Summary

Selena Knight discusses the importance of hiring the right people for your business in this episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. She shares personal stories of hiring mistakes and emphasizes the need to delegate tasks that drain your time and energy. Knight provides a simple question to ask when making hiring decisions: “Who do you need and what are they going to do?” By identifying the tasks that can be delegated and focusing on revenue-generating activities, business owners can free up time to grow their businesses.

Chapters

| **Timestamp** | **Summary** |
| ————- | ———– |
| 0:00:00 | Introduction to podcast episode and reason for sharing lesson |
| 0:01:09 | Lesson topic: the simple question to answer hiring decisions |
| 0:03:01 | Story of hiring a team member who started her own business |
| 0:05:21 | Importance of growing your team to scale your business |
| 0:06:29 | Hiring is part of the Impact Pillar of retail success |
| 0:07:31 | Common challenges and obstacles in hiring and scaling |
| 0:09:03 | Mindset shift needed to approach hiring and obstacles |
| 0:10:35 | Example of hiring a visual merchandiser who didn’t meet expectations |
| 0:12:55 | Lack of clarity and KPIs contributed to hiring mistake |
| [0:13:24] | Hiring freelancers vs. hiring own team |
| [0:14:38] | Offloading tasks in startup and scale-up phases |
| [0:15:46] | Hiring people for unnecessary jobs |
| [0:16:21] | Delegating social media and tracking results |
| [0:19:01] | Deciding who to hire and what they will do |
| [0:20:20] | Identifying revenue-generating tasks and tasks to delegate |
| [0:21:57] | Determining if business will be negatively or positively impacted |
| [0:23:29] | Customer service as a revenue-generating cost center |
| [0:24:23] | CEO as CMO and focusing on revenue-generating tasks |
| [0:26:56] | Making small changes for exponential results |
| 0:27:34 | Delegating tasks to increase sales and revenue. |
| 0:28:05 | Batching tasks to determine which to delegate first. |
| 0:28:52 | Considering how to use the time saved by delegating. |
| 0:29:21 | Suggesting offloading website product uploads to an offshore VA. |
| 0:30:05 | Highlighting the value of outsourcing tasks like image resizing. |
| 0:30:36 | Planning how to use the extra time gained from delegation. |
| 0:31:04 | Cautioning against hiring someone for too many roles. |
| 0:31:40 | Warning against defaulting back to easy tasks after delegation. |
| 0:31:40 | Encouraging listeners to share their insights and leave reviews. |

Quotes

1. **A-(0:00:00)**
   > “I can’t wait to meet you guys in real life.”
   
   2. **A-(0:01:09)**
   > “It is the simple question that you can ask to answer most of your hiring decisions.”
   
   3. **A-(0:03:43)**
   > “She was essentially selling the exact same stuff. We call her the Traitor team Member for easy reference.”
   
   4. **A-(0:05:49)**
   > “On paper she was a great team member, she just didn’t have an awful lot of scruples.”
   
   5. **A-(0:07:01)**
   > “Being able to delegate all of those tasks that suck up your time and drain the life out of you, it’s not only a good business move, but it is like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders.”
   
   6. **A-(0:08:34)**
   > “So you can hustle to a certain level, but after that, you 100% will need the bodies and the minds to help you grow or you’re just going to burn out, you’re going to hit plateaus.”
   
   7. **A-(0:10:35)**
   > “Build the team to build the business.”
   
   8. **A-(0:13:24)**
   > “So let’s say that you sent out a promo email and it brought in $2,000. That’s a three, four, $5 activity.”
   
   9. **A-(0:19:21)**
   > “So start kind of batching those tasks under these little kind of people to see which one is actually the one that you need to offload first, to delegate first.”
   
   10. **A-(0:26:23)**
   > “These are the kinds of tasks that will make a huge difference in your revenue.”
   
   Note: The timestamps provided are approximate and may vary slightly in the actual audio.

Show Notes

**About The Guest(s):**

Selena Knight is a retail growth strategist and multi-award-winning store owner. With years of experience in the retail industry, Selena helps businesses scale and achieve success through effective marketing and leadership strategies.

