Ep #51 Three Mistakes You Are Making With Your Employees

Posted on 30. Jul, 2008 by Elizabeth Potts Weinstein in Management, Radio Show

Elizabeth welcomes Marcia Hoeck, President & CEO of Hoeck Associates, Inc. to share the Three Mistakes You’re Making With Your Employees and how to stop making those mistakes. Elizabeth then answers a listener question about hiring a Virtual Assistant, staff or employees and shares her Entrepreneur’s Success Tip of the Week: Time Perception Series #3, Every Project is not the most important project.

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Transcript: Elizabeth Potts Weinstein welcomes small business owners, entrepreneurs and anyone who dreams of opening a business someday to this empowering hour of the Wealth Spa Radio Show where you’ll find answers to your most pressing financial and legal questions.  Now here is your host, Elizabeth.

Elizabeth:      Welcome everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show and today like usual we’ve got a couple of things going on.  I have Marcia Hoeck as our guest today and she’s going to be speaking to us about the three mistakes you’re making with your employees that are costing you money and how to stop making those mistakes.  Then I will answer a question from one of you all, this question is actually e-mailed to us which is about hiring a virtual assistant if or it could also include staff, employee for that matter.  You know, a lot of people will tell stories about how hiring staff has made the biggest difference in their business but they couldn’t afford it so how do you reconcile that with managing cash flow and being responsible about the finances of your business.  The third thing we’ll be talking about today is I’ll be sharing the entrepreneur success tip for the week and this is the third in our series on time perception and this week’s tip is that every project is not the most important project.  Every project is not number one.

 

Now before we get started in today’s stuff, I just wanted to remind you that if you’re going to miss any part of the show or you want to have future shows delivered to you automatically so you don’t have to remember when and where to listen you can go to the website, thewealthsparadioshow.com.  That’s thewealthsparadioshow.com.  you can go there and sign up to get shows delivered to you automatically by e-mail, RSS Feed, you don’t know what that is, just sign up for the e-mail or by I-Tunes, either on your I-Pod or I-Phone or on your computer.  Also on The Wealth Spa Radio Show, we have transcripts of shows, so if you listen to something, you can’t remember what someone said, not only can you go back and listen to a prior but you can read a prior show so those of you who are speed readers like me that can be really helpful for you.

 

Okay let’s get back into what we’re doing today and I wanted to introduce our guest for today and Marcia Hoeck is the President and CEO of Hoeck Associates Incorporated.  And since 1984, she has been President and CEO of Hoeck Associates and has helped regional and international organizations generate millions of dollars of revenue and save millions of dollars and cost by targeting and integrating communication so she’s a granting and communication strategist.  Now the reason that I invited her on the show today to talk about this particular subject about dealing with employees is because she’s been in business for a while.  She has this business for 24 years and has employees that she’s been with her for over 20 of those years.  So she’s really figured it out how to get good employees and keep them which is a very difficult thing especially for a lot business owner who are just now starting to hire employees.  And in this day and age keeping someone for 20 years is like a billion years, like forever. 

 

So Marcia thank you very much for agreeing to be in the show today.

 

Marcia:           Thanks Elizabeth, I am very happy for the opportunity.

 

Elizabeth:      Great.  So you know, I told the very super short version that you’ve been on business for a very long time and have been able to keep employees for a very long time but of course, most small businesses are not doing that.  Most small businesses and actually all businesses, I think small business have a huge amount of turn-over, I mean, what, you know, why are people having this problem?  Is it possible to not have this problem?

 

Marcia:           Well, you know, it is a problem that most businesses have and that was really a quandary for me when I started out because I didn’t want to have that problem.  I think that the main reason why this happens, especially for entrepreneurs and small business owners, is because when you go into a business or take over a business or acquire a business you go into it for a certain reason because you have a specialized knowledge or great product or service or you want to have the freedom to be creative on your own term and be your own boss, you have a reason for starting the business and that reason does not include that you want to be a manager.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

 

Marcia:           So when you start doing your business and you’re doing it on your own as a single person you are doing fine.  But then you realize for your business to grow as I did.  My business was very successful right in the beginning and I started realizing that I’ve got to hire more people to help me do this work.  All of the sudden I became a manager and my focus had to shift from just doing the work to managing people.  It was something that I was totally unprepared for.  I had taken no management classes in school.  No one told me that this is going to happen.  I see this happen over and over again with businesses today and that’s the big problem because entrepreneurs, especially, they want to do their thing.  They want to do what they started business for in the first place.  They want to hire people who can just work.  I want to hire you.  I want you to go to work and do your thing and be self-sufficient, employees need much more than that, and that’s where the problem starts.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah and I can definitely see that coz’ a lot of people who started out as an entrepreneur didn’t think that they will do that in the beginning.  So, you know, we didn’t get some sort of degree.  I don’t even whatever degree that is that makes us you can magically keep employees happy but you know, you have some background and some technical thing or you’re an expert in something then you can learn to be a business person.  But being a manager really is like another whole, whole another third job in a way.

