's like I look at doing it and I'm like, oh, okay, like maybe I can like eat a piece of candy to make this more enjoyable. Let's find somebody to help with that instead who's going to be like, great, I look forward to this. That's one of the things personally I've learned. So we've gotten worked with more people is there are people out there who love the things that I don't love. And part of the psyche that I had to break is giving somebody something that I don't love. It feels like me getting a gift and being like, I actually don't like this. I'm going to give this to somebody else. Right. So it's like I get a like wiffle ball and let's say that I don't like Wiffle ball and I give it to somebody, I'm like, I don't really like this, but they love Wiffle ball. They'll be like, awesome, I love Wiffle Ball. And so there are people out there who love the things that you don't love. But the hard part, or it seems like the hard part is finding those people who love those things and then also making sure that those people are a good fit. And that gets into, my guess is where it gets into like crafting a job description or so once you get to this point, you've identified, hey, I'm not good at these things or I'm good at these things, but I don't like doing them. How do you move through that? What does that look like? To then take the next steps and actually find those people?

Yeah, I mean it does come into making the job posting. I tend to go very specific and I, I get a lot of feedback in my positions as well as the ones that I have helped other people. I mean, in my recruiting days as well, I get a lot of feedback from freelancers that they really appreciate how clear it is. And so the more specific you can be in that job posting, the more likely you are to find the people that really, really fit. Because it's kind of like a lighthouse or a beacon or a magnet. You can kind of think like it's going to attract or repel people based on what you put in that job posting. And so those are a couple of flags to be watching for, like making sure that the role is aligning with the responsibilities that you've got the right job title. Because these job titles do mean things and the freelancers know what they mean. And so if you're not clear on that and, and that's the gap. Right. I found like a lot of business owners don't know what the freelance roles are because it's so different. Right. If you've had a job, you know about employment and maybe even what like corporate roles are, but that it's just totally different. It's not, it doesn't translate at all.

What do you mean by that?

I just mean like we have to think really differently when we're hiring freelancers or contractors because they're looking for very different things than employees are. Like employees are looking for like, I mean both want a long term relationship, but employees want more than that, right?

Yep.

Freelancers are more like I want freedom and flexibility. And so sometimes that can be hard if you've got more of an employee mindset, like you want things on certain timelines or done a very specific way. You don't have that same control with freelancers. And sometimes that can be difficult to grow.

That makes sense. And the reason that you say that is because oftentimes these early hires, much like yours would be a contractor or freelancer. It's not somebody who you're hiring under a W2 role. They're sending you an invoice, you're paying that invoice. They have flexibility around when they work and how they work. Maybe with some like, soft guidelines, you.

Know, and mutually agreed upon deadlines. Right. It's not like they don't have to abide by that.

And. And your point is that. Yeah, go ahead.

Oh, I was gonna say the bigger thing that I found is that, I mean, we all know like, what big companies do to hire, right? They post their job, they conduct interviews and they make a hire. And so I think what. That's the path I was trying to use originally to find freelancers. But even if you look at their job postings, like that's where I was starting, right? Like, look at Amazon, look at Target, look at Walmart. Like any big company, they lead with who they are, right? Because they are attractive. Everyone knows who they are, they know what they do. And us solopreneurs, I mean, I mean, even I think of Pinch of Yum. Even Pinch of Yum, it's as amazing and incredible as it is. And I love it as a resource myself personally. It's still not Amazon, right?

Yeah.

So I mean, Amazon posts an administrative assistant position. They could have 2,000 applications easy, right? I mean, just depending how, how it's structured. I mean, they get hundreds and thousands of applications for their roles. And so we can't just do the same thing. Right. Our job postings have to look different and they, they need to be. Yeah. Just more specific. They can't have as much jargon. I've had some, I've seen some job postings in the blogging space that I don't know what they mean because there's so many big words. And they're doing their best, right. They're looking at the New York Times or they're looking at their favorite publications of like, how are they, what are they putting in a social media listing? But I don't know what any of this means. And if freelancers, like, you know, they're just scanning and moving on so they're not going to take the time to figure it out.