**Summary:**

In this episode, Selena Knight discusses the importance of hiring the right people for your business and shares a simple question that can help you make better hiring decisions. She shares personal stories of hiring mistakes and emphasizes the need to delegate tasks that drain your time and energy. Selena also explains the two phases of business growth and how to identify the tasks that should be delegated. By focusing on hiring the right people and offloading non-essential tasks, you can free up time to focus on revenue-generating activities and scale your business.

**Key Takeaways:**

1. Hiring the right people is crucial for business growth and success.
2. Delegate tasks that don’t directly contribute to revenue generation.
3. Identify the tasks that should be delegated by assessing their impact on the business.
4. Focus on hiring specialists rather than generalists for specific tasks.
5. Offload tasks that can be done faster, cheaper, and better by someone else.

**Quotes:**

– “Scaling your business isn’t about making huge shifts, it’s about making small changes that, when compounded, create exponential results.”
– “Build the team to build the business.”
– “The problem isn’t usually a bad product or location, it’s often the business owner not delegating effectively.”
– “You are allowed to be the CMO and the CEO.”
– “Delegate tasks that drain your time and energy so you can focus on revenue-generating activities.”

Note: The quotes provided are direct quotes from the transcript.

0:00:00 Salena Hey, there, and welcome to today’s episode of the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. Well, as you listen right now, when this goes live, the team and I will be jet setting our way to Melbourne to get ready for the retail academy live. I am so excited. It is our first live event since before COVID How many years ago was that? It feels like forever, and I can’t wait to meet you guys in real life. But that also means we’ve been a little bit busy, aka a lot busy behind the scenes. And I realized that I hadn’t recorded a podcast episode for this week.
0:00:40 Salena And so I decided because I didn’t want to leave you hanging, and I know how important bringing new people onto your team in time for the busy season is. So I decided that I would share with you one of the lessons that we recorded this month for Scale Your Store, and it is all about hiring the right people for your business. In fact, it is the simple question that you can ask to answer most of your hiring decisions.
0:01:09 Salena So here’s a little behind the scenes interaction to see what it’s like with our monthly Scale Your Store extra bonus lessons. All righty, let’s jump into today’s episode. Hey, there, and welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. If you’re looking to get more sales, more customers, master your marketing, and ultimately take control of your retail or e commerce business, then you’re in the right place.
0:01:42 Salena I’m Selena Knight, a retail growth strategist and multi award winning store owner whose superpower is uncovering exactly what your business requires to move to the next level. I’ll provide you with the strategies, the tools, and the insight you need to scale your store. All you need to do is take action. Ready to get started? Hey, Jill. How, Shelly? I am going to jump straight in this because this might be a little bit of a long one.
0:02:21 Salena And as usual, if you would like to put your questions into the chat, that would be helpful because I can answer them once I’ve finished, and I won’t lose my train of thought. As I said, this is a little bit of a long one. So today I’m going to be talking to you about the simple question that you need to ask to answer your biggest hiring decision. Now, have I ever told you about the story about how when I hired someone to work in my shop and about a year later, I accidentally found out that she had started her own online business the week after she got the job in my store?
0:03:01 Salena Even worse, she was essentially selling the exact same stuff. We call her the Traitor team Member for easy reference. Now, it was actually just a freak one of those serendipitous moments that where one of my existing team members used the same family photographer as the Trader team member. And so she started following the photographer on Instagram and as she was browsing through this lady’s Instagram feed, she sees Trader Team Members family photos and so she clicks on know, just to have a sticky beak as we all would do.
0:03:43 Salena And it says Trader Team Member lists her occupation as the owner of a boutique and that is where Trader Team Members plans unraveled very very quickly. Now of course, fantastic team member had that moment like that crisis of conscious do I dobber in versus this is my job. If this business goes out of business because she’s stealing customers or whatever, I won’t have a job anymore. So she came to me and said, look, I’ve got a really difficult situation that I’m in.
