Lessons

Lesson Info

Meet Your Team

In this lesson we're going to talk about designing your dream team. And as I said we're going to really unpack this myth of delegation. And it really all starts with something that Seth Godin said, but that many, many other people have said, I know my friend Lina West has said this as well, Brian Clark has talked about this, but Seth Godin said on an episode of Unemployable, "What you end up doing, as a small business owner, "is hiring yourself over and over to work for free. "As a result, you get frazzled." and that really, to me, is like, just a brilliant way of saying one of my biggest aha moments when it came to hiring and the vision for my company is realizing that I was not doing one job, I was doing five, or ten, or more. And there's nothing wrong with that, necessarily. You may have the kind of business where you want to do five different jobs, and that's going to allow you to achieve your goals, and that's the way you want to run things and that's totally fine. But the realiza...

tion that what you are doing is not one full-time job, but perhaps five part-time jobs is huge when it comes to actually understanding how your company, even if it's a company of one, actually works. So in addition to designing your dream team in this segment, what we're really looking at is how does your company work. In the previous session we talked about how your goals often outpace your operational vision, and so we need to rethink what our company looks like in order to make it easy to achieve our goals. And in this session we're actually going to take what that company looks like, and kind of get clearer on what are all the different jobs that need to be done. What are all the different areas of responsibility that need to be managed, that need to be covered by somebody, whether that somebody is you, or whether it's a team of somebody's. So as I said, your job is not one job, and it's also not a to-do list. We tend to think in to-do lists, because we live and die by them, as busy entrepreneurs and founders, and even as busy employees, right? But your job isn't a to-do list, neither is anyone else's. Your job is to run your company, that's your job, that's your responsibility. You may have other responsibilities, you might, like me, also be in charge of marketing. But that's your job, it's not a list, it's not a to-do list. And that's why hiring isn't about delegation. If all we ever do is think in terms of delegation, our vision and the decisions that we make about who to bring in to our team, who to get support from, they're dictated to us by our to-do lists. I say enough with letting our to-do lists dictate to us, right? How about we start dictating to our to-do lists. And so that's why we need to stop thinking about hiring as a way to delegate tasks on our own list, and instead start thinking about hiring as a way of building responsibility into our businesses and managing responsibility for our businesses. How can you create separation, how can you create definition around the different areas of responsibility in your business so that you know when you're working in one area of responsibility, that's the job that you're working on. And if someone else is working in a different area of responsibility, and they have responsibility for that thing, you don't have to worry about it. It's now not a function of your to-do list, it is literally something that is off your plate. Does that make sense? Okay. Okay, Megan I've got my eye on you for this session. (laughing) So, what actually does your business entail? What actually makes your business work? Well, Josh Kaufman, who wrote the Personal MBA, says this better than I can, so this is his idea. That there are five parts of every business. Again, it's Josh Kaufman, Personal MBA, did an interview with him for Profit, Power, Pursuit where we talked about this a little bit, but just go read the book. (laughing) He talks about five areas, five parts of every business. And what I would say is these are five areas of responsibility in every business. Somebody needs to be responsible for each of these things. Right now, who is responsible for all of them? You. (laughing) It's a trick question. So there's five parts of every business, the first one is value creation, or figuring out what people need, or want, and actually creating it. You do this a lot, and maybe it's an area of responsibility, an area of the business where you can never imagine giving up control. Maybe you can. We can talk about what that might look like. Then we have marketing, getting your product in front of the right people who want or need it. Sales, moving the people who know about your product and turning them into customers, people who buy your product. Then there's value delivery, or making sure buyers get what they paid for, and that they love it, that they're satisfied, that they're happy. And then there's finance and admin, making sure that all the money and the little logistical things work out. So value creation, marketing, sales, value delivery, and finance. From these five parts, we can start to sort of dissect how any individual business works. We can look and see, all right, who's going to be responsible for value creation, who's going to be responsible for marketing, who's going to be responsible for sales, who's going to be responsible for value delivery, who's going to responsible for finance. What do the different parts of that business actually look like. What are the responsibilities in each part of that business for that particular company. Now, let's get away from the conceptual for a moment and let's actually take a look at what this looks like in a company. So we'll start with my company. We have three core teams. We have community, our community team, we have our growth team, and we have our finance and admin team. Now, saying I have three core teams in my company sounds really fancy, it sounds like there's a lot of people that work for me. And maybe compared to your company, that's true, we have six team members right now. But what you're going to see here in a minute is how different people, different team members that we have actually work in different teams, or help out in different teams. And that the reason we have things organized like this is so that we can better understand the moving parts of our company. How the company actually works to create our goals. So on the community team, the community team is responsible for two parts of the business, as we learned from Josh Kaufman. Value creation, in other words, there their actually developing the product, continuing to refine the product so that it is meeting or exceeding expectations for the people who might want to buy it, right. We're discovering what people need or want, and we're adjusting the product on a regular basis to make it better and better and better. That's where we're creating value. They're also in charge of value delivery, which means they're in charge of onboarding new members, they're in charge of customer service, they're in charge of just making sure people are really satisfied and finding what they want in the community. And so that's all our community team. It's really focused on the product itself, both continuing to create it, and delivering it, making sure that people are satisfied getting what they want out of it. Make sense? Okay. Then we have the growth team, this one's pretty easy. This one's responsible for marketing and sales, so those two parts of the business. It's one bubble on here, I ran out of room. One bubble, they're closely related, just stick with me. And then we have that finance and admin team, and they take care of the money, they take care of sort of the logistical things like calendars, technical support, helping customers with technical things, and so that's the third team. These are the three areas of responsibility in our business. These are the three big pieces of how it all works so that our company makes sense, so that all the I's get dotted, all the T's get