Join Sarah Wood from Sarah Wood Communication as we delve into the essentials of successfully hiring and managing contractors in your business. This episode covers everything you need to build a thriving team, from vetting processes and effective communication strategies to task management and handling client and contractor expectations.

Key Topics Covered:

1. Vetting Process: Learn about effective vetting techniques, including using test projects to find the right fit.
2. Communication: Establishing clear communication channels such as Slack or Front to ensure seamless interactions.
3. Processes: Setting up robust onboarding and task management systems to streamline workflows and assignments.
4. Managing Expectations: Techniques for managing both contractor and client expectations to maintain project clarity and satisfaction.
5. Handling Issues: Proactive approaches to address and resolve potential challenges that may arise with contractors.

Building a successful team starts with solid infrastructure and effective processes. Tune in to gain insights that will help you optimize your contractor relationships and business operations.

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Follow the links to connect with Sarah:

Website: https://www.sarahwoodcommunication.com/

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sarah-wood-682513a1/

All right.

Welcome, Sarah.

Thank you so much for agreeing to be on the podcast today.

If you wouldn't mind just taking a moment to introduce yourself,

and then we will jump right in.

Thanks for having me.

I'm happy to be here today.

My name is Sarah Wood.

I own Sarah Wood Communication, which is a boutique communication agency.

We work exclusively with purpose driven organizations who are

trying to make the world a better place doesn't want that, right?

They do the good work and we help them tell their stories.

We talk about what they do.

We do it consistently, strategically and in a way that reaches and

resonates with their target audiences.

Awesome.

Well, thanks so much for being here.

And I would just love to, if you can just kind of tell me what you have going

on, what issue or question you have, and then for the next 30 minutes, we'll just

work through it and you know, whatever is my, I will do my best to answer and

work through everything that you have.

So I've been in business for a little more than eight years.

I'm a solopreneur, so it's just me, myself and I over here, but I have found that

many clients sometimes want complimentary services to what I offer, right?

They might want someone to help with graphic design or video services,

web design things, marketing things that are related to communication

and that they want assistance with, but I don't directly do.

And so I have come to the point where I think that I need to 10 99 some

people to do some subcontracting.

And my question is.

How do I go about doing that?

I want to make sure that, you know, I'm doing it correctly, legally,

you know, on the up and up with the, with the taxes and all of that.

So as someone who is a solopreneur and wants to tap into some external

assistance, what's the best way for me to go about doing that?

Okay.

Yeah, definitely.

So I want to say first that as far as on the financial side, I would

recommend I'm not a bookkeeper or a CPA.

So I do recommend, you know, consulting with them, but I can talk about how to

set up the infrastructure for it first.

And, you know, obviously there's going to be some budgeting.

So when you start to look into hiring or bringing some some

contractors on board, you're going to want to know what your budget is.

And a lot of that will also be what the client's budget is.

So it may be that you have a, I don't know, a database or something

of people that you've given kind of approval to, and then, you know,

they're sort of on call if you will.

And then as you get those services more regularly.

You may work with them more often and they become a more

regular part of your business.

But I would say as far as financially, the first thing you do want to

do is whenever you are making the proposal to the client, you're going

to want to take into consideration.

You're going to want to know who you're thinking about hiring to bring them in.

So you can budge that into the cost of the client project.

So that's really important.

And then whether that's, I mean, I recommend like that 100 percent of the fee

would be included in the client project.

But if you're not going to do that, obviously, you have to work that out

with, you know, on the financial side.

So, the 1st thing I want to talk about is having processes for communicating, with

the contractors and Like delegating work.

So if we go the route of let me quickly talk about something like Upwork

where you would go into Upwork, you would have an account and you could

hire contractors through there and they would be paid through Upwork.

Now, there are fees associated with that.

So you may want to look into that.

I will say when you're looking for someone that is.

easy because you have a whole list of people who are looking for work on there

so it does make that easier, but it does cost right because there's a fee.

There's like fees associated with paying them, they pay fees on their side.