0:04:17 Salena I know that somebody who is working for you has started their own business and is taking photos of things in the store and putting it on their Instagram and their Facebook and kind of making out that this store is hers. Not mentioning the name, but kind of making out that they have a bricks and mortar store. So did a little bit of research, called my lawyer, got a letter drawed up immediately and needless to say, when she turned up the next day, traded team member was fired on the spot.
0:04:48 Salena Now, I share this story with you to show you that even after at this point I had been hiring for like six or seven years. So even after all that experience, even the best of us can still get it wrong. So do I think she was morally challenged? 100% yes. Did she actively steal any inventory? Well, we could never actually find any evidence that she did. And was she a poor hiring decision? Well, on paper, no.
0:05:21 Salena Because the thing was she was actually a great worker. She turned up on time, she never took sick days, she would stay back a little bit later. She had a great sales conversion rate and she was always coming up with great suggestions. She got along well with the rest of the team, hence fabulous team members crisis of conscience and she pretty much showed up every single shift. On paper she was a great team member, she just didn’t have an awful lot of scruples.
0:05:49 Salena And so you know that to grow your business as the CEO, you are going to have to grow your team that is a non negotiable. And being able to delegate all of those tasks that suck up your time and drain the life out of you, it’s not only a good business move, but it is like a huge weight has been lifted off your shoulders. Now when it comes to the five pillars of retail success, this comes under the Impact Pillar. This is you being the leader of your business. This is you creating the environment, creating the leadership, creating the business that people want to come and work in.
0:06:29 Salena So when you get this right, it frees up your time to grow the business. And quite often you’ll see a direct increase in sales and revenue within months, if not weeks. We’ve had I remember working with Mickey and she had a 27% increase in sales after hiring her first store manager in just three weeks. I know Dion is cracking on to do some of her best months ever since bringing on Coral, her store manager. Now, it isn’t always a store manager, and we’re going to go through that in just a moment.
0:07:01 Salena So you can hustle to a certain level, but after that, you 100% will need the bodies and the minds to help you grow or you’re just going to burn out, you’re going to hit plateaus. And I don’t know. Do you already feel that way? I know that I have been in that scenario over and over again in my business, and I speak with dozens of retailers and ecommerce store owners every single month. And 100% it is the same thing over and over again.
0:07:31 Salena I’m tired, I’m stuck. I’m not sure what to do. I’m in a rut. But here’s the thing. The problem isn’t usually you’ve got a bad product. The problem isn’t that you’ve got a bad store location. And quite often it’s not even that you’ve got a website problem, but you’re trying to fix all of these things that aren’t actually the problem. And you know how passionate I am about fixing the thing that is the problem. And a new website probably isn’t going to fix that for you.
0:08:00 Salena Moving stores to a new location probably isn’t going to fix that for you because 9.9 times out of ten, the reason your business is not scaling is because of you. And I say that because I know that one of the reasons that we don’t scale is because of me. Even at this level in my business, I still have to be learning to delegate. I still have to hire, I still have to be in charge of people, because we can fix all of those other problems faster and cheaper and better if you have the right people.
0:08:34 Salena So I know that if you’re watching this, I don’t have to convince you that you need to grow your team if you want to scale your business. The part where you’re probably getting stuck is, who do I hire? How do I hire and how do I ensure that I don’t end up investing a huge amount of time, money and energy just to have someone up and leave on day three because, hey, they haven’t shown up. That happened to me just a couple of weeks ago with my housekeeper. Just didn’t show up on the third session.
0:09:03 Salena It’s too emotionally draining and it costs money to hire the wrong people. So over these next few lessons, I am going to fast track your hiring process. I’m going to reduce the number of hours that you’re going to spend time recruiting, and I’m going to help you increase your success rate. Cool. All right. So if I wanted to let you in on a secret, if I’ve spoken to you guys one on one, you know that I’ve said this to you. I say this pretty much to every single person.
0:09:32 Salena Scaling your business isn’t about making huge shifts in your business. It is about making really small changes that, when compounded, create exponential results. And while it’s really easy to jump in and do stuff in your business, sometimes what is really needed, and you probably know this yourself already, is we have to change how we approach opportunities and how we approach obstacles. And all of that is changing your mindset.
