Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses strategies for building a high-performing team when you are on a budget. You’ll learn about shifting your mindset about hiring, especially if you feel like you’re not quite ready to take the leap. You’ll also discover the steps to identifying the key needs in your business that you need to fill and how to strategically hire your first team members. Finally, Melissa will close with some tips for managing and motivating your team to ensure business growth and scalability.

Key Highlights:

• Building a team is crucial for scaling a business.
• Missed opportunities are a hidden cost of doing everything yourself.
• Hiring is an investment, not an expense.
• You're not going to feel ready to hire.
• New to hiring? Choose just one area to start!
• When hiring, ask for recommendations from your network.
• When interviewing, pay attention to their level of professionalism.
• When training, set clear expectations for your team. 
• Use communication tools for clarity.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and In today's episode, we're going to talk about how to build a high performing team on a budget. So if you're listening to today's episode and you are maybe a solopreneur and your business is growing and you're getting to that point where you're thinking about hiring someone, today's episode is for you.

But similarly, if you already have a team and you are considering adding additional role to the team and hiring another person to join you, or maybe looking at hiring a specific service provider to provide support and expertise in a very specific area of your business, you will also find helpful tidbits in today's episode as well. So the whole concept of this episode, as I was thinking about it,

really boils down to a lot of the things that I often hear from people who are not quite ready to hire our team yet. For those of you who don't know, I own a virtual assistant services company, and I'm frequently talking to potential clients who are at a point where they know that their plate is full or they know that their current team is maxed out and they're looking at, know, what else can we do? How can we broaden our support? How can I get support for myself? And oftentimes,

we hear, I'm not quite ready to hire yet and it's usually has to do with money. And I think that a lot of us, and I'm looking at myself here, think that when we need to hire someone, we need to invest a large amount of money. We need to hire a full-time person or a part-time person. And then we start thinking about, you know, insurance and benefits, like that's on one high end of the spectrum. And then sometimes it's like, well, I would love to have a social media manager, but they cost

thousands of dollars or you know, there's just so many things that we make up in our minds where it's difficult to justify sometimes hiring and taking that step. on a different note, money comes up frequently especially when a business is new and starting out where there are so many things to invest in and you yourself are trying to take home a salary. That's one. The other thing often is just the overall complexity of hiring and onboarding somebody because I know

that getting access set up for somebody to be able to take things over, even training somebody because it's in your brain, you've been doing it for so long, and trying to figure out how to get that information and that knowledge into some type of a physical space in order to hand that off to somebody else can be really stressful. So just want to acknowledge that. Also, just to share with you my story, I started my business back in 2012.

I share that because building a team is crucial for scaling a business because a one-person operation is not scalable. You're only able to deliver as much as you are physically able and available to do. So at some point, you are still trading dollars for hours and that's not a scalable business model.

because even if you're not charging hourly, there's only so many projects you can take on. There's only so many clients that you can support. There's only so many widgets that you can produce before eventually you're just fighting a losing battle against yourself. Another way to think of this is if you want a 2X or even 10X your revenue, you can't also 2X or 10X your hours or your output or your effort. It's just not the way that it works. And I'll also tell you that if working more hours,

or working harder than you are right now was the solution to getting what you want, then you would have achieved your goals by now. I hate to say it you like that, but it's a great reminder that more doesn't necessarily mean more. Sometimes it's working smarter. It's working fewer hours, but more dedicated hours to the things that really drive the business forward. And so today I want to talk about how to build a high performing team on a budget

because we're going to think about if you're just starting out or if you have a team and you see a need and you already have a lot invested in the people you're already working with, how do we get additional support from another provider, if you will? We'll just use the word provider in that case, whatever that might mean for you. So the first step in order to do this is to shift your mindset around hiring. So always encourage people to start small and before they're ready.