And in order to take someone off of work and like bring them.

Take your working relationship off of Upwork.

There is a larger fee that you have to pay.

So there are some things associated with doing that.

It's not necessarily a bad way, but just So you know that that that could

be, you know, something to look into, but what I want to focus on is like,

if you're gonna have the contractors yourself, you're going to have them fill

out the W 9s and you're going to send them the 1099s at the end of the year.

So the first thing I would do is think about how you want

to communicate with them.

So that might look like something like Slack or there's also a software

called Front, which is really great.

I use that with a client.

It's a paid software.

But, and Slack is free up to a certain point in certain features.

I recommend having a separate communication tool than your

project management tool.

If one goes down, you still have a way to communicate with

people to get things done.

So that's the first thing.

How are you going to communicate with them?

I don't recommend communicating via email because that can

easily become very chaotic.

I don't know about you, but I prefer to get out of email

because it just is, it's a lot.

I get a lot of emails every day, right?

So do you have anything like that now, like that you might use with

clients or anything like that?

I do not.

I do communicate via email.

Okay.

That's fine.

I mean, it's only you, so it's totally fine.

Yeah, I, I have used Slack with different clients

because that's what they wanted to use but I don't have a particular

communication software at this point.

I will say it would, in this situation, it would be me directly hiring people.

It would be, well, I guess hiring is a, a Kind of catch all term here.

Like I know the people,

I know people who do these things.

I have,

you know, personal connections.

It's, you know, a known quantity type situation.

And so it would be, you know, I'm getting the W nine, I'm issuing the 10 99.

That was part of my question is like, you know, what do I need

to be aware of related to that?

Like what paperwork do I need?

That type of question.

As far as communication goes, Like I said, I am primarily using email and

I'm not working in high volume, right?

We're a boutique agency.

We're pretty exclusive.

So we don't have huge amounts of clients at the same time.

So I think that makes it a little less difficult to track than someone

who's kind of has a roster 20 deep, you know, that they're trying to

keep managed all at the same time.

So it's a little more streamlined than that.

Yeah, I still recommend having some way to communicate with them

in like when there are things going on as far as if you're trying to have a

discussion about a client or something in real time versus email because the

thread is a little easier to read and slack is free so it's a really easy

way to all I'm saying is you want to establish the communication process

first however you want to do that.

Then You want to think about how you're going to assign things.

So are you going to have a Google doc where you give it to them or a Google

spreadsheet or something like that?

Or do you have a project management tool?

So do you have one?

Do you have a project management tool that you use to manage your projects now?

We're using Google Docs at this point

Okay.

And you know what, and that might work to a certain point.

And that when you, if you get to the place where you're like, you know what,

we need something a little bit more involved, you could always go to that.

I do have recommend having a place where you can

collaborate track due dates, and maybe that looks like a spreadsheet

to start, but you want to document whatever that process is.

So say like, okay, let's say you're going to use email to

communicate, you'll receive an email from me with task instructions.

Like you want to write out this process, right?

You want to write out like how it's going to happen.

You know, expectation is that when I give this to you on a Monday, it's due by the

next Monday at noon, whatever that might be, or you have 10 days to finish this.

You know And you want to just have that written out.

So you have some sort of base place to start from.

And it can always change as you start bringing people on.

You can like work out the kinks of all that, but communication is one two

is how you're going to assign them.

Well, let me see.

Number two is onboarding.

So the onboarding is going to be okay.

What information do you need from them?

Maybe you have them fill out a form.

A Google form where you can track all their information.

So like, what's your phone number?

What's your email address?

because, and then send them the W 9 right away, get that filled out.

So you'll need to save that because that information will

need to go to your bookkeeper.

If you have it or for yourself, if you do your own books and then for tax time

as well, because then the 10 99 gets issued to those people prior to tax time.

And it's, You'll want to Google this, but I'm almost positive

if it's, if you pay someone more than $600, I do it for everyone.

Even if I paid someone $20, I would do it just to To cover my ass, you know okay.

