76. Hiring Your First VA Or Contractor w/ Raven Wilson

Andrea Nordling 0:00
Okay, we’re jumping into this week’s episode. I am so excited because I have brought on Raven Wilson. I don’t I mean, you have an official title, but I feel like you’re like all of the titles. So she is officially the director of operations at an HQ. But I often refer to Raven as my right hand she has just like, she knows everything that we do. She helps me in so many ways. She does all of the things jack of all trades, for sure, which we are going to talk about on this episode, because we have a lot of questions. In the profitable nutritionist program. We have lots of coaching questions on this in the mastermind. We have lots of questions on this just in life, I think business owners have a lot of questions about when to hire someone to help them in their business, and how to do that effectively. And what do you hire first? And how do you effectively lead someone and grow a little lean and mean and amazing team in your business? Like what does that actually look like? I know, this was very confusing to me. And I have a lot to say about it. Raven has done this on as a business owner side and then also as a contractor side, so she has a lot to say about it. So we’re just gonna, we’re jumping in, we are going to grill Raven is basically what’s going to happen on this about all of the things for hiring a virtual assistant or an online business manager or other roles in your business, from the side of the person being hired. And then I’m going to give my two cents on the business owner side. And we’re going to answer a bunch of questions and hopefully make this much easier for you. If you are just starting in your business, this is not something you probably need to worry about right now. But it’s so good to be aware of where your business is headed. And at what point you should be thinking about this. If your business is more well established, and you are finding that you’re feeling behind, you’re feeling stressed, you’re feeling like your systems and processes or lack thereof is a problem in your business, then this episode will be coming at the perfect time for you. So without further ado, welcome to Raven Wilson. Raven, thank you for coming on the podcast today.

Raven Wilson 2:04
Absolutely. I’m excited. I’ve always been on the other side of podcasts, not on this site. So

Andrea Nordling 2:11
I know you’re very familiar with the podcast, but not as being on the podcast. So tell everyone a little bit about your story. As a VA, like maybe just catch everybody up to speed on how you got to the point where you’re at now. Okay, so

Raven Wilson 2:24
I started in the online industry in 2019, because I had three kids that were three and under. Yes, I know. That’s very short timing. It’s a whole thing. It’s a whole, it’s a whole thing. We had our first three kids in two years and four months, it was crazy. But I needed to work, who doesn’t, and knew that daycare was not an option at all, for three kids in three years, all under the age of three. Putting all of that in daycare would have been literally what I was making in a corporate job. So I knew I could be a VA I knew I could do something online. But I didn’t know like how to do it. Once I figured out the how we were golden. So I started out with podcasts, producing them, editing them all of that. And I quickly quickly learned that I could do way more than that. And I enjoyed doing way more than that. So I transitioned into just a Jill of all trades, jack of all trades, whichever one you want to go with, and just started figuring out every platform known to man like my clients at the time and be like, Oh, do you think you could schedule some emails for me? And I have no idea what they’re talking about. I’m like, Yeah, sure. Let’s do it. Let’s figure. Let’s figure it out. Sounds like a great idea. And so I just figured it out. From there. As I transitioned into more of a VA and OBM. I was building out an agency. This was like, I would say really like COVID really had a baby. I mean, fourth baby, we moved. It’s my husband’s a football coach. It’s a thing. We do this a lot. I’ve moved twice since Andrew has known me in a year is a thing. But we moved. I had a baby. Well, no, I had a baby then we moved and COVID like my business really just skyrocketed. And so I started building out an agency where we did just everything, podcast management, email management, day to day management, calendar, management, all of that kind of stuff. In the summer of 2021. My personal life kind of got really rocky. We actually lost our daughter, and everything changed. I took the next six months off to just be with my family and kind of like figure out my life and what that looked like going because it was a shock. And then that’s kind of where Andrea came in.

Andrea Nordling 5:06
Yeah, I think we we got. Yeah, like, right around the same time you came back.

Raven Wilson 5:12
Yeah, you were one of the first people that I started working with when I came back. We started in February of last year. And you’re one of the first and we started out really slow and kind of just grew into what it is today.

Andrea Nordling 5:27
Yeah. Which is a magical, magical synergistic. Like, all of the things I’m I love the doing ravens, like, Oh, let me do that. Let me get in there and create a process for that. And I’m like, oh, what’s happening?

Raven Wilson 5:43
Like, Andrea will get on a call. And she’ll say, okay, don’t hate me, because we’re gonna do this new thing. And I’m like, Lay it on me, Andrea. And she tells me I’m like, why would I hate you? That’s like, the most fun thing I’ve done all week. Let’s do it right now. Why are we waiting?

Andrea Nordling 5:58
It’s so good. So yeah, last year, February 2021. Actually, I probably started the process. In January, I was introduced to a, like a kind of a VA OBM, Online Business Manager like matchmaking service, which we’re going to talk about. And we’ll give you all the details on that as well. But it’s basically like match.com, for business owners, and for virtual assistants and OEMs. And so I had several colleagues that were like, Oh, my gosh, I’ve used this, it’s so great, you submit a form. And this woman that works with a lot of very specialty, like VAs and OEMs, and trains them, she matches you up with people, she thinks that you would be the best fit for based on the answers in the form that you submit. And then you interview them. And she doesn’t like facilitate the hiring or anything, you know, she just gives you like, I think these three would be great. You do you schedule the interviews and take it from here. So that’s how I got introduced to Raven, it was amazing. And obviously we have, we’re going to talk a lot about what it has looked like in the last year as I went from a total solopreneur with a couple of contractors. For some, like graphic design stuff, I have a Podcast Producer, some very specific project based just, you know, very specific people that have been helping me in my business, to having someone like Raven, now who comes in and is like, Okay, show me what you’re doing, that’s adorable, I’m going to fix it, and we’re going to do it way better, and helping to set up what moving forward is going to be a much more well oiled system. And now we have a lot more hires coming on. And it’s just going so smoothly, because she fills in the gaps for me as the visionary of my company, and what I am really good at, she fills in the gaps of the things that she’s really good at. So it’s been a great partnership. And we were going to talk about that about how to find that person that isn’t a clone of you. Because you don’t need another you in your business. You need someone that’s takes over the stuff that you pushed to the backburner every single day. What’s just been very helpful for me. So for a little context, in last year, when I was like, Okay, I really do need to hire someone, it’s time, I was not dying in my business. I had systems I had processes for those of you that are listening to this and you’re in the profitable nutritionist program, you know, a lot of those processes, I teach you in there, the templates, I give you the way I was managing my calendar, the way I was managing tasks, like really being very constrained in the focus of what I was working on and setting up processes that worked for my brain that worked well. So Raven came in, and we’re going to talk about this, like, you know, she came in and I wasn’t dying, like, oh my gosh, please take this over. I can’t even handle it. It wasn’t like that. However, I was making about I think it was at about 350 in revenue a year at that point. So I certainly could have hired sooner. I mean, I my business could have afforded that I could have definitely done it, I dragged my feet on it probably a little bit longer than I needed to. But to be totally transparent. I was fine. And like I could do what needed to be done. And I didn’t feel like I was drowning. But maybe other people that didn’t have like as many systems as I had, even though we have pretty much broken those systems and created new ones now. They were working for me. So I will say that that’s my, that’s my disclaimer on when Raven came into the picture. So she, maybe I’ll like kick this back to you. So you could say what this was like on your end. But my experience was like, I don’t know what I’m going to give her. I know I need help. But I don’t even know what to delegate. I don’t know how to teach someone to do what works in my brain and like the way I’m doing things. And this feels like it’s going to take a lot more time to try to bring someone up to speed than just doing it myself. So if you have thoughts like that I had them all as well. But there’s a better way. So maybe, maybe you take over and tell me what it was like from your point of view.