 

Marcia:           Absolutely.

 

Elizabeth:      So, you know, what’s the big problem for people?  When you’re a business owner if you’re having problems with employees, what are you missing out on?  What are the big problems, besides you know, being frustrated?  What are the things you are missing out on?

 

Marcia:           Well, it takes your time away from, first of all, it takes your time away from the thing that you love and the thing you wanted to do.  So you started your business to do a certain thing and now you end up being more of a slave to it.  So it takes a lot of joy out of the business for you and you hire employees to grow the business but then you find out that employees come with these expectations from their job.  They’re coming into it from a totally different perspective than you are and they think they are getting a job where they’re going to be doing things and learning things.  And they have expectations of you so they become a sort of a headache to you rather than an asset.  Also, there’s a thing that happens that there’s kind of a staff revolving door and I hear this over and over again where employers will hire someone that they think it’s going to be a great superstar.  They train them really well and as soon as they train them, they leave.  The person leaves and goes to another company and that can be devastating because you’ve spent a lot of time training this person and you think they’re going to be really good just as you get them to the point you want them.  They leave and they go somewhere else.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah, I keep having the problem where people keep leaving me and go start their own business.

 

Marcia:           Yes.

 

Elizabeth:      And I’m like I’m training you to be a great entrepreneur but not for me.

 

Marcia:           Exactly, that happens a lot.  There’s also diva employees.  This is really prevalent where sometimes employees will come into your business especially when they are really talented and they’re really, they can hit the ground running, they become divas.   And they kind of have their own little ??? and they demand that you keep them happy.  They demand certain things.  They want to work at home where no one else is allowed to work at home or they want certain perks that you don’t give anybody else and that can be a double edge sword.  Because if you give them those things then the other employees see that or else you keep it secret then you know you got this espionage going on that can be real problem.  Sometimes when these things start to build up, your staff can become more like a bird, like a necessary evil and you can spend, actually spend more time on staff problems than on making money.  And some entrepreneurs and business people really end up feeling like the tail is wagging the dog.

 

Elizabeth:      Well yeah.  You hire an employee, you hire this staff so you could free up your time to get more clients or whatever you need to do in your business but that got replaced by dealing with these people and managing this headache.

 

Marcia:           That exactly what happens and several people that are in that position that I know have made the decision to down size and go back to soloprenuer because they don’t see another way out.  So instead of growing their business, they end up shrinking their business because the employees have become something that has taken them away from what they love and you know, that’s not really the answer either if you want to grow a healthy business. 

 

Elizabeth:      So in this day and age, is it possible to keep employees for a long time?  and what I mean is you know, you read statistics now where everybody has 3 careers at least then and no one stays anywhere.  You know, I live in the Silicon Valley so I don’t know anybody who’s worked anywhere who’ve worked anywhere for more than 2 years or something.  So is it possible to do this?  Is it just that everyone doesn’t now the tool that they need?

 

Marcia:           Well I think that it is possible to do it.   I have done it.  And I have been talking to business owners who are doing, you know, starting out and doing the same things that I am doing and are finding that by taking some baby steps they are getting employees to stay.  And it really doesn’t seem to matter what business that you’re in.  If you give employees, certain things that they’re looking for, you can get them to stick around.  I think a lot of the job hopping has to do with employees looking for a place that they can be comfortable.  A lot of my employees will say to me that they can’t wait to get to work in the morning.  They feel as comfortable at work as they do at home.  So if you can create something like that where employees are empowered and responsible and have authority and they feel comfortable coming to work, they feel less of a reason that they’ve got to go and look elsewhere.  And I think, you know, especially after 911 there’s kind of a return to people wanting that comfort zone in even in the younger employees where they’re really looking for a place where they can stay.

 

Elizabeth:      You know, the plus side like I know a lot of people around here who complain that they hire employees and these employees are just looking for, this is the allegation, that the employees are just looking to like be working on the next google or something so that they can get their million dollar payout and quit and not work for the rest of their lives.

