How to know when to scale your team beyond a VA

Today’s episode of the podcast is all about how to know when to grow your business to more than one team member, and what kind of roles you might want to consider having. I’d love to know where you are at in your business right now - whether it’s just you, you have a VA or a whole team of people - please feel free to connect with me on my social media! KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCAST ● The common mistake people make when taking on a VA ● How to know when to scale your team beyond a VA ● The kind of tasks you could outsource to a team of people THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE If you do something more than twice in your business, you should not be the person doing it, because it's a process and a task. USEFUL LINKS Join the membership and access the Dream Business Growth Path Jen Lehner’s, Front Row CEO course Becci McEvoy, Social Media Marketer Phil Brett King, My Podcast Assistant Ben Bellamy, Web Designer Teresa Heath-Wareing Instagram Teresa Heath-Wareing LinkedIn Teresa Heath-Wareing Facebook Teresa Heath-Wareing Twitter Transcript Hello and a super warm welcome to this week's episode of the podcast. I hope you are doing well. Firstly, I just wanna say thank you for some of the lovely messages that I have had on DMs and on social media about the change in episodes and how you're enjoying the shorter kind of bite size type episodes with just me. So I really, really appreciate you reaching out, and now would be a really cheeky time to ask for a review. As I've told you before, The podcast because it's so consistent, it doesn't really do anything crazy amazing at any point. As in like, so when someone launches a new podcast, the, it can throw it high up in the charts cuz it had no episodes and now it has episodes, or it had no listeners and now it has listeners. But when you are consistently churning out content and consistently showing up, it takes a lot of effort to actually get you ranking anywhere. Having reviews really, really helps. Also, if you know of someone who is in business that you think this might help, I'd really appreciate you sharing it. So just a little plea before we get started. Okay. So let's talk about this week's episode and what we're gonna be focusing on. I've decided to focus on when you have a team member, how do you know when to grow to more than one team, team member? And how do you know who you need and what roles you need and that sort of thing? So let's just talk about sort of getting a first team member, the VA. So normally a VA is the person that people get straight off the bat. They're the first team member they get. And one of the mistakes I find when people look for a VA is, and I remember someone once saying to me, I want them to be able to do all the website stuff. I want 'em to be able to create social media posts, do the scheduling, write some blogs, duh, duh, duh. And it's like, gosh, this person's superhuman man. Like, seriously, how much stuff do you think they're gonna be able to do from a skill point of view? Because let's face it, we are not all brilliant to everything and neither will a VA. Now the idea of a VA is that they can do lots of different things, but you will find even with some VAs and others, some naturally are better at some things and like doing some things and some like doing something else. I have one of my amazing students she bought on a VA and her VA's phenomenal in the sense of she creates social media posts for her and they're really beautiful and she schedules them and she writes the content and that's brilliant. However, she just fell on her feet because she found a VA who just happened to like and be good at it. So that's not always the case. So if you haven't got a VA and you're thinking, well, what would I use them for? And I think this is. This is a common mistake that people, that people make is they think like, I've got nothing to give them. I dunno what I'll give them, but you are doing so much in your business every single day. And there is a rule of thumb that I was once told that if you do something more than twice in your business, the same task or the same process more than twice, you should not be the person doing it because it's a process and a task, and you don't have to do that. And the idea is that you are putting more value on your time in the sense of you're doing things that only you can do and things that make you money. So when you think to yourself, or you might be thinking to yourself, I can't afford to bring someone in. Well, how much do you charge out per hour? Or how do you make money? And therefore, should you be doing something that you could be paying someone less to do that thing? And it's not that you're giving someone the rubbish jobs. People like these jobs. Some people thrive in these jobs. Some people want to do the things that you don't wanna do, that's what they're good at. So you're not sat there giving them all the rubbish, and you don't need to feel bad about that. You're just giving them something that they like to do. So let me start off by talking about some of the things that Johanne, who's my VA does for me now. She's a full-time assistant for me, has been for a couple of years now, and is amazing and does lots and lots of things in my business. Now. When I bought her on full-time, the reason I bought her on full-time is cause I wanted the accessibility. I wanted someone there when I messaged them or when I emailed them, because if you're not paying someone full-time money, you can't expect that they are not sat there waiting for your email. And now some VA some team members will be brilliant and very responsive and lots of my team members are and they're phenomenal. However, I knew I wanted to be able to say. You are working full-time for me, so I know I can email you within your hours and you will respond. I also knew that initially she would not be doing full-time hours and some weeks she still doesn't do full-time hours, and I'm okay with that. Um, Because you've gotta build up to giving them stuff, okay? You can't just suddenly start them one day and then they're doing like loads of hours the next, because they've gotta get used to it. They've gotta know what they're doing. You've gotta hand things over. So I wanted to run through really quickly some of the things that I give Johanne to do. So she does things like, she posts all the video replays. So when we do any training in the club, when I do a coaching call, when I do a mindset call, she will then post that backup in the club so people can go and watch the replay. She creates things like the Zoom events. She creates things like ad events. So once I work out, when I'm doing things in the month for the club, I will literally give her the dates and she goes and does all the admin around that. She preps my emails. And you know what I worked out today? Oh man, I'm so bad. I've not sent an email for a couple of weeks. That is so unlike me. I dunno what's going on. So I've literally just written at the top of my piece of paper where I've written notes for this podcast episode. Emails in big capital. Letters and I'm like drawing lines around the word as I speak because a bit later on I've got co-working with my exec club and that's what I will be doing in my co-working is writing some flipping emails. But she will, I will write them and she will then schedule them and get 'em ready to go. She does things like, she used to do the interview process for the podcast, so when I had interviews she would do the replying and that sort of thing. She would put, she puts the podcast live, so she dissolve that admin side behind that. She uploads the podcast to the website and to captivate she posts in the group for me. So for instance, if we've got, like this afternoon, I'm doing a mindset session in the group. So she schedules the post to remind everybody. There's a mindset session. She does things like downloads, invoices for me that I then have to upload to my invoice thing. And she schedules loads of stuff for me. So there are loads and loads of things she does and more than what I've just given you on that list. But like I said, it wasn't like she started day one and I gave it her all on day two. So there are millions of things you could hand over. You've just got to give yourself a chance to think about it. And then also, Know that you are going to have to spend some time doing it, but honestly the time spent will come back tenfold cuz I know that's often the excuse. Well, I would hand it over, but I could do it just...