Successfully Delegating to Your Team (Building a Team Series) with Selina Johnson
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What does it look like to hire successfully? Oftentimes, we hire before we fully understand what we need or how to ask for it. That’s why today’s guest, Selina Johnson, joins us to share how you can successfully delegate to your team. Listen in as she explains the value of developing processes, building communication skills, and providing feedback with your hires.
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Guest Bio:
Selina Johnson is a team operations strategist and speaker who helps her clients delegate decision making creating a self-sufficient team for more profits, greater joy, fulfilment, and freedom. Over the last 19 years, she’s worked with two Dames, a billionaire investor, and high-achieving CEOs around the world to confidently lead accountable, motivated teams to drive their vision so they can reinvest their time and energy in creating next-level impact. She loves organisation and structure and even created an SOP for her 6-year-old!
Today’s episode is brought to you by my Love Your Leads private audio training! Are you providing an experience for your leads that sets an expectation on when they’ll hear from you, provides them with tools that will help them easily say yes and book you, while also making them feel seen and heard? In my private audio training, you’ll learn how to love your leads and get more booked clients through an automated booking process.
Here are the highlights…
[1:30] Delegation: Communication, Commanding, Cultivating, & Getting Your Time Back
[3:22] Creating a Successful Onboarding Period
[6:42] Communication: Get Comfortable with Being Uncomfortable
[9:43] Training & Feedback for Your Team
[12:27] The Process of Training, Documenting Processes, and Guidance
[15:49] Communicating with Multiple Teammembers
[21:16] Proactive vs Reactive
[22:37] Internal vs. External Contractors
[24:48] Deciding on Tools for Teams
[26:15] Paying for Training Time
[26:40] Team Leadership Score Quiz
[28:30] Hire Fast & Fire Slow
[30:08] Creating a Backup Plan for Your Business
Mentioned in this Episode
Connect with Selina
linkedin.com/in/selinajohnson-teambuilding
instagram.com/iamselinajohnson
Review the Transcript:
Colie: Hello, hello, and welcome back to The Business First Creatives podcast. Today I am chatting with my fellow mastermind gal, Selina Johnson. Selina, welcome to the podcast. How are you this afternoon? Hi.
Selina: I am super happy and buzzed to be here. Can’t wait to get started.
Colie: Yeah, so Selina’s area of expertise is teams. We are gonna be talking all about teams today, why you should have one, how you can sufficiently delegate. I feel like this is a conversation that like everyone needs to have. So Selina first. What are the keys to having successful team delegation? Like if you had to tell someone, this is the number one thing that you should pay attention to in order to delegate to your team and retain your team.
Like, what’s the high level thing that everyone should pay attention to?
Selina: I think we need to take a step back and look at that. Delegation is actually more important, the hiring part. People often focus on hiring and getting that person in, and then there’s no little to no time spent on onboarding and delegating, and that’s when that hiring and firing cycle starts. So that’s the first thing I’d like to say is that you need to have the time, capacity and know exactly what you are hiring this person for before you bring them in the business.
And once you have them, it’s then developing and retaining that person through the delegation piece. So I’ll say through the system that I created, it’s all about communication, commanding, cultivating, and then also getting your time back, claiming your time back. So those, those are the key areas that I would focus on.
Colie: So Selina, you mean? I can’t just hire someone and give them the keys to the kingdom and just walk away. That’s not how it works.
Selina: I’m sorry, but a magic unicorn does not exist, I’m afraid. It would be great though, wouldn’t it? If we could just click our fingers and they do everything for us. But unfortunately not. No.
Colie: So what, what is two things that someone could do to have a successful onboarding period? Like I’m imagining that like if I was gonna hire someone and bring them on my business, that there has to be like a period where I am teaching them about my business rather than just throwing them into the wolves.
But I have actually only hired two people inside of my business. Both of them were magical unicorns. I will say. So when it comes to like I, I would say efficient onboarding, I don’t think I did that well. So I’m gonna listen to you, the expert. What is it that we should do in order to have a successful onboarding of, let’s say, our first hire?
Because a lot of the people in my audience, Solopreneurs. They are doing everything by themselves right now, and so for most of them, when they hire the first time, that’s when they’re gonna be doing after they listen to this episode.