So communication tool onboarding, you'll want to, I recommend kind of writing out

having a rough process in place prior to even bringing anyone on for the onboarding

and for the task management, just so you have something in place that when

they come on, it just doesn't feel like.

You know, everyone's everywhere.

Right.

You have a way to kind of streamline it.

It sounds like your production process is already streamlined.

So now it's just going to be communicating with these people and making sure

that the expectations are set.

During the onboarding process.

You'll need to have a contract or an agreement.

So depending on who you hire, if they have their own business, they may

have a contract Or you can produce a contract for a subcontractor.

So I typically do that.

I mean, I'm just more of a control freak, so I prefer to be it on

my side, you know, whatever.

My recommendation would be to work with a lawyer for that, draw up a

subcontract agreement and in there, in my experience, I wrote it up

explaining that this subcontractor is agreeing to work using my processes.

So the thing about a contractor is they can really work whenever they want.

Like you're not going to tell the plumber that comes in to your house

to fix something, how to do it.

They're going to tell you when they're available, they're going

to come do their thing and leave.

So when you, and again, consult a lawyer, I'm not a lawyer.

I'm just saying what I've done in my experience is I got the

agreement from them that they were okay to use my processes.

And if they're not, then you can decide whether you want to work with them or not.

But for me, I brought my subcontractors into my project management tool.

They still work on their own time.

Like I don't tell them that they have to be available, you know, 8am till 5pm.

But I do ask that they communicate with me through Slack and we do

tasks and projects in ClickUp.

So they agree to that.

Um, any questions?

I just have.

Yeah, I did have some follow up questions about that because I have a

contract that I use, you know, a lot of times I also use client contracts

because they have a standard contract.

But I do have a standard contract that I use with clients.

I don't currently have one for subcontractors because I haven't

used one up until this point, I have made direct referrals to clients

and kind of just pass them off.

And then they had their own contract and agreement.

But I have found over time that there are a lot of clients who just want to

pay one person, and they just want you to be their primary point of contact.

Right.

And so they just want you to, yeah, they just want you to kind of handle

things that are kind of, they see under the umbrella of communications.

Right.

And So is there are there specific things that need to be in that contract that

are different and I'm not asking legally.

I'm just kind of asking in your experience.

Are there specific things that need to be in the contract with a

subcontractor to protect both of us that would not necessarily be something

I would think about with a client?

Yeah.

So non disclosure agreement.

I don't know if you have that with your clients, but that's going to

be important with subcontractors.

What I mentioned about agreeing to use your processes The understanding that they

pay their own taxes because they're 1099.

So they take care of that.

So there's usually like a blurb in there about that, how and when they get paid you

know, through if they have an invoicing system on their side, or do you need

to establish some sort of pay process?

So you know, are you going to pay them through like Zelle or, I mean,

I wouldn't necessarily recommend that only because with an invoice an

invoice system, it's easier to track.

Now, depending on your bookkeeping software, so like QuickBooks,

you can do invoicing like Xero I think there's some invoicing and

you can request payments as well.

So there may be a way, maybe you want to, I don't know if you have a

bookkeeper, do you have a bookkeeper?

Do you know?

Okay.

If you ever need one, let me know.

I have a great one.

But.

Whatever your bookkeeping software is, there's likely a way to request payments.

You could just, you know, do it that way, but they may have, depending

on the structure of their business, they may have an invoicing and

they may just send you the invoice.

So you'll be able to work that out.

So that would need to be stated how and when they're going to get paid.

So that'll be in there.

Yeah.

That beginning part of it where it describes that you're hiring the

subcontractor because you're under the under, you know, understanding that

they can complete the project that you need or whatever that verbiage up top

you're just going to switch it around a little bit because you're hiring the

subcontractor to work on the project.

Recommend.

So if let's say you find two graphic designers that you really like and

you're like, you know what, I'm just going to work with them for for a while.

You can, again, consult a lawyer, write a contract that's sort of open, right?

Like, meaning it'll say something like projects will be given to the contractor

in this way and like you'll do statements of work for new projects, right?

