The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
Welcome to The Business Lounge Podcast! Each week we'll share proven marketing strategies to help you build an audience of buyers, create impactful content, and grow a profitable business without compromising on your values with your host, Kimberly Ann Jimenez!
Kimberly is an Online Marketing Strategist, Educator, Founder and Thought Leader in the online marketing industry.
Having worked with 33K+ small business owners & entrepreneurs across an array of industries over the past decade, Kimberly and her business partner Chris Harris are obsessed with helping you level up your marketing game, and grow your bottom line.
They co-lead their flagship program, The Business Lounge, which teaches business owners & entrepreneurs like you how to navigate the confusing & often overwhelming world of online marketing and build an unapologetically profitable business on your own terms (and without compromising your faith, your family or your freedom).
Join us at kimberlyannjimenez.com/businesslounge!
The Business Lounge Podcast with Kimberly Ann Jimenez
S6 EP34: Content Consistency on Autopilot: Practical Strategies for Busy Entrepreneurs
Feeling overwhelmed by content creation? This episode is your solution! Learn how to maintain a consistent content flow without sacrificing your time or quality. Discover the four proven strategies to streamline your content creation process! Boost your online presence, engage your audience, and achieve your business goals with effortless content consistency!
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Go to ContentToCustomers.co & enter code 'Blueprint' for $90 off your 3-day workshop seat!
Welcome back to the Business Knowledge Podcast. I'm your host, kimberly Ann Jimenez, and in today's episode we're going to be tackling a question, a concern, a challenge that I've been hearing a ton from you guys. See, a couple of months ago I asked you to send out a massive, massive feedback form and we asked you guys what was the number one challenge you had with content marketing? And, over and over and over again, the answer was time. So I'm really excited because today I'm going to tackle the topic of what do I do if I am really busy? I have a full-time job, I run a business on the side, I'm a busy mom, busy wife, I'm a busy dad, busy husband, and I just don't have a team. How do I actually really leverage content marketing to my benefit without having to spend all of my time glued on social media? So we're going to get into it. I got three really good strategies for you today. Let's begin.
Speaker 2:Welcome to the Business Lounge podcast where each week, we unpack the hottest online marketing and business strategies so you can grow your business, increase your bottom line and make a bigger impact. And now here's your host, kimberly Ann Jimenez.
Speaker 1:So I wanted to kick things off by reading to you one of the responses that we received. And again, I received hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of responses. We've since organized and categorized and tracked all of them so that we can create content for you guys. But I love this because it's so relatable and it's so real, and I want to read it word by word from one of our subscribers. So this person says I know I would be able to do much better on socials if I could devote more time to content creation and strategy, but I work a full-time professional job at this time.
Speaker 1:Part of me also doesn't want to give up my whole life in order to run socials and be on all the time. Please tell me that I'm not alone. Lol, you are not alone. Not in the least. In fact, I feel like the majority of us, if not all of us, can 100000 percent relate to this. There's so many things going on in life, right, we have important responsibilities, we have people that are counting on us, we have jobs and maybe multiple businesses, and it can get really overwhelming, and it can get really overwhelming. Not to mention, we have so many responsibilities as entrepreneurs, and I've been talking about this at length, both on the podcast as well as on the YouTube channel, as well as on Instagram and on my Telegram channel, and that is that we cannot live our entire lives on social media.
Speaker 1:I see this push that has been happening the past few years of like, create more and do more and post more frequently and like there's very little strategy and a lot of content creation. I love my friend, sean Cannell. He talks about this all the time and it's creating random acts of content and how. We love random acts of kindness, but we don't want to create random acts of content. We want our content to be researched, we want our content to be strategic, we want our content to be purposeful, we want our content to actually lead our fans and followers down the path of becoming buyers. And so very frequently, we'll get caught up in this shiny optic syndrome, trying to chase after the latest trends, and we try to do it from a place of hey, we want to get the word out there, right, we want to build brand awareness, we want to build a big community, we want to serve more people, and it's really coming out of a place of a lot of heart. Right, we're doing it with the best of intentions, but that isn't always the best of intentions. Isn't a strategy right? We want to be aware that we are in business to serve people, to grow a company, and it's our responsibility to become profitable, and I see way too many entrepreneurs, particularly in the online space, just using their business as an expensive hobby. It's not actually generating revenue because they're focused on the wrong things.