Selina: What I love to do is create a 90 day success plan. So that’s based off the job description and we are taking five key areas that we want ’em to do within this role, and then mapping that out of how they’re going to do it within the 90 days. So I’ll break it into three sections, 30 days, the first 30, the next 60, and the next 90.
So 30, 30, 30. And then within each of those 30 day brackets, are we giving them a Pacific? Job to do a Pacific project to do. It could be one big project, it could be multiple or small things together, and it would be specific about this is what we expect you to be at what level you expect it to be at the end of the 30 days.
So then you can get to see are they actually reaching that level? Are they struggling? Do they need extra support? Do we need to retrain them? And then when you get to the end of the 90 days, you’ll then realize, well, is this the right person or do I need to move them because they’re not quite hitting the mark.
If you don’t create this plan, what tends to happen is that they’re just left to freedom to do what they think me’s doing and it can steer them in the wrong direction where they’re just assuming that’s the right thing. So we are giving them that clarity of these are the guardrails, this is what we need you to do, and then given the opportunity to step up to the bar and reach those expectations.
So that’s the first part. The second step before is also to create a, schedule for the first week before they actually start and get, issue it to them so they know what their week’s gonna look like ahead of time.
Colie: Yeah, I feel like one of the things that people really miss the mark on, I mean, with your first hire, with your second hire, just in general, First of all, the people that you’re hiring are not mind readers, so I feel like people really struggle to effectively communicate their expectations, and then when the person that they’ve hired doesn’t meet their expectations, they really struggle to communicate that to the hire like, I know in the case of photographers, if you are going to look for an editor, which is very different than hiring somebody internally, but I feel like this is like the first hire that a lot of photographers do is they will hire an editor and they will, you know, try to efficiently tell them how they edit the expectations of the session.
But then when they get it back and it’s not perfect, it’s not ready to deliver to the client, they tend to redo it themselves. Instead of taking the time to communicate what was lacking in their first attempt and giving them the opportunity to, you know, if you will fix it because like you said, those magical unicorns don’t exist.
You are not going to be able to handsome one a task. Even if you have done a really great job of like talking about how you would do it and expectations, there is always going to be a learning curve. And so I really like the idea of this 90 day plan because this gives you the opportunity I. To give the new hire the chance to do the task, learn, get feedback, and then do it again.
I think if we all come into hiring with that expectation of it will not be perfect. You will have to give feedback and allow your hire the opportunity to absorb that feedback and implement it. That’s when you have a really good relationship with your hire, and I feel like that’s where you can really maximize on your return on investment.
Selina: Absolutely. We need to get comfortable being uncomfortable, especially when it comes to bringing people in. Communication is such an important piece of the block of being an entrepreneur and, being the owner of your business and that you are gonna have difficult conversations with people. And it’s just getting, just start that phase.
So if there are things that you’re noticing that you are concerned about or things are not done in the correct way, yes, it’s easier sometimes to do it yourself, but if you take, okay, that’s taken me 30 minutes out of my day. If you track 30 minutes out of a hundred times, you’ve done it this year. That’s a lot of hours.
That’s a lot of time that you could be spending somewhere else in the business to make you more money. So you are leaking money by not delegating. And the Gallup survey shows that people who delegate correctly and effectively have a 33% increase in revenue.
Colie: Oh, I like that statistic.
Selina: Yeah, it’s a huge amount.
So if you’re not doing it correctly, if you are not working in your zone of genius, if you are holding onto all the reins, If you are the bottleneck in your business, then you are not delegating effectively. You need to utilize the people in your team correctly to be able to elevate yourself into your zone of genius and not be the c o e, the chief of everything.
Colie: Yeah, recently and I’m, I am really sad right now that I can’t actually remember what the task was, but I wanna say it was about a month ago, I had handed off a task to my va and granted you, by this time, I think she’d been in my business for like six or seven months, but she did something and when I got it back I was like, no, I don’t like this.
this is not what I wanted.
And when I thought about it, it would’ve taken me about 30 minutes to just do it right. But it took me an hour to make multiple videos and explain. What the issue was and what I wanted her to do differently. And then I sent it back to her. And of course, you know, it took her another 30 minutes to an hour, I’m sure to like implement the feedback and redo it.
And at that point, like I almost went back to, well, let me just do it myself. And then I stopped and I put on my delegation hat and I was like, no, because then she’s gonna do it again. Incorrectly the next time that I hand her this task. And if I can just take this hour now to like lay out everything and explain what it was that I wanted her to do instead of what she submitted.