We're never truly ready for anything. mean, I know that there are certainly times that I fall into this trap and I've met certain people where they're getting ready to get ready to get ready. Like they're planning and they're planning and they're planning and they're researching and they're doing more research and they're planning, but they never actually like move forward and take an action step in order to get things rolling. So you're not going to feel ready or it's going to feel like

you know, we had a really great month back in, let's say February, you know, maybe if we kept going at that rate, then I could afford to hire somebody, but you know, I'm not quite sure. Maybe we need to do a few more months of that before I can fully prove that I'm ready to hire. What I'm telling you is that you're able to start small. And you also don't have to take this big intimidating step on your own.

because hiring the right person will make this so much easier. We'll talk more about that in a minute. But the other reason that I want you to think about your mindset around this is that hiring is an investment and not an expense. So I've talked a little bit about money, probably more than I normally do, at the very start of this podcast episode. But the point of hiring somebody, yes, money is going to go out the door, right? If you hire a virtual assistant,

or if you hire a part-time employee to sit at your front desk and greet customers and answer your phones, that is going to cost you money, right? That's a fact. However, if you or some other key performing person on your team is currently doing those tasks, and then you free that person up or you free up yourself to do more important and...

needle moving tasks that really drive your business forward, revenue generation, and so on, then you ultimately are going to be able to grow the business, bring in more money in order to cover that newly incurred expense. So we need to think about bigger picture here. Yes, you're saving a few dollars by answering your own phones, but at the end of the day, if you would have used that time to say, reach out to three more prospects for your program and enroll somebody, then

know, what is that time worth to you? The other thing is, is that there are hidden costs of doing everything yourself. So just gave you an example where you may be holding back your own growth because you're doing some tasks that you know that you don't need to be doing or maybe there's someone on your team who you know is a star performer and they are so great at what they do but they are getting bogged down in some of these tasks and these details and these rabbit holes where if you were able to free that person up so that they're able to focus on

their most important, their genius work that you would really drive the business forward and start reaching your goal. So, want to talk about some of those hidden costs though as well. So one thing that comes to mind is missed opportunities. So, I know that when I was working solo, I was in a feast and famine cycle. And this is very typical and common for a lot of solopreneurs. And so what would happen would be that I would spend 100 % of my time working in the business

working with my clients, and then ultimately a project would wrap up or a client would move on to hire a larger role for their company and they no longer needed me as an eBay, as a VA, which is a celebrated thing for my clients. We definitely love that big step of hiring. But when those things would wrap up, suddenly I had this gap in my project calendar and then ultimately in my revenue as well because

I was spending 100 % of my time over the last weeks, months in working with clients where I was not out and interacting and networking and finding, essentially filling my pipeline, finding prospects, potential customers, things like that. So I'm missing out on opportunities for my own growth, for my own company when I am just doing everything myself. The other thing is depending on your level of organization,

you might be letting potential clients or leads slip through the cracks. Now, a less obvious form of this could be where somebody reaches out to you and they are interested in working with you, you have a conversation, and for whatever reason, at this moment in time, it just doesn't necessarily make sense to work together. It happens all the time. Okay, cool. But if you are not able to devote the time and attention to then following up with that person consistently,

then that lead definitely runs cold. Whereas we know that when we stay in touch with people, there are oftentimes that business will come from that down the road. So that is a less, I don't want to say intentional. It's never intentional to miss an opportunity, but that's probably a less obvious way that people lose opportunities. Now, again, depending on your level of organization, maybe you misplace an email and then you can't find it or

you aren't able to check your inquiries that are coming in through your website where that kind of gets put to the side for a while. And then you realize you had all these people reaching out by your website for more information and nobody had followed up with them for months. Those are some of the organizational pieces. Again, limited growth is certainly a cost of DIY because you're only able to do so much or your existing team is only able to deliver so much. And most importantly,

hidden cost of DIY is burnout because your energy level and really just how you're feeling overall, the energy and what is the word that I'm looking for, kind of just the vibes. We'll just say the vibes that you're putting out there into the world definitely impact overall the success of your company. So if you're feeling tired, if you're feeling drained, you're not going to be doing your best work and that certainly costs you, right?

Or if you're just not feeling as creative, you're not able to stay on the cutting edge with some of your marketing and your sales, the business ultimately will suffer. So we want to shift our mindset around hiring, especially for some of these reasons. So once we know, OK, I know that I need to dedicate the time, money, resources in order to get some help in my business, whatever that could be. It could be your first assistant. It could be adding your 10th team member.

or somewhere even beyond that. But we wanna identify your biggest needs. I actually just had a conversation with a potential client today, and I went through this process recently when I hired my new executive assistant, was really take a look at what are our needs. So this potential client has an opening that's coming up on her team, and they wanna reevaluate what are the responsibilities that this person had on their plate.