Speaker 1:So we've talked about this at length and I want to encourage you, if you haven't, please check out the previous episodes that we've been releasing throughout the month of September and October, and we will link them both in the show notes as well as in the blog that accompanies every single one of our episodes. So if you didn't know that we have a blog, we do. You don't want to miss it. We're always posting and linking and adding really awesome resources that you will not access in a podcast or in a video on YouTube, because we just don't have the time to do that, not to mention the format doesn't allow for that. So definitely check out the blog that accompanies this episode for those resources.
Speaker 1:Now getting back to the question of OK, so how do we actually create content? How do we deploy strategy when we're busy when we don't have a lot of time, and I can tell you firsthand I have been here and I completely understand it was really overwhelming for me, particularly as a service provider running two different service businesses, to have the time and energy to create my own content and to recreate my own marketing. So a lot of the resources that I share with you, a lot of the episodes that we're putting out in the world, come from first-hand experience. It's not some theory that you know. I learned from a book, or someone told me once in another podcast, the stuff that I've lived through, and because I've lived through it, I want to give you really practical, actionable strategies that you can leverage. Number one the first thing that you want to think about is really doubling down on your workflow and your productivity, and this is something that so many of us know is important, and I know that you guys know it's important because some of our most popular episodes are around Trello marketing and productivity and time management. All these things are important and we want to leverage them, but the majority of entrepreneurs are operating at a deficit when it comes to productivity. They don't have systems, they don't have an organizational workflow and they don't have habits that actually support those systems and those organizational workflows. And yes, it's great that we learn new tools and that we're excited about jumping from one tool to the other, but, at the end of the day, if you don't have a habit and a system and a strategy to make the best out of the time that you have, you're not going to get very far. You know, I've sent my email audience, my newsletter peeps, my VIPs, the people who get to access everything that we've released before anyone else and they get exclusive content that I don't put out anywhere else. Definitely always make sure that you're on our email list, and so I tell them.
Speaker 1:I remember writing this email about Joanna Gaines and how she's an incredible content creator. If you think of someone like Chip and Joanna Gaines, these people have it going on. I mean, we're talking. They're running restaurants. They're still running their business when it comes to, like, renovating homes, and then they're also just launched their own freaking network. They have their own show now. They're writing books. They're creating content online. They're running what now bakery as well. There's just so many things that they're running, and if you haven't had a chance to go to Waco Texas, please do. It's just such an amazing experience. It's like a couple, like less than like an hour and a half from where we live and we go often.
Speaker 1:But that really reminds me that people who are at the top of their game, they have the same 24 hours in a day than we do. They have multiple jobs and multiple responsibilities. So it's easy to say listen, I'm running a full-time job, I don't have the time to create content or to market my business. We all know that that's not true. Yes, it is way harder to market a business and grow a side hustle when you are working a full-time job and or you have kiddos that you need to feed and bathe and take to school, or you're a busy husband and you're supporting busy husband and you're supporting your wife and you come home late at night. Maybe you work night shifts. It's a lot, but it is possible. And so I want to give you hope and I want to excite you and I want to ignite a fire inside of you today, because it's not just possible and doable, it's something that you can accomplish without sacrificing all of your extra time, the very little amount of time that you have left, and not have to be glued on your computer or on your phone 24 seven to make it happen. So get your productivity on point. We have so many resources on this topic that we're going to link over on the blog again related to this episode, the blog that goes along with this particular video slash podcast. So make sure that you're checking that out. But productivity and time management is just such a complicated topic and what I will say right now is this start tracking your time, track everything that you do throughout the day, and my husband, Chris, has an awesome process he calls the paid process. He teaches that inside of his startup launch factory program and I think it's so brilliant because it shows you how you can track your time step by step and back.