I mean, I’m never gonna have to do that to her again, because I will say my virtual assistant picks up things so well. I mean, once I explain it one time. She’s got it. Like she never makes the same mistake twice, if you will. But I do think that I did really have to learn how to effectively communicate that.
Cuz again, I mean I’m real efficient. Sometimes it would just be easier to just jump in and do it myself and just worry about the next one later. But you have to make sure that you have the time because otherwise, you know, if I didn’t tell her that she did it wrong. She wouldn’t know. So she would think that she knocked it outta the park and then when I gave it to her for another client, she would do the exact same thing over.
Right.
Selina: Exactly. If you look at something in sports that they are training constantly. They’re perfecting themselves, they’re perfecting their skillset. And it’s the same when it comes to working with a team member. They’re not gonna be perfect. There’s, there’s this, not this magic unicorn that’s gonna appear in your office.
So you need to be able to perfect them, to get them to that maximum optimum. And I talk about getting your circle, your individual team member circle up to. 80, a hundred percent. They may come to you at 50% and it’s you guiding them from 50 up to a hundred percent to get them to that high performance.
And that’s by you being a leader, leading and managing them and talking to ’em, having that open communication and feeling comfortable to be able to talk to them and vice versa. They speaking to you. So that they can speak about stuff that they wanna support on, but you can also feed back to them when things are not quite right, because if you don’t speak to them and explain that this task wasn’t quite where I expected it to be.
How do they know where the standard bar is? How do they know where expectations are met? So it’s really key that you are communicating with them. And I like to do it by either voice note or do an a loom recording rather than text. Because sometimes text when you slack, it can come across as like, uh, condescending or you are in that still in that frustration mode, right?
So the tone may not be seen, right? So I like to actually show them, Hey, you’ve done this task for me. I noticed that you sent out the wrong link in this email. That seems to be a common one. Can you just make sure that I’m just showing it to you now? Can you just do this and double check the link each time?
Next time? Because we wanna make sure this, we’re in launch mode, we just wanna make sure everything’s going right. Don’t forget to check the onboarding or the specific folder in the Google Drive. So you’re giving them, I’ve noticed that this has gone wrong, just flagging it with you. Can you just go through the process again just to make sure you’ve got it right and if you have any questions, feel free to come back to me and they’ll be, oh, I’m so sorry.
I didn’t realize I had done that. So again, you having that. How’s your relationship with them? It doesn’t feel like they’re getting whipped and told off, but it’s just making them aware that something’s gone wrong and can you make sure you don’t avoid doing that the next time.
Colie: Yeah, and I feel like what I think what we’re gonna progress into now is if you have more than one team member, I feel like if you have one team member, it doesn’t really, it doesn’t really matter how you communicate it to them or where you communicate it to them, because it’s just the one person, but as your team grows, it becomes even more important.
To have those SOPs in, in place to have everything centralized so that everybody on your team has access to the same, you know, information, the same feedback that you’ve perhaps given before, so that when you’re bringing on another team member, they don’t make those same kinds of mistakes that your first hire did if they’re doing the exact same kind of tasks for you.
Selina: Yeah, 100%. And I dunno what your opinion is of this cuz some people will say, do the SOPs before someone comes on place and others will say you can do it while they’re in place. And I’m kind of thinking from people are quite busy and maybe don’t have all the time to correct the SOPs. So I say, I look at what is it that you want them to do?
Can you actually record yourself doing it? So you spoke about the editor, can you record yourself doing that task? So they have a video recording before they start of what it should look like. And that’s the first step. And then they could probably update that and create a Word document of it, because some people will learn different ways.
Some people like video tutorials, some will like images, some will like text. It’s a variety of different ways. I know that when I buy something from Ikea, And I get the diagrams half the time. It never comes up well, like what they say it should. Right? So I prefer video. Yeah. YouTube videos cuz I know straight away I’m following step by step.
So it’s just first of all, getting to understand how your team works and how they understand instructions. And then also you being clear on the process yourself. Cause that can also be a bottleneck if you’re bringing someone into the team. And you ask ’em to do something, but you are not quite sure of the process.
But if they can then figure it out for you, but then you need to be clear of what the outcome is because that can be an issue. Delegation is that you’re hiring someone to do a role, but there’s no kind of subheadings of what that responsibility is or what the outcome is of that as well.
