Ep008 Jane Tweedy - Hiring or outsourcing help or hindrance | FAQ Business Podcast

are you doing it all or doing too much in your small business is it time to hire or outsource do you think you're just going to wave the magic wand and suddenly everything's going to be better afraid probably not so is hiring or outsourcing actually a help or a hindrance today's episode of the faq business podcast may be a bit of a reality check or it might be a oh this just isn't me kind of moment this is a business like you episode with a bit of actionable education thrown in at the end today the business like you is mine again don't worry though we've got guests lined up for coming episodes so you won't have to keep listening to me forever welcome to the faq business podcast for business owners covering four pillars actionable education inspiring leaders businesses like you and thought leadership where we challenge your thinking hosted by myself jane tweedy i'm founder and lead trainer of faq business training where we want to avoid you getting ripped off or ripping yourself off we'll feature an amazing diversity of guests with lots to educate and inspire you let's jump into today's episode of the faq business podcast i'm jane tweedy i'm the founder and lead trainer of faq business training and the host of faq business podcast and today on the podcast i want to talk about something that i'm experiencing actively at the moment as i recently hired a new employee and have been going through the training process primarily remotely which has been quite challenging why do small businesses need to hire the catalyst to hire is often that things are simply not happening fast enough you're aware that you are causing a massive backlog there's so much backlog of things building up the to-do list is huge things are starting to get completely out of control and then you go yep i need to get somebody on board unfortunately what a lot of us do is we leave it later than we probably should have so if this relates to you then yeah that's basically where i was too so i finally bit the bullet and i went to hire someone right before the covert lockdown and then we thought okay she'll start after the two-week lockdown and then of course the two-week lockdown became a lot more than two weeks so we ended up having to go you know what i need you let's start you remotely which was not ideal but we did it we're surviving we're getting through i had held off hiring previous to that though because i knew i was the problem i knew that everything that was about the business was stuck in my head because i've created everything from scratch i am the business i am the knowledge i have created everything i am a massive key person risk so how do we resolve that going forward in a growing small business you will have a number of pain point periods and i can tell you now no fairy godmother can wave their wand and get you through these easily they are going to be painful there's going to be many hard yards required and you need to persevere it's definitely going to be a case of short-term pain for long-term gain there are multiple periods of these growth which really make you suffer in small business the first one is that initial higher the initial higher is tough particularly when you have done a bootstrap startup where you've you know invested your time and energy and you've created everything pretty much from scratch because typically everything has come from your head you haven't actually got anything documented nothing's out you're not necessarily using systems yet you are really doing a lot of workarounds and one of the other key things is you probably started your business in part because you liked the idea of the fact that you were in control you weren't reporting to anybody when you hire somebody you are definitely going to have to give up some of that control the second time when you hit a pain point is when you decide to hire a key person so this is another doer so say for instance you're a psychologist and you hire another psychologist then you fill up the books for both of you and then that person leaves yup that hurts right because you've filled up the books for both those people you're now going to be letting people down so that's a really big pain point is taking that risk of that new person so obviously we need to try and mitigate our risks as much as we can but honestly sometimes we just have to bite that bullet we have to take that person on board otherwise we're never going to grow the next one is when your team is small say under five people but each person plays a very vital part in the business so by one person not being there nothing else works as smoothly it might work for a few days like you can cover them while they're on leave but they certainly if they just up and leave they're leaving a massive hole in the business another one can be where you have a few key people in the business you might have a bigger workforce you might have 20 people you may have 50 people but if your top two or three key people went you would really suffer or you do shift work and your people that do night shift leave and suddenly you've got no night shift workers that can be a real problem so before you're going to go out and hire or outsource anybody i strongly recommend doing what we suggested in episode 7 of faq business podcast and that was doing a business review and time log so what tasks you need to be doing i am going to go over the time log in a tea time tip so you can see more visually what's going on so if you're not sure from listening to the podcast exactly what i mean by the time log and how it works please look at the tea time tip when it comes up in the next week or so the cost of hiring someone you know i was talking whether this was going to be a help or a hindrance hiring someone the initial cost outlay for hiring someone is quite substantial and there is more things than maybe you first might think of so definitely you've got to remember short-term pain long-term gain because if you don't remember that you're going to struggle there is going to be the cost to train and build your team okay so there's a physical time that you're going to spend two of you sitting there training and neither of you are earning money neither of you are actually doing anything that's particularly productive other than getting that poor person up to speed that could be whether you have a subcontractor or you hire an employee because they still will both need training potentially contractor may need less because you could hire someone with specific skills that you need so for