How To Hire Without Ruining Your Brand
How To Hire Without Ruining Your Brand
When I ask my clients about the parts of their business they can let go of so that they can focus more on sales, one of the biggest fears I hear is that they’ll lose brand authenticity if they give these responsibilities to someone else.
When you give customer-facing responsibilities to someone else, it’s easy to be fearful of someone burning the whole thing to the ground through mediocre content, unaccommodating customer service, and a voice that doesn’t sound like your brand.
Here’s the thing though, if you’re in pursuit of scaling your business, something has to give. You have to let go of something in order to make more time for the actions that are going to grow your numbers.
I’ve been in this same headspace too, where I know that I have to let go of the reins, but I don’t want to until I know that the person I’m giving my tasks to has got it nailed down.
Today, I have about 9 people I work with that I export my business’s daily needs to. They’re much better at their respective tasks than when I was trying to do it all myself.
Here’s how I made the jump from chronic doing-it-all to letting go of the reins.
Spend 2 Months Doing It
Before hiring anyone to run anything in your business, do it for 2 months yourself. I find that it’s extremely important to spend these 2 months to:
Develop your voice and perspective.
Niche down and find the micro-jobs.
Gain perspective on the difference between good work vs. bad work.
1. Develop Your Voice And Perspective
Let’s say that you want to export managing your Instagram account to someone else.
If you spend 2 months creating content, engaging with followers, and increasing your audience — you have discoveries about what your followers like and don’t like content-wise, who your target audience is, how you can differentiate yourself from your competitors, and what your brand’s voice is.
When you give these responsibilities to someone else from the get-go, you give them the power to dictate your brand’s voice and unique perspective for you.
What I love about this 2-month method is that you develop a very clear description of your brand’s voice, perspective, and content style, and you also develop 2 months of content that your hire can use as a reference when completing future tasks for you.
This foundation prevents miscommunication and provides clear ground rules for anyone you pass the torch to.
2. Niche Down And Find The Micro-Jobs
These 2 months are also going to help you figure out what you actually need help with.
If you take the time to get very clear about what you can give to someone else and what you truly need to do yourself, you may realize that you actually don’t need a full-blown Instagram Manager, but that you actually need an Instagram Audience Manager who’s responsible for growing your audience and connecting you with your target audience.
You may realize that your secret sauce is your ability to create engaging content and stories and that no one else can do it. This realization becomes much more manageable however, when you are able to slice out that very specific task for yourself, and give the remaining slices of the pie to other people. Someone else can grow your audience for you, post the content for you, create your images for you, and all you need to focus on is storytelling.
What’s great about the 2-month method is that you gain an awareness of all these micro-jobs of the major to-dos for your business, which empowers you to hire smart and increase the ROI of your hires.
When you get super niche about the specialties and expertise you’re looking for, you add an extra boost to the areas that you know are weak spots for you. A targeted strategy like this bears the most fruit for small businesses.
With platforms like Upwork, finding specialists around the world for micro-jobs is incredibly easy and manageable for any budget.
3. Good Work Vs. Bad Work
When you actually do the work for 2 months, you gain a clear perspective on what good work vs. bad work looks like.
I see too many entrepreneurs hire people without understanding the work they’re hiring for, and then waste their money on a hire that does not produce reasonable results. They don’t have the existing knowledge to realize that their hire is producing mediocre, money-wasting work.
Don’t be played for a fool — do the work for 2 months, see what kind of traction you’re able to get with your own devices, and then once you know what your pain points are, hire the person who knows exactly how to problem-solve through that issue.
If you gain a lot of traction using your own methods, that means you’ll have a formula to share with your new hire as well — amazing!
Having this knowledge allows you to fire quickly when someone is clearly not a right fit, rather than second-guessing if your expectations are unreasonable. It also gives you perspective on what “reasonable” results look like from a new hire, and what you can hold your hire accountable to.
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