So you'll have an, a contract, an agreement, and then statements of work

for each project that they participate on.

So the agreement will be more open so that you can always go back to them.

So you're not constantly doing new.

Contracts or agreements, you're doing statements of work.

So the statement of work.

And another reason why I recommend like having the communication tool is one

of the things I did with contractors in the past is I would put in a Slack

message, the project, and then they would send a message in response

saying, I agree, I will take this on.

And, you know, I agree to the due date.

So now I had a record and not that, I mean, you can do this in email

too, but now you have a record of they've agreed to this project.

But having something signed, so in however you send your agreements, just

having a statement of work that you would send to them each time you have

a new project so that they know here's the start and end date, here's your role

in it, here's what you're going to be paid for it, I'll, you know, pay you

50 percent upfront and 50 percent when it's done, however, whatever you work

that out in, that's what I would have in the statement of work, and then you do

a statement of work each time you bring them on to a new project, that way you

have something really clear in place, but that agreement would just be sort of open,

for you to be able to reach out to them whenever.

Is that good?

Any questions about that?

I'm completely different.

I'm completely switching, switching up here a little bit.

Still related to 1099s.

Have you found in your experience that most people just do a direct

cost or do people add on like a little bit of a project management fee when

they're bringing on subcontractors?

Yes.

Putting on a fee.

Yeah.

You could call it a service fee.

You could call it a management fee and call whatever you want.

But yeah, because it takes time to communicate with the person, get them

in, make sure they have everything they need, get the logins right.

That's another reason why I recommend having one solid place

because I'm imagining, let's say it's a web designer or whatever.

They're going to need the logins and they're going to need, you know, here's

this and that, like one place to have all that information, whatever that might look

like for you and establishing that before you bring anyone on is that is important.

Let's lay the foundation first, before you bring anyone on, but I

would absolutely add a fee to it.

Now you don't even have to, it doesn't have to be a line item fee.

You could just up your prices a little bit if you wanted to.

I mean, because think about it too.

Let's say you get click up to manage projects and

whatever, say you pay for that.

Well, that's a software fee.

I'm just going off my experience.

That's a software fee that you want to incorporate into how much you

charge for your projects, right?

So my hourly rate includes all the things I pay for to run my business,

plus what I'm being paid an hour, right?

Like they're all expenses.

I have to take that all into consideration when I'm figuring

out what my hourly rate is.

So yours may go up as you have contractors.

So you do want to include that.

Now, if you want to make it, if you still want to up your prices, but

add a line item, you can do that too.

I think it's probably with new clients, probably easier just

to up your prices in my opinion.

Right.

And is there like a standard for Like a percentage on a dollar

amount that typically is associated with this, or it's varies widely.

So I think it varies.

And I think it's going to depend on your process.

So how much time is it going to take, you know, and I think you may have to

kind of do it and see what happens.

I think you're likely.

Not you personally, this is just humans in general.

We underestimate how long things take.

I think you're likely going to underestimate how long it's

going to take to manage people.

So I think you should go with a number and in six months, do another review.

Like it's, it's going to be important for you to track your time.

It's going to be tedious, but I think it's important to track your

time and your contractor's time.

They don't need to, I'm not saying that they have to like be in with a

start stop, but they need to give you times of how long something takes.

because you need to have an idea of, okay, what am I paying for?

Can I find someone that's more efficient and I'm not paying

as, you know what I'm saying?

Like, you're going to want to know times and how long things take, but for you

personally, you're going to want to know how long it takes to manage people.

So when you're sitting down doing the onboarding process,

how long does that take?

How long does it take to onboard one contractor?

How long does it take to assign them their, their first project.

Likely that'll take longer than their third, fourth, fifth, and so on.

Right.

How long does it take to manage them after the first project?

Like, am I checking in on them a lot?

The other reason why you want to know that is because let's

say you bring on two designers.

One takes is really hands off, does their thing.

They're great, whatever.

But you bring someone else on and you're like having to talk to them every day.

Hey, how's this going?

