145: Tips for Training Part-Time Team Members with Kaneisha Grayson

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Don'T just hire someone to do a task you just don't like to do. If you don't fully understand the task or if you are going to hire someone to do something you don't like to do or you don't fully understand the task, you need to hire an expert, not a va. So to re articulate that you only want to be hiring VAs to do things that you know if they've done it right or not.

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 fathers, 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 Free Timers. Welcome back. I am thrilled to have a returning guest, Kenesha Grayson, here with us today. Kenesha is the founder of Art of Applying, an agency that helps grad school applicants get accepted into top tier schools and achieve funding. She's the author of Be youe Own Boyfriend, host of the Scale youe Joy podcast, and one of my favorite people to listen to. I could just listen to her all day. She was so generous in sharing her wisdom and the highs and lows of her business building journey in episode 131 on scaling your joy while streamlining business overhead. So be sure to go back and listen to this one if you haven't already. We covered so much ground and one of the reasons I invited Kenesha even to have that conversation was little tidbits that she would drop in our BFF community about team building and what she had figured out. So I asked her back so that we could dive deeply into this topic. The highs, the lows, the lessons learned, the what's next of training part time team members. So with that, Kenesha, welcome back.

Hi Jenny, thanks for having me back. Glad to be here.

This is one of those sticky areas where when the solopreneur Says I'm the bottleneck, I'm burnt out, I want to burn it all down. Inevitably, there's this moment of needing to bring on help. And usually I will say the first person is va. Why do you think it is so challenging to bring in that person? And what would you say to that business owner of even where to start?

Yes. Well, the first thing I would say is congrats on having a business that has even a tiny bit of extra cash so that you can have hire that va. And congrats on being open to getting help, because it can sometimes even be a huge roadblock to believing that there's anyone in the entire world who can do any task in your business as well as you can, or well enough to be passable. So I would just say that even just the willingness to enter a VA is already a step in the right direction. And I would say it's important that people understand what. What a VA is. So, Jenny, I know you love a framework.

You know I do, yes.

So a framework that I've come up with is like the pyramid of executive assistance. What I'm saying is assistants, like ce, not multiple assistants. And at the bottom of that pyramid is a va. So that's a virtual assistant. That's somebody very often who might be living overseas in a country that has a drastically lower cost of living than, than a lot of the Western countries. That is the most kind of basic help. And then as you move up the pyramid, it's going to be positions of people that are helping you with executive function and operating in a similar way. But I like to name all the different positions because people often will hire someone who's functioning at a lower level, but give them a really high title. And I don't think that's a good idea for a lot of reasons. One is that when you give someone a title that's way bigger than what they're producing, eventually they're going to want their pay to start reflecting that title. But you want people's pay to be in line with the value that they're producing. So at the bottom of the pyramid is a virtual assistant. Above that would be an executive assistant, who could still be a virtual assistant, but we've just sort of changed their title and a bit more of their role in terms of projects, they own responsibility, their ability to relieve you of mental load. Above an executive assistant, I would say would be like a chief of staff. Above a chief of staff would be something like a coo, a chief Operating officer. So what you don't want to do is hire someone who's primarily helping you with $7 an hour, $15 an hour tasks and then give them some highfalutin title like COO. So that's the first thing I want to say. You said where should we start? Start. Start with understanding where you're actually hiring. And just like you said, Jenny, you're probably hiring a virtual assistant. So don't go giving her the title of COO or director of this or that. She's not really doing that level of work.

What I'm curious about and where I think a lot of business owners get overwhelmed is how do you even begin to bring that person into the fold? So maybe we could talk about onboarding a little bit in free time. Of course, I talk about your externalized business mind having it all out of your head and it's in notion. So hopefully that's the first step. I also talk about the delegation task tracker and I'll put that template in the show notes. At least start keeping track and observing what you could delegate. But the question I have for you, Kenesha, because you have onboarded so many people throughout the years, is how do you get them up to speed within your business and then how do you somehow document that so you make it easier for yourself the next time someone new is starting?

