090: Paying for Consistency and Accountability

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The more content that I can create, the more episodes that resonate, the more I do hope each of you will find one that you just can't wait to share with a few friends. So it all becomes this cycle of content and adding value with a team in place to help me do that for the things that truly are not unique to me like podcast editing and show notes drafting. It really does free me up to solve the bigger challenges in my business and my mission of one to many. So the reason I don't do one on one coaching anymore is I've been become super committed to wanting to create things in the world that express what I feel is my reason for being on the planet. And I've known this since my early twenties of one to many. Communication. Creating books. Creating podcast episodes. Doing things out loud.

This is your time. How can we earn twice as much in half the time with joy and ease while serving the highest good? That is our guiding question here at the Freetime Cafe, your home for heart based business. I'm your host Jenny Blake. Join me for conversations with authors, friends and fellow business owners as we explore ways to free your mind, time and team to do your best work. Now onto today's show.

Hello. Hello my friends. Welcome back. Oh my goodness. Today's topic is one so familiar to so many of us and that is the chicken and the egg conundrum of hiring. When do you go pro? When do you go all in on software or team or hiring specialists? And when do you stick it out and keep doing things yourself so that you can generate the revenue needed to fund the hiring? Therein lies the chicken and the egg conundrum that we know that phrase. It takes money to make money and we know that in a lot of ways it would be good to hire a team and to delegate and to bring on specialists who are better at the work than us, can do it faster than us. And that frees each of us as business owners to do our highest level, most strategic, creative work. And yet there is so often a gap where you don't just have thousands of surplus dollars in cash just floating around unless you're venture backed and you feel nervous. Is this the best use of your time and money and Energy to hire and onboard a or to rent office space. Is it worth doing? Is it going to pay off? One example that I can share in my business recently was the debate of how to go pro with podcast production. I had experimented with hiring different freelancers for audio editing. I had someone on my team who was project managing. At one point, I stepped up audio production and went pro on that front. But at the end of it all, I was still carrying the cognitive load of the podcast getting done. I was the one that had the big picture in my head. The production schedule, the calendar, what episodes needed to happen, what guests to invite, and if I got tired or burnt out, which has happened, it would just grind to a halt because there was really nobody that owned it more than me. Finally, at one point in recent months, this was leading up to the free time book launch. I had heard about this fantastic team, One Stone Creative, through a friend and I was kind of tiptoeing around, should I hire them, it would be several thousand dollars a month. And you know, podcasts, Let me tell you right now, even though free time is now, according to ListenNotes.com in the top 3% of shows, it is not profitable in terms of the expense to record and have a whole team around it. But if you count advertising, things like my private BFF community and successfully building relationships and building trust that lead to other facets of my business, then yes, of course it pays for itself. But it's just a little tricky to finagle the numbers with podcasting because it takes a very long time. Of course we can hope for a nonlinear breakthrough, but a long time to break through to that really profitable flywheel of success. As I was debating, I was starting to spend a lot of time editing episodes, which I do enjoy, and I was not doing other things to prepare me for the launch, even creating revenue generating services and products. And so my brother reminded me, he's like, Jenny, you gotta do it, you gotta hire, you've gotta take this risk, bet on yourself, you know, free up your time. There's better things you can be doing. Hire this team, you know. He was an unequivocal yes, go for it. You'd be crazy not to. Of course, as a business owner and a little bit hesitant because I had already invested so much money over the previous year, I was still on the fence. I have to say now, months later, the fact that you even have two episodes a week coming out consistently without missing a single one, leading up to the book launch and in the weeks immediately following when I was CERTIFIABLY exhausted is only because I ended up hiring One Stone Creative. And you're going to hear from them either before or after this episode. I don't know when this one goes live, but I'm going to crossplay some of Megan, the co founder's fantastic content around podcasting. In particular, I can say that hiring this team is the first time I really experienced a team that was as committed to not missing a deadline as I was. One of the things that got me to sign on the proverbial dotted line was my intro call with Megan, and she said that she and the team have prided themselves on only missing, I think, two episodes for any of their podcast clients in five years that they were as obsessed with