I got to check in with you.

Well, that's a time suck.

Are you pay?

Are you charging your clients enough to account for this

time that you're spending.

So all of that is hours that you need to know what you're, how long

it's taking to do those things.

Right.

What was the other, I think, did you have another question?

I'm sorry, I got really involved in that answer.

I think most of it.

I mean, I think, like I said, the people that I'm considering bringing on are

kind of like known quantities to me.

So that feels a little safer.

I guess I will go ahead and ask this, even though I'm hoping

not to run into this situation because they are known quantities.

If you find yourself in a situation where someone who you subcontracted is

just not doing what they're supposed to be doing, or the quality of the work

is not where you anticipated it being at, what, what would you suggest doing?

Okay.

So you can fire someone.

Well, it depends on your contract.

So your agreement will likely say something like you have to

give 14 days or 30 days notes.

That's like typical between 14 and 30 days.

You could make it 60.

I that's a little long for me.

I'm, I'm a 30 day person as far as like being able to let someone go.

But they, on the other hand also have 30 days, they can give you

notice and leave 30 days, but they could really just leave whenever.

So you do have to be aware of that.

Right.

And but in regards to your contract I would do 30 days, 30 days notice.

So with that in mind, you would, you know, give them 30 days.

Prior to that point my recommendation is try to work with the person.

Get on a call.

So being remote, and I'm assuming you're going to be remote

with all these people, right?

It is really easy to get in like our own silos of working.

I recommend getting on a call.

Hey, I noticed this is what's going on was there confusion about the instructions?

Kind of be curious about it, find out, ask them questions.

Was it just, they're not good, like, do they just not have the

skill, or are they just not great at designing, or did they misunderstand?

If it was a misunderstanding, let's say they, they got it wrong, they

misunderstood the instructions, I'm likely to give them a chance.

Especially if I just went through the effort of onboarding them.

I just went through the effort of getting them a new project.

Let me give them a chance and I may give them one, two projects

just to see some, maybe it was just that was not their thing.

That kind of, because you're also going to start to learn about the contractors.

What are they good at?

What are they not good at?

Maybe one's good at like more floral design than a more like structure design.

So, you know something like that.

So then you're also going to get a feel for what they're good at.

And so maybe then you just learn, okay, I'm just not going to give them,

you know, a project if it's a bunch of flowers versus a bunch of boxes.

I mean, I don't know, trying to, I'm trying to like, but

you get what I'm saying.

Or maybe they're just not great to work with, right?

Either way.

But let's say you don't know, and you want to give them another, so

you want to get on a zoom call.

I think it's really, or a video call.

I think it's really important or a voice call that you get on with

someone and explain not just through email, but through voice so that

they can hear your tone or see your face and understand what's going on.

Okay, now let's give them 30 days or 60 depending on how many projects

you have assigned to them, but let's give them a couple of projects,

maybe two to like redeem themselves.

Can they do it?

Let me try to give them a different project that's more leaning towards

their style of design or whatever.

Yeah.

So the, important thing to remember is to make sure that in the contract there is an

out if things are not going as expected.

And then your recommendation is kind of to handle it like you would if

you had an actual employee, right?

And you needed to kind of talk to them about needing to improve

their performance and whatnot.

Specifically, I think specifically my concern is deadlines, right?

If I am the one that's responsible, right?

I'm the one responsible to the client, right?

And maybe this is a fabulous, you know, they do fabulous work.

It's really great, but maybe they're kind of like pushing on those

deadlines or, or that, or it's making my life stressful, right?

Because maybe, maybe I start giving them a little fake deadline to kind of

try to make my life a little easier.

But if that's someone and you kind of.

And it becomes an issue with the client.

Let's put it that way because I feel like I know how to handle it

if it's an issue for me, right?

But if it becomes an issue with the client and it's damaging your

relationship with the client, how would you recommend handling that?

So very similarly, again, I want to know, is it a personal issue?

Are they going through something?

I recommend having two of everything or three of every service.

So you have some redundancy that you could pull someone in last minute.