Colie: Yeah, I totally agree Selina, and I don’t think that I really understood the importance of communicating between team members until I realized that my podcast manager and my virtual assistant were gonna be working on basically the same. The same project, the same tasks, but they were each gonna have a different role.
And so making sure that, like I communicated to my podcast manager what her role was, and then communicating to my virtual assistant, but also making sure that they can communicate with each other. Because this podcast is one of the things in my business that my team handles. I mean, I’m the one that emailed and invited you and looked at the scheduler and did all that, but once we record this episode, everything gets turned over to my team.
Podcast manager gets a notification after I upload this into, Descript so that she can edit it, and then when she’s edited, uploaded it to Buzz Sprout, made it ready for public consumption. She notifies my virtual assistant who then goes in and makes all the social media clips and writes the email and does all this so, My virtual assistants tasks are dependent on my podcast manager doing her job and making sure that all of the clips are selected and all that.
So it is managing people. It’s not just managing tasks, it’s also managing people and how they interact with each other. Because there were a few times when my podcast manager forgot to select the clips for my virtual assistant to make for the social media. So like the first time that it happened, I just ran in and selected ’em because I didn’t wanna have to wait for her to do it.
And I just sent her a note and I’m like, Hey, on this podcast, you forgot to select the clips for Sarah. Can you just make sure that you do that next time? And she was like, oh, absolutely. But like we’re all communicating about the podcast in Airtable, which I know seems like a really weird place to manage, like team tasks.
But it’s the best tool that I found for myself for the kinds of things that they’re each doing for the podcast.
Selina: I love that. And that’s a valid point that when you’ve got so many people coming in, it’s what’s the best way to communicate with your team that works for your business. There’s some, there’s multiple different project management tools out there. It’s figuring out how you like to do, how creatively, visually you like to see things, and then working out a platform that works best.
I’ve used Asana, which I really prefer, and. What you spoke about really is what we used to do as well. So when we were launching something, say for example a masterclass and we would, there’ll be different team members. So there’ll be a graphic designer, there’ll be a social media person, there’d be a tech va.
There may be someone doing some copywriting. So there could be four people. So what I would do is, Initially, if this was the first time I was doing this masterclass, this or this project, I’d bring them all together on a Zoom call and say, this is what the masterclass is about. This is the aim of what we’re, and then we are gonna be launching this project at the end.
These are the key areas within Asana that I need you to do. Is there anything that I’ve missed? Because often we may forget all the different touch points and stuff that needs to happen. And then we’ve added in the deadline dates, we’ve added in the specifics of what needs to be done, the deadline dates, who’s responsible, and the priority.
Is it a high, low, medium? Because often team members do things based on what they think needs doing first or the easiest thing first, but it’s not based on the business needs. So that’s quite key to make sure you’ve elaborated on. The priority of each task. And then it’s also being clear on, okay, like you mentioned that this needs to be done before someone else can do that.
And then also being clear on, okay, is it actually gonna take you a day to do? Because me being someone who has high expectations and what. Things done like yesterday could say, oh yeah, you can do that in a day. Yeah, you can do that in a day when actual fact it might take them two days or three days because they’ve got other things on, or they feel like this other project that they’re working on is more important within that client.
So we can say, okay, drop that for now. This is, the launch is more for priority. So it’s having those conversations and creating a whole outline in a bird’s eye view on one screen. I like to have it all in one screen, so I’ve got a section that says, Admin’s responsibility and the tasks. Then I have, the copywriter’s responsibility and all those tasks.
So I can see from one screen all the things that’s happening. As they tick them off, they disappear or, well, they don’t disappear. They’re still there, but they grade out. So I know that it’s been done, and then I can see what’s left to do, what’s outstanding, what hasn’t been done on time, and then we can work through that.
And then in between, then we are having voice notes or. Slack conversations just to talk through what’s outstanding or if they’ve got any key questions. So once you rinse and repeat that launch, you may not need to then jump on a big zoom call and have that team conversation again because everyone’s done it previously.
You can just duplicate that board and then run again and do it over again, and then learn from the lessons from the previous launch and then update those tasks and implement different things.
