MBA2583 When Is the Right Time to Hire Your First Employee? A No-BS Guide

0:00When should you hire your first employee? The answer is simple. Sooner than you think. Waiting too long to hire can hold your business back and burn you out. Today, we're diving into why hiring early, even just for a few hours a week, can be the smartest move for you and your business. I'll share how to know when you're ready for that first hire, what tasks you should delegate first, and the massive benefits of growing your team.

0:28Welcome back to the$100 MBA show. I'm your host, Omar Zenholm. where we give practical business lessons three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, to help you take action and start, grow, and scale your business. In today's episode, we're going to answer a critical question. What is the right time to hire your first employee, your first team member? But first, let me get a few important things out of the way. The first thing is that you should never make a hire that you can't afford, okay? If you're not making profit, if you are not making enough money to make the hire, then obviously you should not make the hire.

1:03You should have a healthy cushion even after the hire. So say, for example, you're making$2 ,000 in profit after all your expenses and paying yourself. Your first hire really shouldn't be more than$1 ,000 because you need a little bit of a buffer so you have some profit that you can put back into the business. Second, when we talk about first hire, this doesn't have to be a full-time employee. This could be a part-timer. This could be a consultant. This could be a contractor. This could be an outsourced hire. It doesn't have to be an employee with benefits and all those bells and whistles. And lastly, today's episode is more than just making that first hire.

1:37It's shifting your mindset. Understanding the whole point while you started a business is so you build an asset that works for you, that makes money for you, not you just grinding it out until you get old. In the beginning, at the start, you are building the foundation, but eventually you need to start making some hires to start doing the work for you so that you eventually just make decisions. And the day-to-day labor is done by a team of people that you've recruited. This is why I want you to make a hire as soon as possible, as soon as you can afford it. Waiting too long to hire can stunt the growth of your business and keep you stuck in tasks that don't move the needle.

2:17We're going to break it down in today's lesson and let's start with why you should hire early. Hiring early even if it's a part-time hire or a freelancer, has enormous benefits. The first big benefit that I've learned through experience is that it frees up your time for growth. Every minute you spend on low-value admin tasks is a minute you're not spending on growing your business that will bring in the big bucks. Hiring somebody to handle all these time-consuming tasks gives you back the time to focus on sales, marketing, strategy, product, the things that actually grow the business, the big rocks that actually move things in the right direction.

2:58My coach, Dan Martel, taught me this concept of$10 tasks,$100 tasks,$1 ,000 tasks, and$10 ,000 tasks. Your goal is to drop$10 and$100 tasks immediately, and you should only be focusing on$1 ,000 and$10 ,000. Eventually, in the near future, you'll be dropping the$1 ,000 as well as you get skilled people to take care of that. And you only focus on$10 ,000 tasks. The ultimate goal is you do none of the tasks and everybody you hire does it all. But your time right now is being spent doing all levels of tasks. And by the way, these tasks are not graded equal. $10 tasks could take six hours each and a$10 ,000 task might take three hours.

3:40It makes no sense for you to continue to spend time on things that don't move your business forward. The second reason why this is important is you want to avoid burnout. Here's the reality a lot of people want to talk about when it comes to entrepreneurship. Your willpower, your motivation, it's not limitless, okay? You don't have unlimited amount of willpower to grind it out. Running a business solo can be overwhelming and delegating tasks early helps you avoid that burnout and maintain your energy for the big decisions that actually matter. The third reason why this is so important is that it creates momentum.

4:14A team, no matter how small, creates momentum. It shifts your mindset from, I'm going to do everything myself to building something together. It's good for you to have ownership over something that you enjoy or something that you find critical to your job, but you need to delegate tasks and allow other people to have ownership over their area. And lastly, the fourth reason why this is so important is that it allows you to prepare for scale. Listen, if you plan to grow, hiring early helps you build your systems and processes that make scaling easier down the line. One of the first things I got one of my first hires to do is to document our processes.

4:47This is a boring and tedious task that frankly is very time consuming and not a good use of my time. And by getting somebody else to do it, they're creating value in my company and making it easier for me to get a new hire and get them to learn my processes faster. They're up and running and ready to provide value for my company. So here's the bottom line. The sooner you hire, the sooner you can start working on your business instead of in it. So how do we do this? Well, step one is know when you are ready. Listen, you don't need to earn six figures or have a full workload to justify hiring somebody.

5:23Here's how to know when you're ready. You're spending too much time on admin tasks. Tasks like scheduling, email management, invoicing. This stuff eats up your day and it's time to start delegating these tasks. Another sign is you're turning down opportunities. If you're too busy to take on new clients or projects, hiring somebody can help free you up so that you can grow and make mere money. This is why you're in business. And lastly, you can afford a small commitment. If you can afford hiring a virtual assistant for 5 to 10 hours or 15 hours a week, this is often all you need to get started.