crossed, or hopefully as often as possible, and that's kinda how it all works. It's not organized, I don't hire based on to-do lists, I hire on making sure we are fulfilling our responsibilities to the community, and that product development, the value creation, and the customer support, the value delivery. I hire in terms of growth, how do we grow this community and make our network as robust as possible in terms of people, that's marketing and sales. And then I hire in terms of finance and admin, where are we not making things happen with the P&L report, with HR, with scheduling, and how does that need to work better. So again, these are not things that I'm transferring from my to-do list to somebody else's to-do list, this is really understanding how the business is organized, so that we can meet our goals. So if you go back and think through to that first segment again when I asked you what does your company need to look like to achieve your goals as easily as possible. Some of you might have started to think, like Melissa did and Ayalit did, started to think about some of the corollary business in your industry, or maybe businesses that aren't in your industry or your market, but that are run similarly to the business you know you need to build, the company that you know you need to build. This is taking that a step further, so that it's not just, I know that social network companies look like this, and I know that consultancies look like this but that these are literally the different pieces of that business, the different areas of responsibility that I need to be accounting for at any given time. Okay. Let's take a look at another example here. Let's say you run a design business. Maybe you are a designer, or maybe you have a team of designers and you run a design agency. Either way, there are probably, there are three core teams on your business. Again, whether you're team number, team member number one on all of those teams or not, doesn't matter, but you have three core areas of operation. Design, which again, is both value creation and value delivery, it's pipeline, which is similar to growth, right. It's making sure that referrals are bringing new people in, that you're having sales conversations, that proposals are getting done, and that the final conversions to sale, you know, new client agreements, are going out, right, that's marketing and sales. And then again, finance and admin. That's important for every business, right, we need to know the money works out, we need to know that the I's get dotted and the T's get crossed. So that's what a design business might look like. Let's take a look at a digital products business with a slightly different model. Maybe the digital products business has four different teams they have product development, which would take care of that value creation part. They have a marketing and sales team, they have an ops team that takes care of value delivery, and then they have a finance and admin team. Again, you might be the only person in your digital products business, but at different times, as Bri and Dick would say, you're wearing each of these different hats, right. The more you can understand what hats you're putting on at any given time, the better you can understand how you need to manage yourself. And the easier it becomes to take your hat off your head and give it to somebody else, right. It's very very different, you're not seeing it on the outside, but when you get into it, it's very very different than saying, all right, I need you to take this item off my to-do list, this item off my to-do list, and this item off my to-do list. Instead you say, these activities help us meet our marketing and sales goals, and I'm going to give you that hat. That is actually giving someone responsibility for those goals, and gives them purpose to that job, because now they're not just doing stuff, they're helping you reach your marketing and sales goals. And honest to goodness, that's the difference I see between people who are hiring effectively and people who are not hiring effectively. If you've not hired effectively in the past, Melissa you said you had an experience with this, there's probably a really good chance that you were saying, well can you, as yes, you said that earlier, do this this this and this, as opposed to, I want to bring you onboard so that you can help me, or so that you can really own product development. Or so that you can really own operations, and make sure our customers are as happy as possible. That's a huge difference. Because when you're delegating, when you're giving people pieces of your to-do list, that's still on you. That's still under your control, that's still part of your mental bandwidth, you're in charge. When you give someone a hat, and you say, you're job is to help us reach this goal, now they can get creative, now they can take ownership, now they can figure out, they can start to make decisions about what's on their to-do list and what's not on their to-do list and they don't need you. (laughing) Good. They don't need you. Sure, they need you as a leader, we're going to get there in just a second. They need you as someone to continually remind them of goals to check in with them, but they don't need you to micromanage them. They don't need you to constantly answer questions. Because they know where they fit in to the organization. They know what they're responsible for, they know, most importantly, how they're contributing to the success of the business. Think through all the virtual assistants that you've hired, think through all the freelancers that you've hired. Did they know how they were contributing to the success of the business, or were they checking items off a to-do list. The second one. I've done it too. (laughing) I've done it too. Flipping the script on it makes it so much easier. And also, flipping the script on that makes it a lot easier to wrap your head around hiring employees instead of hiring contractors. We're not going to go there yet, because that's a big discussion we're going to have to have, we're going to Patrice Perkins, who is a lawyer, who's going to help us navigate some of that piece as well, so stay tuned. But this may start to get your wheels turning, like okay, contractors are great, actually. Contractors are amazing, and they are amazing at checking items off a to-do list. Employees are great at owning areas of responsibility, even if that only takes them five hours a week, right? We're not talking about hiring full-time, salaried employees necessarily. I'm talking about just someone who cares about their employer, the vision that you have, and doing a good job helping you reach those goals. Make sense? Any questions about that? Melissa. Yeah, can you clarify a little more the difference between value creation and value delivery. Sure, sure. So value creation is another way to think of it is product development. But like, research and development and product development. So figuring out what it is that you're going to build, what it is that you're going to offer, what services you're going to do. And then, putting that piece together. There's a good chance in the kind of business that you do, value creation happens much less frequently than it might sound like it needs to. Like it's not like, aren't we all just in the business of value creation. No, actually in a lot of businesses, value creation is something that happens kind of intermittently, while value delivery is what you're doing on a regular basis, right. If you're in client services, you're delivering value constantly. But you're not, I mean, we could get in to like the semantics behind it, and that is something fun to do that I enjoy. (crowd laughing) But, in the way that we're defining it here, you know, you came up with that offer, you came up with the idea, you came up with the solution to the problem once. It may look different for each customer, but I would call that value delivery. Okay. And I also wouldn't get super caught up in the differences there.