Like you need like that pinch hitter.

Like, Hey, I got a problem.

I need this done.

because you're going to run into times where the contractor

is not going to get done.

They're not going to, something's going to happen.

They're going to get sick or they're going to be away or they're going to be like,

look, I can't finish this I got to go.

You may even have people that just leave and ghost you, whatever.

Not that you want that to happen, but it does happen.

I would have redundancy in contractors so that you know, Hey, I got something

at short notice, please let me know.

And you may have to offer to pay, I'll pay you a little extra for the expedited

project, but that all happens internally.

Outfacing to the client.

You're going to have to explain it.

Look we'll have it by this day.

You know, you're just going to have to reset the expectations with the client.

And however, you know, you would normally do that for me.

I'm likely going to get onto a call.

So again, they can hear my voice, they can see my face and

they know we got this there.

You know, I just, there was.

An emergency, whatever, we're going to get this done.

Here it is.

And then whatever they say, based on that, you can, you know, maybe

they're like, well, I'm not paying until this is done or whatever,

you know, whatever that might be.

You can adjust that.

But those are my recommendations.

And for me, the first time someone's late on something, maybe even the second,

especially in the beginning, I'm going to find out like, what's going on.

Are you like, was this too much?

Was this too big of a project?

Should I give you smaller ones?

because it's always good to have a variety of people that can do a variety of things.

So maybe I have someone that can do a quick logo.

But giving them like a webpage, they just don't have the time for that.

Right.

So you're going to want to know what your contractors are good at

and you know, what they can handle.

That's going to take time working with them to know that though.

Right.

And I mean, it sounds like, which was kind of my thing going in that it's

really a relationship game, right?

I mean, with your, both with your clients and with your subcontractors, right?

The better the relationship you have, the more you know about them.

The more, you know, how they communicate best and, and what style works best

with them, you know, the better the working relationship is going to be the

better results that you're going to get.

Yeah.

And once you have someone in, and let's say they go, they're doing really great.

And then something happens.

It's worth human to human to figure out what's happening.

Something obviously what's going on, like, right.

You know what happened?

I have someone as backup.

I can bring them in.

Yeah.

Versus just like letting them go.

I don't, that's me personally.

I think some people probably just let people go and they just wash

their hands of them, but that's just not my way of doing it.

I prefer to be, you know, in long relationships with my contractors.

I have contractors that I've been working with for like six years.

Like I like to build that because they're reliable and I can go to them when I

need them and they can help, you know, and I know them, they know my business.

They know my processes.

It's, it's really, to me, it's important to build that.

But you also have to set the boundary, like, okay, this is the

third time, like, you gotta go.

You know what I'm saying?

But after you give them the chance.

I have one more thing I want to add.

I know that you mentioned that the people that you're planning on hiring

are people, you know, I will say, I think it is really important to give

contractors a test project before hiring them, whether it's a proofreader,

it's a designer, it's whatever.

I recommend a test project and you pay them for it.

You don't just ask them for free.

You pay them.

Hey, here is the description of the design I'm looking for

and then you give them a limit.

Look, I'll pay you for three hours of time.

Here's the description, provide this thing like a proofreader might, you would

give them, Hey, here's a whole thing.

Proofread this, I'll pay you up to three hours.

They can take as much time as they want.

That way you kind of establish like a baseline of, of their work.

I always do test projects with contractors and it really helps

me see one, what kind of questions that they come back with.

Did they understand?

Did they misunderstand?

How are they communicating with me?

Were they on time?

Did they have to ask for an extension on a test project or whatever?

It gives me a lot of information about just based off of one thing.

Right.

And it's some of the intangibles as well, too, right?

Like, what's the vibe when I'm working with this person?

Do I feel comfortable with this?

Yeah, I was just thinking about that, that I was like, there are some things

that I could actually use for my own business that it might be helpful to

kind of test run people on, right?

Yeah.

And test run them on something, you know, that's also going

to be of value to me, right?

And value to my business and my efforts at like kind of communicating

and marketing about myself.

