Do THIS So Your Employees Never Want To Leave

Talk about the cost of actually losing an employee. Okay. It's not just emotional. There are so many hidden costs to losing employees, too.

My entire management style encapsulated in a sentence or a few sentences would be throw them in the deep end and see how they go. And if they need support, they're going to reach out. That does lead to errors, which is fine. But the other end of the spectrum is you become a micromanager, and no one likes to work with a micromanager.

Slow to hire, take your time, get it right quick. To fire, like the first four weeks, you've got to know whether they're the right fit or not. It needs to be great or it's, like, not going to work.

Welcome to the successful podcast. Today we are talking about managing and retaining talent in your business. Great episode today. We can all agree that talent in your business is something that will positively grow your business forward. Having the wrong team is detrimental, and.

We get asked this question a lot from our clients as they're growing in money. Like, most of you haven't got into business to manage teams. Like that was usually not the reason that you got into business. And so definitely a lot to learn on this topic today.

Worst. All right, guys, so we want to thank you for the messages we have received. I especially really enjoy the messages about how amazing this podcast is, so thank you so much. Much, Steph. Not so much, maybe.

Thanks. I definitely get the messages. I just. I really appreciate them. Yeah, I do get a lot of messages, guys, but thank you. I really appreciate them.

Personal update for me, guys. So I felt the full effects of a Karen in our local Facebook group. You know how every area has their little local groups? Well, I got rolled in a local group last week. So what happened? I was sitting at my desk right here in the podcast studio, and I saw my dog bark at the gate, and I was like, ah, Felix, cut it out. And then, you know, promptly two minutes later, there was a post in our local group that said there's a dangerous Rottweiler trying to jump over the fence and kill me and my dogs. Well, my fence is 2.2 meters, unless my dog was fucking Usain jump bolt that could get over the fence. My fat little Rottweiler is not getting anywhere near jumping over a fence. This was my opportunity. There's nothing worse and there's nothing I fucking hate more than Karen's in a local group. So this is my chance to unleash that. I did. I unleashed on this lady Tim is.

A regular shit poster in our Facebook group. I would say in our local group which is so great, you know, being local and we have a really great like community in this area. And you know, now we all know Tim as the guy who shit posts in our local Facebook group. But he'll basically someone like. Because you know guys, you guys know because there's Karen's in every local group. They complain about something and they could just go and talk to the person about it instead of complaining about it on the Internet. Tim's pet peeve definitely. And so regularly tells them to stop with their Karen esque behavior. Funny, funny story. My mom's name is Karen and she's also very much a Karen, which is hilarious.

Yeah, Karen. Karen and Karen go together. So I'm going to claim that it was the most liked comment or reply of all time in our local group. So I am king engagement in our local group.

The comments actually got turned off because it got too heated, which is hilarious. So I love that for us down at our local coffee shop in the mornings. So my personal update is that I started a running program courtesy of Tim. Thank you so much for getting me the running program. Why are you laughing at me?

Tell us about this running program.

So look, running probably has never really been my thing. Although I actually think I'm getting very, very quickly.

Who'd you beat last week?

I actually have been beating Tim in running quite a lot and I thought maybe the first time I.

Quite a lot.

Okay. It's been at least four times, so. So when I first beat Tim a run I thought there's no way like that must. He just had an off day and then I beat him again and I was like, yes, I can run. So I previously we were doing a bit of running beforehand, but we were going as we do. This is very fray esque of us. But we were going 0 to 100 and so because of that we couldn't keep it up. Found it really not fun. Very challenging, very exhausting. I was coming back to the house after 20 minutes like dying and needing like a half hour timeout afterwards. So what we did or what this running program does is it does interval training. So effectively it's like, you know, whatever it is, 90 seconds on, 60 seconds off, like that sort of thing for a period of 20 minutes. It's been so much more fun and enjoyable. I've been feeling progression really quickly. I'm not dying after every run and so because of that I actually don't mind going out and trying again. And it reminded me of how we all should approach business. Like, yeah, 0 to 100 sounds good in theory because we get there faster. But if you pace yourself, you can go a lot longer. You'll feel more momentum build, and you'll progress faster in a shorter period of time. So just that little reminder for anybody who is listening, who Maybe is going 0 to 100 and then burning out and then not doing anything, maybe it's time to go and do some interval training for business.