What I hear you saying is, you know, hiring, it's competitive and we're competing in the marketplace. And one of the ways that we can be competitive is by being simple in our description of what it is, being specific, here's what it is that we actually need and making sure that we're viewing it not as like, hey, everybody wants to work here, but we're trying to like be competitive out in the market and make something look really attractive. And one of the ways to make it look attractive is make sure that people understand it, make sure that they know what it is that they're going to be doing. And if it is a good fit, then they'll say, great. Five hours a week I'm doing social media, specifically Instagram and I'm editing Instagram stories and publishing those. Like I know really specifically what it is. I feel like I would really enjoy doing that. And I know that there's going to be flexibility and autonomy within it. Because if somebody is contracting or a freelancer kind of using those words synonymously, that's oftentimes what they're looking for is autonomy and flexibility within their work. Is that getting at kind of what you're saying?

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

Cool. So a follow up question that I know people would have is you go through this process, you've identified your first hire, maybe it's somebody three to five hours a week, contractor, freelance, you've built out the job description. It's simple, easy to understand, it's specific. How do you know how much to pay? Like you're in that stage of hiring your first person and maybe you come from a corporate background and you're used to these absorbitant salaries or maybe you come from a nonprofit background or something like that and that's not the world that you live in. How do you know where things land from a salary perspective?

Yeah, so I usually think, I think more hourly typically because it's an easier place to start.

And usually that's how freelancers and contractors would talk about their pay.

Yeah, exactly. And so I can just speak of what I've seen like in the marketplace and what I see people paying in general right now. But it seems like the more general roles like virtual assistant tend to be more in the twenty to thirty dollars, especially in US dollars. So for American based contractors and then more specialized positions like social media manager is closer to 25 to 35, honestly, like the high end of that, I consistently see them more like 30 to 35 gets you a good social media manager. And then if you want more specifically, like more of a project manager, they run in more of the 35 to 45. And I just think, I think in terms of like how specific the skill set needs. Right. Like a lot of people can be a virtual assistant, but fewer people have the skills to. Skills and experience to be a project manager.

Yeah, that makes sense.

The fees kind of go up and it could be. Right. You could pay 75 an hour if you want.

Sure.

You know, people kind of also get to set their rates and so it depends on fit writers. I tend to go pretty heavy on those. So I look more in the 50 to 75 an hour range. And you can find people around 35, but they usually don't have as much experience. And so just depending on the level of writing skill you need when you're.

Hiring writers, are you ever paying per word versus hour? I've seen that before. It's not something we've done, but it's.

Not something I've seen a lot of people. I've seen bloggers pay by post and I've done that too. That's what I'm on right now. I'm on a per post editing writing package and so that's a little easier. And then we usually have a range. So It'll be like 1200-1500 words.

Sure, that makes sense. Yep.

I don't know, I feel like we've gotten away from it. Right. That used to be like the old. I mean, not that like you're old, but kind of the old way was to pay by word. And I don't know that most people are running their fees that way anymore.

Okay, yeah, that makes sense. And then the follow up question after that would be, how do you, where do you post it? Like, you know, is it indeed.com or. For us, one of the things that's nice and for a lot of publishers is you have a following. So like you can post it on your own social or own email and people know the brand and potentially would be excited about it. And that's been helpful for us. But what have you seen in terms of the most effective ways to actually find people?

Yeah, I think what I've seen. So in terms of sharing it with your own following, there's pros and cons to it. I think from what I've seen, it seems like you need 100 to 200,000 followers to really have the scale to catch, you know, catch a bunch of people that would have experience with that. I just did recruit, recruit a social media manager for a blogger with like close to half a million followers. And we just, I mean, we really only had a very small handful, maybe three or four who were even actually social media managers. Like, we got like 30 applications.

Yeah.

