Listen to learn how you can grow from solopreneur to running a large scale business! With a Doris!
"Back in the old days, when you had an office and hired people and they'd come into the office, and you'd get stuck or realise at some point, this isn't what you want to be doing with your time. And you'd look over and you see Doris, sitting at her desk working away. And you'd remember, "hey, there's Doris. She works for me." - Katie McManus, Brave Business Coaching
In this episode, I'm addressing a question from a former client about the challenges of moving from a solopreneur role to managing a large scale business.
Watch a promo video for the episode that's going to help you transition from solopreneur to manager of a large scale business!
Hiring and Managing a Team: Moving from Solopreneur to Large Scale Business
Are you ready to grow your business and take on a full team that's dedicated and committed to helping you realize the potential of living your full glorious you?
In this episode, I'll be sharing my tips on how to make the transition from solopreneur to managing a large scale business.
From outsourcing tasks to setting expectations for your team, learn how to build a strong and efficient team that will take your business to the next level!
Accessibility: click to read a written-to-be-read transcript of the episode
Emotional and Internal Management: Letting Go of Perfection when Building a Team
Managing a team can be challenging, especially when it comes to letting go of the expectation that you have to do everything perfectly.
In this episode, I'll be delving into the emotional and internal management that is required when hiring a VA or online business manager (OBM).
Remember, their job is to come in and optimize your business.
I'll be talking you through how you can let go and help them to help you.
This episode that's all about ADHD and growing a large scale business, covers:
- How to get yourself into a position where you can have your own Doris.
- What are the tasks that you hate doing?
- Explain what matters most?
- The old days
- Avoiding hoarding the boring tasks
Psst!! Have you registered to participate in my "37 Weenie Challenge" yet?
Get hold of the downloads and guides as well as booking yourself into the 37 Weenie accountability club by clicking here.
Who will get the most out of this episode all about ADHD and moving from a solopreneur to managing a full scale business
This episode is likely to be most beneficial for solopreneurs looking to expand their business from a solopreneurship to a full scale business.
In addition, the episode also covers the importance of having an internal and emotionally intelligent management style when hiring a VA or an OBM.
Useful links
The 37 Weenie challenge registration page
That glorious Sally Field clip that we used in the episode
About Katie McManus
Katie McManus was trained in Executive Business Coaching and Leadership Development at the Co-Active Training Institute in San Rafael, California.
She's a CPCC (Certified Professional Co-Active Coach) and an ACC (Associate Certified Coach) with the International Coaching Federation.
ADHD and the challenge of moving from a solopreneur to managing a large scale business (Transcript)
In this episode, I'm going to talk you through how you can get yourself into a position where you can have your very own Doris…
One of my favourite things about running this podcast is that I got DMs and text messages and emails from listeners, who asked me specifically for new content. And so I just want to throw it out there, if there's content that you want me to create, if there's struggles that you have, in your business as an ADHD - preneur, please message them to me, I want to know what you want to hear that I can have an easier job coming up with ideas of what to talk about on this podcast.
So one of the messages that I got is from an amazing listener, who's also a former client of mine, I won't name him. But he said, I know you did an episode about building a team... which is a great episode, if I do say so myself... it's episode four, if you want to go check it out.
But he wanted me to focus specifically on the challenge of moving from a solopreneur, to managing a large scale business. And to talk a little bit about the challenge of managing a remote team. Because when they're not in the same room, you sometimes forget that they exist, starting out as a solopreneur, trying to do more of the stuff you love. And that helps your business grow. You don't always have someone you can hand work over to yet. So already working as a solopreneur as an ADHD person is challenging, because you have ADHD. And your brain really only lets you get into hyper focus on the things that you enjoy doing. Which is probably why you started this business in the first place. I know for myself, I tended to jump jobs every year or so. Not because I mean, sometimes the job was awful, but not because the job was awful always. But usually just because I got bored of the conversations I was having, which is really hard when you're in sales, because you have to be really excited about what it is that you're selling all the time that boredom leaks through, and you stopped being as good at your job, when you get bored of talking about the service or the product that you're selling. Anyway, this is why we have a lot of ADHD - preneurs in the world. Because we need to be super interested and invested in what we're doing every day, or else we stop doing it.