Speaker 1:Like a few years ago, 2017, when I was really ramping up the business lounge, I was working over 80 hours a week. I was running at it mostly solo. We had one other team member, pearl, who's being my sidekick. Right-hand woman shout out to Pearl and kind of running through that process of oh my gosh, there's just not enough hours in the day to both create content that isn't free, build up a YouTube channel, start a podcast and also build up over 1,400 videos training, marketing, videos on business and on digital strategies for social media and content marketing. Inside the business lounge, I was literally going crazy. If we backtrack even further than that, I was working a full-time job, working 60 plus hours a week. Plus, I had clients on the side as a side hustle and I was helping to run my husband's company, so it was just a lot going on. Now I didn't have kiddos, still don't have kiddos hopefully sometime soon.
Speaker 1:But I do understand the pressure of having so many different things that you're working on at the same time, and tracking what you're doing on a day-to-day basis like not even day-to-day hour to hour, even like in 30 minute sprints will give you so much clarity, in terms of being strategic versus being judgmental, as to where you could be optimizing your time. I can't tell you how many times we've done this with our one-on-one clients. When we run accelerators for our business launch members, we have them track their tasks over a period of a week, literally every 30 minutes. What are they doing, how much time are they spending doing that? And we use a Trello a really great Trello integration called toggle, where you can actually track everything inside of Trello and then you can create a card and say okay, you know I am prepping breakfast on your phone, just like type that in, hit the timer and it'll automatically track the time that you're spending on that particular task. If you do that for seven days, you can really get an idea for where you're spending time and where time is leaking out of your day.
Speaker 1:Remember, there's people who are at the top of their game. You know people like Oprah, or the president, or Jim and Joe, as we've talked about that are at the top of their game. They're running multiple businesses, doing multiple things every single day, and if they can do it, you can do it too. So I want to encourage you to just look at your time, at your schedule, and figure out again where, where are those holes, and then really get strategic about how you're going to be improving your time and your energy. I cannot tell you how many times I've done this in my career.
Speaker 1:Chris actually sat down with me in 2017, as I was saying, and he was like listen, you need to track every single thing that you do. We need to figure out how we're going to delegate some of the tasks that you are doing yourself, that you should no longer be doing in your business. We're going to delete some of the tasks, remove some of the things that are unnecessary, and we're actually going to optimize some of the time that you are losing by consuming content that you should not be consuming, by watching too many Netflix series, by wasting time at X, y or Z, and so I found myself really leveraging strategically my time and my energy and my mental focus in a way that allowed me to shrink my schedule back from almost 80 hours a week to 40 hours we're talking half and that allowed me to live a normal life, and it was a game changer for me and my business. So, again, running your time is so important and that has effects on your personal life, bleeding into your personal life. Start thinking about how you can run your personal life like you run your business. It's one of the things that we preach and we talk about all the time inside the business lounge, and I want to encourage you to do that as well.
Speaker 1:Think about how you can better optimize your family schedule, your personal schedule, your schedule with your spouse. How is it that you're going to be really tracking the time that you spend and making time for, you know, spending with friends and spending with family and still finding that balance because you're optimizing how you run your household. This is especially important for those of you who are mamas. I'm not a mama, but I can imagine the extra pressure and the amount of work that it takes to actually help a little child develop and grow, and nurture those little kiddos and help them become incredible citizens. So I really want you to start thinking about okay, is it going to be a thing where we sit down and we plan out all the chores so I don't have to feel like after I come home from work, there is this laundry list of things that I need to accomplish every day and it's scattered and it's chaotic and I have no time, no quiet time, to sit down and batch my content ahead of time.
Speaker 1:How can I actually optimize the way that I run my household? How can I optimize the way that you know I actually get different errands done, or that I show up for soccer practice or for dance classes? How can I get that system down? And then, who can I recruit right, whether it's a partner, your spouse, a friend, a family member, a parent, your cousin, the little kid who lives next door, who can maybe take some of the household things out of your plate, like you like mowing the lawn, or getting some help with cooking and meal prep, or getting someone to help you with the cleaning. You want to recruit a support system, whether it's paid or free, so that you can really spend a little bit more time strategically creating marketing assets, creating and developing your product.
