Hey, friends. Welcome back to another episode of the Business Journey podcast. Today we're talking all about building a team what to do before you hire. This is actually the first episode in a little mini series we're doing about building a team. Maybe you're interested in building a team today, tomorrow, maybe you're interested at some point building a team.Either way, this information is super valuable and worth listening to, even if it's something that you just put in your back pocket for a later time. Before we get too far, I did want to let you know about a brand new freebie that I have just for you guys. This is five ways to grow your email list from zero to 100 subscribers. So if you are wanting to grow that email list, which I could do a whole other episode just about email marketing because of how powerful it is. If you don't have an email list, you should have one. It's one of the easiest ways to market to your warmest clients and book out those sessions quickly without ever having to turn to social media. If you want five ways to easily grow your emails from zero to 100 subscribers, you can grab that today a link at below so that you can have it in case you want to type it into your you URL. It's Rebeccaricephoto.com/five-ways. The number five Dash ways K number five Dash ways. So definitely go grab that. I know you're going to love it. I am super passionate about team building. This is something that really has developed over the last year or so in my business, just the fact that I've been growing my team and then teaching other photographers how to grow their team and what are the questions that I get the most from people is they say it will, Rebecca. I'm not ready to hire right now, but eventually I'd love to. What should I be doing now to prepare myself or prepare my business so that when it is time to hire that, I'm ready. And I think that's an amazing question, because it's never too early to start preparing for the days whenever you're ready to start scaling your business and growing that team, whether it's through contractors or employees or whatever. There are things that you can be doing now to get ready so that onboarding whenever you are ready to add team members is just a breeze. I can tell you that I did not do these things before I was ready to hire, and I wish I did because by not having these things in place, it really took a lot longer to onboard team members. We started implementing these things later on in our last couple of hires, really our last most recent hire. We have been implementing these things and the onboarding was a breeze because we already knew what we were trying to do. You know, we had some things in place, and so it was easy to bring somebody in because we planned ahead for it. Hopefully, you can learn from my experience and be able to take these things and implement them early before you start hiring, so that when you do start hiring your hiring process is a lot easier than mine was when I first started. So the first thing that I want you to do is to write down everything that you do in your business case. Every single task that you currently do get as micro as you need to. I want you to list out every single thing that goes into making your business run. The reason that we're doing this is because I want you to actually see how much you do in your business. I think as business owners, we tend to just get things done because things need to be, you know, if it needs to get done, I'm just going to put my head down and do it. But I think that we can get carried away and realize there's so much more that we're doing. Then we actually need to be doing that. There are things that we could pass off and pass up, probably sooner rather than later. And so I want you to write down everything single thing you do in your business right now. Then the second thing I want to do is highlight the things that only you can do. OK? I'm saying if it requires your face, your actual face, your actual voice or has a direct impact in revenue, which that one can be a little gray area, but something that only you can do, I want you to highlight it. Now, this is not something like only I can respond to emails because nobody can do it like me. Friends, other people can send emails for you. OK. That's not something that only you can do. Only you can show up and shoot, right? Only you can record a video or, you know, to market your business or whatever. Update your website, whatever. Only you can do some of those things. So I want you to highlight the things that only you can do and then just look at your list. OK? There should not be that many things only you can do, and there should be a lot of things that other people could potentially do in your business from there. The things that other people could potentially do, I want you to put a little star next to what you can automate. OK? What are some things, some processes that you can automate and not have to? Physically, the women doing. Maybe this is stuff like, you know, sending certain emails in your client experience. I know for us, we have our questionnaire. Email is automated. We have our client experience guide. Email is automated and our final info email is automated. So all of these things that our clients are receiving from us. We're not having to hit send. OK, so think about what things you can automate, whether that's using your CRM like dubsado or Honey book, or even something like Zapier. You can automate a lot of things in Zapier, so put a little star next to things you can automate. And then whatever's left are things that either somebody else can do or they cannot be automated. It's something like, actually, you actually have to push the button, you actually have to do that part. And so from there, what I want to do with those things that are left is I want you to start documenting your processes because we already said these are things that you're already doing in your business right now. So any time you're doing something, I want you to document it. One of our favorite tools on our team is free. It's called a loom in our home, and it's a chrome plug in that you can use. Or there's like an actual website loom.com. And what it does is it takes screen captures so you can hit record and take a little screen recording of you walking through this process. Let's say it's your editing process, or maybe your