 

Marcia:           You may find that Elizabeth and one of the things that I really think is important that I talk a lot about is making sure that when you are hiring, that you’re hiring correctly.  So you really need to know your own business values are and that when you’re hiring that you hire to match your own business values and people that resonate with you.  So one of the things that I do in my hiring process is that I really discuss my business philosophy in that first interview and we talk about it often and I will hire someone who resonates my business philosophy and that I really feel good about even if they don’t have the skills over their skill level.  I don’t look for a person with a skill level as much as I look for someone who is going to resonate with me.  And I think that that is the mistake that a lot of people overlook.  They will look for someone who has a really define process that they go through where they’re looking for this particular skill level and a job description and education level.  And they’ll find someone who has all of those things and overlook the fact that they’ve got to find someone with matching values that will fit into their business culture and I think that fit is the most important thing with getting someone who’s going to stay with you.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah.  Definitely.  Okay so we’re about ready to go to our first break and everyone Marcia will be back after the break to talk more about the three mistakes your making, we’ll actually going to go into detail about the three mistakes that you’re making with your employee so stay in tune for that after the break.

BREAK

Elizabeth:      Welcome back everyone. This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein your host and we’re talking about getting the right employees and keeping the right employees.  So I want to get into, I was touching the three mistakes that you’re making with your employees; I actually want to get into those three mistakes.  So what is the first mistake that business owners are making with their employees?

 

Marcia:           Okay, the first mistake is going to sound kind of counter intuitive, Elizabeth. But this was a really hard mistake for me to understand that I was making and it is that most business owners are working too hard.  And what I mean by that is that most business owners are really driven.  They’re the type of people that if a boulder needs to be pushed up the hill, okay I’m going to do it.  I will push that boulder up the hill.  And you know what I’m talking about.  And the whole thing about that is that you’ve really as a business owner if you have employees you’ve got to let go.  You’ve got to let a few other people push those boulders up the hill.  I had to let go of the idea that I was the only person in my business that could handle the important work in my company and that I was the only person that clients would be willing to meet with and that I was the only person that could come up with good ideas and make decisions.  And there was an event that happened early in my business that really made me realize that if we have time I’ll just tell that story real quickly.

 

Elizabeth:      Okay.

 

Marcia:           I was at a business event and it was all business owners and it was a one-day workshop and I was really looking forward to this event because in my industry, it’s very competitive and I don’t often have the opportunity to talk with business owners in my industry.  So I was really looking forward to it and during the break I was talking to another woman business owner and she was really upset.  She was telling me that she just didn’t understand why she couldn’t keep good employees, they were always upset.  She could never keep them happy and they were always leaving.  She said she didn’t understand why because she had heard in management books that all you really had to do with be very clear about what you expect out of employees.  And I said what did you tell them?  That you expect out of them.  And she said, well, I tell them that they’re job is to make me look good.  And I was just amazed by that because she was an owner of a creative business like I am.  It was a graphic design and marketing firm and I can not think of one employee in a creative firm that their ideal job is to make someone else look good.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah and obviously that culture especially.

 

Marcia:           Right, who wants the kind of job where, you know, make somebody else look good.  So that was her idea of what their job should be.  So then, her second problem she said was that her clients only wanted to work with her so she was exhausted all the time.  She had 5 or 6 employees back at her firm but she didn’t ever want them to meet clients because, of course, their job was to make her look good.  And so she was so exhausted meeting with clients all the time and clients didn’t ever want to work with any of her people and she just had this catch 22.  She didn’t know how to get out of it and at that time it was like a light bulb went off in my head.  There was this switch that definitely clicked over and I realized Oh my gosh, you know, was I doing that?  Was I being the front person for my business?  And was I keeping my employees back in any way?  So that I wasn’t empowering them and did they think that their job was to make me look good?  And from that day on, I really started a really aggressive of program of employee empowerment and brought my employees along with client business all the time.  Introduced them as experts to my clients and really got them working much more aggressively with clients, got them into decision making, really engaged them in the business of my business because I just realized that they might think that their job was to make me look good.  And I needed to realize their part in my business and by doing that I was able to develop a culture of ownership with them, where they started to understand my business much more and it really helps to get rid of that whole feeling of me working so hard that I wasn’t allowing them to.  So that’s mistake number one.  I believe that most business owner’s work too hard and they don’t allow their employees to grow because of it. 

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah and they’re still doing everything.

 

Marcia:           Exactly.

 

Elizabeth:      And of course, the good employees are going to leave because they’re bored.  They don’t feel like they’re being used and they don’t feel like they’re part of anything so what’s the point of even being there. 