Raven Wilson 9:45
Oh, I don’t know that. There’s really I mean, I think either way, it’s fine. I’ve had it both ways. I’ve had it where somebody comes to me and their hair’s on fire and they need help and they need help now. And you just have to adapt and get in and out. You do it. But I think the way that we started and what I really appreciated about the way that we started is I could get in, I could learn how you did stuff, I could see what you did, we did a lot of loom videos, we did a lot of zoom calls that we recorded of you just showing me what you were doing. And then we were able to slowly implement the changes, because you could still handle your business. And you did when I had my daughter, I took a month off month and a half off, because we also moved and Andrea just did everything while I was gone. So it wasn’t like she was at a point where me, you know, stepping out for maternity or anything like that, like she couldn’t handle it. But she just didn’t want to handle some of those things. And so I think that was really key in getting us to a good point, because we slowly introduced like, we slowly did things. And then I was able to get a really good feel for how it worked for you and how your brain worked. I think that’s been really big. And being able to change things is just understanding. I’m not coming into your business to make things work better for me, I’m coming in to make things work better for us. And marrying how my brain works and how your brain works to create this system that works good for us takes time, I could have come in, in the next day been like, No, we’re not doing this, we’re not doing this, we’re not doing this, we’re gonna change it to this, this and this, this is insane. I can’t believe you’ve been doing this this way this whole time. But that’s not, it’s not helpful, it is helpful. If your hair’s on fire, and you don’t know what you’re doing and you need help. That is totally fine. But if you have the opportunity, if you’re in a place where you can hire somebody, before you get to that point, it just makes the process so much smoother. It allows somebody the opportunity to get to know you and your business and how you run things. So they can make it better not come in and overwhelm you even more by just changing everything.

Andrea Nordling 12:08
So I have seen many people that have been very confused about like who who they want to hire first. So they’re gonna hire someone that already like is just going to come in and take over and already has the skills and can do it better and can set up systems and processes and can like easily take things off their plate, or I think what a lot of people assume, and that’s one option, and it’s fine. Another option, which I think is probably the only option A lot of people think of is that they’re going to hire someone that they are going to have to train like they have to have this all figured out first, and then they bring someone on and they teach someone how to do all of the things. And that’s where it seems like it’s going to be a really heavy lift. Because like if you don’t believe that you have the best way, and then you feel like you have to pay someone to then teach them and you’re like, I don’t even know if I’m at this point, then that’s when people put it off for way too long, in my opinion. So I just want to give kind of that disclaimer that there’s two ways to do it, you can pay a little bit more for someone that has the experience already and can just come in and take it off your plate, or you can train somebody up, you probably will pay less for that person. And they will do what you want them to do not to say that that person won’t take initiative over time and fix things for you. I think that like we’ll talk about that about kind of communication and growing the relationship long term. But those are two options. And like, from your point of view, what do you think, is? Like, how would somebody find out what that person is when they talk to them when they initially interview them, if they’re going to be like a high initiative taker, like I feel like you are versus you need to tell me what to do. And then I’ll execute the thing you told me to do.

Raven Wilson 13:48
I think you can tell that by their experience. When you’re looking for a VA, mostly they’re going to be they’re just going to do what you tell them to do. And there’s nothing wrong with that. And loom is your best friend. Like literally, it feels so overwhelming when you’re like, oh, how am I going to hand this off? You literally do it once like scheduling an email, for example. You go in and you schedule your email, you loom yourself the entire time. Yeah, loom doc.

Andrea Nordling 14:15
Totally good. And it’s,

Raven Wilson 14:17
it’s free for five minutes. You get five minute Unlimited, you get like 25, but you can delete them. So you get five minute videos. You can explain everything in five minutes. If not just in multiple videos, it’s fine. I do it all the time. But you just learn what you’re doing. And then you tell them, here you go. Here’s how I do it. They may come in and have their own. They may say Oh, awesome. And then they may do it a completely different way. And as long as the end product is the same, that’s totally fine. The end product is that the email gets scheduled. As long as that happens like it’s fine. Whatever way it happens. But don’t get overwhelmed by all I have to train them and it’s going to take forever. No, you’re going to record a loop. That’s yummy that and it’s going to be easy. But I think really one price is going to tell you how experienced they are.

Andrea Nordling 15:11
Like, I’d be curious, how do you know? Like, I’m thinking through this process, like, where do people put their rates? Like, how would you know what someone’s price is before you interview them? This seems like a really dumb question.

Raven Wilson 15:25
It really depends. It really depends. And especially if you’re doing something like Sarah’s matchmaking for Ascot in an email, like just say, Hey, what’s your rate? Like, I don’t want to waste your time. I don’t want to waste my time. I want to know, before we ever even get on a call, what’s your rate? What’s your packages look like? Okay, all those kinds of number.

Andrea Nordling 15:48
When I did that form, I think that there were questions on like, what, what I was expecting to pay or like what I had budgeted for that. So I think that there actually were questions on that. I will say, like, I have a lot of friends, friends and colleagues that have hired people, and they feel like they really overpay for what’s getting done. And I’ve had the opposite experience, I feel like you get twice as much done in the amount of time that I would have thought that you would so I’ve had like a delightful experience in that department. But I think like a lot of people have questions about well, I don’t know how much time I need, if I’m gonna hire someone, and they’re doing 10 hours a week, or they’re doing 20 hours a week, like how am I supposed to know how much time that’s gonna take? Can you talk about that a little bit from the onboarding perspective of how you figure out like, how fast you can do things?

Raven Wilson 16:39
I, I always do. A I guess there’s two parts to this one, I always under estimate, like, for example, when we first started Andrea’s like, I need 50 hours? And like, Are you sure? Like, are you sure.

Andrea Nordling 17:01
And at that time, I was like, I have no idea what I’m going to have you do, by the way.

Raven Wilson 17:07
Because I can almost guarantee you that anything you’re doing is going if you’re doing it yourself, it’s going to take longer for you to do it than it will somebody else. Because you don’t want to do it. You don’t want to be scheduling blog posts and scheduling emails anymore. So what will take me five minutes is gonna take you 30 minutes, because you’re gonna have to talk yourself into it the whole time, you’re gonna have to tell yourself, Okay, I gotta go do this, you’re gonna put it off for three days. So when you’re estimating how much time you need, I would be willing to say that, on a discovery call, when somebody tells me how much time they think they need, that they’ve never needed that much, at least not initially, we’ve definitely grown into meeting 50 hours a month, and then some, but initially, it was not that. So I always underestimate my sweet spot for, especially like established business owners is between 20 and 30 hours a month, depending on like, what all the different pieces are of their business. That’s kind of my sweet spot, because I don’t roll hours. So 20 to 30 hours is usually a good amount of time that even if you don’t, like you get halfway through the month, and you still have half your hours left, you can usually find something whether it’s getting you ahead for the next month, or whatever. And they always do a 30 day trial period where we can reevaluate at the end and say, Okay, you we did 20 hours this month, you really only have 10 hours, like let’s, let’s bump you down, or we did 20 hours this month, and we could easily do 50 hours next month, like I always do that month trial period. And I think it’s still so important for that trial period. And I think we’re gonna get into that a little bit more later.

