MBA1969 Do You Need To Hire A Full Time Website Manager?

Let me tell you about Intuit QuickBooks. When I was starting out my business, I remember sitting at my desk late at night, not working on my business, but cleaning up numbers, tracking and reconciling payments and wondering how this became my life. But once I automated the admin side of things, of my finances, those nights had disappeared and I felt a whole lot better. Outdo it with Intuit QuickBooks. QuickBooks is the trusted end to end solution that businesses rely on for getting paid, managing finances, paying employees, finding new customers and more. QuickBooks provides a team of AI agents and trusted experts. So doing it yourself no longer means doing it alone. Their payment agent gets you paid faster. Their customer agent finds leads, follows up and secures more sales. And the accounting agent automates and categorizes transactions. Get your critical business jobs done with QuickBooks on the Intuit platform.

Ready to save on new tech. It's time for Dell Tech Day's annual sales event celebrating our customers with fantastic deals and benefits. Product perks include Dell rewards, free shipping, premium Support and more. PCs like the Dell 14 with Intel Core Ultra processors will help you do more faster. And with a premium suite of monitors and accessories, you can upgrade your whole setup with amazing savings. Visit Dell.com deals.

Hey all. Welcome to the Hunter where you can avoid the pitfalls of business every single day with our daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and in today's episode you will learn. Do you need to hire a full time website manager? Your website is one of your greatest assets in your business. It's where your business does business right? It's where your customers visit, learn about you, sign up for your newsletters, sign up for your products and services, interact with you. So it's gotta be up to snuff. It's gotta be a top quality, it's gotta be reliable, it's gotta be fast, it's gotta look and feel great. But somebody's gotta do all that, right? Somebody's gotta make sure that the site is always performing well, it is not vulnerable to hackers. Yep, that's the reality of having a website. I'll share my experience when it comes to that in today's episode. But more importantly, we're gonna dive in and find out do we need to h somebody full time to take care of our website to make the updates that we need to make to add a page, to remove a page, to customize our menus, or change things up to make sure our security is super, super tight. What if a customer flags an issue? How do you get it fixed? How often do these problems actually occur? And is it worth it to hire somebody full time? We get into all of that in today's episode. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

Does it feel like it's getting really hard to figure out the best way to save for retirement? Fidelity can help you find clarity so you can save the best way for you. With a free personalized plan, goal tracking and timely insights, you'll be set to take on retirement your way. Get started@fidelity.com future expenses charged by your investments and other costs and fees associated with trading or transacting in your account. Apply Fidelity Brokerage Services member NYSE SIPC.

As I mentioned at the top of the episode, your website is incredibly important to the success of your business. Even if you have a physical business but have a web presence through a website where people can find you and learn value. If your website doesn't look good, is not functioning properly, is slow, it's going to cost you business, people are going to look elsewhere. I mentioned hackers and I gotta tell you, they're everywhere. Everybody's vulnerable. It's incredibly annoying to deal with them. And when your site gets hacked, time is money. You need to get this thing fixed and up and running as soon as possible. Every minute counts. And if you're not an expert at this sort of stuff, you're gonna wish you had somebody on your team when things go down. But it's not just about vulnerabilities and security. When your site goes down, it's also just maintenance. It's also making sure your site is continuing to stay smooth, that you've done everything in terms of the the site functions so it doesn't affect your search engine optimization. You're also going to be adding pages, landing pages, marketing pages. Your site is not static. Things change all the time. You're improving things, you're changing things, you're adding things. You don't want to change up your homepage. You might want to add an image here, change an image there. And now I do understand that these are things that don't happen every day, but you do need to do them right. So who's going to do them for you and do you need to hire full time is what we're going to get into in today's episode. Just from my own Experience. When I, when I first got started, I was on a very tight budget. When I was building my businesses on the side. I mean, this is about 20 years ago.

Seriously.