0:10:05 Salena In this case, we’re talking about building your team. Look, if you ever want to do next level hiring and recruitment, I highly recommend you follow layla Hormosi. Woman is a freaking machine. And she has this great hope, a great quote, which is, build the team to build the business. Because one brain cannot build a 100 million dollar business that doesn’t really matter what number you want, even say $10,000,000.01 brain doesn’t build a $10 million business.
0:10:35 Salena And so here is the scenario that I have repeated way too many times in my business. You think I would learn from the first trader team member, but maybe it is something that you have done as well. The first time that I hired Lynn was to be my well, when I first hired Lynn, she was going to be the visual merchandiser and a sales associate for my store. I knew how important it was to have a really well designed store.
0:11:01 Salena I was just not very good at that stuff. I got to the point where my team would say, look, stock has arrived. Don’t touch it. I understand every piece of theory around merchandising. I just do it. And I remember posting in a Facebook group once I’d hired her, and I was like, oh, hey, I’ve just hired my first team member. She’s going to be my merchandiser. And I remember some smart ass says, well, make sure you have targets and KPIs for her.
0:11:30 Salena I was like, how do you KPI merchandising? I thought and I thought I was so good back then. I was not good. And it’s the exact same thing that I say to you guys, right? Whenever you’re hiring anyone, like, what are the targets and what are the KPIs? That person was doing me a favor, and I completely looked that gift course in the mouth. So fast forward a month later, and Lynn was making the store look great, but the cracks were starting to show.
0:11:58 Salena She couldn’t work out how to use the POS system despite being shown every single shift. Most people pick it up after, like, one or two, like, we’re talking dozens of times later. She still didn’t know how to do it. She wasn’t actively engaging with customers, and she wasn’t selling. So on the days that she worked. Our sales actually dropped and our conversion rate dropped. But everyone thought Lynn was lovely.
0:12:25 Salena And it took me a few months later to realize that Lynn didn’t actually want to work in the store. She just wanted to make things look pretty and merchandising. Well, the stuff that she was doing, it wasn’t increasing sales at all. Like, I didn’t have KPIs, but I knew that we weren’t making any extra money because of Lynn’s work. We were losing money. And by then I had more team members and they were getting really frustrated because Lynn wasn’t doing all the tasks that had been left when she was working her shifts in the store.
0:12:55 Salena Now, in all honesty, this wasn’t Lynn’s fault, because when I hired her, I just assumed that she realized as a store associate that working in the store meant working in the store and I didn’t have the targets or KPIs for her. The truth is, you can 100% KPI someone’s merchandising work because things like sell through rates should increase if they’re doing their job correctly. The truth was, at that point in my business, I actually didn’t need a visual merchandiser on the payroll.
0:13:24 Salena And if my team weren’t perfectly capable of doing the work, I could hire someone on a project basis for a few hundred dollars to come and do it every few months. And I would have done that if I’d hired a freelancer to come and do it. I would have been really clear on what my ROI needed to be. And that was one of the big traps I fell into, is having really clear expectations from freelancers and contractors, but not for my own team.
0:13:52 Salena So there are two going to go through in that first one to ten years of your business. And that’s my favorite quote there from Layla. All right, two phases startup and scale up. Now, during that startup season, you are probably a solopreneur or maybe you’ve got maybe a couple of casual people helping you out. And here is where you focus mostly on offloading the cheap stuff so that you can focus on the money making tasks. We’re going to go through the simple equation for the right hire in a moment, but what we’re being mindful of is in that startup phase, you just need to get rid of the boring doing work so that you can focus on making money.
0:14:38 Salena Now, as you scale up, you will find that you need more people who bring more experience and who know the things that you don’t. Guess what? They cost more money, but they can do those money making tasks simpler, cheaper, faster, better than you could ever do it. Now, look, I have hired so many people, I could probably write a book of mistakes. And I’ve hired people in my business that I didn’t really need like Lynn at the wrong times because they were doing jobs that I just couldn’t stand doing.