Speaker 1:And, by the way, this isn't just about content creation. There's so many other things in business that we need to be able to do, and so that leads me into the next tip, the next strategy, the next thing that you need to get done when it comes to your business and running it like a real company, and start thinking less like an employee and more like an entrepreneur, not just like an entrepreneur, like a successful, wealthy, well-established entrepreneur who understands how a real company is run. And so I think that this is a big thing, a big point of contention that we tend to have. We have been taught and programmed and indoctrinated in this whole system of being an employee, and when you start a business, when you dive into entrepreneurship, all of that goes out the window. I don't know if you've noticed this, but this was a huge reality check for me when I started my own company and, as I was part of, you know, building our first local moving service and developing that and scaling that out to multiple seven figures.
Speaker 1:It was such a shock to the system to realize that there was no structure. I had to create my own structure. There was no boss who was going to be. Like you need to be at the office at seven o'clock in the morning and you need to make sure that you know we leave by 6 pm. That's not how it works. There is no particular handbook or a strategy that every entrepreneur receives on day one. This is how you do business.
Speaker 1:So for me, I think that one of the core things is educating yourself on those systems, figuring out how you can better leverage the way that you run your company and divorcing your inner employee, that person inside of you that's constantly asking for permission, who's afraid to try something new or else the boss will get angry, who sets these crazy deadlines that are completely invisible, untangible and unattainable just because you think that's what you should be doing. Question the way that you are running your company Constantly. Think about okay, what am I actually bringing from corporate? What am I bringing from my conditioning? You know, going through school or college that I need to completely divorce, that I need to eliminate from my personal conditioning and my mindset. How can I break free from those norms and start really living my life how I want to live it and running my company how I want to run it?
Speaker 1:There's so often, as I coach entrepreneurs and business owners and leaders and creators, I noticed this happens a lot and I can relate so deeply because this is what I experienced too. We need so much permission and so much validation because we have never really built anything on our own, and that is the environment that we were conditioned to live in or experience in the traditional workplace, right, whether it was corporate or you worked for a small business, or you're just going through college, right, like the professor graded you on things and was like you did a good job or you didn't do a good job, and so much of that is ingrained in us. And so we're trying to get validation. We're trying to figure out, you know who's going to give me permission so that I can go, try this thing or do this a different way. Again, there's no rules when it comes to entrepreneurship and growing a company. I want to encourage you to just tap into your know-how, tap into the experiences that you want to have in your business. Break free from this box right that we constantly put ourselves into this is how things need to look, or how things need to be, or I can't do that because X, y or Z.
Speaker 1:So many of us have limiting beliefs and a lot of mindset issues that we have to work through, myself included. I've been there. I am still working on those things. I have not arrived by any stretch of the imagination, and I've accomplished a lot in the last decade, but I'm still a perpetual learner. I'm still a perpetual student, someone who's constantly trying to level up her game and every single aspect of life, whether it's my family life or my career, and I think that adopting that mindset is so important. So start running your personal life like you would a business. It's one of the best things we've ever done, chris and I, for our individual careers. As well as thinking of ways that you can start tracking your time and optimizing where it is, you're spending the majority of it.
Speaker 1:Some of you guys have so much going on but you don't think about. You don't have the space, you haven't created that white space to be like holy crap, like what could I be doing different today? What could I be doing different this week? How could I change the way that I run my life so that I do have time to create that offer, to send out those emails, to post consistently, to actually go live, to finally launch that YouTube channel? You've been hearing about it and I've been telling you for years and years and years and years and years, but you haven't actually sat down to have the mental clarity, to give yourself the white space to just think. And maybe that means you know, hiring a babysitter or asking your parents to come over and watch the kids while you and your husband strategize and you go on a lunch date or you go on a dinner date and really plan out how you want to run your household. Or maybe it looks like taking that PTO time that you've been putting off and going to the park, going on a walk, thinking, bringing a notebook and just dreaming of different ways that you could really leverage the time that you do have. Maybe it means listening to some training and a podcast that inspires you on your way to and from work or while you're getting ready in the morning.
Speaker 1:There isn't a day where I'm not actually educating myself on a particular area of life or business while I'm in the shower every morning which is like, hey, we gotta do double duty I'm getting ready and I'm putting my makeup on and I'm listening to something, got my headphones on, or I'm just listening on my phone and that's how you kind of hack it. That's something I've been doing since I started my career. On the way to work, I was listening to training and coaching. While I was doing menial tasks things that were not super important I had my headphones on and I was watching a webinar. I was listening to a course, I was getting knowledge and inspiration so that I could actually output all the things that I was learning and implement them in my particular career. All right, so the next thing that I'm going to encourage you to do I know for a fact that it will trigger resistance.
