Posted on March 12, 2024
The magic of hiring a team around you as an author and the 3 key ways to delegate that you need to know.
#74 Transcript:
So today. I want to talk about how to give yourself storytelling superpowers now. That’s looking about any sort of crazy AI thing or new technologies. I mean, all that’s all. That’s great. Fine. I actually want to talk about. Building the right team and CUNY. Around you. As a storyteller. And I’ll talk about this because it’s something that we’ve actually had to do. Every recently. And then also Amelia has had to do for own author business over the last year. So I definitely have experience in it and I’m far from an expert, but I kinda want to share what we went through. And maybe it’ll help you all learn some things throughout the process. So the first thing is like, why. Would you ever want to hire a team? And this doesn’t mean that you have to hire people full time. They can be contractors. And we’ll also talk about the three different ways you can like hire things out and delegate things. And the truth is that. You know, A lot of times it doesn’t even require even contracting someone out. There’s, there’s many ways to do things, but the reason you would start to do it. Is because. Things going well, things are working. So you’re hopefully making some money. Your readership’s growing. But you’re feeling overwhelmed. You’re either not able to keep up with things or. We talked about in our last episode and what makes you different makes you beautiful. That you might have certain strengths that you want to lean into and you might instead want to bring in people or technologies or other types of things with other strengths that they can lean into, which will net net make your business, make your stories and make your life better. So it seems like pretty simple in terms of thinking about it, but. The thing is so oftentimes we can feel like we have to do everything ourselves and. Some of us can feel really, even guilty asking friends for help asking people for help around us and. The biggest thing to know is that. You are never in this alone and you shouldn’t be in this alone. It’s all about the CUNY all out the people you surround yourself with. And you can go further together. And this is what the best authors do. And this is what I want to help you all do. And. I think the moment in which you. No, when to hire a team is when. You’re growing your skills. You’re growing your mindset. You’re growing your business. But. There’s still opportunity for further growth and you can’t do all the growing yourself. I think that’s the moment in which it’s like, let’s bring someone else on in short. Like you don’t want to do it until it hurts. But when it starts to hurt, you want to alleviate that pain pretty much immediately. One of the biggest mistakes I see authors do is. Not. You know, focusing and leaning into their strengths. And not delegating and having so much on their plate. And funnily enough, the biggest way to give yourself storytelling superpowers is to delegate so that you can do more of what you’re good at and other people could do more of what they’re good at. So the three forms of delegating are crossing it off your list. That’s number one, number two. Is having some sort of software or other technology that’s helping you out. And then third is bringing on another person. Whether it’s a contractor one-off project or. An official, maybe full-time member of your team for authors who are at a very advanced level. And able to consider these types of things. Now. How do these three ways. I’m just going to upfront tell you the thing that you should be doing the most by far is crossing it off the list. That’s the number one best way to delegate it to the future. And. I’ll tell you. How I decide if something should be crossed off the list. Of reading about my life personally. And it really comes down to something simple. What is the big goal you have? What is the big picture goal that you want to accomplish that needs to get done? The next few days, it’s going to really drive your business forward. Think I’m credos principle. 20% of your work yields, 80% of your results. Ideally you want to figure out. What 20% of work is actually driving those results for you. And anything. Anything that is not in. That 20%. Could very easily be cut out. And it would be completely okay to be cut out. And. There’s been a lot of examples of what this looks like in, in my life. And, the biggest thing in terms of what drives reinforce is creating a better product and is making a better CUNY and better education for all of you all to help you use that product. So that’s definitely where most of the value stream comes in. But there was a lot of things that I was doing. Whether it be. The amount of education we’re doing the formats. This number of live events. That didn’t need to be done. And when I started to feel overwhelmed, the first thing was like, let’s do less. Let’s focus in even more. In your case, you might be posting to five different platforms to market yourself, but what platforms really bringing you in the readers? If you’re posting a tech talk, but you haven’t got a lot of use in a while and you’re feeling overwhelmed. And instead of hiring that out, if you’re able to just focus on the platforms that are making you more money, maybe it’s Instagram, that you’re really good at maybe it’s Facebook ads, maybe just hone in on that. Again, in the long run, you can expand and do other things. You can delegate it to the future. Doesn’t mean that it won’t get done. It just means that right now you’re crossing off the list. You have to worry about it. You don’t have to stress about it. It’s crossed off the list. I think that’s like the biggest