instance if you needed someone with canvas skills hire a contractor a virtual assistant with canvas skills then you don't have to worry about upskilling a new employee there could be costs involved like providing software and equipment uniforms or a car insurance super workers compensation all that type of stuff if you're hiring an employee if you're hiring a contractor a lot of that might go away and that can be quite a big outlay that could be even without the car side of it it could be ten thousand dollars that you're outlaying on those type of things so do consider that there is a cost here and do budget for this employee and like i said they're not necessarily helping you in the short term earn more money and in fact you might actually have a bit of an opportunity cost as i've faced i had to make less hours available for me to service my paying clients so that i could take some time out to do some things so that my employee had things to do so it ends up with this kind of cycle when you're starting out of if you don't do that she can't work and it's very frustrating the other thing to remember is that the new person can take a lot longer to do things than you will some things they will never do as quick as you some they'll do quicker but for instance one of the tasks that i get my assistant to do she's taking at the moment about five times longer to do it than i would take to do the same task the thing is this particular task is transcribing so the software does the large part of the transcription she's just got to then check it and manipulate it and things the trouble is when i do it i know what i said i know what i intended to say which sometimes isn't the same thing and i can therefore go through and do that task really quickly whereas for her she's going to hear something because i'm talking too fast and she's going to go what did she say or what did she mean because clearly i've used the wrong word or whatever so she might replay that piece 15 times over trying to get what i'm trying to say now for a start you need to communicate that and go okay don't worry about being so perfect about stuff like that or alternatively if you don't get it on the first two takes then just highlight it and tell me to check it because i'm gonna be able to check it in a take or two not 15 takes later so a lot of it is about communicating a lot of it is understanding that your employee needs to know that they don't need to be perfect progression not perfection is always our motto i'm not going to talk too much today about whether you should hire a contractor or an employee because this is a whole mess of can of worms and a whole separate issue which i will discuss at another time but i do mention some parts of it today as it is essential when you consider whether to outsource or to hire there are a lot of legal ramifications of how you hire somebody so please make sure you check out for your jurisdiction what will apply particularly where you're hiring a sole trader or a sole proprietor because for instance in australia a sole trader the legal entity you're hiring is the individual person therefore it's more likely that the individual person is more likely to be considered an employee relationship or a deemed employee rather than a contractor so even if you have a contractor agreement it says quite clearly you are not an employee blah blah blah the ato and that honestly they don't care they will overrule it if they think you've done the wrong thing so obviously we're not talking about sham contracting here we would never ever advocate anything of the sort but what we're talking about here is where you legitimately think you've set up a contractor relationship but it really isn't the ato and that just don't consider it to be the case so you need to look at things like how you're paying the person whether or not they can subcontract to others because that's one of the keys a genuine contractor can subcontract to someone else do they provide the equipment or do you provide it if they make a mistake who fixes it you or them do they provide the insurance so if they damage something are they the one covering the cost or are you and that gets a bit gray the other one that gets a bit gray is if they have a workplace injury because a sole trader in australia does not have workers compensation director employee may have compensation depending on the state and that causes a huge bunch of ramifications so if you are in australia then fair work your work is compensation in your state icare in new south wales and the ato the australian taxation office are all very interested in who you are hiring and how so like i said please check out for your jurisdiction what applies to you one thing i will just let you know is a lot of people talk about the 80 20 rule the 80 20 rule is nothing to do with contracting and deemed employees it's just not there is a personal services income test which uses 80 but a lot of people are confused so if you look at the ato they do have a deemed employee versus contractor tool i suggest going through that because you may be quite shocked as to who is deemed to be an employee another way to look at it as well is whether this is going to be a short-term requirement that you have or is it a long-term need if it is a specialist task as well maybe you're just going to hire someone to do a specialist task and you really wouldn't have the capacity to hire them for anything more than that for instance a bookkeeper so hiring a bookkeeper on a contract to provide bookkeeping services of say five hours a month you know you're unlikely to need that person on board as an employee as the business grows the bookkeeping need will grow a little bit but will it really ever grow to the need to actually have an employee on board ultimately i wanted an employee because i wanted someone to help me grow my business because i intend to have multiple employees and grow much bigger into the future so remember also it is not about whether the person is a contractor or a full-time employee which seems to be people's misconception there is so many employee options between contractor and full-time employee for instance my assistant is currently a casual worker and not only is she casual but she's casual with a thing called an ifa an individual flexibility agreement and this is an agreement we've agreed between ourselves because it works for both of us so what that means is i basically split her timesheet into two if she does set hours on a set day at a set time like for instance we have a training at 10 o'clock on a thursday then she gets paid for whatever