So I have a little confession around this personal update with Steph. Yes, I may admit that Steph beat me on a run, but the difference is I got back, and I was fine. Steph got back. She was rolling on the floor out the front, going, like, for, like, half an hour. That's how hard she went on these run sit rounds where I was just kind of like, yeah, let's keep a pace and go. And Steph was, like, making it her mission and her one goal in life to beat me.

I don't get to beat Tim much. Yeah.

So that is the caveat here. I wasn't trying. Steph was trying.

Okay, he was trying.

Definitely was. I was basically walking. And then you were like, yeah, cool. I can be. Yeah. So just a note on that, guys, if you're watching on YouTube, don't forget to hit that subscribe button. Big focus of ours is growing the subscribes and follow. Steph, do you want to give us an intro and what we're talking about today?

So we are talking about managing and retaining talent in your business. We talk about talent, we're talking about employees. We've had some really awesome questions lately from our clients who are scaling their businesses around how to retain and engage great team members. And we wanted to answer some of those questions on the podcast because we feel like it's rarely spoken about, honestly, how to be a good manager, how to be a good team leader, how to, you know, motivate your team to take more action. Things like this. Hiring. Yes. But retaining or making someone feel valued or managing their performance, it's rarely openly discussed. And so this podcast is for anyone who has a team or is planning on having a team in the future. Tim, do you want to kick us off with point one today? The cost of losing employees, or do you mean to do this one?

Yeah.

Yeah.

What the fuck?

Yeah. Yeah. So let me jump into the first topic of today. So I want to be really clear about why it's important to retain team members, because I think a lot of the time people are just like, I'll just hide someone new I'll just get someone else in, you know, it's no big deal. And they're happy to have kind of high turnover rates. But I want to really quickly, before we dive into how to retain them, talk about the cost of actually losing an employee. Okay? It's not just emotional. There is an emotional point for you as the business owner when you lose an employee. Okay? But there are so many hidden costs to losing employees too. So first and foremost, please hire correctly the first time. We have got podcast episodes on how to hire. So please listen to episode number 35, which was the three big mistakes we made when scaling our businesses. In that episode, we go through exactly how to hire correctly. Okay? But there are recruitment costs. So these are costs that you spend to advertise, to interview and to hire. So to advertise on seek, you're looking a couple of hundred bucks. You're for looking. Your time is obviously worth something and your time is your most valuable asset in business. So we're talking about interviewing people, hiring people, pre qualifying people. All of that takes valuable time. Time is money. And so you are losing money by having to recruit. Then you have your onboarding costs. So thinking about staff handover, like when we hired someone new for our gym, you know, we had to pay the person to train the other person, which means you're paying two times the people. Plus as admin costs, you know, you got offboarding, you've got annual leave payouts, you've got all these things that come in as a lump sum at once and you have no control over. So definitely onboarding and offboarding costs. There's also lost productivity. So obviously when someone is new into a company or into a role, they're going to be a little bit slow to get started while they're training. And so you're losing a lot of productivity because you might not be getting them to do the 100% of the role straight away. There's also a big impact on morale. So not just other employees, which obviously massively get impacted because most people have a friend at work or their bestie at work. And so when one person leaves it, you know, can have a really big effect on the rest of the team. But other employees who tend to see high turnover also sometimes disengage or lose productivity and affects team morale. People get gossipy, it just gets yuck and it's not worth it. There are mistakes and errors. Obviously, because somebody is learning something new, they're going to take longer, they're going to make mistakes, and mistakes can be costly. Of course there are training costs, so we've been told. Or Google. So Google told me that approximately 10% of salary goes into training. So if you're paying someone 70k, it'll cost you 7k in training. And that might not be directly outward. It's just like in the amount of time and effort that it will take somebody to get up to scratch. And then last but not least, if your team members are client facing, your clients are going to ask why they left and everybody gets impacted when that happens. So we've seen, I've seen companies that we've coached where they've lost team members and then clients have quit because they lost their favorite team member. They don't want to work with the new person and things like that. So, guys, I want to be really clear here. There is a huge cost when you lose an employee. And so it's really important that you hire well at the beginning and then you retain well as well.