Andrea Nordling 18:55
I think we were really lucky in the way that the 30 day trial kind of worked out. Because Raven and I started working together, we knew that we were going to have a little over a month to like work together to try to figure out what the best path was would be how many hours are we going to need? How much stuff could I offload to her, do some trial of that. And then we knew she was going on maternity leave. So from my point of view, it was like, Oh, this is going to be so great, because then we can regroup like I’ll have time while she’s on maternity leave, I’ll have a month that ended up being like a month and a half or something like that. I’ll have some time to figure out like what worked well, and what I want to delegate more of later. Now, obviously, most people would not have that unique experience. But that worked out really well. So I feel like it almost was an extended trial. Like I got, I got to try out this life where I didn’t have to do everything myself and I could free up some of my time and bandwidth. And then you went had a baby and I was like oh my gosh, I can’t wait for her to come back. This is gonna be so good. So by the time you came back, we hit the ground running with okay, this is what I think we could do next. I think that we could do this next. I think you could take this over next And we, like evolved from there and ended up adding a lot more hours. And it has kind of, I mean, obviously it just been a work in progress of how much stuff can I not do things that I think that only I can do are not things that only I can do for the most part, which I have learned. And that has been lovely.

Raven Wilson 20:20
But it really did. I do think like it really did, let us kind of slow play into it. And that was so important, because we both got a feel for what we were doing, and how we were going to work together.

Andrea Nordling 20:32
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. And I, I mean, my other colleagues are like, I’m so jealous, you just have someone that just takes stuff off your plate, she just does it. She just handles it, she figures out solutions you would never think of I’m like, I know, it’s so glorious. And she respects my neuroses, like, which I definitely have some control issues about who does what, and how, and when, and all of that, which is, I think, probably something I mean, a lot of business owners, I’m guessing have some of those similar thoughts of like, only I can do this, then you realize no, actually, other people can do this way better than me. So that’s the first detaching moment. And then figuring out the system and processes in the future to make sure that things get done, the way that you want them to get done. And the client facing stuff is going to be at the level that you want it to be at which I have found to not be a problem at all. But I know some people don’t have that experience when they hire someone and have unclear probably this is a communication issue, like unclear expectations upfront about, like, what is really important to them about being detail oriented about like, exactly how they want things to look and how they want it to feel from a client perspective. So can you talk about that a little bit?

Raven Wilson 21:44
Yeah, so and I think too, like, there’s nothing wrong with you keeping the stuff that you enjoy in your business?

Andrea Nordling 21:52
Yeah, that’s a good point.

Raven Wilson 21:53
So I mean, for us, for example, you still do emails, and like, that’s like the bread and butter of your business. So it makes sense that you would still do emails. It’s not when you talk about the things that you are crazy about keeping or anything like that. Like it’s not, you’re not like, Oh, let me schedule this blog post. And I’m like, Andrea, no, please, please let me do you know, the things that you want to keep are things that one you really enjoy doing. And it’s true, there are things that I personally think in your mind, they have to be the way that they are so that they get the results that they get.

Andrea Nordling 22:36
Yeah, I think that’s part of it. And I also think, like right now we’re, we’re recording this one, we’re in a launch, there are 40, some emails going out for this launch. Many of them are emails that we’ve sent before. So we have a process in the background where raven like goes through, we outline all the emails for the launch, she duplicates them and our email service provider, she gets them all named and tagged and automation set and everything ready. And then I go in for final edit, to see if there’s anything I want to change in the copy. Sometimes I’m writing new emails, but a lot of times I’m editing past emails, making sure it’s exactly what I want it to look like that it’s formatted the way that I want it to look in my final schedule it and from my point of view, it’s like if someone’s going to screw this up, I want it to be me not, not you. Oh, I feel

Raven Wilson 23:22
and it’s something like you don’t, because we’ve come up with several different options to make it where you don’t have to do that. But at the end of the day, like you don’t mind doing that, either.

Andrea Nordling 23:34
No, it makes me sleep at night, knowing that I’m whatever may or may not happen with those emails, it’s on me, that makes me

Raven Wilson 23:41
just about to say is I think it gives you the peace of mind that you need to get through the launch or to get to know that the email went out and that whatever it is, so there’s nothing wrong with keeping this stuff that gives you peace of mind. As a service provider we’re coming in to make your life easier, not harder.

Andrea Nordling 24:00
You said that to me last year at some point early on, then that just stuck with me so much. I think I was putting a lot of pressure on to like, oh my gosh, I have to create a lot of videos for her. I have to teach her like she can’t just be sitting there waiting on me and I’m really busy right now and I don’t know, like what I’m going to delegate and I had a lot of pressure pressure Enos about that. And you’re like, it’s this is supposed to make your life easier, not harder. Let’s like what would be easier. Okay, deep breath. This, this and that. So you’re like, Okay, it’s done. Just I’ll report back tomorrow. Like it’s done. Like, oh my gosh, all I needed to do it was just realize this is supposed to make it easier. Not harder. That was so reassuring to me.

Raven Wilson 24:39
Yeah, absolutely. And don’t overthink it either. Like, you may feel like you need to have all these little videos or whatever. But it’s always worth the conversation like, Hey, this is my issue. Do you already have a solution or do you need me to show you what I’m doing so we can come up with a solution.

Andrea Nordling 24:57
And I think another thing that we have done that This process has evolved to but we meet weekly and if not more often, sometimes we have projects that we’re working on where we need to be in communication more often. And a lot of times, we will do things separately to prepare for the meeting, then we’ll come together and we’ll iron out the fine points. But also there are plenty of times where we just do it together screenshare on Zoom, and I don’t feel like I need to prepare something in advance. I’m just like, Okay, I know, on Monday at 9am, we’re going to hammer that out together, and it’ll get figured out then. And that also takes the pressure off. So I think there’s a lot of different ways to do it. So for anyone that’s listening to this thinking, Oh, my gosh, I can’t even imagine, like creating videos and adding extra staff, you can just also make it easy by jumping on Zoom scheduled times off as often as you need to, and just doing it together. And I think that that works just as well for us sometimes.

Raven Wilson 25:47
I agree. And I think our weekly standing meeting is one of the best things that we’ve done. Because it gives us both that opportunity. Like, for example, last week, I was creating something new within a and HQ and I was really building out something new. I don’t have to go in and record Andrea 700 videos to try to explain what I do. Because I know we have our screening meeting on Monday, first thing Monday morning, I’m gonna hop on and be like, Andrea, look what I did. I’m so excited. Let me walk you through the whole thing. And Andrea is like, oh, my gosh, what just happened? He was telling me the end product, what do I need to know? And be like, No, you have to see what I did. Because I worked really hard on this. I’m really excited about it. Knowing that we have that saves us both, I think a lot of time, because we know, as long as it’s not like a 911 I need Raven to help me with this right now. Or I need Andrea to see this right now. We know we have that standing meeting where we’re going to go over something.

Andrea Nordling 26:50
Yeah, I think that that has been fantastic for us for just the way that we work and the tempo that we’re working at what that was like we didn’t implement that. Initially, we were going back and forth with videos. And that would have been fine if that worked the best for us. But we just we kind of landed on the weekly meeting, which works really well. So I just I think it like evolves and the communication very clear and open communication with everybody about what’s working and what isn’t working is critical with anybody that you hire in your business. So I want to talk about I’m kind of switching gears for a second but I feel like I really lucked out because I your mic, my first big hire, and I feel like I got I won the lottery because I got the perfect person that complements like shores up my weaknesses and complements exactly what I needed in my business, which has been amazing. But I wonder if the role that you have where you’re like you’re very systems processes, how can we do this better? How can we automate this for the future? How can we look ahead and see what we’re going to need a year, two years, three years from now and start building that out now. So that we are growing into it. And we don’t get like behind? Like all of that the way that your brain works on these, like setting up things for the long term is amazing. But I have to think that would be a good starting point for anybody in their business. I think I lucked out, I didn’t know that, that that’s what I needed. So bad, but I did. But I just think that a lot of people want to hire like a marketing person or a social media manager or like someone to take over a part of their client delivery first, that kind of stuff before they have those systems and processes in place. So I feel like and I would just be curious about what your stance is on this. But I feel like having somebody come in and help create the foundational systems is important as a first hire. What do you think about that?