How much time was this taking them? What systems was this person using in order to do these? And they're re-evaluating. Does it make sense to keep all these things within that role? Where are some of the greatest opportunities to expand this role? And they're doing this evaluation before they hire someone. Now, when I talk about identifying your biggest needs, the first thing that I want you to do is evaluate exactly what are your priorities in terms of growing your business.

Okay, what are your needle movers? What are the things that ultimately generate more revenue? Or if you are the director of an organization, maybe it's donors, maybe it's partnerships, whatever insert, it's a, you can't talk today. Ever have one of those days? Go ahead and substitute the word revenue for whatever makes sense for you in your situation. But I'm going to just use revenue for the simplicity of this conversation. What we want to do is figure out

you know what those things are because that ultimately is what you need to be doing. Now similarly to other roles in your organization, it could be that we need to make sure that our operations person is focused on doing, know, optimizing our processes, our workflows, taking a look at how can we better leverage AI, right? That's a hot topic right now. We don't want this person in the weeds of figuring out what's going on with our books and our accounting. You know, we don't...

We don't want to be taking away from that person's ultimate role and what their goal is. So with your role, what are your needle movers? What are your highest priorities? Maybe it's your key performance indicators, whatever that means for you, your company, your organization. We want to know what those things are because those are the things that are the most important. These are sacred. And then we want to take a look at what are some of the other things that we've been doing that are not contributing to those things. So.

This is the non-revenue generating busy work that you're doing. And not necessarily that this doesn't generate revenue or that it's not important maybe down the line, but it's something that you don't necessarily need to be spending your time, money, and energy on right now considering what your goals are. So busy work can easily be email. Just to give you a couple of examples of this high level.

Email is something that I know I can probably spend an entire day in. And I have done that and I'm still doing that. I'm trying to get better about it. But sometimes there's just a lot going on and a lot of communications moving forward. I can sit and email all day and highly likely very few, if any of those things have actually driven my business forward. It's putting out fires, answering questions.

filing receipts from software payments that have gone through, things like that. Emails one. Certainly, it could be posting on social media. Now, granted, I understand that that might be a marketing tool for you and ultimately a sales thing, but is it something that you need to spend your time doing and are you efficient at it? That's the other question. I know for me, social media was one of the very first things that I hired out, even before

I hired other virtual assistants on the team. Social media was something that I can write and it would take me, this was before chat GPT by the way, and all the AI tools we have now, where it would take me at least a half an hour to write a post. And then it would take me more time to create a graphic or find a stock photo that would go along with that post and I would put it out there to the world and then three weeks would go by before I had time to do another one.

Whereas my social media team, I don't know how much time it takes them, it doesn't matter, but all I know is that I get an email every month that says, hey, your posts are ready for review and approval, and that is fantastic. It takes me minutes to review and approve that content versus what would probably take me hours and hours in order to do if I even did it at all, because it would probably sit on the back burner. So think about busy work and things that you're just spending so much time on.

Another indicator could be things that you hate doing and are constantly putting, be putting on the back burner. Things that you aren't 100 % sure how to do yourself. And so you do a lot of Googling and researching and you know it takes you much longer than it should have in order to do. Those are also great candidates for things that could be offloaded to somebody else. I highly recommend choosing one area to start, especially if you're new to hiring. So,

Again, using my example, that could be hiring somebody to help you with a consistent social media presence. Maybe that's a social media manager or content creator. Another example of this could be hiring a bookkeeper, right? Maybe you have nightmares around tax season because you spend weekends preparing for your meeting with your accountant.

and you have a shoe box full of receipts and all these emails that you need to gather up and your books are a mess and it takes hours and hours and hours. And don't mention all the stress getting ready to file taxes. Maybe your next step is to hire a bookkeeper, just a couple of hours a month to make sure that your books and your financials are in order. Choose one area to start if you're new to hiring. And certainly if you have a team and you have an idea of what that next role is,

that you would like to create and fill, or maybe there is a skills gap or a capacity gap on your team and you need help in a very specific area, let's go ahead and choose one and then see what relief or that relief that gives from our current team if we're talking about a capacity issue or enhances the work that our team is doing if it's more of an expertise issue, kind of depending on which direction you're going with this. I hope you're staying with me. I realize I'm all over the page today, but stick with me.