Yeah, absolutely. And yes, I love the tools that you lay out in free time. And I think that if people will slow down and actually do those tools, that's how they would set themselves up. Best problem is a lot of entrepreneurs who feel frantic and over committed and having trouble prioritizing or getting it all done will often fall prey to the belief, well, I'm working in my business so much, I don't have time to do that extra stuff and work on my business. So the first thing I would just say is for the person listening, if you can free yourself from that thought and you know, as you say in the book, carve out CEO time to work on tasks like that, in the long run, that is going to serve you a lot more and than the sort of shortcuts that I'm going to share. But the strategies I'm going to share are probably going to be think of them as like the lifeline band aid solution. But what we really want to do is get to those sort of longer term solutions where you've got that, I think you call it the control center, where you've got everything documented and things like that for the person who's just like, I just know I'm not going to do it or you know, I need someone else to do it for me. Here are some of the things that I would recommend. First you need to decide do you want the person that you're hiring to help you with a one off task or a recurring task. Sometimes there's like a one off task that takes us an hour that we just want someone's help with. We think it's one off. We've rationalized it as a one off task many times. What we think of as a one off task, there's either elements of it or the entire task is a recurring task if it has any element of possibly being recurring. What you want to do is record yourself completing that task. Now if you don't know how to do the task, that's a little bit different. That's more like you then need to just go to Upwork or Fiverr and hire someone to do it for you. But if this is more about delegating a task that you already know how to do, I would suggest recording yourself doing the task. And I don't mean record yourself with like an iPhone sitting in your office. Like you can just record your screen of you doing the task if it's a task on the computer. My favorite tool is loom l o o m as in mother. And their website I think is useloom.com and it's just one of the many screen recording software. So let's take an example task. I want to hire someone to turn this blog post that I wrote into a really pretty checklist. And in general I love to create checklists for my clients. Let's say I'm an organizer and I love to create checklists for my clients, but I don't know how to make them pretty. And I also like want them up on my website so that they are like a download thing that people get after they give our email address. So let's say that I can basically do all the steps myself and I have been doing them, but it takes me a long time. Maybe it takes me five hours to do it and that's five hours I want to reclaim for CEO time. So what you would do, painful as it is, is record yourself. Now I wouldn't do a five hour recording a because you could lose the recording if something goes wrong. But break it down into smaller steps so you could make one video that is, oh, you know, once I have the text of the document and here's how I add in like the little cute bubbles and the cute little boxes for the check mark label that Video. I would even say make the videos no longer than.

For a task that has a lot of like mouse movement, I would only do about 10 minutes. If it's a task that really does take you five hours, it's really more of a project. And so then break that project down into if you can, like 10 to 20 minute video type tasks. I know that sounds really detailed and like, is someone really going to sit there and watch all that? But you have to remember that once you've recorded that video, you now have exact visual data to pass on to someone who can then replicate what you've done. And that person that you've hired will eventually maybe shorten it, be good at it, like be able to do that five hour task maybe in two and a half hours, at which point she could record her own video or make her own checklist. So to summarize all that, the idea really is about giving the person an opportunity to shadow you. And they don't need to necessarily be sitting right there. It doesn't need to be a synchronous thing. It's an asynchronous opportunity for the person to watch you do the task step by step. And if there's just not the time or the willingness to document it in a written way, and not everyone really likes to consume information via writing, I would say video is going to be a great bet for that.

Let's say that's for vas and discrete tasks, particularly ones you can do a loom, demonstrate how to complete it in under 10 minutes. Something you've also done really well is onboarding subject matter experts or sales team members. And that seems a whole lot trickier because you're not just walking them through a series of steps. There's more nuance involved and more discretion and more what in the business world is called soft skills. But that term annoys a lot of us because they're not soft at all. So can you describe to us a little bit about how you hire and onboard people that are, let's say in the sales function to really get to know your business and then know how to represent you and even be client facing, because that's a whole nother level of onboarding.