Raven Wilson 28:33
100% Because it makes anything else easier. If you’re trying to bring in a social media manager and you have no process for it. And you’re just like, I post on Instagram three times a week. And it’s like, okay, what days what time? Where do you get the content? How do you get the content to me? Where do the pictures come from? Where are you keeping it in your like, on my phone? That it just makes her start rocking. But if you have the systems, you have somebody that’s come in and said, Okay, here’s let’s take what you currently do for social media, let’s create a system around it. Let’s put this into air table. Let’s think ahead. Let’s plan this out for a couple of weeks for a couple of months, or whatever. Then when you say okay, let me bring on a social media manager, you say, here’s how I currently do it. They’re a social media manager, they specialize in social media, they’re going to have ideas to make it better. But a lot of the foundational groundwork of even just being able to handle the information to them is already done.

Andrea Nordling 29:36
Yeah. And I think that makes it so much less overwhelming. Now at the point where we’re at now we are building out three distinct, oh my gosh, what do they call that? I feel like a real CEO fail right now departments. We’re building out three specific departments here at HQ. So that’s the operations department obviously that is ravens department literally she is in charge of all of that. it and any subsequent hires in that department, she will be directly training, and then marketing department and fulfillment department. So fulfillment is everything to love on our clients make sure that they get the best experience that’s like, specifically geared towards the success of our customers. And now that we like have this organized into who goes where, who reports to who, I feel like we have these systems going in the background now, and it’s certainly a work in progress, like we we are iterating on this all the time and making it better. And, okay, this did not work with like, let’s do it differently. This time, we’re, for sure always tweaking, but we have at least a starting point on how to bring more people in. And to make it easier for them to win and to figure out like to track what’s the metrics are and to give people a starting point on how they even come into this team, which I mean, the way my brain works, I would I don’t feel like have ever been able to create the robust onboarding is stuff that we have now that you just like, in my opinion, like you, Fairy Godmother just waved your wand and it just like, oh, my gosh, we have all of these processes. Now it’s so amazing. But I would have to think it would be so hard to be looking at bringing on someone to organize marketing and to coordinate the podcast with our SEO people and this and that, and like some of these more advanced things that we’re doing now, which is super fun. But I have the ability to do that as a business owner, because I have somebody helping me create the systems and processes. And it’s not just me doing it. So I mean, shout out to like your zone of genius, it’s been an amazing starting point, for sure.

Raven Wilson 31:33
Well, and you’re hiring to different people, the person that you want client facing, I’m not client, I mean, I do do some client facing stuff. But that’s not where I shine, I truly shine in the weeds of the back end of your business. So the person that you’re hiring, to do operations and to do processes and to do systems and to want to do all of the nitty gritty scheduling, and the stuff that doesn’t sound fun to anybody is a completely different person, than the person that’s going to be more client facing and going to be, you know, interacting with your clients in your community on a daily basis. And like we’re two separate people. And we shine in two different ways. And I think that matters, finding the right person that shines in those right ways. But also, if you would have started with your fulfillment position, and what the fulfillment position is kind of evolving into now. They would have been able to come in and they would have been able to interact in the lounge, they would have been able to do some of these things, but there wouldn’t have been rhyme or reason.

Andrea Nordling 32:42
Yeah. Oh, for sure. And it would have, I would always be the bottleneck of every decision and the filter for every single process. And should we do this? Should we do it this way? Or this way? It would ultimately always come back to me if I didn’t have you in my business, like see the vision of where we’re going and how we need to set this up now to make it easier for later. And that would be so stressful for me. I already feel like I’m the bottleneck in a lot of things unnecessarily because I put myself there, but it would be like 1 million times worse for sure.

Raven Wilson 33:13
Well, and I think too, it would have been more stressful for you. But then it would have been more stressful for me coming in to say like, Okay, we need to break all of this. And do it because there is such a better way. So I do agree that starting with the systems and processes in your business, just set up every other area of your business for success.

Andrea Nordling 33:38
Yeah, I think so.

Raven Wilson 33:41
No matter what, no matter no matter what you’re doing, it all comes down to a system and process.

Andrea Nordling 33:51
Totally. And people are going to be listening to this and thinking, Well, I don’t have systems and processes. Yes, you do. You have a way that you do things. It’s just, you probably have never outlined it or articulated it to someone else. But you do have a system and process. So you need to just document it and then have someone figure out can we improve this and probably you can.

Raven Wilson 34:09
Something as simple as scheduling an email, like the every step you take from you got the idea in your head to this email is sent out. That’s a system and process.

Andrea Nordling 34:22
And the more organized we get on what these systems and processes are, the further in advance, I’m able to create things and to work so I noticed like the better that these systems get and the more we refine them and the more automated it gets it the less I am doing that day to day stuff. And the more well first of all, the more bandwidth I have to create podcast episodes and to be writing new emails and to be creating new content for our students in the profitable nutritionist or in the mastermind. All of that like that just frees up my brain space to be able to do more of that which is great, but also I mean tactically. We know what podcast episodes are happening when when they’re getting released months in advance like that stuff is really planned far in advance now, which was not the case for, I mean, for most of the time, it hasn’t been. But now we’re able to plan so much further. Because like my bandwidth, I feel like it’s cleared up so much on that I’m able to look further ahead, which is helpful for all of us. And that’s been a work in progress. That’s not perfect system either. But it definitely is, things are planned much further in advance than they used to be. For

Raven Wilson 35:31
sure. And you’re able to, instead of it just being an idea in the future, we can speak in, exactly, we know when the profitable nutritionist is going to open again, for enrollment. And we can start taking steps now, for three months from now, like we know, when another webinars going to happen, or whatever, where we can, instead of just, oh, hey, it’s May, we need to launch again, like we know that now. So that we can take those steps and be ahead of it come May, or come September, or whenever, like instead of it just being like this idea, we have tangible processes in place that ensure that we’re staying on top of it to know when those things are coming

Andrea Nordling 36:15
totally, which has been so helpful and keeps getting better and better and better. But we’re also able to look further ahead. And this is something that we talk about a lot specifically in the mastermind with higher income level students of mine that are at this exact place where they’re like, Okay, I need to know what I’m going to need to be hiring for. So I can start now so I can grow into it. So I don’t get my hair on fire situation. And like I just see the value of looking further ahead and knowing Okay, we have a lot of new students coming in, we need to be hiring more support coaches we need to be that doesn’t feel like a 911. Right now, it feels like something that a mature business is able to do, because we are looking further ahead instead of just looking at this month. And so for all of you that are listening to this, like I can’t even imagine what that would be like it sounds more stressful, please just hear me that it is much less stressful to plan further ahead, much, much less stressful. Very enjoyable, actually.

Raven Wilson 37:10
And I think it’s also important to remember that no system and process is perfect. Every system and process can be improved. Every system and process that we’re currently using in your business has the opportunity to be improved, and it gets improved on a regular basis just as we do it more or we try more things or I figure out a different way of something that could be done easier or whatever, like no system and processes perfect. So don’t get caught up in like don’t have the perfect process to handoff. No, you don’t need the perfect process. Just handoff what you’re doing. Yeah. Well, from there,

Andrea Nordling 37:49
such a gift to be able to do that for sure. Let’s talk about like project based help versus someone that comes on on an ongoing basis for a longer period of time. And also maybe in this we should talk about the like employees versus hiring contractors, not that we’re attorneys were getting anyone legal advice, but I know they’re gonna be wondering, like employee versus contractor.

Raven Wilson 38:11
Let’s start with the project based versus monthly. So I think that, especially for people that are like, just starting out, project based is great. You’re just starting your business, you know, you don’t you don’t even know what you’re doing. You don’t even know what to hand off. But you don’t know how to do your website, find somebody, they’ll do it on a project. It’s a one time project totally fine. You need some email headers made, do a one time project with a graphic designer. It doesn’t have to be ongoing to get support in your business. It doesn’t have to be ongoing. There are easy ways in almost every VA OBM anything like that offers a VIP day.