So the third thing that we wanna do then is to talk about fast and effective hiring strategies. So I have several episodes, you can search for them on hiring a VA. I walked through this in a lot of detail on some of the workshops that I've done in the past, but I'm gonna be honest with you and tell you how I personally fill positions and hire very, very quickly. So once you're clear on what you need,

what area you want to focus on for hiring, you want to really identify the skills that are required. What are some of the systems or software tools that this person would be helpful for them to know ahead of the time? Now, I would say be helpful because I'm going to give you an example, CRMs. There are so many CRMs out there. When I'm talking to a potential client, they'll name off maybe a common CRM like HubSpot or Zoho or

Salesforce or I think it's called keep now. I know I'm dating myself but you have the idea and then there are the very industry specific ones as well and they're like do you have someone who specializes in this and I'm like possibly and there are so many that it's likely that if somebody has familiarity for with say go high level or There are so many out there

Anyway, I'm spacing on all of them at this point. But if we have somebody who has a lot of experience in working with CRM systems, they can probably figure out yours. But just if there are critical systems that this person needs to know or have some familiarity with or be able to learn very, very quickly, that is something to identify. Also identifying the availability or the expectations around that depending on what you're looking for. So if you're looking at hiring expertise in a consultant,

Are you looking for them to join your weekly marketing meetings? Is that something that's going to be important? If you're hiring for your front desk, what time of day do you need coverage? Maybe you have a dentist office and you know that in the afternoons those are the busiest times because we have kids coming in after school and families coming in. Hiring somebody for maybe say that 2 to 6 p.m. timeframe, that's going to be important. So we want to talk about what are some of the absolute must haves.

And then from there, honestly, I recommend asking for recommendations. So trusted people that you know in your business network, in your networking group, contacts that you have, even your customers, you can ask them, say, I am looking for a fantastic bookkeeper or I am looking for a fantastic social media manager. Who do you recommend or do you know someone who works with a bookkeeper or works with a social media manager?

and would they be open to introducing me? Sometimes asking for a referral and just going through your network is the fastest way to find a good person to work with. Another thing that I personally do is I'll go on LinkedIn. I actually found my new executive assistant through LinkedIn. I just type in executive assistant, virtual assistant, and people start popping up, check out their profiles.

who takes themselves seriously and has a website, looks professional. And I reached out and I introduced myself and I said, hey, I have this role opening up on my team. Would you be interested in chatting? And so now she's onboarding this week. So there are very quick ways to hire exactly what you need that are maybe not quite as traditional as completing a full job description and posting it and reviewing applications. Now I walk through that process in other podcast episodes.

I know I've done blog posts on it. So if that is the process that you need to follow, I do have resources for that. But for the sake of this episode, when we have a need that we want to fill quickly, then this is personally what I do and what I encourage people to do. Another thing that I've done in the past when I've needed videos edited for my website and for, I would say videos that are going to live on marketing.

assets that I have for a period of time where it's not so much, you know, a quick reel or something like that, that I want things professionally edited and maybe some music and slides added to my videos. I went on Fiverr and there was a guy I found, he had great reviews. I've left him great reviews. I come back to him again and again and again and that was a way that I found him. So finding positive reviews if it's just a quick project sort of thing.

These are all the quick ways that I recommend hiring somebody. And then certainly have a conversation. Make sure they have the skills, the systems, and the availability, and any other requirements that you need. We want to make sure that needs are being met and that we have the right fit. Pay attention to their level of professionalism, their communication styles. Ultimately, do you like this person? Is the conversation easy?

Maybe they were even able to educate you and ask you some good questions or make some recommendations that you hadn't thought of before. That is the start of a great partnership for sure. So once you've gone through that process and determined here's who I'm interested in working with, also recommend asking them for references. And then always, always, always have a contract and agreement so that it is clear on expectations and how the two of you are going to work together. Okay.