I just want to have a caveat to this. I fully agree with all the points. You said that. But your next hire is usually your best hire as well. So those costs can be worth it if you're replacing with better people, which definitely comes into consideration when hiring. So, you know, if you had someone in a role for three years, you, your business, your philosophy, your management, your leadership have changed. Hopefully they've gotten better. And you're probably going to see that in your P and L if that's gotten better. So that means you're going to be attracting a better person into the role going forward. You know, for us, in every role we've ever hired, we've got good people that have come in. Not better, like maybe not better, we don't know. But for us it felt like an improvement, which is great. So you know the caveat to what Steph said. Yes, it is expensive to lose people, but also the productivity that you get back on the other side can make it up totally.

And I think that the, the point that I was trying to make is that if you don't learn how to hire and retain great team members, you're going to have high turnover. Right. And so like, it's. What is it? Slow to hire, quick to fire. I'm definitely not saying keep shitty employees, get rid of them asap. In fact, get rid of them as soon as possible. Ye needs to be a process for you to understand what that person's the right fit for your business and then rehire because you haven't sunk a heap of costs into training and things like that at that point, so slow to hire. Take your time, get it right quick to fire. Like the first four weeks, you've got to know whether they're the right fit or not. Like don't it needs to be great or it's like not going to work ongoing.

Okay, so our second teaching point is onboarding effectively. So I think the most important thing if you zoom out and you take the 10,000 foot view of this is like, what do you actually want them to accomplish in their onboarding period and what does their job look like once they're onboarded? So you need to start with the end in mind in this position. Otherwise you're just like doing random shit with actually not the end in mind of what this person's role wants to look like in the end. And then you want to give it a time limit. So does it take a week, two weeks, four weeks? Like what does that look like? So after you have the 10,000 view for view of what's going on, you want to have like, you know, what their role needs to look like, what their KPIs are, what their, you know, performance standards are, what they need to hit, what are the tasks, what are the outcomes, what do they need to do daily, weekly, monthly. These types of things all need to be set up. Okay, so this is all in the preparation of hiring someone. Where we've seen this go wrong for our clients and people we've worked with in the past, you know, six years is they kind of hire someone and they don't really leave a great first impression because their onboarding is poor or mediocre or unplanned. So Steph, I want to ask you. So if you, you know, successful, didn't work out and you weren't a millionair and you know, things weren't going incredible for you and you're going into a business and you, you know, accepted a job somewhere and then their onboarding process was mediocre, what would you think of the business?

Yeah, I would feel like no one wants to feel unsupported. Like when you hire someone, they want to do well at the role, but you have to give them the things they need to do well. Like I would feel unsupported and I'd start to question, you know, and then what typically happens with small business owners because they're spending a lot of money to hire this person, they have really extreme expectations. And then, so what happens is the entrepreneur gets emotional because the employee isn't doing what is expected of them, but the employee can't meet the expectations because there's been no real adequate training or onboarding provided. And so this is like this awful kind of feedback loop that just doesn't work. So I've got a question here for you, Tim, because I think that I really have learned to love your management style and it has been a labor of love to learn to love it, but I really, really do enjoy it. And I think over the years you've definitely changed and adapted your management style and I really enjoy the way that you do it. So how would you manage someone when they're feeling unhappy or maybe feeling overworked in the business?