thing. And heuristic that you can use. To figure out. If it should be crossed off beyond just the 80 20 rule. It’s names. It’s hard to know. You might be in a stage two where you’re early at, you don’t have necessarily any results from like a monetary side of your business. So it’s hard to know out of all this marketing stuff I’m doing, what’s actually pulling the lever. Right now, nothing really is. That’s okay. That’s okay. We’re all in that phase, potentially for a long time. And when you’re in that phase, use a different heuristic and this year a stick is still helpful, even when you’re in a more advanced phase where you understand this is the work that actually is the most valuable to my business. Which is. Does it give you energy? If it gives you energy. That’s a great thing. It energizes you. I say you could keep doing it. If it. Yeah. Just as in between. It, doesn’t not something you’re super excited about, but something not something that doesn’t give you energy. That would mark it as like a, neutral. Maybe not the first thing to knock off the list. But certainly like worth considering, do you really need this? But then if it takes away energy, If it. If it doesn’t excite you. If it’s something that you really don’t like doing. But you feel like you have to. Cut it out. Cut it out. Don’t do it. Delegate. If the future could be someone else maybe. What you enjoy changes in the future. That becomes thing you want to do, but you don’t have to do it right now. You can give yourself that leeway to breathe, to not be drowning and to focus on what you do best. And again, delegating the future is the most powerful thing. Each week I am up with. Basically a list of everything that’s top of mind. And the company that I want to get done. And I highlight three big things that are always going to be my focuses. And these are the things that if I like did not have time to focus on the week or there something went wrong or. That was a mistake, but all these other things. Might play into those three big things, but a lot of them are just other things that I have in my list. And I’d say about 60 per 80%, 70% of it doesn’t get done on a week to week basis out of the top three things. Now there’s things that don’t get done about 30 to 40%. Ended up being crossed off the list entirely. Eventually. And about another 20 or 30% I ended up delegating and maybe 20, 30%. I eventually. Get to. And. That’s the thing I think we should be. Really hard about what are our high priority tasks? What does medium priority was low part. It’s another way of thinking about it. And if there’s a low priority, do you really need to be spending time doing it? That’s the big question to ask yourself. Now, let’s say it does need to get done. It has to get done. There’s no way around it. Maybe it’s uploading and formatting your books to different platforms. Maybe it’s responding to reader, inquiries and emails for your direct store. Maybe it’s managing your comments and CUNY on a platform like green. What do you do? What do you do? If it has to get done? But you don’t really have the time for it. Isn’t really feeding you. First of all, hopefully you have the money at this stage. If you don’t have the money to go back to step one and figure out how you can cross off the list and delegate to the future. But if you do have the money to hire someone, because I know there’s agreements where people can work for free and you can get college interns. I know there, I seen bill do it. My belief, our whole goal of our company is to help authors get paid. I think people should be paid for their work. They should be paid a fair wage. We’re not talking a million bucks a year. That’s probably not what you’re gonna be paying is going to help you out. But paying them a fair, livable wage, I think is important. That’s just how I do business. That’s my ethics, regardless of what the business is. And I. Always like to share what I do in this podcast. Hoping it helps you. It’s not what you have to do. Certainly not be thing to do, but it’s what I do. Assuming you have the cash on hand. The biggest thing is not who has the skills. I know that sounds weird. But I believe that. We’re very malleable creatures as humans. And that. People who might not be super, super skilled, I’m going to be the best cover designer in the world today. Can become the best cover designer in the world for you. How do you then select for the best people to work with? If it’s not like the skill that matters the most. Because if it’s the skill that matters the most. Then it just becomes like an algorithm, like who is best at XYZ checkbox. And if it was that easy to do hiring, it was that easy to delegate tasks. Is that easy to build team? Wouldn’t everyone be good at it. The answer is most people are not good at it. And the answer is because. Cultural mission and passion fit. Are way more important than skill fit. Now, this doesn’t mean there’s like a huge skill misalignment, for instance, Maybe someone’s the perfect culture to be in an NBA team. But if they’re like five feet tall and I love you. If you’re five feet tall. Not no shade on you. But it’s gonna be hard to make it in the NBA when all these guys are seven feet tall. All right. Just an example of, There’s some aspect of there doesn’t need to be. A level of skill there. But. People can improve drastically over time. And people also will do remarkable things when they’re really passionate about something. So how can you find people who are passionate? And who really would be great to work with. Here’s something awesome. Our space publishing space naturally has a lot of pretty passionate people. It’s probably my favorite thing about it is that so much of us just love what we do. And it’s super