 

Marcia:           Yes.  Absolutely.  The second mistake is that you’re not clear about your expectations.  Even the smallest business does need an internal communications plan and it doesn’t have to be a detailed plan but it does have to be a plan.  Again, so many entrepreneurs and small business people, they want to hire people who know what they are doing put them in a desk and say just do your job.  And they don’t want to direct people.  They want to hire somebody who is already fully formed.  And this is really things that employees want.  They want direction and regular feedback.  They want to know your philosophy and the direction the business is going.  And, you know what they’re working towards and they want to know how they fit in to the plan. 

 

So you need to have a regular program of employee communication and that’s a must for even the smallest company.  And it needs to have a lot of parts to it.  My employee communication plan is very robot for my company and I only have 8 employees and I’m not really perfect at this.  Sometimes my staff gets to the point where they’re, you know, they’re pulling on my shirt sleeve come on Marcia, you know, we need to communicate more.  But I do have a really intense list of things that I go through such as, you know, weekly production meetings, monthly staff meetings, occasional team training meeting, by monthly management meeting, by monthly production management meeting.  We have a lunch with the boss where individually I take each person in the company out twice a year just to check in with them individually, you know, other meetings as necessary, impromptu 101 conversations.  I have on-going compliments about staff members to others in front of them that I make a real effort to do that on a regular basis.  I send occasional notes and e-mails to staff members to reinforce something positive and I just keep this up over and over again because they really really need to be communicated to regularly, consistently on and on going basis.  So that’s mistake number 2 that I see that business owners they just don’t keep up with that.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah.  I think it’s hard to when you’re, you know, we, all of us who have worked at a corporation or in my case a big law firm that happened.  You know, it was big.  You expect an HR Department.  There’s also this departments for stuff and they had meetings.  But I think as small business owners, we don’t run our business like a business, you know.  We kind of ad hawk and a lot of us are crazy entrepreneurs.  We’re starting to stuff all the time.  We don’t tell our staff about it.

 

Marcia:           Right.

 

Elizabeth:      The stuff that goes out, they’re like oh my God, I did this to my assistant where I said something she’s like what do I tell people when they call coz’ I don’t even know what this is.  And I’m like Oh I did not communicate.  Coz’ you know we don’t have any formality to our communication with our staff because we’re so… maybe you only one staff or you have 5 people.  And then you’re like do I need to have stock meetings and maybe the answer is yes.  You need to do.

 

Marcia:           Yes.  You do because they thrive on it.  They need information.

 

Elizabeth:      And do you think that you actually need to have meetings as opposed to e-mail and instant messaging and all that stuff? 

 

Marcia:           Well it depends on what kind of company you have; there are so many companies that have virtual employees but that just not possible or necessary.  So there’s a lot of different ways that you can do it.  I have an employee that’s in Phoenix that we have weekly phone meetings and e-mails and things like that.  I go out there maybe 2 or 3 times a year and we get together.  So it just depends but you do need to communicate regularly.  It just needs to be regular. 

 

Elizabeth:      It could even be an e-mail.  But it’s a regular e-mail.  It’s not the random whenever the person screams coz’ they don’t know what’s going on e-mail.

 

Marcia:           Exactly.  You got it.

 

Elizabeth:      So what’s the third mistake?

 

Marcia:           The mistake number three is that owners do not ask the right questions or listen well enough to the answers.  I think that it’s really important to ask employees what they want and then listen to and act on the answers.  Of course, if when it isn’t bad for business or against the law, you know.  You want to be a little bit discriminating here.  But this is just as simple as it sounds.  Asking people outright what motivates them, what they need to have in order to feel supported in their work, what they expect from you and what, you know, what they really want out of their job that will give you the answers that you need to be a better manager.  You don’t really need to go to management school.  You just need to ask a few questions.  I have a story of an owner of a, she was an owner of a recruitment firm.  And she had a stellar employee that she was sure that he was motivated by money.  He was her top selling employee and she wanted to give him a bonus but first before she gave him a big cash bonus, she asked him what he wanted.  She was just floor by what she said.  He said that what he wanted was a parking space close to the door with a sign on it that said number one sales person.  That’s what he wanted in which was recognition.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

 

Marcia:           So you may be surprise when you ask your employees what they want.  They may want less than what you think and just the fact that you ask, if you’re sincere about it, it will give them pause.  Because most of them have not been asked these questions from a boss before so they will respect you more.  And they will be amazed that you’re even asking and you don’t always have to give them what they want but just the fact that you’re asking, they’ll respect you more and you don’t have to guess anymore.  So there’s a lot of benefits in just asking and listening to answers and then acting on them when you can.

