Lauren Bateman says hire your first employee to handle tasks you're bad at or hate, like editing or customer service, so you can focus on sales and product development. She hired an editor first, then customer service, and learned sales herself rather than outsourcing it.
So you're an entrepreneur, and you might be struggling with a question that many entrepreneurs have, and that is, when do I hire my first employee, and who should I be hiring in the first place? And this could really depend on a number of factors. I mean, is it someone in sales? Is it someone in marketing? Is it an editor? Is it, you know, a bookkeeper? Is it an administrator? And part of that is going to depend highly on you. So, for example, I'm really great at sales and marketing, but I'm not the greatest at operations. I'm not great at details. I don't mind doing customer service, but it's probably not the best use of my time. I'm definitely not an IT person, and human resources is definitely not a strength. My strengths are in product development, sales, and marketing. So I don't want to hire someone who has my strength because I can already do that really well. So when I made my first hire, it was actually my editor, because I was spending a lot of time editing. I am not the greatest editor in the world. And I decided I'm spending and wasting a lot of time editing when I could be focusing more on sales and marketing and some of the customer relations, which is something that I'm really good at and that makes money for the company. So I decided to outsource my time to an editor, and obviously I create the content. But now I don't have to spend the hours editing, and my editor does a much better job than I would ever do editing my own videos. Now, on the flip side, if you are someone that is great at operations, you're great at organization and the numbers. Maybe you want to keep the finances in house, and maybe you are able to do all that operation stuff, but who's doing the sales? Because the sales and the marketing is where you make money in your business. And if you want to grow a team, if you want to grow a bigger team so that you're not doing every job under the sun, you have to make money. So for you, you might want to hire someone who has a little bit more of a sales background. Now, with that said, it takes money to hire good people. I often find that the best person to sell a product is the creator of the product. No one's going to sell your product better than you. So even if you are someone who isn't greatest at sales, I really think it's good for you to invest the time and money learning how to do that so that you can get some revenue going into the business and focusing on hiring out some of the things that are taking a lot of your time. For example, once I started getting business, we had a lot of customer service. How do. How do I reset the password to my account so I can get in and view my courses? You shouldn't be resetting passwords. That takes two time. So eventually my next hire was to get someone on the customer service side of things. Because again, we're talking about balancing time and money, and I shouldn't be spending time wasting it on things that I could hire someone else to do and probably do it better than I can do. Because, you know, when you're an entrepreneur and you're wearing all those hats and you're trying to do the sales and the marketing and the customer service and the editing and everything else, you don't really do any of it with really well because your time is getting divided into so many spaces. So I would try and find things that you're not good at, outsource them to other people so that you can spend more of your time focusing on the things that actually create money for your business and reaching out to the customers, finding out what they want so that you can build products that actually help them, solve them problems and create solutions. What I would love for you to do is put a comment below, letting me know what your strengths are and who you think you your first hire would be for your team. Once you do that, YouTube's gonna pop a video right up over there. Go check that out to learn more about building and growing your business.