Yes. So I'm a little bit of a satellite manager, almost like on another planet manager, probably further out than a satellite. So I'm like my entire management style encapsulated in a sentence or a few sentences would be throw them in the deep end and see how they go. And if they need support, they're going to reach out. Okay. So that does lead to errors, which is fine. But the other end of the spectrum is you become a micromanager and no one likes to work with a micromanager. Okay? So there's a level of support that is required in a management role, but there is a level of, you know, micromanaging that happens in most roles. So I never want to be that person. So that's essentially how that works in a nutshell. So every Monday usually we have a team huddle. If it's a public holiday or something like that, we won't have the huddle. So we have a few questions on the end. So you know, what is your personal happiness out of five? Five is amazing and one is shit. So they'll give you an answer. Anything below a four out of five, I would question and say, is there anything I can do to support you? And then the second one is, what is your professional happiness out of five? Five being amazing, one being shit. If there's anything below a four, you just want to go into it. Usually from what I found with team members, it's something emotional that's happening around their role, usually in client facing roles. Okay, so you know, a gym or a customer service representative or like anything where you're dealing with people, there's going to be unhappy people. And that's just the nature of it. I think Steph and I discussed the other day. I think you can never make everyone happy. Like, and I know that's super common. But you know, the further you get into this thing, you think that people just get pissed off about like the random shit that you just have no idea what people are going to pissed off about. And that brings us back into the manager or the, you know, managing people. And when they're unhappy is like, they're going to be unhappy because they just don't have the skill set to deal with that either. So, you know, if a client's giving you shit all the time, or they're always saying they're unhappy, that's eventually going to affect the employee because they're just gonna start to think that is their natural world. And that's what happens in most positions that we work with. So, you know, I'm asking, what's your happiness out of five? They're gonna give us the answer. Then I'm gonna go back and say, is there anything I can do? And they're gonna say yes or no. If it's a no, I'm gonna dig further and be like, cool. So what's the situation that's making you unhappy? And then I always try to solve for that problem. So if it's something that they're telling me is going on, I'm gonna go back and try to solve that problem. And then I'm gonna make it very clear to the employee that I am doing my best to improve that situation for them. Okay, so what happens when I would go and try to improve a situation for someone? They would be like, cool, Tim's in my corner for this argument, or whatever's going on. They're trying, he's trying. You know, that looks great for the employee. And then eventually you're going to build this role where they're not going to have any dramas and they're going to feel totally supported in the role. Okay. It just depends how you want to manage that as well. Steph, did I miss anything?

That was really good. You. Like, that was. I was like, is he ever gonna stop? Or what's that?

Sorry, I was taking your log line.

So much to say, and I'm like, oh, I just want to add one tiny thing here. If someone comes to you and they're saying that they're unhappy or they feel overworked, you need to ask why. Like, don't just go, okay, I must be overloading them with too much work. Like, most of the time, like Tim said, it's their own emotional stuff. And so oftentimes it might be something that's happening outside of work or they might be feeling pressure. Um, and so the first thing I ask is, like, why? Why are you unhappy? Why are you feeling overworked? What's not working for you, really get a baseline of what's actually happening to make them feel that way and then figure out and don't. What I do see with female entrepreneurs a lot is they try to fix all of those problems for that person, whereas some of those problems actually need to be fixed by that person. So, for example, if this person's putting a lot of pressure on themselves to get things right, one, yes. How can I take radical responsibility and make them feel safe to get things wrong? Because I don't want them to feel like, you know, if they make a mistake, they're going to lose their job. So how can I make them feel safe to make mistakes so they don't put that much pressure on themselves? But two, that person, you can't be responsible for how that person feels. Right. So there is a point where if someone's unhappy or feeling overworked. Yes, it's the radical, responsible part of you needs to look at it and go, where can I help this person? But the question I always ask back is, what can I do to support you? Rather than I'm going to do all this stuff and try and solve the problem for them. You want them to tell you what they need so that you can actually give them what they need.

All right, question for you, Steph. How do you make someone feel valued in their role and want to stay with you and your company?