So when you're running your own business, you usually find really creative ways to be lazy about the stuff that you don't want to do. And by lazy, I mean, you find really smart ways to hack them. So you don't have to spend all your time doing them. And we find ways to maximise our availability for the stuff that we love. Now, there comes a point in your business, hopefully, where your business gets too big. And you start maxing out the amount of time you can spend on the stuff that you love. And also the tasks that you hate doing. They start growing as well. And this is where you have to start thinking about hiring someone. The advice that I give to my clients, when they're at that point where they need to start scaling their team is what are the actions that you do that generate income for your business.
There's a really unique thing that happens for ADHD - preneurs, is that because you hate doing them, and because you found these weird workaround hacks to like kind of fake your way through them, you're really bad at training on them.
You're really bad because you never learned how to do them. Well, you never learned the correct way to set up the system that is scalable for your business, you just figured out the shortest, easiest way for you to bypass it. Now, this could be your accounting, this could also be managing your calendar. This could also be any other growth, boring tasks that you didn't want to do when you were starting your business. It's really hard when you hire someone who will be focusing 100% on doing that thing to say okay, cool. Here's the process for doing this. Because let's be honest, you're probably a little embarrassed about your process for doing this. Because your process for doing this kind of sucks.
So there's this internal management that you have to do this emotional management of letting go of them seeing you is perfect at this. Okay because you're if you're hiring a VA or you're hiring an online business manager, it's their job to come in and see what's not going great in your business and fix it and make it optimal. They are the expert at that. You do not have to be and there are not going to judge you for how you did this. They see this all the time, I want you to take a big deep belly breath. And I want you to let go of that expectation that you had to do this perfectly.
You can use me and your argument against yourself, I give you full permission.
Okay, so here's what you're going to do when you hire someone.
You're going to create a list of everything that you do not want to do anymore.
You're then going to ask them if they have any previous experience that will show them how to do this better than how you've done this. Usually they will.
You're then going to explain without any shame without any self flagellation without calling yourself an idiot, a moron or a lazy person. How you've done this up until now, you're going to explain what matters to you most. So for instance, if you have a process of getting back to inquiries for people who want to work with you, that you're going to outsource explain what matters most to you, does time matter? Does getting back to them as soon as possible matter more than anything else. Does getting back to them with perfect grammar and spelling matters more than anything else. What kind of experience do you want your clients and potential clients to have on the other side of this?
in a way that will make your life easier. You just have to trust them and let them do their work. The other part of this is you have to be willing for them to stop. Because they are they're just starting working in your business. They don't know everything yet. Chances are unless you have a long standing relationship with this person. They also don't know you very well yet. This is going to be a multi month process. And what skill that you need to work on that I work with my clients a lot on. Wait, that grammar sucked.
You have to be willing to let them because they're going to they're going to do a project and they're going to present it to you and you're going to look at it and you're gonna think oh my god, this is so wrong. This is not what I wanted. All. This went off the map here, here, here and here. And this is the skill that you have to get get really good at if you want to successfully grow and scale this business with multiple employees, giving feedback, telling someone, what they did well, and what they need to do better at, and what would make it perfect in your eyes.
This is one of the skills that I honestly spend months and months if not years, working on with my one on one clients. Yes, it is one of the hardest things to do is to turn to another human being who you are paying to do a job and tell them that they screwed up the job that you assign them nicely, that they feel motivated to fix it and feel supported by you and want to stay working for you. And also managing yourself that you don't throw the baby out with the bathwater.
But often, the problem lies my dear friend with you and your leadership abilities. And just because you don't have the leadership skills right now, whatever. Just because you don't have the leadership abilities right now does not mean that you can't attain them. This is one of the things that I do with all my clients, if they're growing a team, and even if they're not growing a team, because let's be real, having clients, you have to have some leadership abilities when you're working with them. If you need to work on your leadership skills, get help. Don't just sit and flounder and suffer and hire people and fire people and feel like you suck. That's not nice, not nice to you is not nice to the people that you hire, it's not nice to your clients who are going to feel all the turbulence coming their way, even if you try to hide it from them. It's also not nice to your loved ones are going to have to hear you bitch and moan about how everything's going wrong. They're gonna get sick and tired of hearing about it. Don't do that to yourself.
