Ready to Bring on a Virtual Assistant or Team Member? 5 Key Strategies to Building a Top-Notch Team

Hey Friend!

I’m so excited to bring this post to you. Today, we are going to talk about growing your team. If you feel ready to bring on a virtual assistant or maybe that first or second team member, this post is for you. I’m going over five key strategies that my company and I have used to build a top-notch team.

I truly believe that my team is excellent. Of course, this has evolved over the past five and a half years of doing this specific job.

It started from having one virtual assistant who actually lived in another country to having a local virtual assistant, to bringing on other types of help like Facebook moderators.

We now have an executive assistant on staff and contractors who help us out with different areas. We also have this beautiful robust internship program that I spoke about. We have this internship program for three reasons:

• I want to teach people in my community how to run a truly excellent and top-notch business.
• To give people an opportunity to earn a spot in Podcast a Profit, if that’s something they can’t afford.
• It’s a kind of mission to pour out, cultivate, and grow the community we serve.

I absolutely love it! They can work for P2P and learn at the same time. So today’s conversation is really around you being ready to bring on maybe your first or second person. Or maybe you’ve brought someone on and you’re like, “This is not it.”

Be sure to grab a notebook and pen. This one’s going to be gold.

Strategy Number 1: Love It or Leave It List

You guys may have heard me talk about this before. I use this practice often as a CEO. Yes, you are already the CEO of your business. Whether or not it’s making money yet, please put on that CEO hat.

Recognize that you are now a CEO if you are trying to grow a business from your podcast that actually makes money or has a big mission impact. So, you need to get rid of some of the tasks that you should not be doing. I used to think I should do everything because I could do everything.

That is false! Now that I have a team, I have proven that to be absolutely incorrect. I can see where God created each person with these beautiful, different skill sets so that we can all come together to create this beautiful company full of strengths in different areas.

I am not skilled in details and operational management, but Lydia, my operations manager, truly excels in that area. She probably won’t want to come out and run a live launch and be in front of the camera. Different people have different skill sets. When we try to do it all, we fail at the things we’re not gifted in because God did not create us to do it all.

As soon as you have the bandwidth to bring that first person on, you need to know what to hand off. So, create your love it and leave it list. This is really simple.

How to Create Your Love It or Leave It List

Spend two days taking inventory of what you do in your company. If you really have a lot of tasks, you could do a three-day period. Write down literally every single thing that you are doing. That list could look something like this:

• Opened my inbox.
• Wrote an email.
• Posted something on social.
• Forgot what I was working on.
• Walked around in circles.
• Recorded a podcast episode.

That’s often what happens when you’re a brand-new CEO. You’re not very organized, right? So you create this list, then you split that inventory list into two columns: the love it list and the leave it list.

For me, leaving it would look like:

• Combing through emails
• Dealing with customer service
• Creating standard operating procedures
• Training a new hire
• Filing the contracts in the right places

All of those things would be stuff I’d delegate or don’t like doing. As soon as you have those two things separated, you’re going to look on the right side of the page. This is the leave-it list.

Ask yourself what role you need to fill, and how many hours it is going to take. Maybe you could hand some of these tasks to a virtual assistant. Now you have clarity on who you’re going to hire and who that position might be.

Don’t Overcomplicate Things

That’s literally as simple as it needs to be. You know, my Enneagram ones who are like, “I have to have 100,000,000 things prepared before I bring someone on.”

No! Bring someone on like a virtual assistant and then build the job with them from a to-do list. That’s right, people. You’re going to make this really super simple.

That’s actually a great exercise for you to do often. Sit down and do your love it or leave it list exercise again semi-annually. As you start growing your team, have them do the same list. As we grew, there were certain things my operations manager wanted on her leave-it list.

We were able to hand that off to someone else in the company. You consistently refine and define the roles in your organization by examining what people love, where their passions lie, and their skill sets, and getting things onto the right plates for those people who love those things.

Strategy Number 2: Look Within

So where do you find someone to work for you? Where do you find your first person? Maybe you would like to have a virtual assistant or even an intern. How do you find this person? I have always looked within.

We look at our super fans or our community. It looks like going through the Facebook groups and seeing who our all-stars are. We look at our top engagers in the student community. We look at the people that really shine in our Podcast to Profit program. We‘re like, you know, maybe it’s going to be a while before their business takes off and they want to have an internship experience. We look within and find talent.

I’ve Never Gone Wrong With This Strategy

I do this for two reasons.