I have a really extreme view of this and because I'm definitely a people pleaser. And so I have a few different ways that I do this, but a few things. One, like, you have to identify what feeling valued means to that person. So in my opinion, and so I think that people are motivated in different ways. Some people just want to be part of your business and your ecosystem. Some people are financially motivated. Some people are motivated by flexibility and time off and freedom and things like that. And so you need to identify what motivates your team members so that you can find ways to make them feel valued like that. So, for example, you know, we have a few different people in our team. So for example, I've had this conversation with a few clients that have beauty businesses and they have team members working under them. And they were trying to monetize or like monetize a KPI for their team to hit, but the team just kept not hitting it. And I was like, well, have you ever considered that potentially they're not. They don't value additional income, like potentially they value something else. And she found out that they were all nurses. They were working, working really hard and what they actually valued was time off. And so she started rewarding people for hitting their KPIs by giving them additional annual leave days. And so there are so many ways that. But just by making them feel seen and heard, I think, Tim, like what you said before about the check, the personal check in that we do with our team members, like, how happy are you? How are things going? How are things going in life? What was weird for you personally this week? Just letting them feel heard and seen and supported and checked in on is so important. We never miss a birthday, we never miss a special occasion. We always just send random, you know, gifts or flowers or whatever to let them know that we're grateful for them and we appreciate them. So there's a few different ways we feel valued that way. How else, Tim? What else?

Really simple one here, guys. And you know, this probably is just a little bit primal as well, but everyone likes to feel valued financially. And I know Steph did say that finances isn't a driver of a lot of people, but when you're paid well, you're definitely going to go the extra mile for a business, you know, criminal thing that Steph and I have both seen, not actually criminal, but criminal for business growth is just underpaying employees and team because they just don't feel valued. You know, if you're giving someone, you know, 50k in their work and they're, you know, butt off for your company doing 50, 60 hours, you know, living somewhere that's super expensive to live, you're probably going to have a very high amount of turnover and they're not going to feel valued in their role. You know, Steph and I are all about paying people well in all of our companies as well. We pay our sales team well. We pay our, you know, set as well. We pay our marketing manager well. We pay our va like she gets paid more than a western VA a lot of the times at the moment. So everyone in our company is a renumerated super. Well, in the gym we pay double the standard rate, so 2x the standard rate. And we don't have a high churn at all with team members. So I think like the first thing you need to do if your business can afford it and you want to hire someone and you're in the financial position to do so is you need to remunerate people. Well.

Yeah, Tim, I love the way that you do this, but you just let go. Like you said before, you've got a laissez faire leadership style. In case anyone wants to look into what that means. But you let people just do their own thing without micromanaging, without checking in. And I know a lot of entrepreneurs who get into management or who hire team members really struggle with this. They almost go the opposite. They go into hyper micromanagement because they don't want the team member to mess up. How have you developed this? Like, just let go and let it happen?

Yeah. So I have developed it by being a fucking psychopath of a manager previously. And I had to step back and just essentially just look at, give myself the hard word and be like, is this effective for the companies? This is effective for you. Is this effective for your stress levels, anxiety, all those types of things? So how I manage it now is I think of everyone in our company has one main KPI. So if they're hitting their KPI, cool. Do whatever the fuck you want. If they're not, that's when I start to look into it. Okay, so just a couple of examples here is marketing manager is a thousand leads per month. She's hitting that. Sweet. I don't need to bother her. Our salespeople is five sales a week, you know, 20amonth. Is he hitting that? Yes, he is. I don't need to look at it or I don't need to look into him too much. So we have our one main KPI for each role. If they're hitting it, I don't have to worry too much. Obviously, I'm going to do my checks and balances and do my due diligence on their role as well on top of that. But that is not something that I need to let them know I'm doing. I'm obviously looking at every single person in our team, but I'm not micromanaging to a degree. Okay. Because it just doesn't need to. Because they're hitting their KPI is where it goes wrong is like when people are hitting KPI and then they get really savage about the little things that don't really matter in a company as well. So for us, I'm looking at the big picture. Are we hitting our metrics? Are our clients happy? Is the coaching good? You know, are we hitting our sales targets? All these types of things. Therefore, if we are, I don't really need to be a crazy micromanager.