gallery delivery process. Like what? What happens when you deliver your galleries to clients? What presets do you have on your gallery? How do you upload your photos? You know, what do you put in your email? Everything that goes into delivering that gallery record your process on Loom. Or maybe you have your processes in a Google doc. I know some people prefer having this massive Google doc. You can do it whatever way you want. Maybe it's using Trello checklists to do that. I know for my team we love using a combination of Loom and Trello, so we will record a loom walking through it. And then we also have a corresponding checklist in Trello because we don't know what our team members are going to like. I have some team members that love looms and hate checklists. I have some of my team members love checklists and are not big fans of Loom. Depending on what your potential team members are going to like, you can set up lots of different variations of the same process. That way they can, you know, whether they are a visual person or like their checklists, you have it done already. So start documenting those processes and maybe you have one Trello board that is just processes, right? And you can have one card for every process and link the Loom video in the description and then have all of your checklists down in your Trello card. So whatever it is. Start the documentation process now so that whenever it comes, time to train a team member. You have this already created and you can hand it to them and say, Hey, watch this video and you don't have to sit there and spend time walking them through the process. The next thing I want you to do after you have the process is put together. I want you to tighten up those processes to be efficient. So look through them and see, are there any places where we're doing things that are redundant or unnecessary steps? You know, maybe I can do this better or, you know, change the order so that it makes more sense. Tighten up those processes so that when you hand it out off to somebody, it's already efficient. And sometimes it helps to get somebody else's eyes on these processes because, you know, we could think something's really efficient and then we hand it off to somebody else and they're like, Hey, I see that you could do it this way. Find one of your friends that are super organized and have them look at it and see if there's anything that you can switch around to make it make more sense. The last piece that I would say to do before you start hiring those first pieces were very like task oriented. There's another piece to this, and I think it's important just as a visionary to be able to say, Where do I want my business to be in the next, you know, two or three years and I want you to create a dream org chart, so put yourself at the top as the visionary.
And then if you know, money wasn't an issue and you know, you had all the funds in the world to be able to pay people, what would your org chart look like? What positions would you have on your team? Would you have an editor? Would you have a virtual assistant? Would you have a copywriter to, you know, write your blogs and handle your SEO? Would you have somebody making graphics or scheduling your social media? What team members would you have? This piece is really helpful to then know, you know what you should be working towards and see, you know, prioritize. OK, I think I want to hire this person first and then have this person and all those things for us in our team. We have like our current org chart and then we have a dream org chart. And so we always know who our next two hires are going to be. Right now, as I'm recording this, I know what next two possessions I want to bring on. And then once I start bringing on those people, hopefully in the new year, then I'll take a look at my org chart again and say, OK, if we were to expand, where would I place new team members? And the reason that I like having a. Dream org chart is it helps me to continue pressing forward that I don't want to get comfortable in where we're at, I want to always have things that we're striving for and our team is evolving. Our business is evolving and I want to get to the place where I like. I never want to be just like complacent and, you know, find exactly where we're at. I am a visionary, you know, through and through one of my my top string finders. If you're not familiar with string finders, I love it. Go check it out. But my top string finder's strength is futuristic, so I'm constantly looking to the future to see what. Where are we going next? Where do we want to be? And so I have that like dream org chart. And even if you're not going to be able to hire for, you know, two years, that's OK. At least you know where you're headed so that you can create those processes and get those things in place. So this is a very broad overview of things that I would do before you start hiring. If you have any hiring questions at all, I would love to chat about it, in my DMs like I mentioned at the beginning, this is something I'm really passionate about is team building, and I would love to be able to help you hover over I can. So definitely DM me. And if you're wanting to like, you're ready to start the hiring process, do you want to get in there? We do a deep dive into all of this in my mastermind. So in case you guys didn't know, I have a mastermind where a smaller group of business owners 10 to 12 business owners, we come together and it's a mix of content where I'm teaching and hot seats where we, you know, dive deep into each other's businesses. And so if you want to join our mastermind, it's currently full, but you can join the waitlist. And so if you go to Rebeccaricephoto.com/mastermind, you can fill out that short form and join our waitlist so that you get info as soon as spots open again for our next round of our mastermind. So I hope all of this was helpful for you, and I'm really, really excited to see what you do with it. If you need help with accountability or, you know, just you need somebody eyeballs on, you know, your list or anything like that, like, seriously, hit me up on Instagram DMs, Rebecca Rice photography, and I would love to dive into it with you. So I can't wait to see you implement all of this, and we'll see you this time next week for another episode in our team building mini series. See next week.