exciting, energizing to be around. Then you have to think about who do you work best with? What are your strengths? Maybe, literally going to Clifton strengths standpoint. What are their strengths? What is their communication style? What is yours? But. Even more important is that. Are do they resonate? With the mission. Of your stories, like, why are you writing? Why are you doing what you do? And. Are they inspired by that? Do they love your stories that they read them? If not, do they at least love your sub genre? Is it they do that. They’re going to be super excited to work with you out of maybe their other clients. Maybe they’re doing this in addition to a day job, and they’re going to get home and be excited. It’s not just another thing for them. This is like a dream. Now I will admit, I think finally people can sometimes be challenging. And. All I’ll say is that I have an idea and it’s literally it’s not a business. Just something for fun. And it’s something that if people thought it would be useful just posting the Facebook group, let us know over email emails and description. It’s just let us know. But the thing of creating like an author job, or that’s not for like necessarily covers honors editors, I think racy does a great job at that. But more so I’m an author who maybe is established and is looking for someone to like, Operations BMI team or kitty manager or merch store lead, all these kind of like different roles that we now have in the author ecosystem that like didn’t exist five years ago, or they’re a much more focused on Long-term retention over one-time projects. Like you’ll want someone who can be a part of your CUNY and run your CUNY for year or two years on. Again, this is something that like I’d be curious about if authors really are at this level, who are like, probably making a full-time living already might need someone like on their team. That’d be something they’re interested in. Of course, like a lot of times be bucketed under having an assistant. As an author. But I actually think that. The role of assistant can get broken down the same as quite a few roles. And that there’s, A little bit more to it. Sometimes in a sense of you might have someone who’s doing operations, you might have someone who’s more key manager side. I just be curious if there could be like a resource that we create that helps authors connect with these people helps collect talented individuals who want to do this type of thing. In the same place. I’m always like I’m nerdy about this kind of stuff. I love like hiring. I love like culture. I love trying to fit the right people, set. Like people can be someone that they’re really passionate about and like business owners can keep growing. And those business owners being authors, the ones I love the most. So anyways, it’s something that we’re abashed about. Something that is interesting. So then I’d be really curious to hear your thoughts on. But. It’s tricky because you need to move slowly with these things. I think some of the biggest risks that we can take some time is moving so quickly. Getting excited about a person. Just go. Okay. You’re hired. Here’s the job description. Here’s you know, 20 hours a week, 10 hours a week. It’s I would do a slow on-ramp. Where maybe you give them one project at first, a couple hours a week. And over time. That person can, be onboarded. Can, Prove to each other, that it’s a good fit. Rather than having to make the very painful. Move of bringing someone on I’m ordering them fully into your systems and then having to. Not have them be a member anymore. ’cause one of the, like the key rules and hiring is Hire slow. Fire fast. It’s brutal, but it’s good advice. And I think that it’s your responsibility to actually hire slows that hopefully you don’t have to ever get to the firing part. Hopefully you’re just focused on hiring great people. Bringing on great people into your team and your network. And the thing is, I think there’s actually two spaces that this can come from. It can come from fellow authors and your network of fellow creatives, or it could come from your fan Kennedy. People already passionate about what you’re doing. And we want to be involved in that capacity. So I think what’s great about us is that as authors who are having kiddies, who are selling to our fans, who are building this base, we actually already have spaces that we know we can turn to. And I think it’s just super, super exciting. Now. What is this last part? This last part is like delegating to like software. Or technology. And. As software technology is increasingly capable. I’m doing more and more tasks. The opportunities to delegate to this third option. Grow more. But there’s some things to think about here, which is like, what is the time to actually learn that software? What is it going to take you to operate? Because it’s probably not fully automated. But it might be, they might shave time off the task. If that’s the case, a lot of times it might make sense to integrate software into your workflow and then have someone to manage that software eventually. Th this is where a tool like formatting tools, that book formatting software comes in handy. This is where you look at things like the editing apps allow you to edit videos, allow you to edit graphics, like Canva book brush, et cetera. They become really valuable. And that’d be things that you would consider too. And my only caveat here is that. I think software can be really beneficial. Rheem is a software company. I think Topher could be really beneficial. But too, oftentimes. I don’t think we think about it in the terms of like the things that like really matter, like how much time is it going to save you? To be utilizing the software. And what