 

Elizabeth:      So you know, I’ve also, we’ve all heard the saying that you should be slow to hire and quick to fire, that whole statement.  You have employees and things aren’t going well or things haven’t been going well up to now.  When do you go a huge effort of trying to implement this kind of ideas and what point do you realize that these people aren’t going to work.  I need to get rid of them and bring in different people.

 

Marcia:           Well you know this may sound like not a very professional answer but the longer I’m in business; the more I’m concerned that this is the right answer.  You really need to trust your gut.  I have been, I kept people on way too long in the past by looking at their work and saying, you know, their work is fine…

 

Elizabeth:      They’re smart.

 

Marcia:           And they’re smart and sitting down and going over things with them and having talks with them and you know, explaining things to them.  Doing all the things the right way by the book but feeling in my gut that something was wrong and then when I finally got to the point where okay this is not working and firing them.  That’s when every other employee has come to me and said why did you wait so long. 

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah.

 

Marcia:           But you know, they didn’t come to me beforehand and say this person’s a problem.  So it’s amazing how, and even as, you’re right I do have employees that have been with me for over 20 years.  I have several employees that have been with me for over 15 years.  The newest employee that I have has been with me for over 6 years as good as communication level that I have with my employees, there’s a lot of things they won’t tell you.  And a lot of times they don’t want to rat out another employee.  And so even though for months I have known that another employee is someone that I should have gotten rid of.  I wait too long thinking I can salvage, I can save them.  I can salvage this employee.  Now I go by my gut and I just will bring someone into my office and say you know, you’re probably going to be happier somewhere.  This is just not a good relationship between you and me.

 

Elizabeth:      And they probably know.

 

Marcia:           I’ve had people thank me.

 

Elizabeth:      Yeah.  Coz’ they didn’t have the guts to quit.

 

Marcia:           Exactly.

 

Elizabeth:      And they’re like oh thank God.  It was something they would actually like.

 

Marcia:           Exactly.  That’s what happens.  That is exactly what happened.

 

Elizabeth:      So we’re about ready to go to our next break.  I wanted to give you a chance to share with everyone how they could find more information about you.

 

Marcia:           Okay.  Thank you.  Yes, I have a website. It’s for this particular area of my business. It’s www.moneymakingdreamteam.com.  And I have a special report on there that talks more about this area and it’s from problem team to money making machine, how to turn your existing staff into a successful team that makes your business more profitable and frees you to do what you started your business for in the first place.  So that’s moneymakingdreamteam.com.

 

Elizabeth:      Well great.  Thank you so much for being on today.  And everyone we’re about ready to go to our next break.  After the break, I’ll be answering a question from one of you all and then we’ll be talking about our entrepreneur success tip for the week.  So stay in tune for that after the break.

BREAK

Elizabeth:      Welcome back everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show.  And this past part of the show, we had Marcia on talking about the mistakes you’re making with your employees and again that special report.  Here’s the website for that one more time it’s moneymakingdreamteam.com.  I’ll share that again at the end of the show.

 

So now is when I answer a question from one of you all and this is a question I actually just got.  It is about; it’s actually on topic with hiring staff.  We talked a lot about in the show about hiring virtual assistants. And I’ve had a number of people on who say look when I hired a virtual assistant, and I’ll define that in a second, when I hired a virtual assistant that was what made the biggest difference in my business even though at that time it was a big struggle.  I couldn’t really afford it.  But that made the biggest difference.  If that’s true, how do you reconcile that with not having enough money to pay, to hire this person?  And having cash flow issues with hiring staff sooner rather than later.

 

And that’s a valid point.  Let’s go back to the definition of a virtual assistant versus an employee coz’ we’ve been talking about employees but a lot of the same information applies.  A virtual assistant, in this case, is someone who’s not an employee but who’s an independent contractor.  So for example, my virtual assistant, one of my virtual assistants, her name is Patty.  And she’s in Wisconsin and she has her own business.  She’s a virtual assistant for a whole bunch of other businesses.  Actually, some people who I actually know, a lot of business owners.  And she spends a few hours each week or each day on each person’s business, going through whatever work that needs to be done.  Not kind to pair taxes, payroll taxes in at just because she’s an independent contractor.  She just invoices me once a month.