Yeah.

Yeah.

because you may hire them to do something in your business.

So right.

You know, you need to know what, and you want to know what you're getting into.

Like if you ask them to do flowers and they give you squares, like we

got a problem, you know what I mean?

Like something isn't right.

You know?

But yeah.

So any other questions?

I guess just, is there anything else kind of related to this that

you think would be helpful for me to know?

because as, as someone who's going to do it for the first time, right, I've

been a business owner for a long time, but I've been a solopreneur, right?

So I've been, it's a very different than kind of working with a stable of

subcontractors or even one subcontractor.

And then of course, like obviously You know, bringing on actual full time

employees would be a whole other step.

But is there anything that you just wish you had known before you

brought on your first contractor that you think would be helpful?

It takes time to manage people, and even though

they're subcontractors, you still have to communicate with them.

And like I said, you'll likely underestimate how long it's going

to take even the best people require some communication, right?

I also think one thing you may want to consider, especially because of

the nature of what you're doing, you may have, like, a designer that needs

to work with the website person.

So again, I'm going to go back to the Slack idea.

If you have everyone in Slack, I would not be the middle person.

I would want to see the back and forth.

So I know what's going on, but it takes a lot of energy for you to be like, what's

the, the designer saying, okay, over here to the, you know, to the web designer.

Well, the designer said, buh.

And then you gotta go back to them and you're going back like that.

No, please, by all means, let's not do that.

That is crazy.

And you're likely to lose track of things, communication.

You're going to lose details.

Things are going to get missed.

Not a good idea.

I would allow them to communicate even though they're all subcontractors.

So something I do for one of my clients is each project

gets its own channel in Slack.

So everyone working on that project is in that channel and can communicate.

Some of the messages don't apply to them, so they can ignore

those, but some of them do.

That's going to make your life a lot easier, bringing those people together.

I would not keep them separate because that's going to be a lot of time on

your hands trying to meet those needs.

Yeah, I think so figuring out how you want to communicate with the people about

the projects, create your onboarding process, even if it's just written out

on a Google doc, and that's all you have, creating your delegation process or task

process and task management, how are you going to track this, make sure people are

getting things done on time, do you ask

for an update at halfway point, like, Hey, how's it going?

Are you going to be there?

Like establish whatever that is for you.

And that might change.

Right.

So it might change.

And then in the onboarding process, that's like getting the agreement

together and all of those things.

And then test projects.

I think that's everything we covered.

I mean, there was a lot of other smaller details in there, but those

were the kind of the main things.

I mean, I think it's, it's, it's good to bring people on.

It's going to change things for you because you're going to keep it in house.

You're going to be able to say yes to a lot more things versus, Hey, no, but

I got somebody you're going to have a little bit more control over the project.

Yeah.

And I just also just remain flexible.

It's going to be a little rough in the beginning.

Every time you hire someone new, there's always like an adjustment

period, but especially like the first couple of contractors you're

hiring just for yourself because you've not worked with them.

Just give yourself some grace.

It's going to take some time to get used to for them to get used

to you just like a new client.

It's really the same kind of relationship, but just give yourself the time to adjust.

And having the processes in place first will really help you with that.

Great.

This has been really helpful.

It's nice to just be able to like talk it through with someone and

I've managed people before, but you know, when I was a supervisor

before I was like in house, right?

So it's different when it's your own business and there's

just different regulations and things that you're involved in

that you would not necessarily.

One more thing I'll mention is I would likely make the

due date the day before, or two days before it's actually due to the client.

So if it's due, like on a Friday, I'm going to tell the

contractor like Wednesday, EOD.

Yeah.

Okay.

Awesome.

And also because you just wanted to be able to have

time to do a, a review, right?

Put everything together, review it.

Yeah.

If you find a mistake, you know, something like that.

Yeah.

Absolutely.

Yeah.

Awesome.

Well, thank you so much for being here.

I'm so grateful.

I really appreciate it.

And I look forward to connecting again.

Yeah.

Thank you.