Colie: Absolutely. And I will say one thing that I wanna encourage everyone in the listening audience is give yourself more time than you think it’s gonna take. Like if you think it’s gonna take someone on your team two days to do something, I. The first time that you assign it, give them four because you just don’t know how long a particular task is gonna take until someone does it.
And one of the things that I’m really happy about where we are now is we are so far ahead that like, let’s say my virtual assistants kid gets sick or you know, one of my team members get sick, we now have enough time in our schedule to where if they end up, you know, on bed rest or whatever for a couple days, it really doesn’t affect our schedule because.
We have put so much buffer time in, like I think my podcast manager right now is three weeks ahead on editing the podcast episodes. And my virtual assistant is like almost two weeks ahead in terms of scheduling and creating all the social media assets. And so that was one of the things that I really love because in the beginning we were doing something on such a tight, timeline.
So, My virtual assistants, one of her children got sick and she let me know, you know, immediately she was like, okay, I don’t think I’m gonna be able to do this by Wednesday. And I was like, no worries. I have time on my schedule today. I will do it. But then after that, we all looked at our schedules and we were like, okay, how can we implement a little bit more buffer time so that if you know, one of us is out, one of us is sick, whatever, we have the space in order for us to, you know, work on things in a slower timeline and still get it done.
By either our initial deadline or like that final deadline where you’re like, no, this has to be done so that we can launch it, put it out, whatever the end task is. But the other thing that I liked what you said, Selina, was about priorities. And so I think it’s important to think about the fact that priorities can change.
Like you may have delegated, you know, task one, task two, task three, but then all of a sudden something changes in your marketing calendar. You have a new collaboration that you’re really excited about, but it. Forces you to like put task number four ahead of the three that you have already assigned to a team member.
And so it is important that we have that kind of flexibility and a way to communicate. Okay, no, this is the priority now. Like I know I told you that it was one, two, and three and you’re doing a great job on those, but like, I need this done in the next 48 hours. So can you put this, you know, at top of mind, until it’s done.
Selina: Yes, exactly, and it’s all about being proactive rather than being reactive is what I got from this conversation because you put yourself in a better place for yourself and your team. I see so many team members that are over capacity because they’re constantly running at 200 miles an hour. So being in a place where you can be more prepared and thinking ahead comes from you being able to plan as a great leader, but also working with your team to say, these are the projects I have coming up.
How can we get them into the business and map them out to make sure that we are able to all fulfill them in a quality way? And, and that’s a great place that you’re in right now.
Colie: So actually that brings me to another question, Selina, because everybody in my business is external, like my virtual assistant actually owns her own virtual assistant agency, but she’s my personal virtual assistant and my podcast manager owns her own agency to edit the podcast. But is there anything that’s different about the conversation that we’ve been having based on whether or not your team member is an internal member of your business or they are someone that you are outsourcing to that perhaps owns their own business?
Like is there anything that we should maybe warn people about or that we should say is slightly different about anything that we’ve discussed thus far?
Selina: That’s a good question. I think that. I like working with other business owners because they, they, they’re running their own business, so they get it. I find that when I work with entrepreneurs in my business, they relate to me quite easily because they understand what I’m trying to succeed in, or they get the, the struggle and the ups and down of entrepreneurial life.
So it’s easy for them to integrate into your business because they have a more of ala relationship of understanding where I’m at. So that’s what I like about them. But I don’t know. There’s a different, I don’t know if there is a, I don’t know. I, I’m struggling with that one
Colie: Well, I’m gonna hop in. I’m gonna hop in with something, Selina, because one thing that I realized when we were talking about tools is my virtual assistant, their company uses Asana. And I know you said that’s what you use. But internally, I actually use click up. And so
Selina: Okay. Right.
Colie: like, you know, if my company uses one thing and I’m hiring you and your company uses another, like how do you have that conversation about which tool you’re gonna use?
Because in my case, We use Asana when I am communicating things that, you know, like new tasks that I need my virtual assistant or someone on her team to complete. They are managing like my, my tasks that I’m assigning them inside of Asana for themselves. But then the individual things like the actual subtask of like, Creating the podcast episodes, all of that kind of stuff.
I can do that in click up and she’s going in and marking things complete when she does it for a Dubsado setup or she does something related to the podcast. But then overall for their tracking and communication, they are marking something complete in inside of Asana. So we’re actually using two different tools, but the way that we’re using them is slightly different.