 

Now I’ve talked in the show about how that can be a great way in the beginning especially when you’re a solo entrepreneur to get the benefits of hiring a staff without having to deal with the complexities in the administrative process.  Now some instances you’ve got to hire employees coz’ it’s the only way it works but this works really great for solo entrepreneurs, coaches, speakers at home businesses stuff like that.  So how do you pay for this virtual assistant when you don’t unlimited fund.  There’s a lot of small business owners are growing our business.  We’re doing well.  We’re making more money and we have more clients, yet we’re not rolling in dough here.  We’re just getting to the point of being profitable, just getting enough money to pay our bills.  And realize that you’re maybe working 50, 60 hours a week.  And you thought that growing pen.  And really the big solution there is to hire somebody whether it’s an employee or a virtual assistant.  But how do you afford that person because you yet don’t have enough money to pay for them. 

 

So a couple of pieces of advice, now, first acknowledge that in fact that this is probably, by the time like to get to the place where you can afford this person you have to have already hired them, this circular problem.  So, you know, that’s probably true for everybody.  You’re not unique if you’re having this problem.  What I recommend is before you go hire the virtual assistant, you figure out what you want them to do.  This is really important coz’ they… and they do that before they figure what they want the virtual assistant to do.  There’s two problems to that, number 1 you’re paying someone a flat fee who’s not doing any work so that’s silly.  Number 2 is that you might not have hired the right person.  All virtual assistants are not created the same just like all employees are not created the same.  You, the small business owner, maybe you need customer service person.  You need someone to answer the phone.  Maybe you need someone to schedule your appoint or maybe you need someone to do bookkeeping or you need someone who does website stuff.  There’s all kinds of different kinds of people you can hire, they may be different people.  Most likely, one person is not good at everything on earth.  So you need to be really specific about what you want this person to do before you even go looking for someone to hire. 

 

So I recommend is, you know I’ve done from previous shows on systems, is you go back and figure out, look at everything you do in a week.  Actually, literally keep track on a piece of paper or a file in your computer, all the tasks you do in a week which things can be delegated, which things are not getting done, which things are still in your to-do list at the end of the week that you need to get done.  Group them together of what you would delegate to this theoretical person that you’re going to hire and then maybe you delegate customer service and maybe you delegate technical stuff, bookkeeping, admin whatever.  Then you go to hire someone.  Number 1 you’re going to hire the right person or at least a better chance of hiring the right person.  And number 2 you’re going to have their job description aren’t you?  You’re going to have the list.  Here’s the 5 or 20 or whatever tasks I want you to do every week.

 

Now the advance level of this is that if you have made the list of the 10 things that you’re going to delegate to this theoretical person you have not yet hired.  The next week as your working on the 10 things coz’ you haven’t hired this person yet, right?  You’re still working on the 10 things.  You write down all the stuff to do in the 10 things.  So the next time that you do that first project, that first task that you take the call from the client, you update something on your website, you create this documents.  You write down all the steps you go through, the passwords that they need and the scripts and thing that gets sent to them.  Then when you hire the virtual assistant, you have their like employee manual.  You have instructions that they need to use to do their job, all done.  So the idea is when you hire that person, they hit the ground running, bam.   Coz’ here’s the thing, it’s highly likely that when you hire your first virtual assistant, if you’re a solo entrepreneur that’s going to take you six weeks, maybe even 3 months before you’re going to get all that money back and more.  There’s going to be a ramp up period because you’ve got to get all the…I mean junk off your table or whatever you’re delegating to this person.  And then it’s time for the money to come in coz’ you guys are going to be doing more prospecting or marketing or whatever is the thing that you weren’t able to do.  You’re going to finish the client projects so you can get paid.  It takes time for the money to appear, right.  There’s a backlog so you need to have that planned for.

 

So now if you have hired someone on day one, you don’t know what they’re going to do this is going to even add more weeks to the ramp up period.  So when you hire someone you want to know exactly their job description is, hand them their employee manual and they can start this afternoon. 

 

The next half of that is you want to plan financially for 2 to 3 months of a ramp up period.  That they’re 500 dollars a month, they’re 200 dollars a month, they’re 1000 dollars a month.  They’re whoever you’re hiring, you want to have that money set aside or found or obtained beforehand for 2 to 3 months depending on your business, etc.  So that could be actually having the money set aside in a perfect world.  It could be a line of credit, it could be you’re paying them with you’re American Express Card.  There’s a lot of different ways they go about doing it but you want to put that in your cash flow projections.  You know, I talk about cash flow projections all the time.  You want to put that in your cash flow projections about 2 weeks ago if you want more about cash flows go listen to the show 2 weeks ago.  But you put that in your cash flow projections so you can say I need to come up with an extra 1000 dollars.  Where is it going to come from?  It’s going to come from my savings.  It’s going to come from my credit card.  It’s going to come from a line of credit in business, whatever.  But you want to plan that ahead of time so you’re not surprise. 