So in my business, in the art of applying our salespeople, they are not the same people as who the clients work with once they become a client. So on my team, salespeople are purely selling. They're purely enrolling people into our program. They also do happen to have fancy graduate degrees and one was a former client many years ago. But I'm happy to hire salespeople who don't even have college degrees. I would say one of my buy and away best salespersons didn't even have a four year college degree. I did want to make that differentiation that they are not really subject matter experts on getting into grad school. Are experts at leading those consultative sales conversations and dealing with the objections that arise those conversations because they've been well trained. Right now I have two salespeople on my team. I've had at one point, I think, you know, five full time salespeople. So I am very experienced. Hiring, recruiting, training, mentoring, professional development, all the things salespeople. I would say first thing is to actually put them through quite a bit of a, I guess, complex application process that gives them a taste for what it will be like in the role. So to apply to be a breakthrough coach on my team, which is what our sales position is called, you have to listen to sales several of the short calls we have with clients. You also have to listen to several of the longer calls that we have with clients and those are 90 minutes and answer questions about, you know, what part of the call surprised you? These are written responses that they write as a part of the application process. What questions do you have for us? Which of the potential clients objections were the most interesting to you? Which do you think would be hard for you to answer? So first of all, they're listening to real sales calls so that they can really see like, do I have the stomach for this? To listen to someone in rapt attention and take notes for 90 minutes and then recap everything I've heard And then they tell me they got to think about it and then we got to go through their objections. Do I really have the stomach for that? Another thing is they make a video to introduce themselves. It's just a simple talking head video. But you would be surprised. Jenny. That is enough to scare away a lot of people. But my thinking is if you cannot even muster the motivation or wanting to do it of a three minute video introducing yourself or in your video, you're very charming, but there's like sirens and crying in the background and people cooking and banging on dishes. That tells me you do not have a quiet work environment that's conducive for this role. Part of hiring great salespeople is really helping them experience kind of the ups and downs and the rigors of the role before they're even in the role. I liken it to like a technical coding interview before you're hired for like a very competitive software engineering job or how the case interviews for management consulting are pretty intense. That's the first step.

We'll be right back just after this.

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I appreciate you sharing your hiring process because I was asking about onboarding and then as you so aptly point out, of course it actually starts with the hiring. First you have to have a really clear and I would say rigorous, almost thorough process. I love how you describe it, puts them through the ups and downs of the role and all the requirements and really getting such a good sense for what the work is going to be. So that seems like step one to successful onboarding is edit out the people who are probably not going to be happy in the role.

Yes. Also just the people who aren't able to meet deadlines. So there's probably about three, four steps in the application process and each step has a reasonable deadline. But sometimes people just miss the deadline and that just tells me like, hey, you're going to be the first point of contact with the art of applying that this person has. I need you to be responsive. I need you to be dependable and reliable and consistent. And if you can't even do that in the application process, this is not the right fit. That's what I have to say so far on hiring in terms of onboarding and training, a to do list new hire has like a little onboarding portal that has various tasks for them and most of the tasks are related to watching recordings of one of my prior salespeople training a new person, if that makes sense. So earlier I talked about the video and how helpful that is. You know, I paid my top performing salesperson at the time to train the new person. It's hours, Jenny. Let's call it six hours of them meeting on Zoom Video on for Several weeks. And I was like, this is so good and so effective. Let's go ahead and use this recording for the following people. So that is actually what new salespeople watch is the recording of Alexei training Adam, if that makes sense.

When you say you put them in a portal, I had the thought recently I have been giving people checklists in notion, but I had the thought I could create a little mini course in Kajabi that's just, now do this. Now do this. Now watch this. And it would probably be a better experience than a standalone checklist. So when you say portal, do you have something that's walking them through it sequentially or is it more of a long list that just says this is everything you need to do?

Yeah. So when you say, is it a long list or is it a course? When you give people the checklist, is it just words or does the checklist have like a video under it? It like checklist, task and then like video you watch?

