Running your own business shouldn’t feel like a never-ending marathon. If you’re clocking 60-hour weeks and dreaming about hiring your first employee just to claw back some sanity, this episode is for you.

Hi, I'm Mike Fox, host of this podcast, "Lone Wolf Unleashed." In this episode I'm tackling the not-so-glamorous reality of delegation—why just deciding “I’ll get someone in to handle my marketing” won’t cut it, and why human beings bring as much risk as reward.

Forget wishful thinking: you’ll learn why setting up solid processes, documenting your tasks (with templates to shave off real hours), and mapping out a hiring strategy are essential before posting a job ad or starting interviews.

Timestamped summary:

00:00 Setting up a hiring process

04:57 Delegating tasks in your business

09:46 Crafting interview questions and contracts

13:21 Delegating your first hire

Mentioned in this episode:

This podcast is part of the Podknows Podcasting ICN Network

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Today we're covering the art of delegation. G'. Day.

My name's Mike and you're listening to Lone Wolf Unleashed, the podcast where I help you to take your time back from your business and to use it on your terms. Thank you for joining me today. And we're covering how delegation is the.

The fastest way to save time in your business without having to learn all this automation stuff. But it comes with the highest risk, and that is because we're dealing with these wonderful things called human beings.

And I'm going to walk you through today how we go about setting you and them up for success so that you can save time. So we've talked about delegation before on this podcast. You can go back and listen to some of those episodes.

I can link those in the description of this podcast.

The premise of it is, is that we need to know what we're giving people and we need to have it well documented so that they can be set up for success so they can go and do the job well. Episode over. Well, we've already, we've already covered it. Thanks for joining me tonight.

Here's the crux of what I've seen, particularly what I've seen recently. And you know, but it is a very common thing for business owners to go through is this typical type of cycle. So let me see if this sounds familiar.

You are a business owner, you work 60 to 70 hour weeks and you go, I've had it up to here. For those listening, I am raising my hand above my head. I've had it up to here. I am doing too much.

And I think that I've grown to a point where I am ready to hire someone. And you go, I know I will get someone in and they can take care of. Let's for example, just say my marketing content. Great. All right, Good decision.

All right, that's fine. And that is the extent of the thinking that goes into the hiring decision. That's not enough. I know. Spoiler alert.

I'm really sorry that you have to hear it from me. That is not enough. Just simply just saying that you're gonna bring someone in to handle your marketing content is not enough.

Now, there's more work to do here. We need to know the type of work that we're going to be giving that person. We're gonna want examples of what good looks like.

We're gonna need step by step instructions. We're gonna need to give them context about why the marketing in your business is the way that it is. All of that needs to be in place.

Before you even think about doing an ad, or before you even think about reaching out to people to see who might be interested in the role. And there's a new process that we need to establish here, which is your hiring process.

And it can be very scary to think about what that looks like if you've not done that in your business before, because there are certain artifacts that go into the execution of that process. You're not just documenting now one process, which is the process that you want to hand over or the several tasks that you want to hand over.

It is a new process that you need to flesh out. Now, the advantage of this and thinking about this way is you don't have to define your hiring process every time you hire.

It is the upfront work that you do before you do it for the first time. Think about that you're building a scalable engine here and that when you go to hire, the first time you're solving a problem, you build a process.

And then the next time you go to hire or do whatever it is that you're doing, you can use that process again and the things are in place. If that story sounds familiar to you, here is the recommendation of what to do first.

Number one, we need to establish whether you really have a need to bring someone on or not. Now, you might just be in the mindset of, I just, I'm just working too much and I just got a, let's just bring someone in. That's fine.

If you are feeling that way, it is likely that, yes, you do need to bring someone in, but let's not rush into it. The first thing we need to establish is what are the types of tasks that you want to get rid of. This may not be so straightforward.

You just might be overwhelmed. And it's hard to make good decisions when you're overwhelmed.

So take a little bit of a break, take a little bit of a step back, and let's have a look at your business as a whole. I've done episodes on the mapping out of your business like this as part of a profile and what your processes are.

But take a step back, take a deep breath, sleep on it. You make good decisions when you're well rested and you're not overwhelmed. So, number one, look after yourself.

Number two is let's figure out the type of work that you really do like to do. Because chances are that you're thinking about getting rid of the work that you don't like to do. And that is perfectly natural.

But that may not be the right way to go first or it might be, then you want to document out the things that you want to hand off.

So once you come to the determination that you've of the work that you want to hand off, we need to make sure that the ecosystem, the infrastructure that is in place in your business is set up to be able to start to share that with people. So what does that mean?

It means that we need to map out whatever process it is so we have those tasks on a page or multiple processes, depending on what the scope of the role is going to entail. And then we need to document out those procedures, get those step by step instructions down. How does the system work?

That's really what you're describing, is you're sitting down and you're working through what the system is and what it does and how it works. That's what you're doing. Make sure that you have your document templates in place. This is a big one. It does save a lot of time.

You know, recently I did an analysis with one of my customers. They're saving between 30 and 45 minutes per document when it's accessed to be used. That's a lot of time.

So if you can get your document templates in place, it just means that the person can come in and they can hit the ground running rather than having to design stuff that should be in place before they start at all. So now you've got a bit of a picture about what you're doing. The next thing we need to do is determine what your hiring process might look like.

