As a business mentor, I have been in the direct sales industry for over a decade!!!!
Every morning when I click on my Facebook and go to my “On This Day”, the memories from the beginning of my business come up and it makes me feel good because there’s most, more often than not, there are pictures of my two little boys and they’re dancing, laughing, smiling or we’re doing something as a family. I just love seeing all of the memories over the past years of their lives. I also love to read my business post for two reasons.
One, I like to laugh at myself a lot of times because sometimes they’re very embarrassing in the things that I actually used to post and put out there. Sometimes I can’t believe I attracted people with that, but I did. So it’s a really a true testament to anybody can build, can start on social media with no knowledge and grow into what I’ve grown into today.
I love to be able to look back and see how my business has grown and to really see not just on the social media side of it, from the product side of it, but also on the business side. I was reflecting on the seasons of business ownership. One of the posts that I did years ago was about me basically saying I felt like if I stopped, everything would fall apart.
What did I even mean “everything would fall apart.”? I started to think about how I went from really being the one woman show to actually starting to delegate help to really look at my business as a company and a corporation.
The more I got into the business opportunity, the more I saw the potential, the more I was intrigued by, can I do it, too?
Maybe I can build a big business and transform my family’s life. That’s exactly what I did!
It wasn’t without a lot of roadblocks, obstacles, a lot of dark times in my life where, for a lack of better words, I was essentially drowning. That’s the reality of it. There are seasons in our businesses where we’re just getting started and we’re wearing all of the hats; we’re the marketing department, customer service, sales or social media. One person doing everything for a thriving business is not beneficial! Team work makes the dream work.
Some point in our businesses, we get to a level where we say, I can’t humanly do this anymore. I’ve maxed out at my capacity. There were times in my business that I got to that place, those dark places, usually resulted in me laying on the floor in the living room crying to my husband, saying, I can’t do this anymore, I need to hire help.
Matt would always say, well, then go hire help, Melanie. And I would say, I’m going to hire help. And then I wouldn’t.
That post that I did where I said, if I stop, everything will fall apart, that really, that really is a little bit of who I was.
At that point, I’ve grown this large organization, but I didn’t grow this large organization by myself. I am pretty sure that sometimes people think like, wow, how did she do it all? And then other people try to do it all. But it’s not realistic to do it all.
I look back at my business when I first started, Matt wasn’t really on board, and he wasn’t super supportive. I did certain things anyways. For example, I worked for a good six months, and then hired a babysitter to come to the house two days a week so that I could work my business for 3 hours uninterrupted.
6 hours a week I had help with my boys.
The next thing I invested in was somebody to help me with scheduling posts.
I hired somebody to help me do all the copy and pasting for me so I didn’t have to do it, which, even though it was like, oh, I can totally do that, it’s not a big deal. That doesn’t take that much time.
How many of you found yourself saying that it just doesn’t take, I’ll just do it myself. What happens is those 2 hours it was taking me to do those posts were 2 hours that I wasn’t getting in front of new people, I wasn’t creating the social media content, I wasn’t writing the newsletters, doing the follow ups, getting out there and growing my business. Only the things that I personally can do.
It is not in me to slow down to speed up. I just kept thinking, it’s easier for me to just do it myself than teach somebody else how to do it.
I then had a business mentor who ultimately happened was he helped me to understand my worth. He helped me to understand what my business was actually worth.
He said, okay, Melanie, what’s your hourly rate? How much my time is worth. At that time, it was early on in the business, I don’t remember what the hourly rate actually was, but it was a significantly more money, right, than to hire a VA.
He tells me, so you are paying yourself $400 an hour to do social media graphics or to do your recognition, to send out a monthly newsletter, to schedule Zoom calls, process recordings, send out the recordings, when then I responded yes, because I was since it’s just FELT easier for me to do it than to stop and train somebody. He says.. but you are wasting money that is $400, maybe 5 hours every single week.
That even though it’s easier for you to do it, you are actually, you could pay somebody 18 to 20 plus dollars an hour. And what could happen is they could do it for you. You can go out and be prospecting, working with your team members, creating great customer service, onboarding new people, and instead, you’re in the weeds with things that you could easily pay somebody, a virtual assistant salary to do.
I’m always asking myself, what’s the best use of my time?
If right now you feel extended, you feel like you’re doing everything, that you have no more to give… I want you to take a step back to see what you can bucket out for the week. What would your ideal week look like?
I want you to look at what are the things right now that you are spending your time on that you know you shouldn’t be spending your time on.
Downloading reports?
Making graphics recognition?
Is it scheduling calls, making YouTube to thumbnails, whatever it might be, Instagram story sets?
I just want you to think about what are the things that you should not be spending your time on? Make a list of that. What are the things only you can do?
I want you to say to yourself, if I were to, because when I really started to go down this road of I’m going to hire more help, not just somebody to auto schedule things inside of my, you know, inside of my customer groups, but what if I hire a virtual assistant? What if I start having somebody that’s helping with emails? What if I have somebody that’s kind of helping me with some of this backend funnels and in my team page and helping me do a lot of this recognition, I started to get overwhelmed by all of the things that I was going to need to teach somebody.
Here’s what I want to challenge you to do if you are in this season of your business right now:
1️⃣ Instead of hiring a VA and giving them a full workload, what I want you to do is sit down and look at your list and say, this week, one of the things you can delegate is having somebody do your team calls, planning your team calls, setting up the zoom links, creating the events inside of your team pages, processing the recordings, putting the recordings in side of the team page, all that good stuff.
2️⃣ Open up a Google document and title it weekly team calls. I want you to write the procedure that you go through every step as if somebody could read this as a manual. Anytime you know that you will have someone else do a task for you, record yourself doing it and make a Google doc!
3️⃣ I hired help for somebody to watch my children so that I could have uninterrupted time to work in my business. If you don’t want to hire a babysitter, maybe it’s hiring somebody to clean your house, or maybe it’s having somebody come in and do the laundry or cut the grass just doing grocery shopping.
Let’s actually make it less intimidating by right now starting to identify what are the tasks that I’m going to offload. So, when I offload them, how is that opening up my calendar? What will this do for you and your business?
So you have to think about, what are the things that I am willing to offload and I am willing to hire to HELP me, not make me more busy.
Remember, I started small, I built my way up, got comfortable with the person I hired, and we worked as a team to grow my business even more! Asking for help is never a bad idea!