0:15:19 Salena And you’re probably thinking, well hold on, Sal, you just said to offload the stuff that you don’t want to do 100%. But in my scenario, and perhaps you found this too, just like we Lynn, I was hiring people to do jobs that didn’t really need to be done. My business wasn’t ready for a merchandiser to be on the payroll. And truth be told, if I just spent that money on marketing, I would have been much further ahead.
0:15:46 Salena So I would love to know in the chat, what would be the first job that you would offload? If you haven’t already, what is the first job that you would offload? Because what I find is for most people, it is social media followed pretty closely by ads marketing. And I totally get it. It is no secret that I find social media a drain and I found ways to hack the system. But we have actually hired a brand new social media person this week who has very clear KPIs and targets.
0:16:21 Salena But one of the biggest issues with delegating social media is the inability or the ability to track results and get a return on investment. So let’s just have a little bit of a scenario here. Let’s say you’re investing $500 a week for someone to post on social media and honestly, that’s probably what you’re going to pay for someone halfway decent that equates to $2,000 a month on having someone to do your research and your social media posts for you.
0:16:49 Salena So your role as the business owner is to ensure that that person or that agency at a minimum is bringing you in more than $2,000 revenue directly attributed to what they’ve posted or what they what they’ve put in your bio, all those kinds of things. And when I ask retail and ecommerce store owners this really hard question, how much revenue can you directly attribute to those social media posts? They often come up with answers like, well, but it’s all about engagement or it’s all about brand awareness.
0:17:29 Salena Most of the time you can’t afford a brand awareness campaign, you need a sales campaign. And so I dig, okay, well, show me the stats. What sales or revenue or growth can you directly attribute to that person’s work? Show me the UTM tags, show me the analytics that clearly measure how much traffic is being driven to your store and the sales that come from this brand awareness that you’ve been paying for.
0:17:53 Salena It is totally doable. And just like any other role, measuring growth from social media can be done. But mostly you just don’t do it. It’s not done because it’s a pain in the ass job and you don’t want to do it. You just want somebody to take this thing off your plate. And setting KPIs and setting targets and tracking those results is one of those things that you like to avoid. Am I right? I know this because you are me many years ago.
0:18:22 Salena Nowadays, I get really excited about the results when I meet with my CMO. The first thing we do is go through every single step. So hiring the person that you need, the one that will actively increase your sales and revenue, think about that. Whether it is a sales associate to stand behind the desk, whether it is someone packing your orders, whether it is a social media manager or an ads manager, that person has to actively contribute to increasing your sales and revenue at most stages of the business.
0:19:01 Salena So how do you decide who to hire first or in some of your cases next? The simple question to solve this hiring quandary is are you ready for it? Who do you need and what are they going to do? Yes, simple as that. First up, are you ready to work out? Let’s start with what your business needs and then reverse engineer who it is you need. So I got to go here. I decided to skip that part. This is a really simple I’ll put this in the action plan.
0:19:41 Salena The easiest way to work out who you need next and what they’re going to do is to write down everything that you’ve been doing over the last week, every single thing that you can think of, everything. And then work out which of those jobs do you want to give up, which ones do you want to delegate? So I would say take this action plan and shadow yourself. Just keep it like you put it in a note in your phone and just be writing these things down. Like every time that you do a task, just add it in and how much time you are spending.
0:20:20 Salena So next I want you to do what you’re going to find from this is you are doing a crap ton of stuff that quite simply doesn’t need to be done by you. Could be done faster, cheaper, better by somebody else. But one of the traps I see people falling into is trying to get the next person to be them and do all of the things and mostly that doesn’t happen. So what I want you to do next is, as you write down those tasks, is just give a simple dollar sign to how much direct revenue each of those tasks brought in that you were doing.
0:20:53 Salena So if you were uploading products to the website, kind of generates a little bit of revenue, but you can’t directly attribute how much your time did. So I would kind of put that down as like a two. But if it was something like sent an email, that’s like a three or four or five, however many dollar signs you want to write, that is a high converting activity. So let’s say that you sent out a promo email and it brought in $2,000.