Speaker 1:No matter where you're at in your journey, there will always be resistance to delegate and outsource, and I get it. I have been there. I understand there is a lot that goes into this, but we're going to break it down into a pretty simple process. You have two options. You either run yourself into the ground trying to do all the things on your own thinking that you're the only one who can do things perfectly, or you can challenge yourself to think bigger, to think like a really successful entrepreneur, a wealth builder, a legacy builder, somebody who really understands that their time is limited and they have to leverage other people's time in order to achieve the mission. And this goes back to your purpose and your why. At the end of the day, if we don't learn to delegate, if we don't learn to trust other people, with some of the things that we have on our plate, it'll be impossible to achieve the mission. You will never reach your full potential or serve the amount of people that you were put on this earth to serve.
Speaker 1:If you're always running things on your own and I get it there is a comfort associated with control. I am a control freak. Okay, I have no problem admitting that. You can ask my team. I'm a perfectionist at heart. I am such a pain to work for sometimes because every little detail has to be corrected. I see everything. I'm the kind of person that, like I, will catch all the little things and be like, oh, this is wrong except my own stuff. Then my team has to catch what I do. But it's really comfortable to have that level of control and oftentimes, if we don't learn to break free of that and realize that the mission is more important than our ego, we're not going to achieve what we need to achieve, what we were designed to achieve, what God put us on this earth to do. So I want to encourage you to realize that what I'm going to say is going to trigger some ifs, buts and maybes, and that's totally normal.
Speaker 1:We're going to talk about it, we're going to break it down. So delegation outsourcing, let's do it. You have two different routes that you can take, based on where you're at in your success path, and so if you're not familiar yet with our online success path, definitely check that out. If you're in the business lounge, you know that you have access to literally the entire thing, including all of the programs and courses that we have in there. But I've seen so many people try to replicate the success path, and a lot of big names in our space practically just replicate it, try to replicate it on their own platforms, and I think that's pretty cute. But at the end of the day, we have the original thing and you should definitely check it out. It's going to give you a list of all the things that you need to be tackling, based on the stage of business that you're in. It's going to help you identify what stage of business you're in and it's going to show you what you should be ignoring in a particular stage versus what you should be working on.
Speaker 1:So, if you're anywhere from the validation stage through the hustle stage, this is where you can get really good at delegating and using outsourcing on a per project basis. That means you're not going to be hiring a team. It is not for you. It's not the time to be hiring a team. When you're in those three stages, what you really want to focus on is leveraging your resources, building your social media assets, building a community, building your email list, creating your website, doubling down on validating your offers and getting your first few clients so that you can hire yourself, so that you can supplement the income that you would otherwise be making in a traditional job, or help supplement the income that maybe your family needs if you are married, and it's something that would be helpful for your family, which so many of you guys are in that situation. So, again, if you're in the validation stage, through the hustle stage, you want to start outsourcing per project Once you've reached breakthrough through scale, which is the next three stages we have breakthrough, profit and scale. At those stages you want to start considering bringing more people on deck. That's when you start hiring, building your team of superstar A players, people who can really take your vision and run with it. And I really want to encourage you, because a lot of people get overwhelmed when it comes to outsourcing.
Speaker 1:When you're in the first three stages, do not worry about having to hire someone full time. It is way too much pressure. I see this going awry constantly. I've done it myself and it just creates this place where you're not mature enough as an entrepreneur to be able to give someone else direction, instruction, training and have realistic expectations of what they can and cannot accomplish. So most of the time, entrepreneurs fail when it comes to outsourcing and hiring because they have this insane expectation that people are just going to be in their mind and they're going to know exactly what it is that you want achieved. That's not how it works. I don't care how talented your employee is, I don't care where you poach them from. At the end of the day, you have to have training and you have to provide that time and that space to delegate and give something off to somebody, and the resistance that most entrepreneurs have in this stage, when they're again kind of starting to build their team and hire, is that they're thinking, holy crap, like I could do this better. I spent all this time training, and then this person doesn't work out, or this person doesn't get it, or what I get back is not what I expected. They get frustrated, they fire that person and they start the cycle all over again. So you don't want to get stuck in that particular place.