This is way before website platforms like WordPress and Wix and Squarespace and the others. I literally had to learn how to build a website with HTML and css. So I actually taught myself this stuff. I had to learn about hosting and domains and DNS and security and SSL certificates, and I just had to learn it all on my own. It literally meant me going to the library and reading web development for dummies. Now, as I progress in my entrepreneurial career, the technology got better and better. I started to use platforms like WordPress. I started to manage my own website. But I would consider my experience kind of the exception. Why? Because today I don't actually manage my own website anymore. Yeah, I can jump in there and do a few things, but my time is not well spent tinkering with a website after my company has reached a certain level. You know, once you kind of have what's called escape velocity, where your business is making enough to pay for all your expenses and your own salary, you really need to start looking at, okay, how's my time being spent? Should I be tinkering with a website? Should I be, you know, thinking about strategy and hiring great talent and bringing in more revenue? So even if I wanted to, I shouldn't be actually tinkering with my website website. I should be hiring for this position. Now, in my experience, when it comes to your website, there are three major areas you need to be kind of concerned about or need to take care of when it comes to your website. Number one is just general maintenance. Like I mentioned, updating the site, adding pages, changing images, adding video. You know, maybe you want to change the copy, maybe you want to change the font, change the color here or there. This is just maintaining the website and just adding content, removing content, that type of thing. Maintenance number two is optimization. When you build your website for the first time, it's going to be pretty much fully optimized. It's going to run really well, it's going to be fast. But as you start changing things, adding things, uploading things, it's going to slow the website down. It might cause maybe some broken links, it might cause some issues or errors. And you just need to make sure your site is always kind of being updated and being optimized. So the first one is kind of just maintenance. The first one is optimization. And the third thing you need to really worry about is Security, hacking attempts, your site going down, just overall server management, making sure your host is handling the traffic. So it kind of say security and uptime is one bucket. Now it doesn't matter what provider you have, it doesn't matter what technology you're using, what platform you're using, you are vulnerable to hacks. Trust me, we've been hacked a ton of times. Sometimes it's not apparent you've been hacked from the front end, from like what the visitors see. But if you have somebody looking over your site or you have some good flags in place, you know when something is wrong, okay, and you can fix it before it becomes a bigger problem and you become an embarrassment on the Internet. So those are the three categories you need somebody to help you with. Maintenance, optimization and security. Now do you need somebody full time to do these three things? The answer is no. Most small businesses are not going to need full time help 40 hours a week to do these three areas of responsibility. There are some rare exceptions where maybe you're a media blog, where you're publishing maybe 20 blog posts a day and there are blogs that do this and there's a lot of activity happening on your site. Somebody who's managing your website would be needed full time. But if you publish or maybe add or change things on your website once a week, a couple times a week, then you really need somebody part time. And by the way, this is very common and there's a lot of great web developers and website managers that are happy to work for your company part time. In fact, a lot of them have a system where you can buy a block of hours every so often. So you don't really need to pay them a regular salary or pay them by the hour. You could just pre buy a bunch of hours, say like, hey, I'm going to buy 20 hours. And anytime you need help, you send them a message, they go ahead and do something for you, or they do some regular maintenance or when things go down and you need their help, they'll go ahead, save your website and then say, hey, this is how many hours I worked on it. And they deduct it from your balance of hours that you pre bought. Where do you find these people? Pretty simple. They're on every freelance website you can find. They're probably the most common freelancer out there because it's not a super high technical level to be able to do this job, but you got to know your way around your platform pretty well. So you can go to upwork and go to freelancer.com and you can find these people and just hire them part time and come to an agreement or again buy some packaged hours. Now this is actually a good starting point because you'll actually see how many hours you actually need to do those three areas of responsibility on your website. And maybe your business starts growing, it starts getting busier on your website and those hours get more and more and then you can make a call, hey, is it more affordable for you now to make a full time hire than to keep buying hours or paying somebody part time, which now is becoming 20, 30 hours a week? This is a real possibility for anybody who actually runs and delivers their business on their website. Meaning people buy on their website, you deliver your content or deliver your product on your website. Meaning like an online course and you deliver it on your website or maybe some online community, something like that. If this is the case, you probably have the potential of needing a little bit more attention. For businesses that just use a website as sort of like a portfolio website, like a restaurant, you're just going to see what that restaurant's all about. You might book a table, you might get directions, but that's pretty much it. You're not really consuming their product on the website. There's not a lot of continuous traffic or maintenance or help needed or even if you do everything online, but you don't necessarily deliver your content, deliver your product on your website. Like say for example, you're a coach, but you deliver your coaching on a different platform. Those types of websites are gonna rarely need full time help.

Dear McDonald's, your breakfast menu fire tens across the board. I could be happy with anything even though I order the same thing every time. Thanks for not judging me. I'll try something new next time.

Maybe score a two for five dollar deal on a sausage McMuffin with egg. And more limited time only price and participation may vary. Cannot be combined with any other offer. Sing at regular price.

To wrap today's lesson. You actually don't need to spend much to get some really good help. But let me give you a few tips on hiring the right person. Number one, you're going to actually save money by getting somebody who charges more. I know that sounds a little bit counterintuitive, but it's real. And in my experience, somebody who is more expensive in terms of their hourly rate, they are more experienced and they're going to solve your problem faster. And therefore you're going to spend less hours spending on getting the job fixed. So for example, if somebody is $30 an hour but takes three hours to fix the problem versus $50 an hour, but takes 30 minutes. Obviously the $50 an hour person is more cost effective and you get the problem solved faster. And time is money. With your business, there's opportunity costs. We're not factoring in here. We're just looking at the cost of labor here. Don't try to find the dime in the rough. Find somebody who's high. They'll be able to solve your issues quickly. Sometimes you're not going to find the perfect fit for your business for your website from the word go, not from the first hire. You might have to hire a few people, go through a few people in the first maybe few months to get a feel of how they work, get through a few projects or a few updates together and that's okay. But when you find somebody, try to build a relationship with them. Try to even give them some projects that they can work on to improve your website, improve your speed, improve your SEO, it's worth the investment because you want them to invest in your business and be around when you need them in the long run. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA Show. Make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss an episode. Like tomorrow's episode on Q and A Wednesday where a listener asks a question, how do I handle health insurance when it comes to my remote global team? We get into that in tomorrow's episode, so make sure you hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app so you don't miss it. Before I go, I want to leave you with this. Having a website manager webmaster on retainer close by, a phone call away, a message away is like insurance, right? It's like making sure that if something horrible happens to my website or I can't fix it myself, I got somebody who can fix it. I got somebody who knows my site, knows what I need, can get in, get it out, can solve the problem and basically alleviate my headaches. It's well worth it because I'm telling you, in business you will have a few hiccups here and there when it comes to your website. Thanks so much for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

Of. ADP knows anything can change the world of work. Like what if a blocked shipping port caused a worldwide coffee shortage? Suddenly, businesses are scrambling to manage an increasingly drowsy workforce. Productivity slips 20% just due to the extended time it takes to conduct a job interview while yawning. Anything can change the world of work from HR to payroll. ADP helps businesses take on the next anything. ADP always designing for people.