0:21:20 Salena That’s a three, four, $5 activity. But you might have also spent an hour resizing images for your website. Whilst it’s a task that needs to be done. It doesn’t actually directly bring in revenue. So I would put that down the low end of the scale. So next up, what I want you to do is to identify whether the business will be negatively impacted if someone else does this task. For example, is your business going to be negatively impacted if somebody else uploads products to the website or answers emails or resizes those images?
0:21:57 Salena No. Now, I don’t want you to get distracted on how things are going to be done at this point, okay? So rather than defaulting to things like, well, no one knows how to answer emails correctly, that is just a simple process matter. So during this exercise, don’t get distracted by how things are going to be implemented. We’re going to get to that part in one of the other lessons. Quite simply, will the business be negatively impacted if someone else answered general customer inquiries? And the simple answer is if you do your job right, no, the business is not going to be affected.
0:22:30 Salena So conversely, let’s look at whether the business will be positively impacted if somebody else does this task. So let’s go back to that customer inquiry scenario. The business should be positively affected because when somebody else has that duty, they have a KPI to answer an inquiry with a set period of time. Customers aren’t going to be waiting days for you to find the time or even worse, actually remember to reply.
0:22:56 Salena You can also set targets for things like customer service for sales, believe it or not. So if you are looking at the customer service role, how much are they selling? And you might be thinking, well, hold on, if someone is answering general email inquiries or returns, what do you mean how much are they selling? This should be a revenue generating cost center. This is something that a great salesperson, a great customer service person who does their job well will actually sell products for you in the meantime.
0:23:29 Salena So think about when if someone sends a support ticket in saying, I bought this white shirt and it’s too small, instead of just filling out the form and saying, send it back. Potentially, the person who’s doing a great job looks at the sales history of your customer and says, no problems. Let’s move that up to the next size. Oh, and by the way, I see that you love midriff pink shirts. Did you know that we had a new pink midriff shirt in? You might want to check it out.
0:24:00 Salena And as a customer, how awesome is that? Oh my gosh, you’re actually looking at me as more than just a number. So a great customer service person who has KPIs, who has targets is going to do all of those things that you don’t do because you’re just like, oh my God, a customer service ticket. I just don’t want to even reply to that email. And you can freed up to work on all of the things that grow the business.
0:24:23 Salena Bring in the sales, bring in the customers, bring in the revenue. Next up, I want you to be looking at what you should be doing again. Just go through what is the stuff that grows your business and makes the money and brings in the customers. Now, before we go there, can I just get a bit of a sidebar here? Right now I am pretty sure that you guys are still in control of your marketing. So sure, you might have an agency doing ads for you, but you are still the one doing the marketing strategy and probably a lot of the implementation.
0:25:02 Salena Whereas in corporate land, a true CEO isn’t conducting at this level of implementation. But for most of you, this is where you’re at, right? So let’s just run with that. You are allowed to be the CMO, the Chief Marketing Officer and the CEO. I 100% give you permission the things that are making you money and should be getting done. Think about things like creating upsells and cross sells on your website.
0:25:30 Salena Segmenting out your email database so you can market the right offer to the right person at the right time. Sending out emails, testing opt in offers. Segmenting pop ups on your website. Reaching out to suppliers to negotiate promotions, volume discounts and exclusive deals. Looking over your metrics to see what works and what isn’t. Looking at your sales team metrics. Setting targets, following up where people aren’t hitting their targets.
0:25:57 Salena Forecasting your inventory and cash flow. Negotiating better rates for your overdraft or for your loan. Creating a marketing plan and implementing that marketing plan. Looking at your customer analytics and your churn rate and crafting offers to retain customers. Mapping out your Black Friday, Cyber Monday or Mother’s Day or Christmas deals based on your previous marketing debriefs and the data that you’ve got from those.
0:26:23 Salena These are the kinds of tasks that will make a huge difference in your revenue. And if you are not doing them because you are too busy resizing images for your website or you are too busy packing orders, then it is time to find the people who can. And I’m sure that you can see that if you are always putting off sending emails, but every email that you send generates $1,000, then by not sending out a couple of emails a week, then you’re likely losing $8,000 a month.