Andrea Nordling 38:55
Oh, this is interesting. I

Raven Wilson 38:56
don’t know about this. I used to offer audits, for example, where you’d pay a set amount of money, I come in and audit one system in your profit in your business and say, say it was your client onboarding. You had no idea where to start what to do. It was a real pain point in your business. You couldn’t afford to hire me monthly. But you could do this VIP day. The way I would do it is I would do a zoom call. We would go through the process. They would show it to me. I would take a week or so redo the whole process for them and then hand it back to them.

Andrea Nordling 39:33
Oh, that sounds like such a great solution for someone that’s like I know I need help but I don’t know if I can swing a commitment right now every single month.

Raven Wilson 39:41
Exactly. And it’s a way to there are some people that will offer like a like get it done VIP day where you have like four or five just low hanging tasks that you know need to be done. You don’t have the time to do them. You can’t hire somebody to man into the monthly, hire somebody to come in for five hours, 10 hours and just do it, and then move on. And that frees up so much space for you that then you can start to see what you might have on monthly basis. But there’s nothing wrong with starting with project based work. One, you open up your network of providers, you start to get a feel of what you do like what you don’t like what different communication styles people have, how to hand off stuff, like there’s nothing wrong with starting that way. Especially if your business isn’t at a point that it can sustain paying somebody monthly. Because there’s nothing worse than saying, Okay, I’m just starting out, I need these three things done. So I’m going to hire a VA, you hire a VA, you get those three things done. You’re now contracted on a month to month basis for a certain amount of hours. Now what? You, Bill, you don’t have the stuff for them to do. And you feel like you’re wasting money.

Andrea Nordling 41:02
Yeah, absolutely. Well, okay, first of all, this is a good segue to let everyone know, if you are a participant in the April class of the streamliners scale mastermind, you are going to get to benefit from kind of this VIP day situation with Raven directly because she will be in Cancun, looking at everyone’s systems and processes and working through this kind of VIP day style in person. And if you are not currently a participant in the upcoming round, we do have a few spots left. So I feel like this is a good point to tell everyone that if you are making at least $50,000 a year in your health and wellness practice. So you are definitely at the point where you have systems and processes, you have things to be delegating you. Maybe you need some better systems and processes. And you would love to get ravens eyes on it. By the way, you should apply for one of the remaining spots. So you can do that at Build a Profitable practice.com/mastermind Feels like that was a good point where I needed to say that for people that are like, I knew what you Raven, I want you to do a VIP day for me.

Raven Wilson 42:06
That’s the only way you can work with me because Andrea has all of my time.

Andrea Nordling 42:17
Yes, such a good point. Okay, I kind of want to talk about the value of a long term relationship. But I also want to like I think that I anticipate will work together for a very, very, very long time barring any huge life changes that neither of us are anticipating. But what about people that hire someone in the beginning? And they’re like, I think that this is going to work for a while, but probably not long term? Can you talk about that a little bit like pros and cons of that arrangement?

Raven Wilson 42:42
So let’s dig into that a little bit more. They hire somebody and it’s not going to work long term, long term, because they don’t necessarily feel like they have a person or Oh, that’s a

Andrea Nordling 42:55
good question. Yeah, no, I’m thinking about actually, I have several colleagues in this position right now where they have someone that can do the tasks that they need right now. But they are not necessarily gifted or motivated in the sense that they’re like, and let’s try this next. And like, here’s where I think we’re going, let’s see if we can implement this. They’re very, like, let me check the boxes on the checklist that we already have. But they’re not really iterating for how to improve for the future.

Raven Wilson 43:25
So what if that’s just where they stay? And then your next hire is somebody that is over them that manages them? And is that forward thinking person? Love it. There’s nothing wrong with not being forward thinking or not wanting to take the initiative? Like, that’s just not what some people can do? Yeah. But that doesn’t mean that they’re bad at their job,

Andrea Nordling 43:54
either. Yeah, or that they don’t have a place in your organization.

Raven Wilson 43:58
Absolutely. For sure. That if you know that, okay, this person isn’t taking initiative, but they do everything correctly, and you enjoy working with them. There’s nothing wrong with your next hire being the middleman between you and them.

Andrea Nordling 44:14
Yeah, yeah, that’s probably a good thing we should talk about to the way that we’re setting up our organization structure and our team moving forward. And how this all looks is we have the three departments we have marketing, operations and fulfillment. And there’s going to be a head of each of those departments. And those are the people that report to me. And I’m not necessarily long term in the business in touch, often with every single person in every department. And so there is a rhyme and reason for how to set this up. We have had so much fun figuring this out over the last six months. This is what a lot of our meetings have been about about structuring the organization. What does that look like onboarding new roles, what should we prioritize first company values tracking People’s metrics and like, how, how are we going to track what’s working? What isn’t working? It’s been fun. It’s a completely new skill set, I will say that is, it’s feeling very, like a lot of growth to me. kind of proud of myself, I was what I’m gonna say.

Raven Wilson 45:18
It makes you realize you’re running a real business,

Andrea Nordling 45:21
for sure. Absolutely. And you don’t have to do that in the beginning. And I want to just like reassure everyone, I was like, this is this is new, this is new, as we’re making seven figures a year, this is what it looks like. And it does require a new skill set. And we’ve invested in programs. And we’ve invested in software’s and we’ve invested in mentoring and coaches that can help us do this better. But I don’t I’m not doing it myself. Ravens right there with me, we’re figuring it out together. It’s kind of a fun puzzle that we’re putting together. But it didn’t, it didn’t start this way. It’s not like you know, you’re making $50,000 a year, and you need to immediately fill three departments in your business. That’s not what I’m saying. I just, I know, it would have been really helpful for me to hear someone talking about what this looks like at the seven figure level. And so I would know, okay, at some point, that’s what’s going to be happening. And that’s like, you know, there’ll be ways for me to figure this out where I don’t have to reinvent the wheel and figure it out myself, because someone else has already done this. And it makes perfect sense, that would have been very reassuring to me. So that’s what I’ll offer to anyone listening.

Raven Wilson 46:20
And it also is in line with what you want the big picture of your business to look like. And I think that matters, because not everybody, you have to take what you want big picture what you want in five years, and then work towards that. And that’s what we’re doing. And that’s why we’re structuring your business the way that we are, is because that’s what’s gonna work in five years.

Andrea Nordling 46:40
Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. And then in five years, it’ll be like I have all these other new skills to do now that I didn’t even know were on the horizon. I’m glad I didn’t know about though. It’s so fun. So what happens if things are not working? Like someone makes their first hire their second, hire their third, hire whatever that’s like, and it gets like they realize this actually isn’t working? What is best practices around that?

Raven Wilson 47:05
Communicate? Like, it’s as simple as that? Truly, why isn’t it working? Is that a you problem? As the business owner, are you doing something that’s not making this work? Is it who you hired? Are they just not a good fit for you and your business? Is it the way the two of you work together? Like there’s so many different aspects. And the easy thing is just like, oh, this doesn’t work, we’re done. But like, I really encourage you to look and figure out why it’s not working. Or you’re not clear on what you needed. Because that’s totally possible. And that also, if you’re not clear on what you need, you can’t communicate that you can’t hire the right people. And there’s no nothing wrong with the trial and error of figuring that out. But it has to be figured out like, not every this this isn’t working is as simple as it’s not working, there’s a reason and figure that out. Because even if it ultimately means that you injure relationship with the current person you’re working with, it helps you not make that same mistake moving forward.