I have some videos, but I've resisted video because they get out of date so quickly. And then I. Oh, absolutely. Like, I forget what I said in them and then I don't know if it's still correct and they just tend to annoy me as a format. But I do think that the video has been so helpful. So I was just recently onboarding a new person and of course if I just take the time and make a three minute loom and it conveys way more than just words and so I'm compromising, but my next step was realizing it could actually flow them through. There's no reason I couldn't put it into my course software, which I use Kajabi and like give them the nice experience of learning something, which is what any external student would go through because it is they're kind of a student for at least a month. I don't know what you find when you're hiring, but it's at least a month of just trying to wrap their head around everything.

Yes. And so, Ginny, I would say the ideal solution would be. Yes, the course. Personally, one of my developmental areas is to get things from in my head to course format. So for us it's I guess, sort of a hybrid of what you mentioned. It is a checklist of things they need to do, but within each task, if I say, you know, the task is called watch the video about how to deal with the statement, but will this work for me? So that's the task. But then they're watching that part of the video. So I guess it is sort of a course, sort of a checklist because there's also just actions on there that say, read our quick call script. And then it's just a link to the script. It's no video being like, hello, I'm your host, let's go. It's not like that's just here's the script. It's a blend of videos where you're watching Alex, say the star salesperson train Adam, the new guy, who's no longer the new guy, he's just the guy now. So there's videos that they watch and then there's also the just straight up read the script post. Any questions you have, let's have a little discussion under that task. There's like a place where we can then have a comment by comment discussion. So we use Basecamp, the OG of project management. I've tried out Notion. I was like a very early adopter of Notion in like the first week it came out or whatever. Many years ago. Yeah, exactly. It's changed and evolved tremendously since then. I couldn't even say it's probably even the same software really. But we stick with Basecamp and use Basecamp for all internal team communication, all communication with clients. Every client has their own project in Basecamp, which is their client portal. So we just use that one tool. But it's all kind of just whatever tool you want to use. I would encourage people to not get too caught up on like, okay, should I use teachable or kajabi or. No, it's just about transferring the knowledge from your head to some sort of documented recorded way that could be written, that could be video, it could be a blend. And then transferring that and chunking it down into Check offable to dos. Those check offable to DOS serve several purposes. One, you can see where they are in onboarding themselves and consuming the content. And then the person can also understand, okay, I've done two of 27 to do's. Whereas if you just give them like a 10 hour recording or something and you have no idea how much of that recording they've watched, where they are, what if they have a question 90 minutes in? So have them watch those recordings. But let me talk about what's in those recordings. The types of things that we go over in our sales team training is, I guess it could go into two categories. One category is sort of that domain expertise that you mentioned earlier. So that would be making sure that they know the official names and the informal nicknames of the top 25 business schools, the top 10 policy schools, the top 10 law schools. Because on a sales call somebody might say, yeah, I would really like your help getting into hbs. And you need to know that HBS means Harvard Business School. You don't need to know the GMAT score exactly that they need in order to be competitive for hbs. That's the consultant's job to know. But you do need to know the language that they're speaking. You know, another shortened term is ad. Com. That means admissions committee. You need to know that. So there's literally just like drills of what do all these crunchy made up words that nobody except for people applying to grad school use. That's the training. Now the two people we have on the team both went to top business schools, so they already knew all that language. But when we're hiring outside of that profile, the person literally has to learn almost from scratch the names of all these schools. The difference between the GRE and the gmat. Only international students who come from countries where English isn't their native language have to take the English language test. So don't ask, did you take the English language test to somebody from an English speaking country? But I want to clarify this Domain expertise only needs to extend as far as us being able to answer the question, are we a hundred percent confident that we can help this problem, can help this person solve the problems they're telling us about? So that's the domain expertise side of training. And the other side is the starting basically from scratch and teaching them how to sell expensive things via a call where you ask deep, probing questions and demonstrate your authority not by giving free advice through asking thoughtful questions that make the person go, oh my goodness, I hadn't even thought of that. If you're asking me these questions, you must actually be an expert because you have me thinking about things I didn't even know I needed to be thinking about.