is that time worth to you? You don’t have to necessarily write it down, but you also could, and you might find it that could be like quite valuable to you. But you might also see that this software does something cool. That feels really nice, but it’s not what you really need. And if it’s not what you really need. Is it worth the time and money, et cetera, to learn and use it. It’s up to you, but I would always kind of. Go an err towards the side of a minimum viable processes. Meaning the least amount of tools is probably the better. And same thing with the least amount of different people you’re working with. Although I love giving people opportunity. I love working with other people. You don’t necessarily need to beef up your team to the extreme. You don’t need to give everyone a standard process for every single thing. Having a minimum viable process for this is. This is the operating book that we need. That’s you know, a few pages and now those annoying furniture handbooks that no one ever reads. And if you turn running your business into an annoying furniture handbook with 10 million parts that no one ever wants to put together, including herself. That’s not going to be a great place to, to operate. It’s not going to be a house that you want to live in. And the words back assign. And. You might be delegating work, but actually creating more work for yourself in the future. You want to be careful about that. Be measured and be very focused with this is what this is accomplishing. And this is why I needed to accomplish this now. And if it’s not delegating it to the future. Then this is exactly what it needs to be done now. And why. And. Giving yourself the space to let that evolve over time. Now. My last thing, when talking about giving yourself. Storytelling superpowers. Because I really do believe that Figuring this formula out. And being able to do more of what you love is like the biggest thing. But the last step. And a really important step. Mind you. And surrounding yourself. With mini mastermind, a fellow creatives. On a similar path. We’re not talking about grip here. We’re talking like four or five, maybe six, seven people max. Who you can learn from. I think you’re on a shared journey with, because. When you get to learn and grow and make mistakes. Share that with others and they get to learn and grow into those mistakes. Share with you. All of a sudden you get to learn and grow faster. Because you’re not in it alone. And I think these types of things are. Where Facebook groups are very powerful, but where the CUNY’s that are off the Facebook group. So there’s the subgroups in a place like subscriptions for authors. Whether it’s, the conference that you met at and that person that you met, these are the things that like become really valuable. And the things that like, I. Like love fostering and things that I’ve gotten so much value from my life. And I highly encourage you all to also participate in. And also to do and to Literally search out for, and to not be afraid to be like, Hey. Everyone wants this. Everyone wants it. The little mastermind group, whether you’re just getting started, like you might be like, no one wants to learn from me. He’s no you, how you. People are just getting started with their first chapter. And they would love to have an author. Who’s just getting started the journey with them. All go through it together. Meet once every other week. Talk for a little bit, provide some companionship insights learning. Oh, it’s amazing. And then they’re operating is to, for you to collaborate, help fellow creatives out where all of a sudden delegating, especially in early stage, maybe it doesn’t look like, hiring someone out, but instead it looks like actually. Collaborating with a fellow creative person where you can both help each other win together. These are all entering things. These are all things I have to think about. And. Before I go in and off this podcast, I first want to say is this helpful? I I’m not an expert in this, but was this advice something that you think is useful? Does this help you as an author? As ultimately a business owner think about publishing a different way, because I just think if you’re a full-time author, Either you have a very simple focused business model. And focused way of doing things, or you’re going to have some form of help at some point, because there’s so much involved in this business. And so much to take on. And it’s important. Like we’re all going to probably cross this path at some point. At least that’s the goal. And if you’re on green. And you’re thinking of ways like, Hey, like I wish someone could manage my room for me. I wish someone could post to MyRheem. Let us know, because we are always open to finding other people who can do these things as a team ourselves. We’re also expanding with, are there ways that we can help? Speed up the management time for others. We can help make this even easier. So we’d love to hear like how we can make things easier for you. And we’d love to hear if this is something you’re interested in. Maybe you haven’t started reading yet because you’re worried about the management time or because you’re worried about X, Y, Z. I would love to just hear why. Hopefully we can help you. And. That’s really it for me today. I hope you all have to meet more of your day. I hope you all enjoyed this podcast. Definitely subscribe. If you want more. Follow us and. If you haven’t yet gone descriptions for authors.com. Sign up for our mailing list, gotten our free book. Checked out all the awesome resources we have there, the blogs, the fireside chats, and you really should. So go to script’s rod, this.com. Check it out. The meantime. Don’t forget storytellers rural. The world.