Yeah. And I think guys on this, like, you know, a lot of people who do typically go into micromanagement will be those that are in more creative industries. So website designers, graphic designers, social media management, anything that requires a high volume of focused, creative work. I think the best way that you can let them do their thing is like, you like, first of all, just know. And I think this comes back to self trust of just knowing that no matter. Like this cannot. This one person cannot completely tank your business. Okay. Like, they just won't. There is so much you have to make, so many mistakes over a really extended period of time for a business to go under. So just trust that, like, there's not much that can't be solved with. I'm really sorry. And here's a he's a free week or here's a free month or we'll work an extra amount of hours to fix this problem. Most clients are going to be more than happy with that.

Yeah. So just a story on this, guys. I've seen this go wrong for us, particularly this management style that we're speaking about right now is not for everyone. And it fogs up. Okay? And it did fog up recently for us. You know, in our marketing position, I was kind of like, whatevs, like do whatever you want type thing. And you know, it did send our metrics backwards for a little bit of a period. I had to step in, intervene, and then we kind of fixed the situation. But, you know, it happens.

And also it happened because the metric didn't get hit. Like the KPI didn't get hit. We were able to go back in and we're able to fix that thing and it wasn't detrimental to the business. Guys, you can. This is exactly what I was just trying to say is like, there will be mistakes that are made, but they will not be like, awful. Like they're not going to be shut your business down awful if you keep a check on the KPI, which you will, and if you keep a check on like for, you know, if someone's a creative person and they're putting something out, like, you might not be to your liking or to your taste, but the client might love it. And so just ask the clients if they're happy and if they're not, they're usually pretty vocal. So you'll find out and then you can fix it. And I think it's just being really in that fixer mentality is like, you don't want to get too hyper focused on micromanaging somebody when the work output that they're putting out, I guess it may not meet your perfect, like really high critical standard if you, especially if you have a perfectionism level. But it's like, I think I saw a statistic or a quote that basically said, like, you know, you can't just. You can't have more of you. Right. Because there's no more of you. But you can have, you know, three other people who are at 70% of the output that you have, and you're still going to have 210% versus your 100%. So if that, like, if you can give 100% to your business, is that. That. Oh, my gosh, yes.

I got the math right. Let's go.

Um, and so if you that, like, even by hiring them, even by them not being you, and even by them not being perfect like you, and even them not doing exactly the way that you do it, you're still going to have more than double the output. And so it is just so important, guys that, like, you do have to let go to grow.

Yeah. So just lastly, just to wrap that in a. Not if you're a micromanager or you're a very blase manager like me, I've really found it beneficial to tell the employee or team member what they can expect from you as a manager. So when people come into our company, I always say, like, here's the KPI. You hit it. If you hit it, you probably won't hear from me too much. Besides our team meeting, I'm not going to be looking over the quality and standard of things you do. As long as we're hitting the numbers. Okay? So that is the main thing. You know, you can micromanage. If that works for you, that's cool. But like, I've never met anyone that likes a micromanager. I don't think it's great for company morale either.

And I would recommend just go onto Google and type in, like, Leadership Style Quiz. There's a couple of really cool free quizzes that will tell you what your leadership style is and the pros and cons of each. Like, there are pros and cons to being laissez faire. Like Tim is, I'm kind of a middle manager. And, you know, there might be a micromanager. And so there are different types of leadership and if you go do one of the quizzes, it'll tell you and then you can work towards what you want to be more like and how you might want to behave slightly differently to move into a slightly different style stage or style of leadership. But there are different sort of leadership styles. And it is really important for somebody coming into your company to know, like, if you are going to be a micromanager, just again, that's how. And it's not going to change. And you're like, that's it for me. That's cool. Just be like, hey, I have a really pedantic way of doing things, so please don't get upset if I breathe down your neck about this. Like, just preface that for the person so that they don't feel like a personal attack every time you come down on them.

Steph, give the listeners a bit of an idea of how psycho I used to be with my team when something would go wrong in the gym. So something would go wrong. What would be the next steps or my initial next steps once I had this huge emotional outburst.

Yeah. Tim would just blow up at the team members. He would just message them, blame them, and then like three days later he'd, like, apologize. So he did used to be very fiery. Used to be very fiery. And so. And we, we had really high turnover, which is no surprise. And so, you know, it's taken a long time. Well, a long time. It's a couple of years for you to refine your management style now. I don't think Tim wouldn't block about literally anything. Is so calm and collected and cool and just as like, oh, if there's a problem, we'll fix it. All good. No worries.

