Chapter Twenty Five - Hire For Your Weaknesses: You Can't Do It All - Jenny Revels

"We Wish We Had Known - Everyday Tips from Consultants To Grow Your Business"

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Hire For Your Weaknesses: You Can't Do It All

JENNY REVELS

Revels Consulting LLC
HR Consultant and Leadership Coach
revelsconsulting.com / jrevels@revelsconsulting.com

As a solopreneur or new business owner, you are great at something that made you go into business. After 25 years in corporate human resource leadership roles, I did the same. Due to my business background and education, I thought I would be capable of learning and doing everything too, such as billing, accounting, collections, marketing, customer service, scheduling, selling, recordkeeping, presenting, materials, technology, website, ordering products, etc.

      Sometimes it’s hard to trust others with those details or confidential matters or you just don’t have the funds. However, once you get busy doing what you love, those other things still have to happen, and they don’t always get your attention or aren’t done well.

      Your website crashes. Billing falls behind and clients aren’t paying on time. You can’t keep up with staffing or employee issues. You have no funnel of business to fill the gap when things get slow because you fell behind on marketing. Marketing is where I struggle the most, especially since the pandemic. I relied on word of mouth and networking to get business. After the pandemic, it was harder. I hired help to create a branding and marketing plan and improve my website. If I would have continued to try and figure it out myself, it would have stolen the joy from my real work. I had to hire for my weaknesses.

      You don’t have to do it all. When you hire others to help, you can focus on your clients and the things you love doing. Revenue will follow. Just be sure to put a good process in place. Use the checklist on the next page as a guide to sort through what tasks to delegate and what to do after you hire help.

Steps to Hire for Your Weaknesses

Decide Tasks to Delegate

•       Evaluate how you spend your time weekly and monthly using these three charts.
•   Joy vs. Dread Tasks – What motivates you? Where is your passion? What do you avoid?
•    $$ vs. Dead Time Tasks – What tasks directly impact revenue? What do not? What tasks can be eliminated?
•    Quick and Easy vs. Time-Consuming Tasks – What tasks can you do efficiently and effectively? What tasks are currently inefficient?
•       After you’ve evaluated all of these items, looked for patterns, calculated the time and money factors, it should help you determine what work could be best delegated.

Find Capable Partners and Really Delegate

•        Remember, you are searching to hire someone to fill your weaknesses. They likely won’t be just like you.
•       Develop a strong job description that includes specific expectations and outcomes that you want performed and how performance will be measured.
•        Outsource your search to a specialist to broaden your reach and find a solid match.
•       Take the time to orientate and train on the front end or you will remain too involved in the tasks.
•       In the early phases, schedule weekly check-in time for them to ask questions and propose changes.
•        Stay out of their way! Give them time to succeed!
•       Celebrate the partnership with praise and reward them when expectations are met. You don’t want to lose a strong partner!

JENNIFER REVELS

Jennifer Revels, an HR consultant and leadership coach with 25 years of human resource management and consulting experience, helps leaders and small business owners with all facets of planning, structuring, hiring and managing employees. Typically, a small business owner is strong at whatever their business specialty is, but sometimes hiring the right people, managing them and putting effective employee communication plans in place is not their strong suit. She’s worked for over 20 years in a corporate HR leadership role and five-plus years in private consulting. She is a calm and trusted partner, helping develop your hiring practices, growing your team strategically, creating a positive culture with less conflict, but also having difficult conversations or making difficult staffing changes with legal risk consideration, so that you’re not stressing about those things.

She left corporate life in 2016 to find more balance in her life, travel more and spend more time with her husband and two sons, but enjoys using her skills to help smaller businesses who don’t always have the funds or resources to hire a full-time manager or human resources expert.

She enjoys partnering with business owners and leaders who care about their team and want a trusted sounding board when stuck or overwhelmed about hiring, managing or growing their teams.