Andrea Nordling 48:16
Yeah, I see a lot of people that have a pattern of this. So like everyone I hire, it just doesn’t work. They don’t do it. Right. They don’t I can’t count on them that did it. And like, well, that’s just a pattern, then I think that it’s a you problem. It’s there’s something is broken here and probably is expectations, or values or communication in some regard.

Raven Wilson 48:35
And as a service provider, if I get on a discovery call with somebody, and they tell me, yeah, I’ve had four different people and like, it just doesn’t work out. That’s like my number one red flag.

Andrea Nordling 48:49
valid, valid,

Raven Wilson 48:50
tells me like it’s something if they’ve gone through four different people, like there’s something more wrong here than what meets the eye. Their expectations are off, like you said, or they have issues delegating, or whatever the issue is. But if you get on a discovery call with me, and I’m talking to you about, Okay, what’s your experience with hiring people? Have you had help in the past? What does that look like for you? And you tell me, you’ve been through four people in the last five months. That’s my number one red flag, and I’m probably not going to offer to work with you. Because it tells me there’s something more to the problem. But if you could come and say, Yeah, I’ve been I’ve had four different people in the past five months, I’ve really been honing in on why those relationships didn’t work. This person wasn’t a good fit, because she had weird working hours, or this person wasn’t a good fit, because she didn’t take the initiative that I needed. That’s totally different than if you’re just like, Yeah, I’ve ran through four service providers and none of them were good enough. Yeah, absolutely. So it requires and I think just hiring and working with service providers in general require Here’s a lot of self reflection.

Andrea Nordling 50:03
For sure. Yes, this is very important, everyone, this is why we, this is why we self coach, and this is why we pay for coaching, yes.

Raven Wilson 50:12
Because it’s not always so black and white on why things aren’t or are working, and you have to self reflect and kind of remove, remove yourself from that. And like you’ve said, in several of our processes, you’ve been the bottleneck. 1,000%. Yeah. But you’ve been able to figure that out by reflecting back and saying, Okay, what made this not work so well, or what? What was the issue here, and some of it is just also having that good relationship, that open communication, empowering your team members to come to you and tell you and I think we’re kind of at a place now where, if I see that you’re bottlenecking, something, I’m going to call you out on it. It wasn’t like that in the beginning. But you’ve empowered me over the last year to be able to do that, where I feel comfortable doing that, where I feel like I can step into that role to say, hey, you know, the system right now, you’re the issue. It’s totally okay. But I totally have a better way, if you can just not be the issue anymore.

Andrea Nordling 51:18
This is what our conversation sounds like, all the time. Yes. And, okay, maybe this is my personality, I don’t know. But if this is helpful, I like I can control frequent, the best of them don’t think any differently, but at the same time, nothing is life and death. And it doesn’t have to be so serious either. And so, I mean, sometimes things go wrong, and they don’t like it isn’t. I mean, sometimes things go really wrong. And then we’re just like, okay, sometimes coach it like we will have guests coaches coming in the program, they can’t get on Zoom, we have like a zoom issue. It doesn’t work we have, like, Okay, that was a real bummer. What are we going to do next time, but we just like, I mean, at some point, you just kind of have to laugh about it and go, Okay, we learned from that one. And it’s a no one died, it’s okay was not the end of the world moving on. So I will also offer that, that we get to do this business for ourselves, we get to run our own business, we get to have these learning opportunities, we get to pay people to do life with us, like we have the most amazing jobs. I mean, truly, we help people be healthier and achieve their goals and we get paid for it. It’s incredible. And then we get to this point in our business where we get to support the livelihood of other people’s families as they co create our dream with us, which I think is it just blows my mind that that’s even possible. So fun. And we get to do it, we don’t have to do it, we get to, and it doesn’t have to be so serious either.

Raven Wilson 52:41
I agree. And I think that’s something that a lot of people get caught up on. And it’s totally understandable. From a service provider perspective, like, this is your livelihood. This is how you pay your bills. And not only is it how I pay my bills for working with you, but like, this is your livelihood. And so it’s totally understandable that you take things seriously. But I think something that I’ve truly, truly appreciated with you is the grace when things do go wrong. And I think it has made our working relationship a very, very easy yes, on a continual basis.

Andrea Nordling 53:16
Totally. Yeah. I mean, there’s Yeah, things. And it really does come back to communication. Something that I think was helpful for us, is when I really sat down and articulated like what my company values are. And that’s going to be really helpful for us moving forward as we onboard new people onto the team and stuff. And one of the things to me that’s very, very important, is taking Extreme Ownership. Like when we screw up, we’re just like, I totally, totally did that. That was me, here’s how I’m going to fix it. I do this, you do this, like we would expect anyone to do this, we don’t expect people to not screw up, we just expect that we’re going to fix it and we’re not going to pass the buck on it. So that’s for me personally, like that’s just really important to me. And that’s how I parent, that’s how I think I show up in the world, at least as my intention. So yeah, we figure it out. We troubleshoot, we have, I think pretty good communication. And that’s been important. But also, it doesn’t have to be so serious all the time. And we just can expect that things are going to go wrong because they are it’s Murphy’s Law, it’s totally going to happen. It’s okay. Everyone will get through it. And we will be all the better for that.

Raven Wilson 54:26
And even though you’re hiring somebody to work in your business, you’re still hiring a human trough. And humans make mistakes. And systems make mistakes. Sometimes I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had to go in apologize for a mistake made that I had no control over. It wasn’t even my fault. It was a platform’s fault, but I was in charge of setting up that platform so I had to go apologize for it and I had to eat that one and it sucks. That’s just part of it. That’s just the nature of it and your risk wants to that matters.

Andrea Nordling 55:02
Yeah. Okay, let’s circle back to employee versus contractor tell me if I’m wrong on this. Because I know people are gonna have a lot of questions. First of all, consult with your own accountant in your own state or country and all of that, because there are tax implications to whether you’re hiring employees in your business and the structure of the entity of your business. There’s like lots of considerations there. So I’m for sure not going to steer you in any particular direction, because your own advice on that, but from my understanding, the reason that someone would want to hire an employee versus a contractor where, like, they’re not an actual employee in your business, you’re not paying benefits, you’re not doing any of that they’re your 1099 in them, and just paying them as contractor. The reason someone would opt to do an employee versus contractor is because then you have more control over their hours, their availability, like if they’re working for someone else, or not that kind of stuff. Is that, like, that’s my understanding of kind of the consideration there. Is that true?

Raven Wilson 56:03
Yes. With an employee, you can dictate their working hours, you can dictate when they can and can’t take off. It’s just like, if you worked in the corporate world, yeah, versus with a contractor. Obviously, if you have a good contractor relationship, then that matters. But with a contractor, they set their time they set their hours they set when they do and don’t work, they come to you and say, Hey, I’m taking off this week versus saying, Hey, can I have off this week or whatever. But again, like with the right, contractor, they’re not going to do it maliciously. You’re watching this league. So I’m taking. But yet with a contractor, they they set the rules,

Andrea Nordling 56:51
right? Right, right. So that will be dependent, like take that for what you will and bring it to your accountant and decide when you are hiring someone I do not see. And I just will be very transparent about that. I am not hiring employees at this point, my accountant and I have talked at length about this. And because I feel like, well, for sure, with Raven, we’re able to have very clear communication about this. And so I don’t have any worries about time expectations or any of that. But even moving forward, I feel like we have a pretty solid onboarding process for other contractors as they come in that we have very clear communication about time expectations, and that as well. So if at some point that isn’t working, maybe it’s something I’ll revisit. And as the business grows, maybe it’s something that will be advantageous tax wise to revisit anyway. But for right now, just to be transparent, it’s contractor based at a an HQ right now.

Raven Wilson 57:43
And it also just matters the way that your business works. Your business isn’t something that has to be done between eight and five.

