The Hire-or-Not Decision — What's Really Stopping You | Ep 9

Most established business owners know they need help long before they
actually get it. In this episode, Meagan Van Woert digs into the real reason
the hire keeps getting pushed — and it's almost never about budget. She
shares the questions that actually need to be answered before a hire
makes sense, and the mindset shift that makes the decision possible.

Transcript

0:04

That you're almost ready to bring someone onto your team for longer than six months, or maybe investing in other resources to help you move the needle, then this episode is for you. Now, in this episode, think about one task that you could delegate to someone else. And I'm going to be providing you the decision framework that you can actually leverage to not only make the decision, but I also am sharing a simplified plan that you can use to hire or purchase services and actually test the effectiveness. You need help, and you've known that for a while. Every week you delay costs you in three different ways from making those decisions. It costs your time, it costs your energy, and it costs you the strategic work that you're not getting into. Imagine if you had a crystal ball in front of you and you were able to view the future. Imagine making those hiring decisions, the resource decisions that you need to free yourself up to scale or grow your business. And you look back and say, why didn't I make those sooner? I was missing out on opportunities to grow my business in these new ways. I was missing out on me freeing up my time. Now, this is the story you might be telling yourself, and this happens for so many of my clients, is that I'm almost ready. I'm almost ready to hire. So let's get into the three real reasons why the hiring hasn't happened. And you should be able to relate to these. And then we'll talk through that action plan and how you can dig in deeper. The first reason is the fear of being responsible for someone else's livelihood. And what if the revenue fluctuates, right? So if we talk about the fear of being responsible, maybe you're thinking about, you know, finding the right person. Imagine if you did find the right person. Imagine if you did invest in finding that right person. Wouldn't your fear kind of go out the door? If you look at fear in the eye with regards to hiring or making some of those, you know, critical decisions, it's about really understanding what it is and why you may have that fear. It's those uncertainties, right? Well, what if you took the time to and you did the research to interview the right people or research the right product or services? Doesn't that give you a little more certainty? And doesn't your fear start to dissipate a little bit? Yeah, absolutely. And in these podcasts, I am here to give you tips and tricks to overcome those uncertainties and for you to identify what fear is coming up and why it's happening, and that it's okay to take these risks. Reason number two is around perfectionism. No one will do it exactly the way that you do, and that is perfectly fine. It's one thing that business owners get stuck on, and we'll go through this exercise in a few minutes, is around, well, I really need to make sure things are done the right way. And sometimes we as business owners have a hard time delegating that work because we expect it done a certain way. Well, imagine if you hire the right person, eliminating the fear, right? We do our best to hire, right, the best people, and we do our best to hire the right products and services to support our businesses. And guess what? If it doesn't work out, it doesn't work out. But if you put the gumption and the focus up front, then this awareness, this facade of perfectionism, you can train anyone to do the job you need to do. If it's this job you're or task you're delegating, right? So it's possible, and I'm here to give you that content confidence and certainty that you can hire someone with and provide them the right skills and training to do the job. And ideally, you're gonna be hiring someone with X experience, right? Of course, you're gonna have to fine-tune their workflow and process to meet your needs, but that's doable. It happens every day in business. So I hope that eliminates a little bit of the fear for you. As a business owner, you have to be courageous and you have to rip off the mandate. And I am here to give you the certainty and the confidence to make decisions or move on from them because I know you can do it, and it's hard, and you may not have someone in your corner to push you or for you to, you know, put yourself on that stand to really make these decisions more confidently, but I know you can do it. The third reason why you may not have hired someone so far is the identity. If I am not doing this task, then what is my role? When you think about identity and you're giving something up based on where you're at with your business, you may not know exactly how to fill that time. That may be a part of the decision of is it worth investing in this person and why, right? But to grow your business, you're probably at a lot of capacity right now. You're doing a lot of things and you have limited capacity to take on other things or to take on new things or analyze how well your business is going, or identify and strategize ways to grow your business, right? There's a lot of components of business around operating and efficiencies and growth, maybe looking into new products or services to expand on what you're doing. Those are the things you may not have the time for right now. And one of the things I work with my clients a lot on is these decisions are freeing them up to move their business forward, to make more effective decisions because they are growing their business and moving it forward in a way that is effective. Now, the other thing is theoretically, if you're hiring someone to help you with something, then you are able to do more to continue to grow your revenue. Sometimes you have to spend money to make money. We know that, right? Not only from you know hiring teams, hiring staff, but also investing in marketing and advertising. This is a very known piece of business, and your time is valuable. So we encourage you to think about how you can delegate. And delegating and investing in others and other resources will help your business grow a hundred percent. And I love being a part of that process. I love being here speaking with you today to provide you that support and guidance and confidence to tell you that you can do it and to try to look at fear in the eye and think about well, what am I really afraid of? How does that impact me? How does that impact my position as a leader in this business? Well, you are being brave and you're being realistic on ways of growing your business and moving it forward. And you can actually do that. Now, the other thing that's a really important component of this is what are the questions that actually need to be answered for you to actually make these hiring decisions, to do it or not to do it, right? Some of those questions may look like something like this. What are the specific tasks that you're doing that someone else could do? Now we're gonna do an exercise at the end of the podcast. So if you want to start to think about what some of those tasks that you're doing today that someone else can do, you're welcome to write that down if you have that. Or make a mental note if you're driving. What about what would you do with the time you