What would you say to somebody who is nervous? Anytime a team member is in a client facing role, I think the stakes are higher and the owner tends to feel that. I know I have in the past where they're just nerves and inevitably those team members are going to make mistakes and they're going to be awkward at first and they're going to need time and they're usually going to make those mistakes on calls or in emails with clients. It's just how it goes. So what would you say for the psychological aspect of handing your baby over or a big part of your process and getting over that hurdle of just the fear of what could go Wrong or it's not going to be as skilled as I would do it.

What I would say is first make sure you're handing over the right thing. It is very, very important for entrepreneurs to know the most valuable uses of their time in their business. And when I say valuable, I truly mean quantitatively. So what actions do you, Ginny Blake takes that make you the most money in your business? And the ones that take up the most time and bring in the least amount of money or really have no connection to bringing in money. That's where you want to start with outsourcing. People want to start their outsourcing with what they like the least. And I do believe in having a heart centered business. However, if you don't at least have a strong working command of a task, it can sometimes be hard to tell if the person you've hired is doing a good job or when things start not working as well as you'd hoped. It's hard to know if that person is underperforming or if there are maybe some external market conditions or if your process needs adjusting. So don't just hire someone to do a task you just don't like to do. If you don't fully understand the task or if you are going to hire someone to do something you don't like to do or you don't fully understand the task, you need to hire an expert, not a va. So to re articulate that you only want to be hiring VAs to do things that you know if they've done it right or not. For example, with my taxes, I did very well in accounting in grad school, but I'm not an accountant so I am not going to hire a VA to help me with my taxes. I might hire a VA to help me with some receipts or something, but I'm not going to hire a VA to file my taxes. I'm going to hire a CPA and accounting firm. So just make sure that you are offloading off your plate the things that are appropriate to be offloaded. For example, Jenny, I in 2020 got back on the phones and was doing sales and I have some numbers for you cause I know you like numbers. And I was the main salesperson January through September. And then I brought on one of my consultants who was helping the clients with grad school, actually trained her and brought her on as a salesperson from September through December. And while I was taking calls, the revenue that my business would make for every sales call I completed like 90 minute breakthrough call was $9,520. That's between the yeses and the no's, Jenny. For 90 minutes and are you saying.

That that that's high or low?

Oh my God. That is so high. That is so high.

Yes. Okay. Okay.

Yeah, sorry, that wasn't clear. For 90 minutes of my time, my business has made $9,520.

Got it.

So sometimes people rush to, we call it get off the phone. Sometimes people rush to get off the phones because selling is very strenuous and it's like emotionally challenging too to hear know a lot. But what are you getting off the phones to do? Are you getting off the phones to do something that brings in $1200 every 90 minutes for your business? Or maybe even $0?

If you are killing it at sales on the phone, that does not necessarily mean that you're going to be great at hiring, training and managing a sales team. It's almost a completely different skill set. Skill set is closer to a salesperson who's rocking it on the phone is a sort of an individual contributor rock star. They really only have to worry about themselves and their own performance. Hiring, training and managing a sales team starts becoming about managing their calendar, managing their emotional state, listening to recordings of their calls and giving them feedback on what they need to do better and what's working well. Hounding them when they don't fill out the call log. Where are you even getting a call log in the first place? Now you got to go and look at all the software or decide if you want to build something custom in house. That's a completely different job. So just make sure that you don't just rush to outsource a task if you're really good at it and tasks that brings in a lot of money for your business. If it's making you miserable to do that task, then. But you're really good at it. Okay, well then that means it's time to kind of slow down and document yourself being the genius doing it so that someone can watch you do your genius work and learn from you. But just be very careful about just thinking that it means you're a more sophisticated business owner. If you have a bigger and bigger team, it might just mean that you're hiring more and more people who are less good at you at bringing in money to your business.

We'll be right back just after this.

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Now you're in that manager seat that I personally noticed my own energy and strengths. I don't do well with a big team. I don't enjoy it. It drains me. I don't think I'm that good at it, at least for long periods of time. So it's true. Like, you don't want to build yourself into a corner. And yet sometimes we only learn that the hard way, too, of building it out and then contracting it back.