her pay rate is for 10 o'clock on a thursday so if the award stipulates that she must be paid penalty rates on a sunday or whatever and she has to work on a sunday because we're doing an expo then she will get paid sunday rates however if i put this podcast up on a saturday and ask her to do the transcription by monday at 5 00 pm she's got time on monday to do the transcription time in normal business hours however should she choose to she might prefer to do that on sunday she might prefer to do that at midnight that might be her preference and that's cool because that means i don't have to pay her sunday rates or midnight raids because she chose to work then so it's actually a really good option and it gives a lot of flexibility so i do seriously think you should consider a casual workout with an ifa if that works for you particularly if they are working remotely when you are hiring an employee i am going to be running some courses on my online school about this topic so please check those out procedures and instructions so important how is a person going to do anything for you if they don't know what to do and how to do it many years ago when i first started in corporate i remember the huge lumpy procedures manuals and you would flick through the procedures manual for instance because the photocopier broke down and you'd go to the page about photocopiers and it would say open the front door you know do this and you're going what do you mean by the front door there were three doors that could have been considered to be the front door and it was always guesswork whereas now we've got the benefit that we can record our instructions not just in writing not just in things like flow charts but also through things like audio we can audio to text we can use videos and we can use screencasting so all of those tools are really helpful and means that we can get the procedures manuals created a lot quicker but also a lot more effectively also what you can do is you can show part of the process to your employee and sometimes what i've done is just pre-recorded some of the tasks where i can just basically go through a screencast of the software i'm using now some of those when i record them cleanly i actually also chuck up on my youtube channel as a public video so then you get the benefit of some of the training that i'm giving my employees as well so check out our youtube channel with teaching them with procedures and instructions i do suggest provide them with some instruction so prepare something provide something so it might be as i said do a video record as you're live training them the video it could be to create a checklist to create a trello board whatever it is you do something to help document the process but what you can do is get that employee or that contractor to fill in those gaps so they effectively create something that suits their style for instance they may make a checklist from the video they may make a flow chart or they may make a trello board and all i've given them is that video to start with now that's great for the future because if they then leave somebody else takes over their work whatever then you have got some instruction for them to follow some hiring warning sign tips and tricks the first thing is if they haven't worked for a small business before make sure they understand the difference between working for a corporate and working for a small business not turning up to a shift at mackers not turning up to a shift at the grocery store packing shelves isn't such a big deal because they have a large workforce and now a lot of them use things like facebook groups so they simply put up on the facebook group hey guys we need one of you to come in if you can today between twelve and four and if someone's available they can put up this hand and say yeah i'll work that shift so a lot of that can be covered when we're working in small business we do not have that luxury there is no cover typically so if there is no cover then they need to understand the ramifications when they don't turn up they are causing you hardship and they need to understand that and that's why if they are not turning up for no legitimate reasons obviously if they don't turn up because they're sick or whatever that's fine but if they are you know every monday they're sick and they happen to have rugby league party thing on a sunday you might start questioning it right complex things to look at when we're doing things like behavioral event interviewing so we're trying to find out is the person going to be a good fit for us don't hire a mate or someone that you know without following the process that you would normally okay don't skip steps because this person seems great i'm going to give them a chance if you do that it's more than likely things are going to go sour so please make sure you still follow your process also try and have a plan b in place for instance at a minimum have things like job descriptions and ads ready to go in case you need to re-hire someone for that position pretty quickly just leaving it till after they've left is really not a great place to be management and leadership is really important when you're hiring people and even when you are outsourcing to people have you actually been a manager or leader before a lot of people have been dumped into management roles because they were good at what they did or because they started a business they thought it was going to be just for them it was just going to be really an income replacer and instead they've gone actually there's a lot of demand i'm going to grow the business so you may be what we call an accidental leader modern leadership is very different the dictatorial leadership of old things have definitely changed i've made it a habit to ask over the years during the interview process what's the best way to manage you to get the best out of you it's a really common question i ask when i'm interviewing and the reason for that is because i hate for instance to be micromanaged but somebody else may need a lot of attention during the day so it's almost like micromanaging because they feel that they're being ignored and not valued if you're not constantly in their face so you need to work that out you need to know what type of person are they are they the type of person that just wants to be given high level tasks and then off to complete them or are they a person that would rather be given a bit more detail so that they do the best job they can and they don't face you changing everything because you don't like the way they did it speaking of which you have to let go of