Christine Corcoran breaks down why founders delay hiring and when to actually do it. Start with a time audit to find your highest-value work, then hire when you hit 80% capacity. Set aside 20-30% of revenue for wages, and watch a hair salon example show how hiring opens slots for more clients.
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Welcome to five Minutes of Momentum. These episodes are a short five minute burst of inspiration, motivation and massive action. If you need that little kick up the butt to get things moving and to inspire you to take massive action, then every single Thursday I'll be sending you through a five minute episode to download, digest and implement to finish your week off strong. Are you ready to get started? Let's go. Welcome back to five Minutes of Momentum. Today I want to talk to you about hiring support, knowing when it's time to hire, support and even when you don't feel ready. One of the things that I hear from a lot of business owners is they get to certain stages of growth and they don't feel ready to hire or they might have blocks around hiring. Now one of the things I see around the mindset blocks that prevent people from hiring is not feeling ready, right? Not having the money, the control issue, trying to control absolutely everything, or not knowing how to manage people or thinking it's a time issue. I don't have the time to interview, I don't have the time to hire, I don't have the time to train. Whereas the reason why you don't have the time is because you haven't hired yet and you need to hire and that's the only way they're going to buy back your time. You need to buy back your time. And so the other thing too is like not knowing what type of support you actually need without blowing your budget. And so that's a tricky one because every business is different. And so one of the things I always suggest to clients is do a time audit. Where are you spending your time and what is your zone of genius? Where are you the most valuable in your business? And if you were to spend more of your time in your zone of genius, then then you would make more money in order to cover the costs of your team. Right? I always as well had a, a mentor always say to me like once you're earning 10k months you should be setting aside 20% to grow for with team because otherwise you'll end up staying at 10k months. So you need to actually because usually at that time you usually quite close to capacity and so you want to identify that you've got to buy back your time and knowing then where to invest is usually going to be time. So you're either you start with delegation, you start with outsourcing, you start with automation, right? So if you can put in systems or automation to again buy back your time, I'd start there. Then I look at how Do I delegate? And who is the right person to delegate to? And that time audit should help you map out where you're wasting your time and what the skillset is that you need. Because the skillset will then tell you who you should hire first. So is it marketing? Is it content creation? Is it email marketing? Is it customer service? Like there's so many different areas that you may need to hire in, but you want to go one, what's going to buy back the most time first? So I'd start there and then the next step is how am I going to generate money? So sometimes that is knowing that I need to actually hire for team to sell more. So what I mean by that is that you either hire someone to deliver a service that you can charge for or you are hiring someone to cover tasks that will then free up your time to be able to deliver more services. Make sense. So you're going to make more money because you're delivering more services instead of spending time on admin or other tasks that are literally just bigger busying up your calendar. So that's how you determine, you need to determine, okay, so where am I wasting my time? Where should I be spending my time to make more money? And sometimes that's also giving you space to free up, to sell more. Right? And so I remember hiring my obm, not feeling ready at all to hire and being like, well I'm at capacity now, so if I'm gonna be able to serve more customers, I need someone to manage this part of the business that if I'm gonna be able to serve more people, I need someone to be able to manage that side of the business. And so I needed to actually have someone come in and do complete online business management so then I could free up and coach more or speak more or get online more like the own, sell more like. All of that became apparent because I was so busy trying to keep the maintaining of the business that there was no way I was so stuck in the weeds, there was no way I was going to be able to sell more because I literally didn't have the space to receive more. Right. So I that that brings me to not knowing when it's the right time, if you are at capacity or if you're getting close to capacity. You want to recognize that if you don't free up more of your time, you are not going to gain more time or so you're most likely not going to feel ready. But there is a way to do cash flow forecasting in order to prep for covering that so what I usually do is then look at someone's time, where they're spending time in their business and be like, okay, let's map out what type of team member you need and then let's go find that team member and start saving more of your time. There's always going to be a transition period where you're feeling like you're going to be even more time poor until you get your time back because they need training, obviously. And then we go, okay, so if I forecast out your income and go, well, how much money can I set aside for team? Then how much time will that give me back? Then I can go, okay, what can I do with that time? And then you forecast that and how much more money will I make with that time? And then I forecast that to then figure out, okay, what do I hire next? There is absolutely a freaking way to do that. Right? And people get stuck in like, oh, I don't really have the money. Even though they do, they're just really apprehensive to actually use that 14 and they're scared to make the commitment to have consistent wages come out of their business. Now I will say wages is a huge profit killer. So you've got to be so careful on how much percentage you set aside for wages. Wages in majority of traditional service based businesses, if they sit between the 20% of 20% is great, 20 to 30% is getting high. So 30% is getting high. So we want to keep it under the 30% mark. Right? So, and again, it will depend on what you're actually hiring. You hiring to gain back your time? Are you hiring to sell more and have someone deliver that time? Right. So if they're offering a service, they can then sell more. So to give you like a basic example, let's say you run a hairdressing salon because that's the, you know, industry I've come from. If you run a hairdressing salon, you have a column of a hairdresser. They're available for a certain number of hours per week and they deliver a service that they charge for. So they're bringing in income for the business. Okay, now if you get that, that person, when we did this, we used to get a hairdresser to 80% capacity and then we'd hire the next team member because if they're already 80% capacity, very quickly they'll get to 100%. Right. And so we needed to hire in order to open up more space to actually receive more clients. So it works. The same majority of online businesses too you get to a certain capacity, you can only service and serve more customers until you're at the next level of capacity. So you either need to hire a team member to deliver more of that service or or you need to free up your time to be able to deliver more of that service, or you need to free up your time to create other ways to deliver a service or something of value. So again, you may need to be freeing up your time to be able to create an online course that you can then sell and then you need to use your time to sell that online course. So honestly depends on the individual type of business that you offer. So what I want you to know is that you're not going to feel ready, but you're going to feel like capacity. So pay attention to that and know that if you choose not to hire, you are keeping yourself at the same level. Right? You're still going to be conscious of that. Otherwise you will end up holding yourself back from growth. I hope this helps. Make sure you send me a message if you have any questions with anything that I've covered.