                       

Okay.  And then going back to what we talked about earlier in the show.  The whole slow to hire, fast to fire.  Don’t hire the very first virtual assistant you interview.  Maybe you’ll hire coz’ maybe their absolutely brilliant and perfect fit and you resonate with them.  But don’t just hire like, you know, I have people who have hired, this is the first person who have answered the e-mail.  Like maybe you sent e-mails like 3 virtual assistants and one of them replied.  We’ll don’t hire them just because they replied.  It’s a funny thing for me to say but people do that all the time.  Okay, they hire the one person who showed up for the interview and on time.  The one person who showed up for the interview wearing a non ridiculous outfit.  So what I recommend is, you know, acknowledge that it may take you weeks or even months or two to find the right person and meanwhile during that time you can be working on the system for the stuff you want to hand to them.  You’re going to be working on those procedures.

 

And of course, be fast to fire.  Pretty much everyone I know who has virtual assistants has let a bunch of them go.  I had a VA I was working with it one time who I had let go who just was a terrible fit for me.  And really it wasn’t that she was incompetent about the skills, it was the personality issue.  You’ve got to agree to what Marcia said.  A lot of this isn’t about technical skill; it’s about culture and personality and the ethics and vision of your business even if you’re hiring someone virtually.  It’s not just about employees; the same rules apply from the hiring and firing perspective.  

 

All right we’re about ready to go to our next break.  Just to recap it’s acknowledging that it may take 3 to 6 months to catch up, have exactly what you want to delegate to them ready to go and take time in hiring and be quick to fire.  So after the break, I’ll be covering the entrepreneur success tip for the week in our series of time perception tip, this is tip number 3, every project is not number 1.  So stay in tune for that after the break. 

BREAK

Elizabeth:      Welcome back everyone.  This is Elizabeth Potts Weinstein, your host for the Wealth Spa Radio Show and now moving on to our entrepreneur success tip for the week.  And this week is our third in a series of time perception tips so we’re not just talking about managing time, we’re talking about how you perceive time, taking it to another level.  This week’s tip is every project is not number one.  Every project is not of the same importance in other words.  This is something I’ve really come to the head for me in the last couple of weeks.  I’ve always known that you need to prioritize tasks.  I mean, I think we’ve all heard that, right?  We’ve all been around the world enough to skip the time management books and calendars and systems that you need to number things, the ABC, 123 whatever it is.  Now just to give a disclosure, I’m not talking about tasks, which are things that are completed in one day in one sitting.  I’m talking about projects so things are going to take more than one day to do, typically, or at least seem like a much better thing.  They have multiple steps, multiple tasks inside them so everything from putting together a new website to a project you’re doing for a client.

 

So as many of you, I’m sure listening, I have this insane, I can’t even think about list of projects to do.  Some of which are things I have to do.  I’ve already promised or I’ve already sold or have to get done because they’re some law.  Some of which are things are definitely I want to get done, they’re strategic to my vision.  Some are kind of just ideas that I might do.  Some are things that I may do someday and there’s a whole list of things.

 

Now, I always resisted strict prioritization.  I would triage things like I would put together the here is the projects that are the must dos that I’ve already decided I’m going to do and here are the projects that I might do someday, kind of divide things up into two categories like that.  But on the list of things that I must do or that I already decided to do, already announced, already sold, I was very resistant to prioritizing them.  As if somehow making one of those projects number one would mean that the other ones weren’t important.  As if I, because if I was just working on one project, all the other ones are going to be bull’s eyed dropped somehow.  I also really worry about keeping my staff busy and my other independent contractors busy.  You know, for instance let’s say, I was working on my new website, piece of my website. Well, even though I have 5000 other projects going on I would start working on it so I can get something done to delegate to my graphics person and then something to delegate to my web person and something to delegate to somebody else.  So that way when I, you know, they weren’t sitting around doing nothing for the next two weeks.