control you may have gone into small business so you could avoid being bossed around but now you're going to have to relinquish some of that control and let this employee make some mistakes maybe not be a hundred percent perfect and you've gotta be okay with that otherwise you just simply won't progress i also highly recommend that you get an hbdi profile a hermit brain dominance instrument profile completed on you and your new and higher not as part of the hiring process but afterwards at faq business training faq business consulting we offer these and we have done so on ourselves as well this allows us to know the thinking preferences of both cheryl and myself so i know for instance that she needs sequential sequential is a strong thing for her whereas i am not sequential at all i'm very much ideas scattered approach so what i need to do before i give her tasks is i need to slow it down a bit i need to stop i need to be more detailed and definitely sequential which is not my go-to but if i don't do that for her she will potentially struggle with my instructions even though i think they're clear enough but we need to do this because otherwise i'm going to get frustrated at her and she's going to get frustrated at me and she's a great worker why would i want that to happen so we need to make sure we understand each person's way of thinking and we adapt where we can the upside of us thinking differently is that we are basically a square when it comes to the whole brain thinking approach so that is a good thing but we do think differently working remotely because of covert a lot of things have gone remote and it's also highlighted a lot of people actually don't want to commute anymore they want to stay local and that's why some of the local areas the out of sydney suburb areas for instance have skyrocketed in price because a lot of people want to have more space to be living and working from their homes admin and support related roles are often remote and that's why obviously we hear the term of virtual assistant and virtual assistants are definitely an option and these are typically contractors but do make sure you are checking whether or not they're a contractor or an employee and whether it's right for you personally i like the idea of a mixture of in-person and remote particularly for training we did some training recently in person and it was so much easier to allow that time to try out i worked in macas through uni and things and i was a crew trainer and shift assistant manager all that stuff and we had a training method which was prepare present try out and follow up and i find i still operate this to this day but i find when you're training online that the tryout phase tends to get condensed now in some cases we had it condensed because she wasn't able to share her screen so it became a little bit harder to try out so she was telling me what to do on my screen but it would have been easier to see what she would have done had she had the reins fully at her end so it was a little bit tricky at times i like the fact we've been able to do the recent training in person which has given me more ability to give her time to try out so i've showed her how to do it once then she's had a go at doing it she's tried it out but with me explaining things then trying it out again largely doing it by herself and then trying it again and making sure that she can do it so that is a good approach and the problem with remote is often we don't allow that try out time so my recommendation for more complex tasks is to take that time to do that proper try out process because otherwise what's going to happen is they're probably going to establish a bad habit because they're off trying out and doing it without you being there and it's just not going to work so be careful with that the next thing when you're hiring and outsourcing is to understand the task allocations between you and your hires so do make sure you get a system and you stick with it so whether that's a system like a service mate or workflow max for the tradies sector or whether it's something like trello which is more your project management task management type system really stick with it do not fall into the trap of using email text or messenger because it's very easy for everything to get mixed up and for you not to know which task you're talking about by using trello and i use the paid version we have a sheryl to do board we have cards within that or list within that that have the instructions that have the meeting times then have some templates for some of the tasks that we repeat and then we've actually got a waiting on jane so when she's done something she needs me she can put that into my list now you don't have to do that and some people would say that's not a great way to do it but what i've found is that the allocating tasks to people in the checklist doesn't work as effectively as it should which is very frustrating you might be amazed but to get one of these podcasts from the end of this recording to it being up and running online takes about 20 different steps granted we're not just doing a podcast it's a podcast a video and a blog so it is definitely more complicated there is 20 steps and the thing is with these 20 steps we are almost tag teaming our way through it so i do the first part the video edit i then upload that to the transcription software where cheryl will jump in and do the completion of the transcription she downloads that transcription document i then go in and add headings she then puts that onto the blog then i have to check the blog and publish it so there's a lot of processes that go where i need sequential steps completed another issue though is ideally when i started the podcast i really wanted to have three or four in the can before i started and things just didn't work out that way as they do but i really wanted to start in september the whole spring into life kind of thing and for me to be able to do that it meant i actually had to start the podcast without any in the can which means that we're running up against deadlines every single week so not ideal so if you are going to start a podcast definitely get ahead of the game because you will struggle otherwise now sometimes with the trello boards we do allocate things to people within the boards but sometimes we've found it doesn't work as effectively as it could do but we do find when we use the at and name the person that it does work well and those messages definitely go through to the other person if you are not sure though you could always send a little text and just say hey it's up on