Certainly, I walked through some of these more traditional steps of hiring in other videos and podcast episodes and blogs and workshops that I've done, but for the sake, again, of this episode today, we're just gonna cut right to the chase and we're gonna do this quickly and on a budget. So the last item that I wanted to talk about here when it comes to building a high performing team on a budget is also to manage and motivate your team effectively.

So of course we want to set clear expectations. You know, what does success look like? How does, how is it measured? We want to talk about also incentives. So something that I love to do, for example, with my team is we offer incentives if they refer a client to us, because sometimes you might be thinking, well, you have a team of virtual assistants. If somebody came to them, wouldn't they just work with that client themselves?

And it depends. Sometimes our team members, they personally are at capacity and they're not able to take on a client. Or maybe when they're talking with a potential client, they realize that, you know, skillset wise or availability wise, they're just not a great fit. They may refer a client to us, which is awesome. So, you know, certainly offer bonuses and incentives if they were for clients. Other team members to us, which is also something that I highly encourage. We also offer things like

Bonuses for going above and beyond will send a gift to team members every month My senior VA team and I will determine like who really went above and beyond this month and send them just something fun Usually we do, you know gift card of their choice or you know, if we know that they really love crafts Maybe we get them a hobby lobby gift card or something like that just for an example But you know shouting people out and showing

recognizing them and showing gratitude for when they do go above and beyond is something that we do on the team as well. We also will offer bonuses when team members grow accounts. Just kind of giving you some examples here, not to put my team on a pedestal or tell you all about kind of the ins and outs of the running of my business, but sometimes I find it helpful because you might be able to take some of these ideas and also use them as incentives for your team as well. So the other thing is

growing accounts. Not that my team members are salespeople and they're always looking for clients to buy more services from us, but naturally as their working relationship continues to evolve over time and trust is built, oftentimes the client will say, hey, can you also help me with this? Or I would love to move my social media over to your team or gosh, my bookkeeper is going to be getting a new position at a company. And I'm wondering if maybe you guys have some capacity to take that on.

So naturally, the working relationship with our clients is going well, they're often likely to send more work our way, and we reward that monetarily on the team as well. Again, not a commission necessarily, but we do offer that incentive. other things in terms of managing your team, communication tools are clear, are very, important for clarity. How do we communicate as a team?

Is it email? Is it on Slack? Is it through our project management tool? I'll talk more about that in a second. I know on our team, a lot of us use Voxer, which is just kind of like a voice messaging walkie talkie kind of an app that cuts down on time spent on typing emails, writing responses to emails. It's just hop on, talk about like, here's my question or here's my suggestion with how we deal with this. Or here's an idea that I have.

and then letting them respond naturally. It's super easy, but having those communication tools. So if you're hiring a bookkeeper or you're hiring, say for example, a social media manager, how are you communicating with them outside of meetings and calls? Maybe meetings and calls is where you get your work done together. Maybe you're meeting once a month to review your books. Maybe you're meeting once a month to co-create your content together just as long as you know what the communication tools are and that's clear.

in terms of expectations. The other thing that's super important with managing a high performing team is having a project management tool. Knowing who's working on what and what the status of something is, being able to specify kind of timeline of when something needs to get done are huge. So I've talked about this many times on the podcast already. Asana is what we use. There are many great tools out there. Monday.com is another one.

but we absolutely love leveraging those tools in order to be able to manage a remote team. Lastly, in terms of managing your team, making sure that processes and workflows are clear across the board for everybody so we know what to expect, we know what the next steps are going to be in a process, we have a consistent experience for our customers and so on. So again, high level, but these are some of the important things to have in place. So.

Just to recap, we wanna shift your mindset around hiring. We wanna identify your biggest needs. We talked about fast and effective hiring strategies to get that specific need filled sooner than later and not necessarily going through a tedious traditional hiring process. And then we also talked about how to manage and motivate your high performing team. So I hope all this information was helpful for you today in your growth journey.

I would love if you would take a moment to rate this podcast. Give us five stars. Leave a written review if you feel so inclined and you have an extra minute. That is super, super helpful for us and just communicates that we're here providing quality content and helpful content for those who need it. Again, appreciate you for listening and tuning in today. I will be back next week with another episode of Make Space for More. Take care, everyone. Bye-bye.