got back? We talked a little bit about that. This is the funny thing with business, and I've learned this personally over the years. I've been an entrepreneur for 20 years. If you don't create capacity to think about the future, think about your strategy and your intent, then you're only gonna move at a the the single pace of business and business growth. But if you delegate and you think about how you spend your time, those are the decisions, right? You think about hiring, you think about investing in resources that can help you. What would you do with the time you got back? And maybe you don't know, but I love having conversations with people about what are your goals, right? And this is where you you can decide on your end about how you would use that time. It could be to do, quote unquote, do more things for the business. It could be uh pausing and reflecting on your goals for the next six to twelve months and putting an action plan together, but you have to create that capacity sometimes to do that or be very disciplined around how you spend your time. I love having these conversations, and I love that we're talking about it on our podcast today because it is so moving and inspiring for you to think about that. Because if you're not hearing it from someone else, then and you're not personally motivated to build capacity, it's just a huge missed opportunity. And I have to tell you, I have been building capacity into my role as an entrepreneur. I've I've started many businesses every year, if not twice a year, I strategically build capacity into my schedule to understand my intent. I like to do quarterly conversations with myself and my customers around what is important now and why. And those are things that will really keep you on pace and on target to manage your day, to manage your time, and to continue to think forward. It's incredibly moving. Now, I told you at the beginning of the podcast I was gonna share a hiring decision framework with you. So let's go ahead and jump right into that. Now, let's start with the piece of defining a role by the work that you need to stop doing, not the person that you're imagining. So, what is the task, what are the things that you would have someone do to complete the work? So don't focus on who it could be. Think about what is the work that needs to get done. If you want to take a minute to write down a couple of your tasks and thinking through that decision, we can get into that. But I want you to think about these things at a high level. The other thing I want you to think about is starting with a contractor before hiring full-time. This would reduce the commitment threshold significantly. And if they're doing a good job and they are following your guidelines, you could go 20 hours a week, right? Imagine the productivity and how that could help scale your business and how that could free you up. Now, you're not hiring because you have the capacity to manage someone, you're hiring because you don't have the capacity not to. And that flip changes how the decision feels. You will gain capacity by bringing someone on or hiring a service or investing in a resource, right? Yeah, you may spend, you know, a couple hours getting them going, but the gain is much more at the end of the day. Now, I have I'm wrapping up the three-series episode on the decision making, and all the five decisions that I've named, we've gone into too deep, and I just want to acknowledge that these decisions are hard because they're honest and they're they're complex. And I hope that some of the tips and tricks that I've shared with you over the past couple weeks have been helpful for you. I encourage you to listen to them again if you need to, and slowly with a pen and paper, write things down, pause it, replay, listen through the end, and reflect on what's resonating for you, and think about what you could do to put it, make an action plan. Okay? You can do it. And the other thing I wanted to highlight is they're not business decisions. These are identity decisions for you as a business owner. These decisions and these questions that come up all the time for all of my clients, it's the uncertainty of knowing which one I should focus on, what is most important right now, and how I should be focusing my time. And with the few tips and tricks I've shared, especially the lead domino, if you have multiple decisions, if you haven't listened to my lead domino podcast, I encourage you to listen to it because it teaches you so simply on how to list and prioritize your decisions that you have to make. And this hiring decision may be on your list, right? Maybe you have multiple. The lead domino technique teaches you which decision to start with. I use this every single day for like my daily tasks, which is and it's amazing. I if I don't know where to start sometimes, I use the lead domino techniques to identify the impact in urgency. And that helps me identify where to start based on what needs to get done first and why. It's simple. I use many techniques, but that's one I heavily rely on, and many of my clients use it often as well. So let's talk about what you can do about this hiring decision today, okay? So I want you to pick one task that you're currently doing that someone else could do well enough and not perfectly. Now you may be thinking, oh my god, I have no idea what this task is. Or maybe you have like two or three things in mind. Maybe if you have two or three tasks, run it through the lead domino. So rate each of those, score each of those with an impact score and an urgency score, and then total the score, and whatever one has the highest score, consider that as the task to start. Because it has a high impact for your business, and it is more urgent than other things. So consider that as you think about your currently task. I want you to write it down. There is this psychological business notion of if you write something down, it makes it more real. And I love having a pen and a notepad next to me because it makes it more tangible. It's not just this weird idea floating in your mind. It really can ground you by writing things down. So I want you to write down this task, the one that resonates for you the most, if you do the lead domino test or not. And I want you to write a description of it. And not even if you're ready to hire today, it will help you work through what are those things that you would hire someone for. Okay? You could do it. Writing it down makes it feel real. And this is gonna create awareness for you on your next steps. If you are looking for a service for someone to help you with, what is most important and why? Are you gonna get what you need from that? Right? And especially if you're looking for a person or if you're looking for you know someone who's qualified, be sure to you know review their levels of experience that will, you know, reduce some of the fear that we talked about. Many ways to go about that. But create and surface one task, and that will get you started, right? Makes it very possible for you to make that decision to hire or not. I hope that today's episode was enjoyable and helpful for you. Now, until next time, I want you to amplify your thinking, and I encourage you to act on it. Next week, we are opening a new chapter about what happens after you decide. What happens after you make decisions? Because deciding and doing the things are very different. I encourage you to save and follow our podcast. I look forward to seeing you next week. Thanks everyone.