When Is It Time to Pay for Help? – Sophia Dagnon – MicroConf Growth 2019

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0:15when it's time to hire for help and I'm actually going to talk about this from a Cana service providers perspective because I've been hired by a lot of businesses way too early in the process where there wasn't actually that much I could do for help and investing in my help wasn't really the smartest thing for them to do and when I've been brought on a bit too late in the process and that wasn't great either Oh so kind of as small business owners you're used to doing so much of stuff by yourself I mean you get pretty good at being pretty self-sufficient and it's hard to know when it's time to bring

0:54somebody on and it is usually about a time when you know you're getting really tired you haven't slept properly in about five six months coffees not really working for you anymore you're just like hey I need somebody to help me with us but do things to do and to think about before paying someone is you really need a clear idea of what it is your business actually needs that you don't have the expertise the time nor the energy to really provide for it and then you actually need to be willing to let somebody in for help and I don't know about you guys but that's something I

1:31find ridiculously difficult it's right it's actually like letting somebody in and explaining all my business does and letting them really help me so maybe you're thinking hey like I'm ready now and this is a fantasy picture so I found a lot of people I speak to myself included you know you have this dream that at some point you're going to retire on an island in Headey or somewhere or in a cabin in the woods and your business will be running smoothly everything would just be self-sufficient and grating you're like okay like I'm ready I'm ready to make this dream happen I'm going to build this massive

2:05team and everything is just going to be fantastic but that's probably not actually the best time to bring people in and these are some terrible reasons to hire help so everyone else is doing it I mean it's hard when you look and a lot of people are building companies at different speeds and you're like hey like these guys start at the same time I did but they have already done like all these other things like shouldn't I also be doing those things and then you have like somebody you really admire so a mentor who's like hey you know what you ship instead of doing like you should probably bring in and it

2:42yeah an SEO person or a conversion copywriter or somebody to help you that's also not a good time to bring someone in or it's the industry standard which kind of covers the everybody else is doing a thing or you're just naked and things are really hard and help sounds good right about now cool but what you really need three things and so for this I'm actually going to tell you a couple stories from my own personal experience and the first thing what you kind of do need to hire someone is money but while yet you need money to pay them that's not the only thing that you

3:22really need for because when you invest money in something it means that you're not investing in something else and so you got to think about like great I'm bringing in this person and they're helping me do this one thing but is this really the best way so for example there was this ed tech company and they had a fantastic piece of software they just raised their first series a so they have money to spend know like you know what content marketing that's the thing everybody is doing that's the thing we should do we have money we should air we should write really great educational content that our customers love but you

3:59know sounds really sensible like why wouldn't you do that but the content they want it right was really high level stuff so we basically did like the HBR style articles for EdTech but one of the content was great it wasn't really solving the bottom-line problems it wasn't really helping the company bring any money in it wasn't serving problems that the customers were asking because they were still in development they hadn't really figured out their pricing yet so the pricing structure was a bit weird they wanted at first they thought they were going to go for enterprise clients then they thought they were going to go for small business

4:36clients and solopreneurs and so everything was just really unclear so we were creating this great content but it really wasn't doing anything for them and then the other thing is nobody had actually planned the money for content marketing so yeah I mean you put these great things out there but unless somebody's promoting them like it's not doing anything for you so by the time they raise the second round of investment the new investors came in and they were like guys we're cutting this content thing out like look it's not doing anything and this really got me thinking they spend his money investing in content and it didn't bring any ROI

5:16what would have happened if they'd actually thought about what would really help the business bottom line cool so the next thing is you also need a good plan before you bring somebody in and so this is another story from an entrepreneur this time so he was a course creator he made a lot of really awesome YouTube videos and by the time was tired working together he'd been running profitably for like five six years and he had a small team he had a designer you know or use your stuff and she really just wanted to let somebody else do the copy side and at the beginning when we first started working

5:55together we had this really detailed development plan like this is exactly what we're going to do we're going to make these ebooks in these courses and these things and then two months and he was like you know what we spent Otis were doing that but now I want to do something else so we make a new plan and we start doing these other things about three months after that it's like you know what now I changed my mind again I think we should now do this other thing and so because he'd basically gone in with that I have this pain and I won't sew it and a writer would help me solve

6:28it but he hadn't really thought about what the business would look like long term he just ended up throwing money at things they weren't working and we're really frustrating and so you really need a direction you need a map of somewhere of where you want your business to go and the third thing you kind of need is time and that's time to just invest sitting with the person like what does a contractor or full-time employee like whatever the relationship with the person you want hire as you need the time just spend with them to onboard them properly and to just be there for when things go wrong at the beginning

7:06because in any relationship like no matter how much you get on no matter how good they are their job and how awesome you are there's gotta be issues you need to be there to help them solve it okay but Sir this was all a bit vague and other people's stories how did you figure out when it's a time for you to hire for your own business and so this is a simple three-step process cool so the first one is figuring out what you really need to grow your business and this sounds deceptively simple it's like well yes so if you like of course we've thought about this but it's about

7:45culling oh those hundreds of ideas that you've got in a sauna in Trello on your phone in notebooks and really like ruthlessly prioritizing the one or at most two things they're going to really help you bottom line and you need to know what they are and you need to know how that person did you hire is going to help you get them okay so this one actually comes from this question gets used a lot in interviews and I was in conversion it gets used a lot in a customer interviews and in surveys and that's basically picturing the outcome you want so what would it look like in

8:24three months after you made that hire like how would you business be different what will be the same like where would you be am I getting that really clear picture you kind of know where you're going and Wow like I used to think that those questions are really vague and the visualization is just like that's like a rule thing that like random people do hey that's not for me but it does give you that really really crystal clear idea of what success looks like and once you know that oh then you know how to get there oh maybe we get to slide three at some but I figure how this works I'm pressing

9:00the home button there we go so the third one is you need to find somebody that you can trust and this is particularly important for small businesses in big companies you can kind of afford to just work with a lot of different people you can afford to make a lot of errors that you can't really afford when your budgets in your bottom line I kind of you know strapped and so you need to find somebody who's going to be invested in you who is going to be invested in your business and that you can work well together with because Wow yeah it sounds a bit soft you really when you're

9:37building something you want to build it with people that you like and people that you trust and be what does you actually get on with and so like personally I think if you're going to build something amazing then that's probably the most important one to focus on and go that that is me if you guys have any questions thoughts you can hit me up after this thank you [Music] you