Now if you've never hired before, that's fine and there's lots of resources out there online that you can look at in terms of what it means to hire. Here are some basic things for you to think about.

What we need to be able to do is we need to articulate the, the task that you've determined onto a position description. So a position description is just that is, is a document that describes what the position is, what it does, what its purpose is, who they report to.

All of that sort of stuff goes onto a position description. That is the first document that you're going to want to, to do up. Now that position description might be fairly large.

You might go, well actually, or maybe I need to hire two different part time people to be able to handle that. That should become clearer to you as you complete that position description. Now we're going to use that position description to do up a job ad.

Your job ad is the second artifact that you can now do up to hire Someone now the job ad is there. It is basically a marketing tool for employees to join your business.

It gives them a picture about who the business is, why the business exists, who the customers are, how long you've been around details out of your position description. You don't necessarily need to share your position description straight away. A lot of the details should be covered in the job ad. But then you can.

When you've got interested candidates, you can then share the position description with them prior to setting up an interview. Then you're going to have what type of person am I looking?

So we need to define some criteria there about the type of person we want filling this role.

And something to keep in mind here when we're determining this criteria is that in business what we want is we want to be able to hire the highest capability people at the lowest cost. There's often trade offs that happen with this, right?

If you bring in a really highly experienced person and you pay them a lot of money, chances are you're going to have to refer to them less because they know what they're doing. But you are a solo founder and you might not have the cash available to pay someone a lot of money to take care of a problem for you, which is fine.

But we have to understand that person that you bring in is going to need more handholding. So we want to be able to establish some way of figuring out someone's capability and how much to pay them. Essentially then we have the interview.

So people will apply to the role. You'll look at their cvs, Are they a good match? You can use AI.

There's a whole bunch of organizations out there now using AI to help them with hiring and matching up which CVS are good matches to jobs.

Then once you've done that, you want to establish some interviews and you want to be able to interview and you want to be able to have a set of questions that are targeted around how people would handle certain tasks within that job. So not every interview set is the same.

Make them really meaningful, make it so you can get to those outcomes quickly and know really quickly what's the crux of what I need to know from this person to see that they can do the job. You might not want to ask like these really silly general questions like what's your greatest weakness? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

You want to be able to craft a really good, articulate set of questions where you can really gather that information, get into that detail with a candidate and then after that is you're going to Find someone that you're going to want to offer job to. You need an employment contract, so you are going to go to a lawyer. Please don't use ChatGPT for this.

Go to a lawyer, get an employment contract done up.

You may have local government resources in your area that give you guidance on what should and should not be in employment contracts, but definitely go and engage a legal professional to help you establish that and you can have that in order before you even start hiring. Right. You know, do this earlier, go and figure out what that looks like with a lawyer.

Get that employment contract in place and then it's basically when you go to offer the person the job, you will then input whatever details are relevant into the placeholder text on that contract and you'll send that off for signing and get underway. Then, yes, you've hired someone, Congratulations, you've got someone in your business. It doesn't end there.

And I have a friend, his name is Rory Berry, is a people strategy guy and he really tries to hammer home with people about the whole onboarding experience into your business. And I highly, highly recommend you figure out how you're going to deliver a good solid onboarding experience to your new starter.

Now, there are different ways to do this. Obviously it helps if they are in person.

If they're online, then you're going to need to establish really early a cadence and a rhythm with them for catching up, making sure that they have what they need, etc. Remember, the whole goal here is that we don't want to spend more time managing them than we would have taken doing the job in the first place.

We want to spend less time managing them than doing the job because now we've saved time. Establish those cadences, make sure your expectations are really clear.

Make sure that if they are not meeting the role requirements that you know about that early. We want to hire slow and fire fast.

Remember, we want to make sure that those things are in place, that you can see what they're up to, what they're doing, that you're getting the outcomes that you desired when you went to hire and then, you know, you're managing them, etc. Etc. The goal is we want a happy employee who brings their best to work.

Create a culture that can do that, and I don't have time to talk about that today.

That is not the purpose of this podcast, but it is really important that you think about how you're going to onboard and give them that experience and make sure that that type of probation period is taken care of. Really well, Not to freak you out, not to discourage you about all the work that you need to do to bring on your first person.

But ultimately it is a boon to businesses to bring people in because more people means that you have been growing and you are ready to make that first step. And ultimately it will save you time. Remember, you are the shareholder in your business. You are the founder of it. You are the shareholder.

And the ultimate goal here is to create systems and processes that other people can do so that you can reap the rewards from that through business ownership. So what have we learned today? We've learned today that hiring is worth it and it can be an experience trying to set that up for the first time.

But it is very rewarding to be able to hand off work to someone and have the things in place for them to go and do that for you so that you can save time. But I don't want you going in with rose colored glasses. There is a lot of work that needs to be done there. I thank you so much for joining me.

You could have been doing a million things since today, but you decided to hang out with me and learn about how delegation of your first hire can help save you time and the strategies to use for that.

Make sure to go check out my website@lonewolfunleash.com resources and you can check out some of the resources there that might be useful for you in your systemization journey. Until next week. I'll see you then. Bye.