5:58And it's not going to cost you normal days. It costs you like 500 US dollars per time, especially if you're hiring overseas in places like the Philippines. Step two, easy way to start are the admin tasks. Why admin tasks? Because they're time consuming, like I mentioned, but they don't require expertise. You can train somebody very easily. Most people can learn very simply with a just shooting a video, a screen capture video on your computer, the tasks you need them to do. Most people are pretty good at following directions. Delegating these tasks frees up hours in your week so that you can focus on high value work.

6:32So the first things you should just offload are email management, answering emails from customers, scheduling, data entry, invoicing, billing, any kind of documentation, any kind of repeated procedure like publishing a blog post on WordPress, making edits on a website, uploading and publishing videos on YouTube, anything that is just a procedure that needs to be done. I'm going to give you a good example. This podcast that we record. This podcast takes a lot of people that do a lot of things. There's a lot of steps. There's a lot of things to do to make this podcast happen. Now, I want to focus on things that I can add the most value.

7:06And that includes just focusing on the creation of the content. That means brainstorming the ideas, researching, creating the script, and then delivering the content, meaning recording this content. So once it's recorded, I then just share it with my team. That's it. I'm done from that point. Everything up until that point and after that point are done by other people in my team. So somebody takes that file and edits the file. Somebody creates an audio file. Somebody creates a video file. Somebody uploads it to YouTube. Somebody creates the description on YouTube. Somebody writes the headlines and the taglines and creates the thumbnail.

7:42And then on the audio side, creates the show description and then creates the blog post on the website. and then it gets published. It gets scheduled to be published. There's social media assets that get created from these videos, from these episodes. We create these assets by other people on my team and then they get scheduled. They get posted on my social media. I don't even touch my social media. They do it for me because again, these are admin tasks, things I should not be doing. I should be focusing on the things that add the most value to our business. So action step, time to take action.

8:12Get your notebook. Make a list of tasks that you do in a week. When I did this exercise first time, No joke. It was like almost 400 things on that list. Okay. And you want to circle the things that you don't need to do anymore. Things that you can train somebody else to do that don't directly generate revenue or require your expertise. Now, it's going to take some effort from you to delegate this. Sometimes you just want to own everything. But these are the tasks you should delegate first because they're going to free you up big time. Step three, start small. Your first hire doesn't have to be full time.

8:43Like I mentioned, you want to start small. all, just hire a virtual assistant, somebody that is part-time, 15 hours, 20 hours, depending on how much work you have for them. You can ramp them up, even start at 10 hours and 15 hours, and then eventually full-time at some point. I really love the platform onlinejobs.ph. This is like a job board out of the Philippines. Really good hires we got from that website. And now that you have a list of tasks that you're going to delegate, that becomes the job description. You now know what you need them to do, and you can put that in the job description and make it easy for them and easy for you to find the right hire.

9:14Another option is to hire an agency that specializes in something like an agency that creates or edits videos. This is a good option if you create a lot of videos and don't want to do the editing anymore and they can do it for you. But the bottom line is you want to start small and start with what you can afford. You don't need to start with a full-time hire benefits. You can start with a part-time hire that does what you need them to do. Get those admin tasks out of the way and then just learn to be a manager. Learn how to delegate. Learn how to train somebody on those tasks so that you can make the next hire, the next hire, the next hire.

9:44Step four, focus on ROI, a return on an investment. Think of your first hire as an investment, not an expense. Okay. The goal here is you want to hire somebody who frees you up to make you more money. This is the point. If you feel like making this hire is going to allow you to make more money, that's a good return on investment. For example, if you hired a virtual assistant for$15 an hour and you hired them for 10 hours a week, that's 10 extra hours for you to spend on revenue generating tasks like running webinars or sales calls. If you can make more than$150 in a week with those extra 10 hours, because you're paying them$15 an hour and their 10 hours is$150 a week.

10:21If you can make more than that every week, it's a return on investment. And you should now that you have 10 extra hours. Calculate the value of your time. If you make$100 an hour on high value tasks, hiring somebody that handles a$15 an hour task is a no brainer. Now let's just be totally transparent, you're going to be freed up eventually. But at the start, you're going to need to train them. You need to manage them. You make sure that they have the support they need. So maybe you're not going to be totally free of those 10 hours. You might going to have seven hours at the start and then eight and then nine, then finally 10.

10:53But just know that it's an investment. So when is the right time to hire a first employee? As soon as you possibly can afford it. Start small, focus on delegating admin tasks, and think of your hire as an investment in your business growth. So to recap, hire early, free your time, avoid burnout, and prepare to scale. Start by deli any admin tasks that you don't require your expertise. You can just train them with a video easily. You can just walk them step by step how you do any kind of task. And number three, begin with a small commitment like a VA, a part-time hire, a freelancer, a consultant.

11:25Thanks for tuning into the$100 MBA show. If you want more of these practical business lessons, you can find them on our website over at 100mba.net. Better yet, just hit subscribe or follow on your favorite podcast app, the one that you're using right now, or hit subscribe on YouTube. If you're watching, you'll get our next episode automatically. Again, we publish three days a week, Monday, Wednesday, Friday, making sure we help you take action and build, grow, and scale the business that you want. I'm Omar Zanom, and I'll see you in the next episode.