Yeah, I hate to get blown up by me as well.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. It was not nice.

All right, let's get into the list of questions. So we have one from Felicity Roberts. How much were you earning through your business before you started outsourcing? Bit of an interesting question here. And then we have two other caveats to this. So was there an oh, shit, I'm putting all my eggs in one basket filling, and then what was your first investment dollar wise? Great. Couple of questions there.

Yeah, really good questions, Felicity. Okay, so how much are we earning through your business before you started outsourcing? I hired my first VA when I was earning probably 2k a month, like really early. And the reason I hired someone really early and I just hired them for like four, five or six hours a week was because I was spending so much time faffing about on mailchimp, trying to get these email addresses in and trying to send out these email marketing templates and make them pretty and add the links and the boxes and the yada yada and the. And I was getting. So I could tell that that was not a good use of my time. Like, I was like, if I could be out there marketing, I could be selling more tickets, but instead I'm here faffing about with a fricking Button. And so I knew that somebody could do that faster than me because I was hating as I was hating every minute of doing it. And so the first person I hired, and I've still got the advert for it, is like a male chimp superstar was what I was, what I put the job out as.

That's the most simple tool. This is dumb dumb over here.

You listen to our tech stack chat last week. I'm not techie. So the first person I hired was that person. And that person ended up growing from five hours a week, and she ended up working 50 hours a week for our company over the next three to four years. So, um, yeah, I was not earning a lot before I started outsourcing. I want to be really clear, and I know we get a lot of hate for this, but I'm. I'm just being honest about it. She is a Philip. She was a Filipino va. And so, you know, it didn't cost me a lot to outsource that, but I knew that, guys, if you are earning less than, you know, $200,000, probably $400,000 a year, your number one goal is marketing and sales. Marketing and sales. Marketing and sales. You get to do what you do as, like, a byproduct of the marketing and sales that you do. Right? So the thing that you love to do only comes because you do marketing and sales. And so I knew that everything I was doing that wasn't marketing and sales, that was like, you know, canva or tech stuff. I was like, this is taking me away from making money in my business. And so it was really easy for me to outsource that stuff at the beginning. What about you?

Yeah, for me, it was a little bit different. So I am a person that likes to learn a lot of skills. So I essentially took the role of everything in my business for a very long time. Probably till I was at, you know, 3, 4, 500K, I would do everything myself. So that was solely so I could learn the skills. So I learned, you know, Facebook ads start to finish. I learned email marketing start to finish. I learned how to fucking clean stuff start to finish, like, and do it to a professional level. And then the first kind of thing I really did outsource was virtual assistant. And that was like, emails, invoicing, you know, chasing up client payments, those type of things. I probably would have done it a little bit differently now. And VA was, you know, in success school was the first thing we hired for after we, you know, had the transition from pmp, because we knew how Beneficial like a great VA was. So for anyone listening to this, I would suggest, I'm not going to suggest, but I would be hiring a virtual assistant first. A VA from the Philippines. I think that's just a really great place to start. And then just wet your toes with management as well. They're quite easy to manage, typically because they work very hard. Usually most of the time they're very responsive, they're willing to improve and take feedback, you know, versus a lot of time a western VA can have some opinions on how you should run your business when it is your business as well. So that can go wrong. You know, the second question here of was there an oh shit, I'm putting all my eggs in one basket feeling? No. And I'm going to give you a caveat to this. So whenever Steph and I try something in business, we give it a 90 day period as a tester. So, you know, hiring a new agency to run our ads, hiring an email marketing expert, hiring a virtual assistant, hiring a new marketing manager, hiring a salesperson, set up all these types of things. We give it a 90 day period. So then we're gonna closely check our P and L, we're gonna check our money, we're gonna examine the investment, we're gonna look at it. But I think if you go into anything and you say, hey, I'm gonna test this thing for 90 days, it's probably a, a strategy that you can't really go wrong with. What do you think?