and committed to shows going live no matter what as I was in that intro meeting and in our onboarding. I also said to them, as I always say, and you hear me, I'm a broken record on this, do not let me be the bottleneck. If you don't hear back from me on reviewing the draft of show notes or listening back to the audio, publish it anyway. There's usually nothing so dire in a podcast episode that it can't be fixed after it goes live. So to take a step back in this example, what Megan and the team are helping me do is drafting invitations to potential guests. They're helping prepare for interviews by researching recent social media for those guests. After I conduct the interview, that's where I come in. That's my zone of genius. You know, I just. I've always said for many years, I've been podcasting for six years, that all I want to do is show up and have the conversation, and then someone else takes the rest. So I conduct the interview, they edit the audio, they draft the show notes. Once I give feedback on the show notes, or even if I miss doing that, they program and schedule it in Megaphone, which is the podcast platform we use, and Squarespace, which are where the show notes show up. They even draft the email to the guest to say the show is live. They write sample copy for sharing. We've done some swaps in the process, but for many clients, they'll create media, graphics, social sharing. It's just incredible. And so beyond the logistics of what they do for the life of an episode, it's the first time that I have outsourced the responsibility super effectively, where I know that they're waiting on me, that if I don't review show notes, they're still gonna push it live, that they're gonna ask me if they don't have content in the can in the industry speak in order to stay on schedule. And the people pleaser in me, often a detriment. But in this case it's good that I don't wanna be last minute for them. They are so respectful of me and my process and getting these shows made that I want to show up for them. I want to make sure I don't miss my deadlines. I want to make sure I'm a good team player of working with them. So it's just super cool that in this case, this investment, even though it was a stretch for me, it freed a part of my mind that is what enabled me to launch the book at all and go on other podcasts and have this production engine of my ongoing public original thinking that is so important to me, especially because I'm not on social media. This is my channel, this is what I've got to know that it's handled and taken care of and that they are the pros and that they have that ear to listen back and make the edits. It's just a truly freeing feeling to have hired a team better at it than me, who owns the process better than me. Now, for those of you saying show me the data, the data is very interesting too. In addition to doubling the size of our BFF community, and a lot of that was due to the overall flurry of book launch activity, I can tell you that our downloads just in the first quarter of 2022 are up 187%. That's pretty impressive. Now, of course they're up, you say, because Jenny, you did a podcast tour and you were on a bunch of shows, I think 25 to be exact. Going on other people's podcasts talking about the book. Yes, absolutely, that's true. So podcast download numbers probably wouldn't be up if I hadn't just done a big podcast tour. And I'll link to the tour playlist that's in Spotify in case you want to check out some of those, if you're not totally sick of me yet. But listen, the show wouldn't have been consistent at all if I was relying only on myself. During the launch, I had team transitions happening behind the scenes. There was a lot of sort of chaos and upheaval. That's the nature of a launch and a lot of dispersed attention and energy exertion. So even though we can't attribute this podcast growth, we had looks like 27,000 downloads for free time. And again, it's a relatively new show in Q1 even if we can't attribute it entirely to the fact that I brought on an outsourced team, I can tell you that there's no way it would have been consistent through the launch without it. And I do think that consistency is a big factor that leads to growth. People want to know when the episodes are launching and be able to come back to them and share them with friends. You know I'm big on word of mouth marketing that the more content that I can create, the more episodes that resonate, the more I do hope each of you will find one that you just can't wait to share with a few friends. And so that's where it becomes that positive, virtuous cycle of podcast content being interesting, hopefully generating interest in the book, generating generating interest in some of the backend stuff, whether it's the free toolkits, the Mastermind kit, or things like the BFF community or even the Freetime Dashboard. So it all becomes this cycle of content and adding value with a team in place to help me do that for the things that truly are not unique to me, like podcast editing and show notes drafting, it really does free me up to solve the bigger challenges in my business and my mission of one to many. So the reason I don't do one on one coaching anymore is I've become super committed to wanting to create things in the world that express what I feel is my reason for being on the planet. And I've known this since my early 20s of one to many communication, creating books, creating podcast episodes, doing things out loud.

We'll be right back just after this.