And I just didn’t know if that was something that we should highlight, because I mean, I’m easy. I was a, I was an Asana user before I was a click up user. So I think part of my, oh yeah, I’ll just use Asana for your part, was that I was comfortable with Asana. I don’t know if someone else, you know, if there’s something that your business does that’s slightly different than the outsourcing, like how you should communicate.
Okay, that’s great that you use this, but like in my business, we have to use this.
Selina: would first look at making notes of if there’s been any concerns over the past months of issues with using tubes. If you’ve noticed anything, write those issues down so you’ve got it to remember. And then go to them and say, Hey, I’ve noticed that we’ve been using these two platforms for this period of time, and then the ball’s been dropped where it’s caused, a lot of challenges within the business.
We’ve missed projects, deadlines, or we’ve missed key information that we needed to supply clients with. And these are the, the, these are the issues that’s happening. Can you see if you can fix the issue within two weeks? If not, if it’s no improvement in the level of service, then we need to migrate to one platform.
That’s the way I would address it.
Colie: And I feel like that’s something that people should be exploring in this 90 days. I mean, of course before you hire someone, you should figure out how they are communicating internally. You should always make sure that someone that you’re bringing on your team is either familiar with the tools that you are already using in your business, or that they have a willingness to learn.
And I do wanna say that, I mean, that’s on you. If like I’m using click up and I’m bringing somebody onto my team that doesn’t know how to use click up, like I feel like that’s part of what I should be paying her to do is learn how click up works, but also how I’m specifically using it in my business. I don’t feel like that’s something that I should delegate to them.
That, you know, you do it on your own time. I feel like that should be part of like the paid onboarding training process. How do you feel about that?
Selina: Yes, absolutely. Because you are hiring them to do specific tasks. They probably know other platforms are ready, so it’s probably not gonna take them that long to figure it out anyway, with the way that you work with it. And I find that you are leveling them up to be a better serving your business, so why not pay them for that time?
Colie: Yeah. Okay. So I feel like this is a good opportunity for us to talk about the free resource that you have for the listening audience. You have a quiz that’s gonna give us our team leadership score, which, I’m sorry guys, I haven’t taken the quiz before we started recording, but I’m gonna take it the moment that we hit stop.
But tell me about the quiz and tell me what someone is gonna get from their results.
Selina: So, yeah, I created this quiz based on, I love my team method because I noticed there was a lot of business owners who. Thought that there was X going wrong in their business when it was actually deep rooted in Y and Z. So I created this so you can get a full overview of the current BL blind, blind spots that happen in your business and provide you with actionable steps of how to improve it.
So this scorecard’s going to go through five different areas, communicate commands. Cultivate, clarify and claim. And then you’re gonna get a report that’s gonna show you out of a hundred percent what you scored and it’s gonna give you like a traffic light result as well. So you’re gonna see what needs immediate attention, what needs further development, and what is in your excellent and proficient area.
So you, and then I’m gonna give you some bullet points of what exactly you can do within those five pillars to improve your leadership, your team leadership.
Colie: Yeah, and I mean, I feel like the overall thing that I’ve gotten from our conversation is that. You know, a lot of us find, like it’s a high threshold for us to bring someone into our business to start, but then when you bring that person in, you have to have a plan from the beginning to make it successful.
You wanna give them as much training, as much expectations, as much as you can to make sure that not only that you’re a good fit for them, but that they’re a good fit for you. And so, like retention is the name of the game. What’s that phrase, Selina? Where you hire fast and fire slow. Is that the one?
Selina: yes. And so I feel that it’s, it’s a great place to be in your business when you’re bringing these people on, but it’s also like you said about how to retain them and develop them and spending that time, having that time capacity. So if you don’t have the time in your business, it’s not probably the best time to bring somebody in.
It’s like when you are working with somebody junior in your business and your business is at a high level, you wouldn’t expect them just to be able to jump from what a lot of clients say to me is, I’m trying to 10 x my business, but they’ve got a two x person. So you can’t bridge that gap quite quickly.
Right? So you need to make sure that you, if you, if you’re bringing in someone at a junior level and your business at 10 x and they’re a two x. You need to have the time, capacity to work with them to, to get them up a few notches, right? Otherwise, it’s not fair that you bring them in to sink or swim in the, in the business.