Yeah, and I just want to, I want to answer this in a different way because I don't know exactly what you were meaning here. If you were all your eggs in one basket basket for the outsourcing or for investing. And so there are two different things here. If it's for outsourcing or for team, then yeah, the 90 day thing. Perfect. If you're thinking about making an investment for your business and you're saying, oh, I'm putting all my eggs in one basket feeling. And some people can do this like when they buy coaching or invest in machinery or equipment or like you would when you invested in the gym.

Yeah.

You know, we know this feeling of like putting a lot of money towards something and then leaving yourself with not a lot of money to make sideways moves. We've both been there many times and I think the number one thing that you have to do, so you really have to know your numbers to like before Tim. I remember when Tim first went from his parents gym into the gym was at his parents house into his first big facility. And I remember, like, I was still working in my day job at the time. I don't think I had a business at the time. And I remember the day before you had signed the lease, which had, you know, yearly increments on how much the rent was going to go up. And the first year we could afford, easy peasy, no problem. But the second year and third year investments, like, they were going to really stretch us financially. The third year investment basically felt impossible at that point, but we knew if we could just get the client base and grow the client base, that we would easily cover the rent payments. And I remember the night before Tim signed the lease, he woke up middle of the night, bowled upright, picked up his laptop and opened his spreadsheet and was just running numbers and running numbers and running numbers and running numbers and just making sure that worst case scenario, we recovered. Best case scenario, recovered. What was our exit plan in case it didn't go to plan? Like, you have to know those things like, like self trust comes from having plans for yourself. So it's like, you know, we talk about this when people quit their job and go to the next thing. It's like, if you quit your job to work in your business, like, you have to have a plan in place. Don't just quit and have no plan. Like, don't just quit and be like, oh, I hope I'll get some clients. Like, no, quit, have a plan to get clients and have a plan in case you don't get clients. And I think when you have lots of plans in place and then you can trust yourself and you can go, okay, I'll be all right.

Yeah. So first investment was the final question on this. So I'm gonna say business coaches. So I've had about 11 business coaches. Not because I'm a coach Hopper, because they had specialties in different things. So when I say business coaching, I'm someone that goes balls deep with everything I do. So if I'm in someone's program, I'm watching every module. I'm watching it three times. I'm gonna show up to all the calls, I'm asked all the questions, I'm going to be DMing them. I'm going to be asking for what I need from a program. I'm not like a satellite person that signs up to stuff and doesn't go fully into it. So when I say I've had 11 business coaches, I've been through and sucked all the knowledge I can out of every single one of those person. And it has made me the coach I am today for that reason, because I go hard with it. So I think, like, first investment for me was business coaching. I would never, ever regret that. Some of the best things and people I've ever met have been people I have invested in in their programs. Steph, how about you?

Yeah, first of all, a business coach, it was different. It was like this business coach that did, like, these events. And so, like, I had to fly. Remember, you went to Brisbane? I went to this event. And. And I want to be really clear, guys. I think at the beginning, like, when it comes to investing in business coaching, like, you get, it can be really easy to get sold into, like, what they present as online or you meet them in person. You get really caught up in, like, what they're saying, and, oh, my God. It's just really important when you invest that you know what you want to, like, what you're trying to get out of investment. So, like Tim said, like, I invested $30,000 into a coach, and I think I've been to, like, three of their coaching calls, and. And I can't sit there and say, like, oh, I didn't get anything out of the coaching because, like, I didn't show up for the coaching, right? But what I did is I washed all of the modules and I grew my business. They told me that I'd make a million dollars in my first 12 months, and I did because I watched all the modules and I implemented them. So it doesn't matter how you show up for a program as long as you show up for the program. Right? But what we get frustrated by Felicity is, like, you know, with people, if they were going to make their first investment, a coach like Tim and I both have is then not actually doing anything with the coaching. Like, the coach, the program, the offer, the training, the system, the thing that you learn has to be implemented. Otherwise it will not work, and you will not get an ROI on your investment. So for both of us, it was a business coach. I actually couldn't even afford mine. I put it on a $5,000 credit card, and I paid that off within a few weeks, actually, afterwards.

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