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The other part of this chicken and the egg conundrum was actually getting quiet recording space in New York City. You heard me share all these funny moments early on in this show. It launched in March of 2021 about never having quiet house. I would have dogs barking, toilets flushing, doorbells ringing, deliveries. One morning I was set to record back to back episodes and plumbers needed to come over and carve a 4 foot by 4 foot hole in the ceiling. And so there was just this comedy of quiet or quiet escaping me that I didn't know how to solve until finally I decided I am going to pay for recording space. Even though I want to be frugal, even though this area of the business is not Direct Line profitable. I'm going to go record this place in midtown in New York and I'm going to see how that goes. This was another pilot of spending money, in this case $68 a month to be a member, which gets me a lower booking rate of $50 an hour. And I started scheduling these blocks of three to four hours, I would say every two weeks. Part of me was hesitant. Couldn't I just be doing this at home? Couldn't I just suck it up and ask the entire house to be quiet for three hours? It's not that hard, right? It shouldn't be that hard. And yet it was the other side benefit and I did not see this coming. But just like paying for a personal trainer, it got me to show up for myself. So those of you who already rent office space or you're signed up for co working spaces or you have a personal trainer, you know that just paying for it. I mean, I guess theoretically a gym membership, but a lot of us sign up for those and then don't fully have that ironclad accountability. But just paying for the space and not being able to back out last minute actually gets me to show up for myself and record even on days I don't feel like it. Lately I've been so tired from the launch that there are many mornings that I drag myself out of the house still in my sweats, get on the subway, carding my microphone and my books and my bags and I go sit at a coffee shop and I'm sort of drooling, half drooling, staring off into space, going, are you kidding me right now? How am I going to record a podcast episode in this state of mind? But because the space is booked And I can't cancel last minute. It gets me to go and sit down and record just as I'm doing right now. So I want to play a little clip from you from the last time I did this. My observations as I was leaving the studio, that you can just hear the energy in my voice, like how happy I was that I actually showed up and did it. And I know for sure that if I had been at home trying to rally and Michael was around and Ryder was around and the kitchen was around and I could just dilly dally my house, I don't think I would have recorded at all. And in my case, every time I come into the studio and do a sprint, that's at least three episodes at a time and usually bonus content for the BFF community. So imagine that's already six to 10 episodes. That just wouldn't have happened if I wasn't paying for the space and paying for the team. So here's a little snippet of me leaving the last recording session.

I'm leaving Gotham Podcast Recording Studio and I just can't believe the difference in how I feel. It was a rainy New York City Morning, 45 degrees. I did not want to go in today. I had just finished launching the book today as I'm recording this. It's two weeks after book launch.

I was tired.

I'm traveling again tomorrow and if I.

Were left to my own devices, there.

Is no way I would have recorded back to back episodes today from home. Instead because I had paid for the recording space. $50 an hour, booked in advance, hard to reschedule, can't cancel last minute. I rewarded myself with letting myself take an Uber and not navigate subways and walking through south of Times Square. And I got there. It wasn't my most productive day ever, but I recorded three solo episodes. Two for free time, one for Pivot. I recorded a little promo plug for the leader toolkit@itsfreetime.com leaders just in case you want to start a mastermind group for what else?

Accountability.

And I even recorded a little bonus content for the BFF Community Community, our private podcast feed. All in all, I'm leaving feeling tired. I didn't have another episode in me. Sometimes when I have 20 minutes left on the clock of a three hour session, I'm able to just get one more quick one in. That did not happen today, but overall, such a win. And it is purely because of having to schedule and pay in advance that this added level of basically paying for accountability and quiet is working. I purposely recorded this part from my phone because I wanted you to hear just a my reaction right after the fact, but also the soundscape of New York City. It's one of these kind of classic days of just rain and sounds and people and the chaos of this part of town.

To wrap up this episode, you hereby have permission to hire, even if it's outside of your stretch zone, especially if it's going to free your mind and your energy for doing more of your best work. And you have permission to pay for something even when you don't have a direct line ROI right away. But you're curious to see where that renewed time and energy and focus can take you. I would love to hear how your hiring and delegating experiments go and how you have created accountability for yourself in ways that get you to show up even when you don't feel like it. You can always leave me a voice memo@itsfreetime.com ask thank you so much for being here listening everybody. Have a beautiful rest of your day.

If you've listened this far, you get a gold star.

Thank you.

Word of mouth is the most joyful way we can grow this show and it helps us land interviews with the luminaries and inspire insightful guests that you would most love to hear from. Please send this episode to a friend who might find it helpful, and for show notes and related links from this episode, visit itsfreetime.com while you're there, make sure you're subscribed to the Time well Spent newsletter. You'll get instant access to my Tech Toolkit, a continually updated list of all the software I use, along with the total monthly spend to run my business where no one works full time, even me. Visit itsfreetime.com join remember, you are running the show. It's time for radical reimagining and everything is up for grabs. Let it be easy, let it be fun, and build with love.

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