Speaker 1:What you can do instead is start getting a feel for what it's like to work with other people by outsourcing on a per project basis, and so you can leverage places like firewritercom or Upwork to start delegating small things. On our website, we have a list of over 100 tasks that you should be outsourcing to a brilliant virtual assistant, and we want to start with some of those tasks. They will be different based on where you're at in your business journey, what kind of business you run, what kind of content you're producing, what your marketing strategy looks like, what platforms you're leveraging, but at the end of the day, it's just going to give you some ideas so you can pull some things from that list and maybe have 10 things that you want to start putting off taking off your plate. Now, one of the things that I want to make super clear is you do not have to just use virtual services or online services. You can 100% give this to one of your kids, who maybe is a teenager and is into graphic design, and they could be creating your YouTube thumbnails. Or you can delegate it to an intern from a college nearby who wants more marketing experience, and that person can be in charge of doing simple things like designing your graphics on Canva or styling your blog post, or editing and proofreading your newsletters. All of those strategies, all of those things, all those tasks, are smaller things that other people can do, so that you can focus only on the things that you can do in the business.
Speaker 1:For example, if you're a personal brand like me, nobody else is going to come on this channel and talk to you about online marketing, because that's not how I have set up my business. I'm the one who's creating the podcast. I'm creating the training courses inside the business lounge and our other programs, like content calendar 2.0. I'm the one who's coaching and offering and rendering the service. I'm the one showing up for live streams. I'm the one filming the podcast episodes and writing the captions for social media. Everything else outside of that is something that can be delegated to my team. Why? Because I am the talent in my business and you are the talent in yours.
Speaker 1:There's things that only you can do and you want to point and really be very, very, very honest. Ok, this is this is where you get caught up. When I say that write down the things that only you can do. You're going to start writing things that you think that only you can do. That's not the reality. You got to be honest with yourself. You got to really challenge yourself on that list. That list should be pretty short. Okay, I don't want there to be written. Uh, you know, design graphics, edit YouTube videos, create blog drafts All of that stuff you can delegate to someone else. Okay, do not kid yourself.
Speaker 1:I see a lot of control freaks who are like writing the whole list and it's the list of things that only they can do and it's the entire list of tasks in their business. Do not do that, for the love of God. That is 100% counterproductive to what we're trying to achieve. So be honest with yourself. If you're not honest with yourself, you're not going to achieve results and you're just going to be stuck in this perpetual cycle of feeling you don't have enough time, you can't create content and that's why you're sucking. Don't blame time. It is not time. It is strategy that you need and mindset that you need. You need to heal some of the things that you've been putting off and you have to confront some of the limiting beliefs and the realities that are going on in your head. Okay, so we got the list of things that only you can do. Be honest about it again. And then we're going to really start delegating one to three of those things that are not on the list.
Speaker 1:Again, very simple examples editing your videos or your podcast, publishing your videos or podcast, creating summaries for the show notes or for your blog draft or for your YouTube description. You should not be needing to do any of that stuff If you're running a YouTube channel, like I do setting up your tasks, doing research on potential content ideas, looking through Facebook groups and Quora and different forums for post ideas or questions that your ideal audience is actually sending, maybe replying to some of the basic DMs that you're getting often, or handling your customer support. Those are all things that you could delegate eventually, but as a one off project, start doing small things like maybe you get your logo designed or maybe you get a few photos for your Instagram grid edited. Maybe you have someone design some of your graphics or edit your thumbnails or write one of your blog posts. Yes, you can hire awesome writers. It's going to take time and you have to be willing to give them instruction and direction and training, but once you start delegating and you get back an amazing product, you will be hooked. It will change your entire world and you will get so much of your time back. It is so worth it.