trello but make sure that the actual work and things is in the trello board so it's really clear what they need to do next our trello boards connect to our shared google drive which makes our life a lot easier we can connect to folders or we can connect to files so i can go hey it's up in the transcript file go for your life or whatever so that makes our life a lot easier but what i want to communicate here the biggest issue the biggest problem with working with the assistant for me is me i am the massive bottleneck so some weeks i have only had to pay her seven hours when i could easily have given her 30 hours worth of work because i simply couldn't get stuff to her quick enough to do so bear that in mind you are potentially going to be the bottleneck is there any way that you can stop that being the case one thing i do recommend is the repetitive task thing don't give them something which is a one-off because it's a waste of your time and theirs give them something that you can train them they can try it out then they can keep going and doing it ongoing so please make sure you think about giving people tasks that they're going to be able to repeat lots much more efficient for you to do it that way giving feedback to your staff members and even to outsource people is really important you don't want to just fire someone because they don't know what they're doing when they didn't even know there was a problem if they are doing the wrong thing you need to let them know make sure you let them know the good they're doing nobody wants to be you know the brunt of abuse all the time so always let them know they're good as well as they're bad don't be too nice though don't avoid saying something to avoid conflict it will backfire if it's not the right fit if they just don't work for you then don't drag it out you're hindering their chance to get their next job risking customers in your business so please don't keep someone on board that is not the right fit conversely if they're an amazing fit let them know about growth prospects let them know where this could lead to in the future treat them really nice because then they won't want to leave you there's been a bit of a side benefit from hiring my first employee and i find now that i do my pay every week whereas before yeah i just kind of pay myself intermittently when i go oh i need some money to pay a bill so i would pay myself at that point so it's been a bit of a side benefit the obvious benefits though are that things are actually getting progressed honestly there was no way i could do this podcast without an assistant on board it's just too much to do i have also started getting out the emails which are also connected everything's kind of interconnected the online school is being readied for launch and the black friday sales all of that stuff is taking place and that just wouldn't have happened if i didn't have her on board so i'm eternally grateful to have her on board before we finish up with a productivity hack i just want to go through a bit of an actionable education summary of what to do if you need to hire an employee or a contractor you'll be able to take our course on hiring in person and you'll get much more details and handouts with that so keep an eye out but in the meantime you can either take some notes or grab this from our blog do the time log exercise we mentioned in last week's podcast in episode 7 and we'll also mention it in more detail with some live examples in the next tea time tip focus on identifying what tasks are repetitive they're the best ones to offload outsource or delegate what person or people do you need so is it one person that can do all the tasks or do you need to have three different people going to work part time for you wouldn't an employee or a contractor be the right fit including the legal ramifications and the budget for it remember you are going to be the bottleneck i can assure you of that how can you minimize that impact do you need to streamline or fix any processes before you bring that person in do you need to start recording these things before they come in or can you live train them and keep that recording and then they create checklists and flow charts from that how are you going to manage your task how are you going to allocate them out and where are you going to do that allocation so as a reminder i use trello think about the feedback process how you're going to communicate feedback how you're going to talk about their performance both good and bad and make sure you've considered things like growth opportunities personal and professional development so that this person is going to be someone that grows with you and your business we like to finish up with a productivity hack or a tech tool that we love today is kind of both and we use trello trello allows us to create process templates that we can copy across every time we repeat the task so for instance for the podcast like i said there was about 20 steps to do the podcast so that is all in one template we copy that template across and go right podcast eight recorded episode tick you know edited episode dick transcribe completed and then we just put all the tasks in like that you can allocate the tasks to different people you can share a board with a customer which can be very useful so you can be an agreement with people as to what's going on there's a lot of things you can do with trello you can connect it to things like google drive which we have done so there's a lot of great things here i really recommend trialing a system like trello to make your life better but particularly when you have got a new employee or a contractor so in summary is it a help or a hindrance to hire someone there is no fairy godmother there is no magic wand that's going to be waived there's hard slog whether you hire that employee or that contractor remember you're likely to be the bottleneck and the problem be prepared to work through it and hopefully you'll come out the other side happy wealthy and wise thank you for listening to today's episode of the faq business podcast available on all good podcast services you can subscribe today via u or faqbusinesspodcast.com on apple itunes ihop radio or spotify subscribe follow share and we're able review our podcast or leave us a comment on either youtube or our blog page thanks for helping us to help you the small to medium businesses who are growing and want to make a difference look forward to connecting with you again on the next episode of the faq business podcast [Music]

2021-11-24 17:25

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