Absolutely. And sometimes while we think about hiring people and whether or not they're going to do a task as well as you, one thing I did want to clarify is that for every task that we outsource, the person to whom we've outsourced the task does not have to do it as well as us if 80% will do so. For example, the revenue for breakthrough calls completed when I'm on the phones is $9,520. But when my team is on the phones in 2021, it dropped way down to $4,120. And I was like, oh, my goodness, that's like half right. But we had two salespeople, and they were able to do a lot more on calls than I could do. So even though their revenue per call went down, they were able to do more calls than I could do. So 2021 was a bigger revenue year than 2020 when just I was on the phones. So I did want to make that clarification. Hire someone. They are freeing up your time. So if you're able to replace yourself with one or two people who are able to achieve a better result than just you, then that is something that you could be open to.

I really appreciate you sharing that. And that's so interesting too, because if you look at one metric revenue per call or per time Spent on the phone, you could say, oh, it's dropped by 50%, oh no, this is an emergency. But then when you look on the whole and you say, well, they're able to take quadruple the calls now it's a different story. So thank you for these numbers. I'm so happy you brought them today.

Yes, I love to share numbers and I don't always have the numbers. And that's a lesson that I've been learning, Jenny, is I feel like you love a dashboard and I love a dashboard too. I don't like to make a dashboard.

I hear you. I'm no good at maintaining a dashboard. I love a good dashboard. And it's tricky, especially when the data isn't automated. It's not automatically pulling it all in.

Yes.

What has been a memorable mistake in hiring part time team members that you learned the hard way and you've since implemented some kind of correction?

Yes, I would say I learned the hard way that executive assistants and administrative assistants will do whatever you ask them to do, even if you are asking them to do time consuming, inconsequential things that as the visionary entrepreneur you think are important but don't realize how much time they are taking. By that, I mean, you're the boss and the administrative assistants and VAs that you hire are going to do what you ask them to do and they're not going to push back and challenge whether that's a strategic direction we want to be taking. Unless, you know, they have been very much coached to understand that that's something that you would welcome or that you even require in the role and they're just going to do whatever silly project you thought was a good idea three weeks ago, whether it's actually a good project anymore to do or. And so by that I just generate a tremendous number of ideas. I'm sure you do too, Jenny. And so I was just spitting out ideas left and right and my executive assistant was like, we need another administrative assistant. I'm like, okay, well let's get another one. And then after we had two, we were like, we need another one. So then we got another one. So at some point I had three full time executive assistants for a smaller than million dollar business. And I would often ask like, what are y' all doing? And they're like, we're doing the things you asked us to do. But sometimes, Jenny, I couldn't even remember the things that I had asked them to do. I thought it was a good idea on Tuesday, but by next Tuesday I'd already Forgotten I'd asked them to do it. And so it was just a lot of way more detailed than necessary projects. Example would be that I wanted all of our clients to be responded to by their consultants within one business day. And that was a standard that I wanted. I had communicated that to the consultants, but whatever way I communicated it to my admin team meant that they were checking the correspondence in the client portal of every client every day. And that level of granularity is completely unnecessary. It got to the point where a client would send a message to their consultant, and before the consultant could even respond, one of my admins would be like, hello, did you see their question? Please get back to them. And the consultants were just like, yeah, can I breathe before I respond? And so we were wasting a lot of time and money because my requirement that I didn't realize I had made a requirement was that, you know, we want people responded to within one business day. And they're like, well, then we need to monitor every single portal every day. Part of that is a failure in the way I delegated. Right. I should have said maybe something like, please spend no more than X hours a month on client monitoring, or please check all client portals once a week to see if something's happened. And then if there's someone you constantly have to remind to get back to their client, tag them for me, something that is clear but also reasonable. I feel like I made my outcome expectation clear and sort of left it up to them how to get there. And also, when you've overhired, your team is not going to tell you you've overhiered because no one wants to lose their job. So people will just sort of dream up projects to fill their time. And I don't mean to say it like that they're being dishonest.

They're.

