When Is The Right Time To Get Help In Your Business?

Big day in the office today, several things happening to share with you. I mentioned yesterday, my good friend Craig has his product launch today – so excited to see how that goes – wishing him the very best.

Also quite a few things happening on our front at Internet Profits. I have three interviews that I’m conducting today on my quest to find my superstar Personal Assistant. We’ve actually got three different people coming in today; one at 9:30 am which is in just over an hour, one at 11:00 am and one at 2:00 pm.

So quite a busy day today. But obviously if and when we find the superstar Personal Assistant that I’m looking for, it’s really going to help me to manage my schedule, manage the team, manage our projects, manage the tasks, help take care of all the things that I don’t want to or shouldn’t really be spending my time on. Free me up to focus on the most important things.

And that’s probably one of the things I really to talk about today, that I think used to always be on my mind, and probably a lot of others as well. So possibly this will be something that’s valuable to you.

How Do You Know When Is The Right Time To Start Getting Help In Your Business?

When is the right time to grow? When is the right time to relinquish some of the responsibilities that you have?

Because when you first start in your business, to get your business off the ground, you’re typically a business of one, for most people. An online business is not typically, generally speaking for many people, the same as an offline business, y’know, with a brick and mortar business.

Many people that straightaway, depending on the size of the business, they need help. They need a cashier at the checkout, or they need somebody helping with stock or, y’know, all these different things.

Well when you go and start your online business…

For A Lot Of People, They Start As A Business Of One

And that’s what I actually like about this whole internet-based business – is that you really can just start a business as one.

When I first began there looking into all this stuff, which initially was in 2004. I was in a full-time job, I had a lot of other responsibilities, and just in my spare time I was able to start studying, buying products, getting mentors, joining coaching classes to learn my skills, to learn this craft. And still to this day I do that.

But not to get off track, when do you then know when it’s time to stop being just a business of one, and get help?

Now in the past I’ll take you back to, was it probably 2011 maybe 2012 I can’t quite recall now, but the business was growing and I thought, right it’s time to really grow fast.

In my head, I thought we had everything in place in order to allow us to start growing really, really fast. I had these wild ambitions that we’d go from where we were to like a million paces above very quickly.

And So What I Actually Did, Looking Back In Hindsight, Was A Mistake

But I’ll share this with you guys; I started hiring all these people, we moved into an office that was probably about a thousand square feet, and we employed about six full-time staff.

I went from like nobody in that office, to six full-time staff. I had an assistant and all these different roles we filled. Now the problem with that was, what actually happened is, we reached Christmas. This is not long before December that we started hiring all these people – round about October-ish.

Then we reached Christmas, and over the Christmas and New Year period, we ran into this really freakish low level of business. And then we had a few unfortunate things happen; like a couple of our high-level clients ended up having issues and kind of had to back out. Personal issues – nothing to do with the business. So we actually refunded them.

And so we saw all of our cash flow all of a sudden, because we invested so much just to move into the new office, to employ all these staff, go into a quiet period, having a few unfortunate events – all of it came together really to put massive strain on the business.

And we actually had to start getting rid of everybody – it was an awful situation!

So years on now, when we’re kind of in a similar situation – we’ve just expanded and grew into a 2500 square foot office. We grew pretty quickly last year and it put a massive strain on all of our resources, so much so that actually…

I Didn’t Expand The Resources And The Team In Time

And actually we kind of started going backwards in terms of revenue, because I made a mistake. And I think one of the reasons is actually, in my subconscious I had all these fears of that same scenario that happened years ago playing out again. I think that actually held me back.

Well now I’ve kind of broken through that, with the help of mentors and just really pushing myself. And so now I’m in this stage where I’m like, well how do I know who to employ, how do I know when’s the right time?

Here’s the answer to that…

When You Experience The Pain, It’s Time To Get Help

What I mean by that is, a lot of people when they get into business, especially if you’re a bit younger, you kind of think it’s cool to build a real business with staff and employees and all these different things. And you kind of think like yeah it feels real, it’s exciting when you start doing that.

But the reality is, if you employ, or bring on help or staff because you think it feels good, or feels cool, or it feels more real that way. Then you’re likely going to run into problems.

But when you approach things of going as far as you can, until you just experience that pain. We expanded here because we were experiencing massive pain.

The business was starting to suffer. We were going the wrong way. We were sitting still which by default meant we were heading backwards.

Now I Knew Right Where I Needed Help

Well I want to do all this video work. For me to do this myself; (a) I haven’t got the skills to shoot the quality of video that I want and (b) I wouldn’t have time to do anything else.

Like even doing these Drive videos. If I had to get to the office, edit them, produce them, upload them, embed them, put them on our Facebook page, put them on my blog, put them on YouTube. I probably wouldn’t be doing it, because it had taken me away from too much other stuff.

So, full-time Videographer – we’ve experienced the pain, we can’t grow how we’d like without it. So there, we filled that role, we’ve got Adam there.

Then y’know well what about taking that video and uploading it, and embedding it, what about building of our sales funnels, and all of our web pages.

What about taking care of my blog and all these all these other marketing assets, all these marketing things.

Do I Have Time? Is There Pain There?…

For me to try and still do all that myself, like I did years ago? Could I steer this company in the direction that it needs to go? Could I do my clients justice? Could I do my team justice? Could I do the business justice? No!

So there was an element of pain. Now we’ve got Chris my Marketing Assistant who does an awesome job in in all those areas. Obviously, well, now I’m experiencing pain because it’s like, well;

• Do I have the time and the opportunity to efficiently manage myself?
• Can i efficiently take care of all my emails, all of our booking of everything, my international travel that I do every eight weeks or so?
• Could I take care of all these other things properly?
• Could I manage all of these things?
• Could I run our project management system?
• Could I manage the team, be the eyes and ears of the business?
• And could I manage all the reports that we need to have coming in, the KPIs, the indicators, how many leads, how many visitors, how many customers, how many clients, revenue all these reporting?

The answer’s “No”… So we’ve got an experience of pain there.

So Now I Need A Personal Assistant

Now I need somebody to come in and take all of that off my hands, so that that runs efficiently.

And going forwards you know, then from for a while, we’re okay. But then I see one of the next areas of pain I think we’ll experience is actually an Affiliate Manager to manage our affiliates in our high level Partner program and our Certified Partners, to do a better job there.

So basically the bottom line I’m sharing all of this with you is; hire and grow when you’re a point of experiencing pain, when you can’t go any further efficiently or effectively, it’s time to get help.

That could be just somebody like an outsourced worker, like an assistant. Or somebody to do certain things from like Freelancer or Upwork that’s just overseas. Or it could be employees, you know. It’s totally up to you and how you want to live and run your business.

So hire when you’re at a point of pain, don’t do it before, and you should see that everything works out well.

So that is The Drive for today. We’re obviously here. Time to get in and get started. See you with Utilizing The Time And Money You Have on The Drive tomorrow.