 

I would also have this issue of being, getting procrastinating about one project by doing another, right?  So let’s say, I sit and I work on my client project and I’m like maybe I need to move to a new web host for my website so I’m going to go on google and start researching on web hosts.  That way I don’t feel like I’m wasting time coz’ I’m not like searching around google about information about Angelina Jolie’s babies or something, right?  I’m doing something productive of one of the projects on my list so it’s not procrastination, right?  Still it’s kind of the same things and what ends up happening?  It’s that none of my projects will get done.  Nothing was getting completed because I wasn’t working on them on any sort of logical order.  I was treating them all of equal importance which means all of them are equally unimportant and I wasn’t really getting anything done.  And something that’s really powerful for me that I did, a couple of weeks ago, was I sat down with that project list and I force myself, I had to kind of force myself, to put them in order.  12345 all the way down to a lot of numbers and so all the projects that I have already decided to do that are not just maybe someday but they’re projects that I’ve already decided to do put them in order 1 through whatever it is.

 

So how did I put them in order?  Coz’ that was a big challenge for me.  How do I put these in order?  They are all important.  I have decided to do all of them.  They are all things that I must do or you know, I mean, they are not maybes or something.  Here’s how I made one of the decision coz’ there’s a lot of decisions you have to make when you’re prioritizing your projects.  One decision was which of these projects pinging you the most.  So what do I mean pinging you?  There are unfinished projects that you have in your life that are constantly nagging you, pinging you, energetically throwing little laser beams from across the universe.  It could be everything from a client, you owe this client the finish product, project so they can be literally pinging you by calling you, e-mailing you and maybe you’re not like returning their e-mails or calls or you’re just e-mailing them back to say I’ll get to you soon.  Let me say they’re energetically pinging you.  So yes they haven’t called but you can feel them glaring at you from across the city.  It may be the piles of this project that sitting on your desk.  It may be the virtual assistant that is waiting for you to get back to them so that they can finish their project.  It may be in my case, in my bathroom that just got renovated, I put one coat of paint on the wall.   I didn’t put a second coz’ I got through one coat and I couldn’t decide and for the last month I had one coat of paint on my walls so it’s kind of the white showing through, you know.  And every time I go to the bathroom the walls just saying paint me, paint me, I’m unfinished. 

 

And so when you look at those projects you have on your list which one of those things are pinging you constantly?  Then of course, there maybe a logical order.  So for example, I’m planning all my website, to consolidate them onto a new host.  I want get that done before I do my big Amazon.com campaign to promote my book and why is that?  Because I need to have everything, all my ducks in a row, right?  I need to have everything finish before I go do that next step.  Same thing with the website stuff, I’m not going to work with the website stuff until I finish the things that are pinging me.  So before I even get to do website things, my clients don’t know about the website moving, they don’t care.  But they want their projects done.  They want their books delivered.  They want their audio books recorded so I got to get that stuff done before I worry about the next big project that isn’t pinging me in the same way.  So I’ve just got the thing about.  Go back and look at your list, your master list of all the products you have to do and look which one of these things, of course the very some things that you can cross off that are not relevant, that you haven’t decided to do that are in the maybe list.  So when you get rid of all of that stuff and just look at your project list of the things you must do, you’ve already decided to do.  And put them in order.  The top being the things that are pinging you and bothering you the most and the next, put things in a logical order of what things needed to be done for second term.

 

So that’s the entrepreneur success tip for the week.  Next week, we’ll be covering the next time perception tip in the series.  And I also want to give you a heads up on who’s going to be on our next week’s show.  Next week we have ??? Scott and she, let me give the exact title what she’s talking about.   She’s going to be talking about how to finally write the book you’ve always wanted to write and use it to attract a ton of clients effortlessly.  So we’re going to be talking about strategies to write a book.  How it not be painful as well as what you can do for that and why it’s even important, you know.   Do you even need a book?  Why would that be good for your business?  You know, knowing that you don’t make much money off selling books.  So anyway that what we’re going to be talking about next week. 

 

Just wanted to remind you, that if you miss any part of the show, you want to listen to past shows or you want to have future shows delivered to you automatically so you don’t have to remember the time and place all you have to do is go to thewealthsparadioshow.com.  That’s thewealthsparadioshow.com where you can subscribe to have the show automatically delivered to you by e-mail, by RSS Feed which is kind of how the blog is delivered or via I-Tunes which will work with an I-Pod, work with an I-Phone, work with your computer, Mac or PC.  So again that’s thewealthsparadioshow.com.  You can also read transcripts of past shows so you don’t have to listen to the whole thing if you just wanted to get one part or if you’re a speed reader.  And the future will be allowing people to purchase CDs and printed transcripts of the show.

 

So again, thank you so much for being on the show today and don’t forget we have ??? 55:42 Scott on talking about writing your book, finally writing your book.  So again thank you for listening and I look forward to speaking with you guys next week.  Bye bye.

 

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