Turn your ADHD entrepreneurial side hustle into a large scale business!

Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Hey, new listener, thanks so much for checking us out and there's a good chance you have adhd, so I quickly wanted to ask you to please, please follow this podcast in Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or whichever app you're listening to this on, don't leave it until later because you will forget. Thank you. Squirrel. In this episode, I'm gonna talk you through how you can get yourself into a position where you can have your very own Doris Squirrel. Squirrel. Hi, I'm Katie McManus, and this is business strategy for Weenie ADHDpreneurs. Squirrel one of my favorite things about running this podcast is, is that I get DMs and text messages and emails from listeners who ask me specifically for new content. And so I just wanna throw it out there. If there's content that you want me to create, if there's struggles that you have in your business as an ADHDpreneur, please message them to me. I want to know what you want to hear so that I can have an easier job coming up with ideas of what to talk about on this podcast. So one of the messages that I got is from an amazing listener who is also a former client of mine. I won't name him, but he said, I know you did an episode about building a team, which is a great episode if I do say so myself. It's episode four if you want to go check it out. But he wanted me to focus specifically on the challenge of moving from a solopreneur to managing a scaling business, and to talk a little bit about the challenge of managing a remote team, because when they're not in the same room, you sometimes forget that they exist. Starting out as a solopreneur, trying to do more of the stuff you love, and that helps your business grow. You don't always have someone you can hand work over to yet. So already working as a solopreneur, as an ADHD person, is challenging because you have adhd and your brain really only lets you get into hyper focus on the things that you enjoy doing, which is probably why you started this business in the first place. I know for myself, I tended to jump jobs every year or so. Not because, I mean, sometimes the job was awful, but not because the job was awful always, but usually just because I got bored of the conversations I was having, which is really hard when you're in sales because you have to be really excited about what it is that you're selling all the time. That boredom leaks through, and you stop being as good at your job when you get bored of talking about the service or the product that you're selling. Anyway, this is why we have a lot of ADHDpreneurs in the world, because we need to be super interested and invested in what we're doing every day, or else we stop doing it. So when you're running your own business, you usually find really creative ways to be lazy about the stuff that you don't want to do. And by lazy, I mean you find really smart ways to hack them so you don't have to spend all your time doing them. And we find ways to maximize our availability for the stuff that we love. Now, there comes a point in your business, hopefully, where your business gets too big and you start maxing out the amount of time you can spend on the stuff that you love. And also the tasks that you hate doing, they start growing as well. And this is where you have to start thinking about hiring someone. The advice that I give to my clients when they're at that point where they need to start scaling their team is what are the actions that you do that generate income for your business and what will free you up to do more of that? So when you do hire this first person who you're going to outsource all the tasks that you hate, there's a really unique thing that happens for ADHDpreneurs. Is that because you hate doing them and because you found these weird workaround hacks to, like, kind of fake your way through them, you're really bad at training on them. You're really bad because you never learned how to do them well. You never learned the correct way to set up this system that is scalable for your business. You just figured out the shortest, easiest way for you to bypass it. Now, this could be your accounting. This could also be managing your calendar. This could also be any other gross, boring task that you didn't want to do when you were starting your business. It's really hard when you hire someone who will be focusing 100% on doing that thing to say, okay, cool, here's the process for doing this. Because, let's be honest, you're probably a little embarrassed about your process for doing this, because your process for doing this kind of sucks. So there's this internal management that you have to do, this emotional management of letting go of them, seeing you as perfect at this. Okay? Because you're. If you're hiring a VA or you're hiring an online business manager, it's their job to come in and see what's not going great in your business and fix it and make it optimal. They are the expert at that. You do not have to be. And they're not going to judge you for how you did this. They see this all the time. So I want you to take a big, deep belly breath, and I want you to let go of that expectation that you had to do this perfectly and also recognize that. That hiring someone for your beginning business is not going to be like you getting hired for a business that you worked for before. So, for instance, I worked for Cisco Systems. It's a massive technology company, and they'd been around for decades. They had processes and onboarding steps and things that I, you know, would have to do in my job that thousands of people had done before me. You are starting from scratch. You cannot have standard operating procedures for onboarding someone, yet you are years away from having standard operating procedures for onboarding new employees. I want you to be gentle with yourself here. If you have a hard time being gentle with yourself, then I want you to, when you're berating yourself, let that small part of yourself that's getting beat up by you be like, well, Katie said we should be gentler to ourselves. Can we just be nice right now? You can use me in your argument against yourself. I give you full permission. It's funny when we're coming up with these episodes and I'm kind of, like, just talking my way through it. I wish you could take a snapshot within your brain of how it works. Because, like, how it works, like, I'm mapping it out visually in my brain. Like, have you ever seen that show, the Queen's Gambit? The chest show? Like, how she does it on the. On the ceiling? I don't do it on the ceiling, but it's, like, in the air around me. It's really funny, but I wish you guys could see in my brain. Okay, so here's what you're gonna do. When you hire someone, you're going to create a list of everything