But it was a lot of people that were just like, loved, you know, love this blogger and love the brand and wanted to help, but they didn't actually have the experience that we were looking for. But it was like, so sweet. Right, so keep that in mind with your community as well. That, that there's, that as well. There's some risk there as well, especially if you're not, you know, really familiar with the hiring process. If there's, you know, it's easy to make mistakes and I wouldn't want anyone to alienate their community over it either.

Yeah, that makes sense.

So just like, you know, just a word of caution, depending on your comfort level, you know, I still really like upwork. I find of all the freelancing platforms, I think they have the highest quality freelancers on it, you know, in comparison to some of their competitors. And then also Facebook groups, I see that is still another great place. Particularly, you know, there's a lot of Facebook groups that are geared toward, toward freelancers or, you know, some of the large food blogging ones as well can be helpful because there's a lot of bloggers out there who are, you know, freelancing on the side while they are building their, building their blog as well. And so that can be a good, a good place to source from as well. I tend to steer away from Indeed and LinkedIn because they tend to be more employee centric. So freelancers aren't spending that much time looking for jobs over there and.

Yep, yep, that makes sense. So at what point do you know when you're ready to hire? Some people I'm sure would say, like, maybe I could, maybe I shouldn't, should I? Should I not? And is there any, like, way to kind of reflect on that and to know if you're ready?

Yeah, I think, I mean, I think about that five. I mean, I think about the five hours a week. Right? Five hours a week at $25 an hour is $120 a week. And so will those few hours, like, really have an impact on you? And I think, because sometimes it's like, yeah, that hundred bucks, like, I would rather spend $100 than do those 10 things. Then you're ready. I think another big sign is burnout, like if you cannot continue. Right. There's always this risk if you don't outsource, if you hold it all to yourself and try to do all the things forever, you're at a risk of burnout and then not being able to do all those things. And so that's another one to watch for if you're getting to that edge of just kind of that permanent exhaustion kind of depressive state, but not really clinical depression, like, feeling.

Yeah. Uninspired, like, the work that you're showing up and it's like, work that you don't want to do. Previously you did want to do it, and now you're in a state of like, gosh, I don't. I don't want to do this anymore. Yeah. Do you have. Do you have on that specifically? Um, my guess is you've connected with enough people to have kind of some patterns of knowing what that looks like. But any tips for, like, recognizing burnout when somebody's at that point? Like, are there kind of internal signals that you could be aware of or monitoring for?

Yeah, I mean, I think for me, I can speak a little bit to my own story of burnout, where I started taking depression indexes online, but then I would never test depressed, and so I'd be like, well, I must be fine. I think, honestly, another one is if you're saying I'm not burned out because I love the work, or, you know, denying it, I think is a big one. Like, if you're denying that you're burned out is, again, like, my personal story. But also I've seen it in some bloggers that I've worked with who insisted they were not burned out because they loved the work. And I was like. Like that. That's not how it works. Like, that's exactly why I think you're burned out.

Yeah. Yeah.

It's not about that. Right.

It's. It's almost like a deep level of self reflection around how you're interacting with and feeling about showing up and doing the work. And part of it is, like, sometimes the work is just hard to do. Like the War of Art. Steven Pressfield talks about that. Like, this idea of the resistance. And it's hard to know, like, what is the resistance? Like, something that's really hard that I should be doing that's going to, like, help me break through. I don't want to write, but I know it's important versus, you know, what is burnout or just something that's not my zone of genius. I feel like that's really hard to. Hard to know how to navigate those things. Do you have any thoughts on that? And like, the idea of zone of genius? Zone of genius is like, I love this work. It feels good. I sit down, I show up, I do it. Versus there are hard things that you have to do within a business. And you might, that might just be a truth to business is having to do hard things. Do you run into that yourself and just say, like, hey, you know what? 20% of the time I'm just going to accept I'm not going to love what it is and it has to get done.