Andrea Nordling 57:50
Right? Right, right, I actually feel very strongly that I want to incentivize people that work for me to be as efficient as possible. So if I think something’s going to take you 10 hours, and you get it done in seven, good go, you like go get a massage. Fantastic. That’s, that’s beautiful. I think that yeah, but that’s how for me how I want my business to be structured. So I think about that, in terms of how we are structuring these roles, and what the expectations are timewise of people working in business, I want it to be flexible like that. And I want people to be incentivized to be to simplify things and to be efficient and to use their time. Well, instead of feeling like they’re punching a clock, that’s really important to me.

Raven Wilson 58:29
And just even from like a getting tasks done perspective, Andrea and I are completely different. She wakes up at 5am, I’ll wake up at 8am and have 15 notifications, because she was up from five to eight, and like getting all her stuff done. Whereas I work best like between nine and 12 at night, and she’ll get up at 5am and have 15 notifications. And that in a contractor relationship that’s possible with an employee relationship, not so much. But it allows you to let your people work when works for them. Because I still, I didn’t say this earlier, but I homeschool my kids, they stay at home with me, everything I do is with my kids around. We’re recording this very early on a Saturday morning so that my kids aren’t around so that my husband can watch them. But everything I do is with my kids around in the background. They are from ages eight, will almost eight this summer to one that’s going to term one next month, and they’re always around. So being a contractor, I can make that work for me as an employee it would it be as possible.

Andrea Nordling 59:38
Totally. Yeah. And again, that just goes back to communication. We’re just super open and honest about what’s working and what isn’t working at any given time. And because we like there’s no reason like there’s, at least from my perspective, there’s no nothing I see that isn’t working. So it’s like yeah, you work whenever you want to that makes sense to me, and for your role. It makes sense for you. Totally. So is there anything that we didn’t cover? I feel like we had a, we had a pretty solid list of things that we wanted to at least touch on just based on questions that people have been asking on recent coaching calls and questions that we get in the mastermind. So, yeah, like, I mean, I feel like we kind of covered broadly, a lot of things. But was there anything that you thought of that we didn’t talk about?

Raven Wilson 1:00:22
I think we covered it all.

Andrea Nordling 1:00:24
I think we did, too, we gave a good overview, at least of what hiring can look like, and that it doesn’t have to be scary. And it’s not a marriage proposal, either. By the way, you can date different contractors, and you can figure it out. And when you get the one that you want to go on the second and third date with, they’re going to make your life so much easier. And it’s actually not going to be harder, if done properly. And if communication is very effective, and open and honest, your life is gonna get so much easier.

Raven Wilson 1:00:58
I think with that this is the last thing I’ll say about it is it is good to have that 30 day trial period, not every service provider has that 30 day trial period. But in my opinion, it is the most important thing you can do. It protects you as the business owner, and the service provider from getting in a really sucky relationship. So I would be very reluctant, even as a service provider, to sign a three month contract a six month contract on my first hire. You want to know that you like working with that person. Like, you don’t want to get into a six month package where you’re contracted with them for 20 hours a month for six months, and you absolutely hate everything they do. Like that just would it that would suck. And so I think especially if you are making your first hire, you’ve never done this before. It’s important to seek somebody that gives you that 30 day trial period.

Andrea Nordling 1:02:02
And it’s more negotiated if they don’t offer it initially like yes, it’s

Raven Wilson 1:02:05
totally okay. On your discovery call nearly can I offer three month packages? And you’re like, Okay, but what if we don’t work out? Like, what do you have a trial period? Can we do a trial period? Like, this is my first hire? I don’t know what I’m doing. I want to make sure that this is good for both of us. What if you hate working for me? Like I don’t want you stuck working for me either. Just as I don’t want to be stuck working with you if I don’t like it. And that’s okay. Because again, we’re human, and not everybody’s personalities vibe with each other. And that’s totally fine. But especially if you don’t know, what you’re looking for that 30 day grace period is something I personally would push for.

Andrea Nordling 1:02:49
Yeah, absolutely. And then if you are looking for project based someone like a graphic designer, or someone doing something for your website, or you know, creating something I know one of the first projects we did, I was going to a live event and I had a booth at a conference and I was really circling the drain on getting a trifold brochure. I was like I’m this trifold brochure situation is keeping me up at night, which I had no, like, I had no idea that you could even take that off my plate I just was complaining to you. I’m like, I’m really sorry, I’m not getting you stuff on time. I’m just like really struggling over here with this trifold. And you were like, the track like, can you just send that to me, I’ll just just send that my way and don’t think about it for three days. And I was like, okay, and then she comes back with a beautiful trifold. And that was like a really great example of oh my gosh, I didn’t even think that that was something that someone else could do for me much less do a way better than I did. But where I was going with that was even if it’s project based, you can still have somebody do a paid test project for you. So if you’re doing something like I know a lot of people do like a trifold brochure, because they’re gonna go do a booth somewhere, or they have a live event or they’re doing a workshop or they, you know, need business cards or just any of those things. You can also do that on a trial basis. Even if you’re not hiring somebody for a long term, you can still pay them to do a test project to see if, if it’s a good fit for ongoing projects that may come up to

Raven Wilson 1:04:12
is that can be part of your hiring process, like literally, on your discovery call can be like, Okay, I really liked our discovery call and say they want to do a three month contract, maybe you come back with, Okay, what if we do this project? I have this trifold brochure that is just stumping me, can I pay you whatever their hourly rate is to do this project and just see how we work together. Like you can do that before you ever even make the decision to hire them as part of your hiring process. And you could do that you could have three different people working on your trifold brochure to find the right person. Like it’s totally fine to do that as part of your hiring process. Yes, you’re hiring contractors and it is different than employees. But that doesn’t mean that you can still test the waters?

Andrea Nordling 1:05:03
Yeah, absolutely. You could even have three different graphic designers to keep in mind with this example, you could have three different graphic designers doing three different paid test projects, one of them doing something on your website, one of them doing trifold brochures, one of them doing, I don’t business cards, something else. And then you get three assets in hand at the end that you can use. And then you can pick the best one that you think is the best fit moving forward for who you’re going to grow with and keep working with and keep hiring on an ongoing basis is another option. Totally. Okay, I feel like we have covered all of the ground, I’m sure that this will be an ongoing conversation, and you’ll be back on the podcast for sure. want to remind everyone if you want ravens eyes on your stuff, and believe me, you do get your booty to the mastermind for April. So here’s a reminder of how this is working. We are starting early April, with a zoom two part workshop series to get everybody in the mastermind audited with their offer with their three year plan we’re going through I have a very specific process in the mastermind for higher level businesses. For strategically looking at how you are going to be growing into this vision. We’ve kind of touched on that a little bit in this episode too. But looking really far ahead in the future and then working backwards on what you need to be doing now to grow into that. That’s the whole method of the streamline and scale mastermind is so that you don’t get behind and you don’t have your hair on fire. So we’re doing both of those components on Zoom In early April, then we are going the next week in person to Cancun where we are going to be coaching. And we are going to be implementing and doing a very strategic work occation to implement the three year plan, and any tweaks with marketing and systems and processes and all that that was revealed the week before in our intensive workshops, and Raven will be on site to do that. So if you are coming to Cancun, which is optional, we have changed the structure of this a little bit, which is why I’m giving this rundown here because we did have quite a few people couldn’t come could come. And I didn’t want anybody to be missing new content or missing any strategy. While we were in Cancun. At the same time, I feel very strongly that the in person connection and collaboration of being at a live event with your people is incredibly transformative and super profitable for your business. So I do want to have the in person component for anybody that can make it there. So we’ve decided that in Cancun in person, we will be coaching Raven will be there doing kind of these VIP audits for systems and processes and helping the students that are there to set that up. While we are on site in Cancun, it’s going to be incredible. And then we are going to come back to our real lives implement for a week and then we are doing the overcoming objections intensive. If you have no idea what I’m talking about, then you need to go to the sales page and read all about it. It is a very, very specific process for setting up discovery calls, consults and copy in a very specific way to set up a sale for premium packages and offers and then overcoming any objection in those sales calls. So that you can properly evaluate the sales calls, take the snippets from it that you need and create copy on your website and in emails to further overcome those objections and sell people before they even get on the calls kind of like a cycle of profitability. I don’t know if that’s what I’m gonna call it. So that is happening. It was initially going to be happening in Cancun. But the change is now we are going to be doing that on zoom the following week. So that is going to be a two part workshop actually. And we’re going to be doing that separately so that anybody who cannot make it to the in person event in Cancun is not going to miss any of that time to be actively workshopping and asking questions and being part of that content. So that is the change for the mastermind. Clearly, a huge component of it is going to be while we are in mass in masterminding together in Cancun, Raven is going to be there talking about systems and processes. And we talk a lot about hiring and bringing people on for the success and scaling of your business too. So if any of this is landing for you, and you’re like, I think I’m supposed to be at that mastermind, what is she talking about? There are a few spots left, go to build a profitable practice.com/mastermind Read all about it. And then you can apply on that page.