Okay, so you are a solopreneur you're growing your large scale business, and you're hiring employees and support staff to come in and make your life easier and help your business make more money.
Now, we are also living in a time where this doesn't all have to happen in person. And let me share something with you. I've only met one of the people of the freelancers who works in my business in person in my entire life. I haven't met Neal, my producer of my podcast, I have never met Rhi, my OBM and fractional CEO. I've never met anyone that's on her team. OBM stands for on line business manager, okay.
It's basically a virtual assistant on steroids. A fractional COO Chief Operating Officer, their job is not just to come in and manage all of the normal stuff that a VA does. They're literally looking at the operations of how your business functions. And they're setting up standard operating procedures. And they're also streamlining all of your technology to work together better. And to be more simple for you. Their job is to basically set up all of the background junk that will help you scale this business to the next level. And I typically recommend if you're a solopreneur wait until you are making 90 to $150,000 a year before you look at hiring and OBM they are expensive, but they are critical. If you want to grow your business to multiple multiple six figures or seven figures. I've never met Jess Bruno who does my social media. I've never met Tyler Cook, who does my email marketing. The one person that I have met who helps me with my blog and my website is Helen Marino is a dear friend of mine. But here's the problem. Back in the old days, when you had an office and you hired people and they would come into the office, you'd be able to be in your work all day and get stuck or realise at some point. This isn't what you want to be doing with your time and they'd look over and you see Doris, there was Doris, you know, sitting at her desk working away. And you'd remember Hey, Doris, she works for me.
She can make my life easier right now. I can give this task that I don't really want to do, to Doris and that's her job. Amazing. Let me do that. It's really easy to remember that you have a Doris to hand things off to and Doris is just a few feet away from you. It's a little harder when you have a dispersed workforce and everyone works remotely because you're sitting in your office or at your dining room table and you're working away and you're working away and you're working away.
And then a few days later, when you have a meeting with your Doris, whatever their actual name is in the here, and now you're explaining how your week really went off the rails, because you were just stuck on this one task. And you're Doris is gonna say, "Hey, Steve, why didn't you call me. That's what I do. That's what you hired me for."
You accidentally become guilty of hoarding all the terrible, awful boring tasks that you literally pay someone else to handle for you, just because you forget that they exist. So here's what you are going to do. If you have employees that work in your business, who are remote that you tend to forget about is you're going to set weekly, if not daily, check in calls with them.
And these checking calls, and you don't have to prepare for you literally show up on the call. And you go through what you're tackling that day and you ask them to go through what they're tackling that day. And then together, you figure out if there's anything that should be handed off, this call can take as little as two minutes or as much as 20 minutes. shouldn't take more than that. And of course you like this person. So you probably want to add like a five minute buffer for chatting. As I said that I realised that I'm on with my producer, Neal. And we usually spend about 30 minutes chatting, and our recording sessions, and he's probably like, that's not enough, Katie, you need more time.
That simple interruption, that simple reminder that comes up at the same time every single day will get you thinking about okay, cool. What is it that I don't want to be doing today that I've put on my to do list that I could potentially give away. And sometimes that's enough. Now on the other side of this, you've just hired another human, train them to be proactive about taking things off your plate, train them to call you and interrupt you multiple times throughout the week, asking you Hey, what is it that you're focusing on that you should not be focusing on?
What is it that you have on your to do list that should be on my to do list? Give them full permission to be annoying in this way. Because oftentimes when we hire people, they don't want to bug us because they think bugging us is a bad thing. Not for an ADHD - preneur, we need that.
We need to be pestered and reminded that you exist, give them full permission train them the best way to do this that's going to be most effective for you and call it a day. And if you need some more guidance on how to get your teams to work more effectively with you. I want to point you back to Episode four where I did a deep dive on this and how I have trained my teams to be more supportive of me and my ADHD.
© 2022 - 2023 Katie McManus – Business Strategy For Weenie ADHD-preneurs