• People in my community already know a lot about my business, so our training will be much easier than hiring someone from the outside.
• You’ll gain a certain value and moral compass when you bring in people who are already like-minded with you.

We consistently look for people with a faith-led, self-starting, driven, detail-oriented, and self-motivated heart to serve. When we find those people, they are plentiful inside my community because those are the people we attract. I would love to partner with them and have them grow with us. Looking within has always been a great strategy.

When you hire someone from within your own community, they may not be experts yet, but you bring them in and work with them. You cultivate them and help them grow. It’s so rewarding and fulfilling for both of you because you are able to build a role with somebody who is willing to learn.

Strategy Number 3: Date Before We Marry

Let’s date people before we marry them, okay?

So, you get excited. It’s like, “Oh, I found somebody. They’re going to come on and be my podcast assistant, virtual assistant, or whatever role that you need.”

You’re so pumped. They’re excited. They look so great and filled out your little Google form. You had a quick chat over Zoom. “Let’s do this and sign a year-long contract.”

What we typically do – and what I recommend – is that you always want to test the waters with somebody. Just because something sounds good doesn’t mean you’ll put the ring on it.

I highly recommend a 30-day trial for anyone doing anything within your organization. Even our interns have a 30-day trial. If they are not able to cut it within 30 days, we will part ways.

This is clear and it’s very clearly communicated from the beginning. We don’t mince words. You are expected to reach these certain expectations. We have standards and core responsibilities that you’re going to be doing each and every week. These are the hours, right?

You have preliminary things that are set out. You want to date someone and ensure they can uphold their side of the bargain and that you can uphold yours.

Strategy Number 4: Set Your New Hire Up for Success

I want to be careful with this one because I think we can get into perfectionism, and that’s not at all why I bring this up. But I will say that as a visionary, you guys can probably imagine my personality. After I hired my first virtual assistant, I would just shoot some videos and be like, there you go. That’s how you do that, bye. Versus my operations manager, Lydia. She is meticulous.

We’ve got contract links to the roles and responsibilities, and those link to our operating systems. They know exactly what they’re doing on exactly what week. They check the boxes, and then we have success metrics. We have all these amazing things lined out for our new hires, but that was a complete evolution of probably 24 months of refining the hiring process.

When you’re new and getting started, you don’t need everything perfect and everything in place, but you do need a few things that I definitely did not have.

• A contract
  • You will need one for your new hire, even if you have an intern or virtual assistant.

• SOPs (Standard Operating Procedure)
  • How do they do the job that you’re asking them to do?

• Communication method
  • Voxer, a walkie-talkie app, is a great option because it’s quick. If you want to use writing, go with something like Slack.

Let People Fail Forward

Be really involved in the training process for the first 30 days. As they complete a task, take the time and energy to review it, find where they went wrong, and then train them on how to fix it. I’ve become a better leader by empowering others to fix their mistakes. Empower others by training them to show up with excellence instead of just doing it myself because it’s easier.

Strategy Number 5: Clear Communication

I can’t stress this enough: clearly communicate. When you start building a team, I want you to imagine a marriage. When you are married, you don’t just get to operate in a vacuum and not communicate with your spouse.

You are constantly working on communication in your marriage and within your family. Believe it or not, it’s the exact same thing in your company, whether it’s an intern or virtual assistant. Clear communication is absolutely critical.

Remember You’re the CEO

When it’s an employee, a contractor, an intern, or a virtual assistant, they may feel bad or awkward. You’ve got to remember, you are the CEO of a future 6 or 7-figure business, whichever is on your heart. Maybe it’s not financial. Maybe you want to reach a certain size or have this certain ministry effect.

You cannot reach that point and that level without putting on your leadership pants and your CEO hat. So you’ve got to have extremely clear communication about your company’s mission, standards, and expected excellence.

All of that is within the job’s parameters and the roles you’ve set out. And then you have to uphold those. So, I am really showing up with kindness, of course, but also unapologetic boundaries and leadership. You have to pull your team up with you.

Don’t Forget to Show Some Grace

Now, of course, show some grace when people are new and if there’s a training period. But I’m talking about us now and this really successful full company. We’ve got different people doing different things in the organization. If you are going to go to the next level, your leadership has to elevate, and it’s got to be at the next level to create a top-notch team. It really does start and stop with you.

You’re willing to display respect for your team members. Clear communication—that is, communication on all fronts—is really the bottom line.

I hope that these five strategies will help you begin cultivating and growing your team, whether it’s a team of one or 20 or whether it’s an intern or a virtual assistant. These strategies have been imperative for me.

I pray this blesses you!

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