Speaker 1:One of the resources I wanted to share with you today is virtual freedom. I read this book in 2016 or no 2015, and it really changed the game for me. So, chris Decker amazing dude this is like the Bible of delegation. Now, it's focuses mainly on delegating and outsourcing to the Philippines, which we have done extremely successfully. We have a team in Romania and we have a team in the Philippines, and we have had people in Puerto Rico and here in the States that we hire on and off, but for the most part, that's where our core team has been and we've scaled to seven figures just by doing that. So it is possible. I'm living proof and we teach an entire course inside the business lounge. So if you're in there, definitely check out the outsourcing formula I share there, like where to find people, how to design your job post and your listing, how to train them with Trello resources. We have an entire Trello training library how to train them without spending a crop ton of your time to do that. All of that is in the outsourcing formula, but for now, doing per project outsourcing is so strong and so important and so easy to do on sites like Fiverr and Upwork and those sites have come such a long way.
Speaker 1:You can even do things like delegating your podcast intro to an awesome voiceover talent. You can have a great animation for your YouTube intro as well, or your outro. All those things are really great. You can have people clip smaller clips from your podcast or a keynote presentation that you did, or maybe even a YouTube video, and have those posts clipped into smaller ones so that you can distribute that on social media. You can have people who curate a bunch of social media posts and queue them up on your scheduling platform. So many ideas, so many ways that you can go about this. So I want to challenge you to start thinking about outsourcing on a per project basis.
Speaker 1:And now, for those of you who are a little bit more advanced, you are past the validation, through the hustle stage, you're maybe in the breakthrough, you're in the profit or you're in the scale, and when you go through those three stages, it can be really scary to start building a team. So I have a couple of resources for you. Number one I highly recommend reading 21 Irrefutable Laws of Leadership by John C Maxwell. I have that book here. Hold on, okay, here's the book. Love this book. It's amazing. Really, anything by Maxwell is fantastic, but that's a really great resource to start understanding the psychology of being a leader, to start understanding team building and what that's going to take, and then, when you hire, hire slowly, understand that culture fit is extremely important. Skills can be taught. It can be optimized.
Speaker 1:Oftentimes we hire for the skill and not for the culture fit, and I've found in my business that hiring for the culture fit is 10 times more important. In fact, right now, the person who's in charge of our content marketing she's our content manager, her name is Belle and she's amazing. We hired her for a support role and she did fantastic as a customer service person and now she's being promoted into our content manager because she had this willingness to learn more about content marketing. She had already been practicing and deploying some graphic design strategies and video editing and she started just running with it. We gave her a couple tasks and she's just stellar fantastic running with it. We gave her a couple tasks and she's just stellar Fantastic. So I love Belle and I love that she is growing into that role because she is a culture fit. She's been amazing, you guys. So, so good. You can ask Chris, he loves her.
Speaker 1:But more importantly, I just want to contrast that by saying last year we hired two social media managers girls who are super experienced, already had run their own businesses, had multiple clients hired. Two of them had all the skills, were not the culture fit and it was a disaster, a complete and utter disaster. I mean it's been the worst hiring experience I've ever had and I, chris and I have hired like we had like 300 employees at one time in our moving company days when we were running a local service. So we have experience hiring people in person and virtually have experience working with people in the States and in foreign countries, and so one of the worst experience we ever had last year and these are people who are very, very, very good at what they do it was just not the right fit culturally. There was clashing and lots of issues and drama and it just did not work out for that reason.
Speaker 1:So you want to start thinking about prioritizing culture fit and, yes, it's important that they have some skills, but they don't have to be the most incredible skills you've ever seen. If they do not have the culture fit, please skip on that person. It's just one of the biggest hiring hacks and tips that that I can give you. And, of course, you want to test those people on their particular skills before you actually hire them. We actually have paid projects that we have our candidates go through and we analyze those projects. We look at really different things and we'll talk more about this in our upcoming episode on the ultimate guide to outsourcing and hiring, but for right now, I just want you to start dipping your toe in the water. Right, try one thing. You may or may not like it, that's okay. Keep trying and finding other people. These days, with things like Upwork and Fiverr, you can really get a feel for who is a great designer, who is a great editor and who just doesn't have a lot of experience.