Yeah, I think it's that. I mean, I really see zone of genius as the antidote to or antidote to burnout itself. Because as you can start taking steps, I mean, I mean, because it's not like you're going to go from 20% zone of genius to 80% in a day or a week. And so. But could you do 5% more zone of genius next week? Right. First we have to be aware of what the zone of genius is. But you don't only have to delegate. Delegate isn't the only solution here. Outsourcing isn't the only way. You can also stop doing it, doing some things or you can put some things off. And I don't think delaying is procrastination. I think it's strategic. Like if you are consciously choosing. You know what I mean? I think procrastination is more like unconscious. We don't even realize we're doing it. But if I am delaying a project or you know, something. Yeah, I think that's a good thing. I think that's a good thing if it means you're spending more time in your zone of genius because then you're going to be focusing more on the areas that are really going to make an impact.

Yeah. Yeah, that's great. So my guess is people will hear this and they'll be excited about the potential of making that shift in their life to start to move more. And I think we could all do it. Nobody's at a hundred percent. Right. We all have the opportunity to do more of our zone of genius type work. And I know that that's a lot of what you're focusing on right now is helping people make that transition. So can you talk a little bit, Emily, about how people could work with you and the different ways that people could reach out and not only follow you and what you're up to, but connect with you to work if they're interested in working towards that?

Yeah. So if you are really interested, for people that are really interested in figuring this out like getting more clear on your zone of genius. I do work one on one with bloggers to develop their organizational strategy session. And through that it's a three step process where we have a meeting for an hour and I go deep into understanding who you are and what kind of team you have in place right now, or what you've tried in the past and how it's worked. Then I go away and build the organizational strategy based on what we've talked about and then we come back for a second one hour meeting. So that's step three and we refine it. And so then at the end of this process, you are ready to go. You've got the bulk of the job, posting is written, you just need to run with it, post it, add some application instructions, tell people the deadline and how to apply, and then you can jump right into hiring from there. And I'm really focused on, okay, what are the next couple roles for the next next couple years? Because as you grow and change, things are going to evolve and so we can't. I can't like write your whole organization's organizational strategy for the next 10 years. So yeah, yeah. So there's all the details on that are@emilyparent.com strategysession and if you're listening and you're like, oh, I'm not quite at that level, I did put together a zone of genius workbook that has all of my favorite reflection questions in it for getting started on figuring out these zones. And so that's@emilyparent.com cool. And then beyond that, I'm on Instagram. Emily Perrin.

Awesome.

I just love it. It's simple and I love connecting in messages. So even if you just listen to the episode and want to say hi, I'd love to hear from you.

That's great, Emily. Really great to connect and to chat again. It's been fun to hear your story and your transition as you've continued to apply your own methodology to your own work. And cool to see how that continually allows you to be in your zone of genius more. So it's inspiring for me and I know it will be listeners as well. So thanks for coming on.

Wow. Thanks Bjork. It was great to be with you today.

Hey there, it's Alexa and thanks for tuning into this episode of the Food Blogger Pro podcast. We hope you enjoyed this episode and we hope you got something out of it. Some nice little nuggets that you can take and apply to your own blog or business. I wanted to let you know that we actually have a free download. It's a PDF all about monetization. So one of the main reasons why people want to grow their food blogs, grow their online businesses, is to make an income, is to make money from doing what they love to do. And we actually have this eBook, it's 100% free to download. Speaking of monetization, it's free, so it talks you through 16 different ways ways that you can monetize a food blog. And we're very familiar with things like display ads or sponsored content or affiliate marketing. But there are so many other ways to monetize a food blog. And in this ebook you'll learn about 16 of those ways. It's a great ebook, one of our favorites and one of our most popular. And like I mentioned, it's free for you to download. So if you're interested in downloading this ebook, you can go to foodbloggerpro.com podcast podcast-guide and you can just put in your name, your email address and you will get that ebook for free. Again, that URL is food bloggerpro.com podcast guide and you can download it right there for free. All right, thanks for tuning in again. We will see you next time next Tuesday. And until then, make it a great week.

Sam.