That's almost like taking initiative. They're like, okay, well, I've got some extra time. Kenesha wanted some data on the clients from last year. You know, she asked for four points of data on all our clients last year. Let me get her seven points of data, since I have some extra time. But that's maybe just busy work. So I would just say it's really important that when you outsource tasks, delegate tasks to your team members, that you also empower them to push back on their ability to get those tasks done by the time you've asked for them. But also, is the task even necessary?

Yes. And they do. They accumulate. It's like they just accumulate. Like, I was laughing when you brought this up and I'm so grateful that you're sharing this as a lesson learned the hard way, because it's true. Sometimes they just inherit tasks or it's almost like a task patina on the business. There's just a whole lot of fluff and you gotta give the recurring tasks a haircut like once a year and just say, yes, what do we want to carry over into the next year? And as much as turnover can be challenging when somebody leaves, I have often found that I look at everything they're doing and I go, we definitely don't need to be doing 20 or 30% of this anymore or in this way or now a new software tool was introduced and no one has to do it at all. But before they told me they were leaving, it was just coasting along because none of us have the time. And as you said, you kind of described that they may be hesitant to bring something up or genuinely want to fill their time to show that they're getting a lot done. But what looks like quantity is not always what actually influences and creates impact in the business for the owner.

Absolutely.

So if you could give business owners permission to do something differently or drop something all together in this area of training and onboarding part time team members, what would it be?

I would like to give business owners permission to keep some of the tasks in the business that they are very excellent at and bring in money for the business without feeling like you're making a lower level, non CEO type decision. If you are a rock star at getting people to sign up and pay for your program, it's okay to keep being the person who gets people to sign up. You might just need to outsource something different and get something different off your plate. Or if you are extraordinary at graphic design and there's someone you can hire to do it for less money, but it only takes you an hour a month and it brings you a lot of joy. And it may not mathematically be the exact most optimized decision, but if it makes you really happy, it's okay to keep the one hour graphic design task. So that's what I would say is keep the things that you're really rocking at that make a significant difference to your business's revenue or that give you joy, as long as that trade off between the time that it takes from you to be able to do other things is an okay trade off.

I love that. Thank you so much. And I feel the same way. I'm like, if there's some tiny thing that you Happen to love, keep it. What's the point of giving away all the stuff we love in our business? We're basically all just tinkering around in our own sandboxes.

Absolutely.

I don't mean to be insulting or dismissive. Maybe some people genuinely want to conquer the world and you have to get out of the way, but I don't know. I think my definition of a heart based business includes the owner's joy, as I know it does for you. It's the name of your podcast of absolutely. Doing what's joyful and keeping that energy high.

Yeah. You know, in my business, I still really enjoy occasionally responding to the potential client inquiries. I don't respond as myself because I don't want people to feel like they can have access to me from just sending in a random email. But sometimes I'll respond as my assistant, but it's really me, and it's just fun for me sometimes to just see that very, very, very beginning part of the funnel, the kind of questions people are asking, how they're feeling. And I just keep that task. I don't let it turn into my whole whole day. But it is something that I keep. Another thing is I have 30 people on my team who are very well equipped to lead our group coaching calls. But sometimes I just want to do it. It's fun for me. It's a party, it's a pep rally, and I love dealing with the clients. So those are two examples of me, you know, not outsourcing and delegating every single thing and keeping a few of those things that tickle my fancy.

I love that. That's so awesome. Kenesha, where can people find you if they want to learn more and keep in touch?

Absolutely. So I have a podcast called Scale youl Joy where I talk about things just like this. I even have a podcast episode about hiring an extraordinary executive assistant. So definitely come see me@scaleyourjoy.com and then if you are interested in applying to grad school, we also help people apply to college. That's pretty new. See me at my business, the Art of applying. We're@theart of applying.com.

Amazing. And I'll put the link to that podcast episode in the show notes. So thank you for mentioning it. Kenisha. It is always such a joy to talk with you. And every time we end the conversation, I go, there's so much more in that big, brilliant, beautiful brain of yours. So thank you for opening up to all of us today. I really, really appreciate it.

Wonderful. Thanks for having me Jenny for asking great questions and keeping me on track.

You got it Big. Thanks everybody for listening.

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