that you do not want to do anymore. You're going to sit down with this person. You're going to go over this list and ask them which parts they can take off your plate. You're then going to ask them if they have any previous Experience that will show them how to do this better than how you've done this? Usually they will. You're then going to explain without any shame, without any self flagellation, without calling yourself an idiot, a moron, or a lazy person, how you've done this up until now. You're going to explain what matters to you most. So for instance, if you have a process of getting back to inquiries for people who want to work with you that you're going to outsource, explain what matters most to you. Does time matter? Does getting back to them as soon as possible matter more than anything else? Does getting back to them with perfect grammar and spelling matter more than anything else? What kind of experience do you want your clients and potential clients to have on the other side of this? This person you've just hired, a whole new brain. They have creativity and resources and experience that you get to tap into. You do not need to lean into yourself to handle all of this. To figure this out, you've just hired another brain. You can find a creative way to tackle your problems in a way that'll make your life easier. You just have to trust them and let them do their work. The other part of this is you have to be willing for them to up because they are. They're just starting working in your business. They don't know everything yet. Chances are, unless you have a long standing relationship with this person, they also don't know you very well yet. This is going to be a multi month process. And what skill that you need to work on that? I work with my clients a lot on. Wait, that grammar sucked. Hold on, let me redo that. What? What are those prepositions? Just, I think that's the grammar term. I might be wrong. Oh my God, I'm embarrassing myself. So it's funny, when I learned French, I realized how little I knew about English grammar. And I read this book and it's English grammar for students of French. And through a second language you learn your own grammar so much better. But that sentence is bad. Okay, I'm gonna do that again. What was I talking about? Oh yeah, back to the topic at hand that I finally remember because my producer Neil reminded me, you have to be willing to let them up because they're going to. They're going to do a project and they're gonna present it to you and you're gonna look at it and you're gonna think, oh my God, this is so, so wrong. This is not what I wanted at all. This went off the map here, here, here, and here. And this is the skill that you have to get really good at if you want to successfully grow and scale this business with multiple employees, giving feedback, telling someone what they did well and what they need to do better at and what would make it perfect in your eyes. This is one of these skills that I honestly spend months and months, if not years working on with my one on one clients. Because it is one of the hardest things to do is to turn to another human being who you are paying to do a job and tell them that they screwed up the job, that you assigned them nicely, that they feel motivated to fix it and feel supported by you and want to stay working for you and also managing yourself, that you don't throw the baby out with the bath water, right? Because it's gonna be so tempting when this new employee who's just entered your business is in there and wrecking stuff and not doing stuff correctly the way that you want it to be done. It's gonna be so tempting to fire them. And sometimes, yes, that is the right choice. But often the problem lies, my dear friend, with you and your leadership abilities. And just because you don't have the leadership skills right now, just because you don't have the leadership abilities right now does not mean that you can't attain them. This is one of the things that I do with all my clients if they're growing a team and even if they're not growing a team, because let's be real having clients, you have to have some leadership abilities when you're working with them. If you need to work on your leadership skills, get help. Don't just sit and flounder and suffer and hire people and fire people and feel like you suck. That's not nice. It's not nice to you. It's not nice to the people that you hire. It's not nice to your clients who are going to feel all the turbulence coming their way even if you try to hide it from them. And it's also not nice to your loved ones are going to have to hear you bitch and moan about how everything's going wrong. They're going to get sick and tired of hearing about it. Don't do that to yourself. Join the Weenacast Hyper Focus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month. It's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast.com hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast.com hyperFocus okay, so you are a solopreneur. You're growing your business and you're hiring employees and support staff to come in and make your life easier and help your business make more money. Now, we are also living in a time where this doesn't all have to happen in person. And let me share something with you. I've only met one of the people of the freelancers who works in my business in person. In my entire life. I haven't met Neil, my producer of my podcast. I have never met re my OBM and Fractional coo. I've never met anyone that's on her team. OBM stands for Online Business Manager. Okay? It's basically a virtual assistant on steroids. A fractional coo, Chief Operating officer. Their job is not just to come in and manage all of the normal that a VA does. They're literally looking at the operations of how your business functions, and they're setting up standard operating procedures, and they're also streamlining all of your technology to work together better and to be more simple for you. Their job is to basically set up all of the background junk that will help you scale this business to the next level. And I typically recommend, if you're a solopreneur, wait until you are making 90 to $150,000 a year before, before you look at hiring an OBM. They are expensive, but they are critical if you want to grow your business to multiple, multiple six figures or into seven figures. I've never met Jess Bruno, who does my social media. I've never met Tyler Cook, who does my email marketing. The one person that I have met who helps me with my blog and my website is Helen Marino. She's a dear friend of mine. But here's the problem. Back in the old days when you had an office and you hired people and they would come into the office, you'd be able to be in your work all day and get stuck or realize at some point this isn't what you want to be doing with your time. And they'd