How are you? My family and I have been traveling to go to Clamour in Dallas. We got to stop by and hang out with Lennon, one of the other strategists on the team, and his family, which was great!
It made me thankful, being able to do this, because I have a whole team that I’ve built that allows us to be able to travel, work remotely, take vacations, and just have the freedom we need to live the way we’d like to.
It took a while getting there, though. For a long time, I felt like I was doing it all.
In this week’s podcast episode, I talk with strategists Lennon and D’Laina on my team about how we were all able to fit YouTube into a busy schedule. Here’s what we’ve learned as individuals and as a team.
1. Start before you’re ready. If you feel like you don’t have the money to pay for someone to assist you with part of your business or channel, start before you’re ready (within reason, we definitely can’t speak to every situation). In Lennon’s case, he talks about how he experimented by having someone help him with his business for just 4 hours a week and seeing how that went for 3 months. D’Laina talks about the tension she felt when hiring an editor for her personal channel. She realized that whenever you’re saying yes to something, you’re saying no to something else. She realized she could keep some extra money in her pocket to have to save or spend on other things, but she’d have less time to do the things she loves OR she could give up some of her finances to free herself up to have more time doing the things she loves, building her channel or her revenue up as a result because she gets to work ON her business instead of IN her business.
2. Trust someone to take your work. We know how it is. It can be painful to let someone else take on a certain area of your channel or business. Whether that’s answering emails, editing, producing, designing thumbnails, etc. But you’re never going to be able to hit the next level of your channel/business if you don’t relinquish control. There are so many good systems you can put in place to help you train someone else to work in your business. And once you give someone permission and authority to mess up and learn how the process works, they may surprise you and be even better at that task than you or enjoy it more than you did!
3. List everything you do. Have you ever thought about everything that you do in a day? Not just on your channel, but from the time you wake up to the time you go to bed. Do you make coffee? Get the kids dressed? Journal or read? Clean? It’s important to start tracking what you do in a day and how much time each thing takes you, so that you have a realistic idea of what eats away a lot of your time, what you enjoy, what you don’t enjoy, etc. and if it’s worth hiring someone to help you whether it’s in your personal or professional life. You won’t know until you track!
4. Be extremely clear about your expectations. Have you ever had a job where you can never seem to please the boss? They tell you to do something and when you do, it’s usually criticized? That’s usually on them. You have to be crystal clear on your expectations whenever you’re training someone new to do a task. If that means filming yourself putting away your laundry, so that it’s folded and put away like you like it – do it! Allow a grace period where you allow someone to make mistakes as they learn and move forward together.
5. Compensate them well. In our experience, you get what you pay for. We’ve all done things “on the cheap” and end up unsatisfied with the results or wasting money. When you compensate well, you’re showing your appreciation for a job well done and you’re usually paying for much better service. If you can’t afford to compensate well, hold off on paying someone until you can.
6. Refine the plan as you go. Training someone to help you in any area of your life or business takes time. It’s okay if it looks different than you thought it would initially or if certain things just aren’t working. Hang in there and just be open with your communication. When you get it right, it’s amazing how much your time frees up or how much lighter you feel now that someone else is taking care of a task for you.
I know all of us are busy these days, so I hope this helps you reflect and think through how you can free up some time to prioritize working ON your business (big picture) or channel, instead of IN it (tedious stuff that can be outsourced).
Thanks for reading!
Keep changing lives,
Tim