MBA1570 Q&A Wednesday: Who should be my first hire?

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Hey O. Welcome to the $100 MBA show, bringing you powerful business insights every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zed home. I'm also the co founder of the $100 MBA, a complete business training and community online and today's episode is a Q and A Wednesday episode. On our Q and A Wednesday episodes, I answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you have a question you want to ask, just email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Ray and Ray asks. I'm six months into my new online business, I'm making profit and I can afford my first hire. Who should it be? Should I invest in marketing, sales or something totally different? Would love to hear your thoughts. Thanks for the awesome podcast, Ray. Making your first hire is exciting, but it's also very important because it's the first big investment you're making back into your business. It's a huge step for you because you're realizing you shouldn't be doing everything and it's time to delegate. We've spoken a lot about this topic on the podcast, but I want to address Ray's specific question today and talk about where your money is best spent when it comes to your first hire for an online business, much of what I share today is applicable for any business. A physical business, a consulting business, a service. What you need to get off your plate and hire for is pretty much the same in that first year of any type of business. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business. So Ray wants to make his first hire. Not sure who it should be for what department, where is his money spent most wisely? And my firm opinion when it comes to this topic is for the most part, every business is different. You might have, you know, different huge needs that other businesses don't, but for the most part, I believe it should be invested in administration. Your time is being spread and spent on many menial administrative tasks. Emails, invoices, small finicky admin tasks, spreadsheets, notes, you name it. And an administrative assistant can really take a lot of that off your plate and put a lot of time back into your schedule so you could focus on what you do best in your business. That's why I believe an administrative assistant, a virtual assistant, is the best first hire, because you can take off all the stuff that you shouldn't be doing. Really, it's wasting a lot of your time and frankly is not something you really enjoy. And the best way to come up with a great job to description is to list all these tasks. Sit down, force yourself for an hour to write down all the little things that you do that are not really in your wheelhouse of expertise. It's not really bringing in the big bucks in your business, but has to be done. Whether it's scheduling appointments, whether it's taking meeting notes, emails, customer support kind of tasks, ordering gifts for your clients. If you run a podcast, for example, and you need to email the people that are on your show to let them know that when the show aired, that's an admin task. There's a lot of little tasks you probably are going to find in this hour of brainstorming. This is what you need to hire for because it's eating away at your day, it's eating away at your week and your months, and you can get rid of it for a pretty low price. You as the business owner should be working on the big rocks. The $10,000 tasks. If you're looking to hire a admin assistant and you are open to remote work, onlinejobs PH is a great site to find great talent in the Philippines. WeWork remotely is another great job site for this task. And the great thing about admin assistants is if you can't afford a full time hire, you can always hire for 20 or 30 hours and it's probably going to be plenty for them to do. I know it sounds like, whoa, an admin assistant, how much value they're going to add, how many more sales are they going to bring in? It's not about that. It's about freeing up your time so you can bring in the big bucks like I mentioned, so, so you can focus on what you do best so you can grow the business. This is a great first hire because this person is going to learn so much. They're going to be able to create standard operating procedures, SOPs and write every procedure that you do, hand it over to new people and so much more. Not only an administrative assistant help you with menial tasks that are sucking all your time, it also will create a layer between you and your clients. This is especially important in client or service based businesses where you're maybe now sending out your rates and negotiating things. And I found in my past when I had service based businesses, having somebody who is dealing with the money, dealing with the rates is a godsend because I don't have to talk to my customers or my clients about that. I can really just focus on being the talent, being the person that delivers them results. We could talk about the project, talk about their needs, how we're going to deliver results and say, hey, my administrative assistant's going to send you an invoice and take care of all the payment questions. This relieves you of those duties and it gives a lot more perceived value and professionalism to your business. One of the reasons why we don't hire administrative assistants is because we feel like it's going to be work on our part to train them. Well, I'm not here to tell you that that's not true, but it's work well done. It's an investment that you're really going to get tenfold back. Because yes, you'll have to train them on the tasks you're doing and you know, hand over the things you don't want to do. But we're talking about maybe a week, two weeks maximum training. They're going to document everything you taught them so that the next person that comes in, they can easily be trained and they're going to hit the ground running, they're going to be able to take over your tasks. Some of us, we think, well, if I make a marketing hire or if I make a specialist hire, they're going to work on their thing and just ask Me a bunch of questions and we're good to go. They're going to do their thing. I don't have to do any training, I don't have to do any kind of onboarding. That's not completely true because they're going to need to learn how your business works and your products and your services. But also what we like to do is we have our administrative assistant document every procedure in our business. So if we make a marketing hire and they do Facebook ads in a certain way or they set up certain things, we document that process and the EA kind of writes it all out and it's in our documents. We call them Playbooks and it makes your business so much simpler to run and it gives you this security net. It gives you safety net where you feel like, okay, you, you know what, if a hire doesn't work out, I can hire somebody else, I can replace them and they can hit the ground running because I have the playbook all written out for them, ready to go. This also makes your business a whole lot more valuable because if you ever wanted to sell your business, whoever buys it can pick up and hit the ground running because you have procedures in place. All because you made the right first hire with your administrative assistant before you started hiring other positions.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's question from Ray which should be his first hire for his online business. Firstly Ray, congratulations. That you're in this position in six months and you're ready to make your first hire. I truly believe an executive assistant can take a lot off your plate that's bogging you down. When you're doing it alone at the start, you're doing everything. It's time to stop that and to start to offload a lot of these small administrative tasks that suck away at your time every single week. Thanks so much for the question, Ray. If you're listening right now and you have a question you want to ask, just email me over at Omar MBA Net and I'll answer right here on Q and A Wednesday. Don't forget to hit that subscribe button to make sure you get our next episode automatically on whatever app you like to use to listen to podcasts, whether it's Apple Podcasts or Citradio or Spotify or Himalaya, we're on every single one. Hit that subscribe button right now. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the biggest mistakes solopreneurs make is they don't delegate. They think they can do it all. They think that they should do it all or no one's going to do it as good as they will. And they're not wrong. You know, most people are probably going to do a better job than if they hired somebody else because they know the business better. But at what costs? You have to say, hey, if somebody can do it at 90% of what I do, but I don't have to do it, that's a better investment for your business. You cannot grow and expand and scale. If you're doing everything, you need help and you need to allow yourself to get help. Okay? And you have to be proactive with doing that, with offloading that stuff, training somebody. A lot of people hire people and then they don't give them the tasks. So that's why I said, sit down. Write down for an hour all the things that you can give an ea. Train them up. Question this list. Ask yourself, is there something missing here? Am I being too light here? Sometimes people think, oh, they can't do that. Why not? Why can't they do that? Why can't you train them? Why can't you shoot them a video and show them or get on a call and record it? Most of the things that we do on a day to day basis is not rocket science. You can get somebody else to get on and do it. Thank you so much for listening. I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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