Colie: And I wanna just tell everyone like how Selina and I came to decide to record this particular podcast episode was I was telling her about the time that I lost. My vision, which for those of you that don’t know, back in 2016, I lost my vision completely for about six weeks. And I mean, how can a photographer do their job when they can’t?
I mean, they’re legally blind. And so one of the best things about bringing team members on is so that if you, you know, have some issues that you’re working through, you have other team members to kind of pick up the slack and keep your business moving. And so, you know, team members can be thought of as like your plan B.
Like if you are incapacitated and you can’t do this, have you set up sufficient SOPs? Do you have team members that can pick up the slack while you are unable to do the services as you’ve been doing them previously? I.
Selina: Yes, it’s a really difficult one because as a photographer you’re used to doing everything yourself, and you hold onto everything because you have a passion for it. That creativity. And then it’s bringing this person in that maybe client facing or doing stuff that’s gonna affect the reputation of your business.
So it can be really difficult to entrust in someone to come into your business. Are they gonna do it as well as I can do it? Can I trust them? It’s easier just to do it myself. It’s easier for me to do it than it to explain it to somebody else to do it. No one can do it like me. So they’re the type of things that we constantly go round in our mind.
But let me give you an example of like when I first started my business. Within the first five months, I hired a blog writer because I was creating these amazing blogs, and it was getting great traction, but I couldn’t keep up with it. So then I hired this blog writer to come into my business. I delegated that out to her.
I gave her the Pacific titles, and she created the contents. I reviewed each of them for the first six weeks, gave her feedback on Loom, and then it got to the point where she perfected it that I didn’t need to read them anymore. I felt comfortable that this OH’S been published. Oh, great. But I didn’t need to read it, but it was out there and it was from me, but she was representing me and she understood my mission, my values, and my tone of voice.
Everything was on point. And because I delegated that out, I then became number one on Google for Pacific search term. I was on page one, but if I didn’t get somebody else into my business to support me, I wouldn’t have got that opportunity to get more people coming into my business. So it’s the same as a photographer in your business looking at you are talented, you are, you’ve got this great, amazing talent in with what you do for clients.
But what happens if touch what it doesn’t, but what happens if you need to take time out of your business? For not just two weeks, but two months, six months. What’s gonna happen to your business? Will it suffer or will it die? What plans can we put in today to support your business as you are growing your business?
Also, I noticed that a lot of these type of businesses, it’s just reliant on them. So how do you then expand and scale your business if it’s just you? So if you wanted to multiply that, if you weren’t looking at the course avenue, but you are looking at in-person photography for weddings, children, celebrations.
It’s just you taking those pictures. What if you wanted to bring in another photographer? You then need to have that, be able to be good at leading to them. Bring somebody else into the business. So, It’s still looking at how can you clone yourself, but bring in somebody who’s at the same level of standard as you, has the ambition, has the drive, and is willing to go that extra mile in your business.
Colie: Selina, I love that you said that. And back on episode 40, I interviewed a fellow photographer, Jill Smith, who did that. Like she felt like she was getting so much business in her area that she wanted to bring on associate shooters in order to do that.
And she does it a little different than what I say the typical photographer does, cuz most photographers would take on more shooting. But delegate all of the afters shoot tasks, like the editing, the gallery creation, all of that kind of thing. But Jill did the opposite. She brought on associate shooters in order to photograph more families, and then she actually handled the editing and the creating the galleries on her end.
So both ways Work guys. And that’s episode 40, and I am gonna link it in the show notes in case you are interested.
Selina: That’s really smart. I like that idea because again, it’s bringing somebody else out to expand your business. I would hate it if someone contacted me and I, and I said, I’m sorry, I can’t do it because I’ve got something else on that date. So it is finding ways to, if you are in demand, how can you support those people?
What else can you be doing?
Colie: Yes, absolutely. Selina, we have talked about so much goodness, and I know that the listening audience is gonna wanna come find you. So tell everyone where they can find you on the internet. So,
Selina: So you can go and get my quiz at selinajohnson.com slash quiz, and then you can find me on Instagram at I am Selina Johnson.
Colie: Ah, I am Selina Johnson, so my Instagram is Colie James. I did seriously think of changing it to I Am Colie James or the Colie James. I mean, you know. Just puts a little, puts a little emphasis before the name. But Selina, it has been a pleasure talking with you about all things delegation. everyone.
That’s it for this episode. See you next time.
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