Raven Wilson 1:09:19
And I will say all systems, for the most part are open for discussion. Like it doesn’t have to be specific. I mean, obviously it is specific systems for your business. But it’s not going to be like a one thing fits all.

Andrea Nordling 1:09:33
One platform or like one software or something like that,

Raven Wilson 1:09:36
right? Like one like I’m only talking about your email marketing system, like you can come to me with your system and then we can talk about like, it’s not like I’m going to just say I only talk about this one thing or this. These two things like all systems and processes are up for discussion. So don’t let that stop you from asking. I’m gonna click

Andrea Nordling 1:10:00
So I think here’s my experience on this, I will look at what I’m currently doing and where I think the pain point is and where I think it needs to be effects. And I’ll tell Raven about it. And he’ll look at a completely different part of it. And is like, let’s start with this. And I’m like, what? Okay?

Raven Wilson 1:10:17
Like, we literally did this, like last week, she was like, Hey, I have this really big idea. Don’t Don’t hate me. It’s really scary. And I don’t want to implement it for like, two years, because it’s so big and so scary. And I’m like, Okay, tell me more. And then she started talking about it. And like, Andrea, I already have the solution in my head. Like, let’s do this tomorrow. Like, what are you waiting for? It’s a very regular occurrence over for meetings.

Andrea Nordling 1:10:44
Yes, it is. I also am remembering we said we were going to tell them about Sara’s matchmaker site. Let’s give the link for that. Do we have that?

Raven Wilson 1:10:53
It is? Let me double check it just so I don’t get it wrong.

Andrea Nordling 1:10:58
And these are the links for the mastermind sales page when information page and Sara’s Her name is Sarah Sarah Wiles is the matchmaking site that we’re gonna give you her. Like the links to both of these are going to be in the show notes for this episode as well.

Raven Wilson 1:11:12
So the link is Sarah Wiles, S A, R A, w i, L, E, s.co, backslash matchmaking.

Andrea Nordling 1:11:22
Okay. And it’s fun. It’s a fun process, because it’s kind of like match.com for your business, I found it to be very enjoyable.

Raven Wilson 1:11:30
And don’t get overwhelmed by it either. Like she asks very kind of specific questions like I’m looking at right now. So like, Please describe what support you’re looking for in your business, or paste a job description. If you don’t have a job description, don’t, don’t overthink it, just say, I need help with emails and social media and updates to my website, or I need help

Andrea Nordling 1:11:58
onboarding clients, like, yeah, I need help managing my one on one clients or whatever.

Raven Wilson 1:12:05
Yeah, or I need help was like a community management, like, Don’t overthink it. But at the same time, as much information as you can provide will ensure you get a good match. It helps her team to match you with good people that fit what you’re looking for, as well as when those people get. So like on my side, we just get kind of a copy of your form, where we can read through it and decide if we want to work with you or not. And then either punt it back to Sarah’s team and say, Hey, this isn’t a good fit for me, and they’ll find you somebody else, or schedule the discovery call and move on. But the more information you can give in that allows them to decide before ever hopping on a discovery call. If it’s something that they’re interested in, and ultimately saves everybody time.

Andrea Nordling 1:12:51
So good. It means a great, great process, in my opinion.

Raven Wilson 1:12:58
Yeah. And the one other thing I want to encourage people that we’ve actually just started doing, and we like kind of dove into it last week and are very fascinated. Is that predictable success quiz? Yeah, let’s talk about that for a second. It was mind blowing. It’s by Les McCowan.

Andrea Nordling 1:13:15
Yeah, there’s a book that goes with it. And then there’s a free quiz, predictable success quiz, just Google that you’ll get the link for it. We’ll also link it up in the show notes.

Raven Wilson 1:13:24
Yeah, it like tells you how your brain works. But also, there’s like four different aspects of it. There’s a visionary and operator, a processor, and then synergist. And all four play a role on your team, but only in certain areas.

Andrea Nordling 1:13:42
Right. And we all have certain degrees of proficiency in each of those, like we aren’t only one thing or the other. So it kind of helps you rate, what levels your strengths are, too.

Raven Wilson 1:13:53
And how in the book especially tells you like how to work well. Like for example, I have a very, very, very clear high number in processor. And then when you read the, like the description of it, it’s absolutely everything that I’m doing within an HQ right now. But the book tells us how to like structure that and how to make it better.

Andrea Nordling 1:14:18
Yeah, and how to support someone in like, make sure they’re in the right role, but also how to support them in playing to their strengths. Depending on what those strengths are, which I think is helpful. It’s going to be no surprise to anyone I am like almost exclusively visionary, which a lot of people that are listening to this probably will be. And that’s a beautiful thing. You don’t want to hire other people in your business that are strong visionaries necessarily for most of the roles, because that’s your job. And that’s what you like to do. You have all the ideas and if you have a team full of people that just have ideas, ideas, ideas that nobody is executing. It’s going to be very frustrating for everyone. So we have found this to be really a helpful way to look at at people’s strengths, I think it’s really good, right? Because

Raven Wilson 1:15:02
Andrea, as a visionary doing operations would not be pretty. Not my favorite at all. And so using that to your advantage, even in your hiring process is huge. Yeah.

Andrea Nordling 1:15:19
able to take that quiz and just to know where they fall on that spectrum is really great. Yeah,

Raven Wilson 1:15:25
totally like, it’s like regular practice to ask people what their Enneagram is, know, ask people what their predictable success is, and give them the link to take it. And then take that and use it like you don’t want a visionary coming in as your director of operations or to do your ops and your processes. You want a processor or an operator, you maybe you want a visionary, or somebody that has a little bit higher a visionary to be community management or something like that, or somewhere in marketing

Andrea Nordling 1:15:54
or something like that. Absolutely. Right. Like

Raven Wilson 1:15:57
everybody has a place and this just helps you kind of not have to trial and error so much to find their place.

Andrea Nordling 1:16:05
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Oh, my gosh, thank you so much for coming on today. This is early Saturday morning. Like she said, Thank you for having coffee with me this morning and talking about ironing. I know this is gonna be really helpful for a lot of people who are just curious about, like, how to make this the best process for themselves, how to grow into it, when to start, what to start with. I know we covered a lot of ground. So thank you for sharing your experience with everyone.

Raven Wilson 1:16:32
Thank you for having me. It was so fun.

Andrea Nordling 1:16:35
I’m sure it’s going to be a repeat occurrence. So thank you in advance for other possible podcast episodes that will be happening.

Raven Wilson 1:16:42
Absolutely.