look over and you see Doris. There was Doris, you know, sitting at her desk, working away, and you'd remember, hey, Doris, she works for me. Indeed I do, dear. She can make my life easier. Right now, I can Give this task that I don't really want to do to Doris. And that's her job. Amazing. Let me do that. It's really easy to remember that you have a Doris to hand things off to when Doris is just a few feet away from you. It's a little harder when you have a dispersed workforce and everyone works remotely because you're sitting in your office or at your dining room table and you're working away, and you're working away, and you're working away, and you get to a point where you're like, wow, I hate this task. I don't want to do it. And you look around and it's just you. And you're like, well, I guess I have to do it. I'm gonna go make a cup of coffee. And then you get into the kitchen and you're like, well, I'm kind of hungry. Maybe I'll make a sandwich. And then you look at the dishes in the sink. You're like, oh, crap, I didn't do the dishes. Okay, well, now I have to do the dishes. And then you open the fridge and you're like, oh, gosh, well, I don't really have anything for a sandwich. Maybe you'll make lasagna. And then four hours later, you're eating lasagna and you're like, what's that task that I was avoiding doing when I wanted to make a cup of coffee? And then a few days later, when you have a meeting with your Doris, whatever their actual name is in the here and now, you're explaining how your week really went off the rails because you were just stuck on this one task. And your Doris is going to say, hey, Steve, why the didn't you call me? That's what I do. That's what you hired me for. You accidentally become guilty of hoarding all the terrible, awful, boring tasks that you literally pay someone else to handle for you just because you forget that they exist. So here's what you are going to do if you have employees that work in your business who are remote, that you tend to forget about, is you're going to set weekly, if not daily, check in calls with them. And these check in calls you don't have to prepare for. You literally show up on the call and you go through what you're tackling that day, and you ask them to go through what they're tackling that day. And then together you figure out if there's anything that should be handed off. This call can take as little as two minutes or as much as 20 minutes. It shouldn't take more than that. And of course you like this person, so you probably want to add like a 5 minute buffer for chatting. As I said that, I realized that I'm on with my producer Neil, and we usually spend about 30 minutes chatting in our recording sessions and he's probably like, that's not enough, Katie. You need more time. Oh, yes. Another thing that you may want to do if you have a dispersed workforce that you tend to forget about is simple. Set an alarm on your phone every day at 11am have an alarm pop up. Is there anything that you can hand off to your assistant? Is there anything you're dreading doing today that you can ask your OBM to do? That simple interruption, that simple reminder that comes up at the same time every single day will get you thinking about, okay, cool, what is it that I don't want to be doing today that I've put on my to do list that I could potentially give away? And sometimes that's enough. Now, on the other side of this, you've just hired another human. Train them to be proactive about taking things off your plate. Train them to call you and interrupt you multiple times throughout the week asking you, hey, what is it that you're focusing on that that you should not be focusing on? What is it that you have on your to do list that should be on my to do list? Give them full permission to be annoying in this way because oftentimes when we hire people, they don't want to bug us because they think bugging us is a bad thing. Not for an adhdpreneur. We need that. We need to be pestered and reminded that you exist. Give them full permission. Train them the best way to do this that's going to be most effective for you and call it a day. And if you need some more guidance on how to get your teams to work more effectively with you, I want to point you back to episode four where I did a deep dive on this and how I have trained my teams to be more supportive of me and my adhd. I did a really stupid TikTok today of how I can never figure out how to pour the right amount of coffee in my cup to let enough space for the milk. It's so dumb, but it already has 21 likes. Likes, likes, likes. Are you an entrepreneur? Are you struggling to stay focused and organized while juggling a million tasks? Are you looking for ways to improve your productivity but finding it hard to stay motivated? Then you need to get access to my weeniecast for Winners show that's exclusively on Apple Podcasts. I know you might be thinking I've tried everything to stay on task and nothing works. But I'm enjoying the advice I'm getting here on the weeniecast, and let me tell you, I'm delighted to be able to help you and thousands of listeners just like you, my friend. But the weeniecast for Winners podcast is next level, and I'd hate for you to miss out on it. For just $1.99 a month, Weeniecast for Winners delivers in depth and actionable advice that's specifically designed for entrepreneurs, including those with adhd, whether diagnosed or suspected. I'll talk you through how to increase your sales conversions, keep your mindfulness on point, and even offer practical tips that can help you be more productive and successful in your business, all while catering to your unique needs of being an entrepreneur who might be struggling with adhd. With weeniecast for Winners, you'll get practical tips and strategies that you can use to drive your business forward without the frustrations and setbacks that often come with adhd. So if you're ready to start seeing real Results, subscribe to Winniecast for winners today@winniecast.com winners for just $1.99 a month, you'll gain access to the valuable insights and strategies that can take your business to the next level. Weeniecast for Winners is a show that's worth every penny for entrepreneurs who want to succeed. Subscribe now and start enjoying the benefits for yourself. Join the weeniecast Hyper Focus community and unlock a whole world of support. Get direct access to me in exclusive calls, turbocharge your network with unlimited referrals, and boost your productivity with Sprint calls and accountability sessions. But that's not all. We're talking expert talks, masterclasses, and more. Register now to get in front of the line for this at the introductory price of just $77 per month, it's time to elevate your entrepreneurial game. Let's do this together. Go to weeniecast. Com hyperfocus all one word. That's weeniecast. Com hyperFocus.