0:26:56 Salena All because you’re doing safe work of packing orders or standing behind the counter. Remember, scaling your business isn’t about making huge shifts, it’s about making small changes that when you compound them, create exponential results. Even if you just freed up 3 hours a week to send two more emails to a really good offer to a segment in your database that could make you $10,000, just that one little thing and changing your mindset to hire the person that you need.
0:27:34 Salena The one that will actually increase your sales and revenue is one of those first shifts that you can make to help you exponentially grow your business. All right? So when it comes to which tasks you should delegate, I want you to use this chart that’s going to be this is just a very basic kind of fun, just a little canva template. You can just play around with it. But I want you to use this to get an idea of what different people would do in your business.
0:28:05 Salena Because what could happen is that you try and hire someone to do copywriting, to be a sales associate, to do email segmentation and to upload stuff to the website. And the reality is that isn’t one person’s job. Even though you might be able to do them all, somebody else is not you. It’s not their job to do all of those things. So start kind of batching those tasks under these little kind of people to see which one is actually the one that you need to offload first, to delegate first, rather than which one you just want to do, which is social media. I know for all of you, the answer is it’s 99% not going to be a social media person.
0:28:52 Salena All right? So just while you do this, just to wrap things up, I want you to think about what are you going to do with the time that you get back? So you’ve already mapped out in this chart here, you’ve already mapped out approximately how much time per day or per week you are spending on that task so you can aggregate those amounts. When you hire this new person, say you’ve got somebody who is packing orders and is also going to upload products to the website.
0:29:21 Salena Honestly, uploading products to the website is something you can probably offload to an offshore VA for a very, very minimal price. These people do it all day, every day. Might charge you like fifty cents to a dollar per product. It’s probably not something you need to be spending someone spending $20 an hour job uploading products to the website. So again, if you’ve got questions about this, just ask them inside of the group. And I can give you my experience because I have hired for pretty much every role for dozens of businesses all around the world these little things like resizing images. Oh my gosh. I have a guy that I got off upwork. He charges $5 to resize 50 images.
0:30:05 Salena 50 images. You know what, he’s not sitting there resizing them. He’s got a program that he runs them through in his computer. 2 hours later you get your pictures back. Like hello. If that’s not worth $5, then what the heck is? He probably get them back to you quicker than you would go to Starbucks and get your coffee. So now that you’ve got an idea through this column here about how much time you’re going to free up, i. Just want you to think about what you’re going to do. Remember, what are the tasks that you should be doing?
0:30:36 Salena So if you end up with 15 extra hours a week, what are you going to spend those 15 hours on? And the answer is something in the task of what you should be doing, preferably the thing with the most dollar signs. All right, so the biggest issues, just to wrap this up, the biggest issues I see is when you try and hire a person to do too many jobs and they aren’t you, that’s not what they’ve been trained to do.
0:31:04 Salena And if they are a generalist rather than a specialist, they’re not going to do it as quick. Let’s take that resizing images. They probably don’t have a program on their computer to resize 50 images in a few minutes. They’re going to sit there and do it one by one. And the other thing that I see is when you get these hours back is business owners and CEOs who actually default back to doing easy things and I’ll put my hand up and say I was one of those people who just went and so that’s a wrap.
0:31:40 Salena I’d love to hear what insight you’ve gotten from this episode and how you’re going to put it into action. If you’re a social kind of person, follow me at the Selena knight and make sure to leave a comment and let me know. And if this episode made you think a little bit differently or gave you some inspiration or perhaps gave you the kick that you needed to take action, then please take a couple of minutes to leave me a review.
0:32:07 Salena On your platform of choice. Because the more reviews the show gets, the more independent retail and ecommerce stores just like yours, that we can help to scale. And when that happens, it’s a win for you, a win for your community and a win for your customers. I’ll see you on the next episode.