Speaker 1:Now, as you're thinking about bringing on your first team member, one of the things that Chris Decker recommends in his book Virtual Freedom is to bring in a general virtual assistant. I have done this many times in my business as people have come and gone from the company, and I highly highly recommend that you do bring in a virtual assistant, somebody who can just kind of run all those things and you can do that on a foreign country for, let's say, three to five dollars an hour, if not a little bit more. Or you could do it here in the States or in a Western country and have someone who's working, you know, remotely with you or even in person. Then they would not be virtual, but they would still be an assistant calendar. Someone who can, you know, run with creating landing pages and syncing up your newsletters and making sure that your blog drafts are styled correctly and that you're publishing at the right time, can remind you to create content, can distribute that on social media, can answer basic questions from people on your socials or your inbox, can manage your inbox for you, which is such a big deal. All those things are things that you can delegate to someone who can become your right hand person.
Speaker 1:Every strong leader, every executive in the real business world and I hate using that word because it is a real business when you're running an online business, but you get the point Every single one of those people. They rely on other team members who shine at things that maybe they don't or they don't have time to do, so why would you run your business solo forever? I mean, that's great that you are able to have all those tasks, but you can't keep yourself small intentionally. So please, please, please, please, start educating yourself at the very least on those topics. Grab these books, read them and take action. Start looking at who you could potentially hire.
Speaker 1:My first hire, I only hired her for five hours a week. That's all I could afford and slowly over time, I started adding more hours 10 hours, 20 hours, 30 hours, 40 hours, a bigger pay raise. All those things started happening slowly and they allowed me the white space and the time that I needed to create and to be the talent in my company and to do more of what I was gifted to do without having to compromise on my energy, my time and my schedule. So now you have no excuse. Yes, you could absolutely devote more time with content creation and your own marketing if you didn't have a full-time job, a family, a spouse or whatever else that's going on in your world, but, at the end of the day, there's plenty of people who are making it happen regardless. They're having those things that you're going through, plus 10 others. They're making it happen and they're doing it because they're getting really resourceful, and that's the key to running a successful business.
Speaker 1:So I hope this episode was helpful and it started getting your wheels turning in terms of how you can creatively start looking at optimizing your schedule, really nailing your time management and then leveraging other people's time to grow your business. At the end of the day, that's what entrepreneurs do best, and we really need to start thinking bigger as online business owners. Hey, if you found this episode helpful, it would be an amazing help for me and my team If you would share it with someone who's also starting their own business, with either starting a side hustle or they're full on working full time in their business and they're thinking about creative ways that they can scale and make better use of their time. And, hey, if you are listening to this or watching it on our YouTube channel, would you screenshot it and tag me over on Instagram stories? I would love to hear from you, give you a little shout and get to know you better. Thank you so much for watching.
Speaker 1:Make sure that you're subscribing to the channel, if you haven't already, as well as the podcast. It's a small thing that goes a really long way for our business. And, hey, if you're wondering how you can work with us to take your content, marketing or your business to the next level, here are three ways that you can get started. Number one make sure to download our success path. It's completely free and it'll give you the six stages of online business success, from validating your business all the way through scale. We're going to give you a detailed overview of what particular strategies you need to be deploying, but also, just as importantly, what areas you should leave for the next stage. You should not be worrying about Now. It's not a comprehensive list, but it definitely is going to get you started on the right track.
Speaker 1:Number two come over to Content Calendar System 2.0 and check it out.
Speaker 1:Visit our most popular product is going to give you everything that you need to know about content creation that's efficient and will save you a ridiculous amount of time from the lens of profitability, because we don't want to just create content for the sake of creating content.
Speaker 1:We want to do it for a purpose and we want to get results. Number three come join us inside the business lounge. It's our premier signature program where I teach my very best work around marketing in general, as well as designing funnels and creating webinars and selling via Facebook ads. All of that training is jam packed inside the business lounge. Not just that, but you're also going to get monthly coaching calls with me and my co-pilot, chris, where you get to ask us questions, we review your sales strategies and your sales funnels and we give you feedback in real time. You're also going to have access to our Facebook group and our private forum where you can connect with thousands of other online entrepreneurs who are just where you're at right now, and you're going to be able to feel that sense of community and get feedback from those people in real time as well. All the information will be linked in the description box below and I will see you in the next episode. Un beso.
Speaker 1:Bye for now.
