If you really want to grow your business, at some point you’ll want to bring on a team. With only so many hours in a day, you will eventually reach capacity and need to leverage your time in order to grow.
Adding a team is one of the best ways to grow business revenue, but it’s also the most difficult. It will change the way you work and stretch you in ways you cannot imagine. (They don’t call them growing pains for nothing.)
So how do you know if you’re ready?
If you want it, earn it
I coach my clients to “earn their right to bring on a team.” Yep. It’s not an automatic next step.
I see this all the time with clients who are successful. They reach a capacity in their time and work availability and think the next step is to just add people to their team. It makes sense on the surface, but without clear processes this is a disaster waiting to happen.
Before putting up the job posting or asking for help, you must maximize your current capacity on a personal and professional level. The key is to know you’ve actually reached your capacity.
Ask yourself: where can I free up more time? Where can I narrow my niche so that I am not distracted or working inefficiently?
It’s easy to get overwhelmed with success, which is exciting but messy. And the ugly truth is, leveraging a team can mean leveraging a mess. It amplifies what is really happening behind the scenes.
Bringing on another person (or people) without crystal clear processes could end up driving really great customers or employees away — the opposite of what you want to happen.
✔ Pro Tip: Learn to manage yourself before you manage a team.
A team will change the way you work
When you bring on a team, your work shifts from delivering projects to leading and managing people. It’s going to distance you from your customer and the service or product you’ve worked so hard to create.
So, you better REALLY like working with people (rather than directly with clients). Otherwise, no money in the world will be worth adding a team.
You move slower and make more mistakes with a team. There are egos to massage and processes to follow that slows everything down (even with the most streamlined timelines). And every now and then, you have to let someone go.
With that said, I HIGHLY recommend leveraging a team. After 2 years of being solo, I can’t imagine my business and work without our team. I have realized that I much prefer working with and growing my team than the original copywriting work I started out doing.
Growing a team can be deeply rewarding, just in a different way. I look for freelancers or copywriters just getting started who also want mentoring and training. I enjoy the process of building a team of people who want to grow, both professionally and personally.
I think that’s the point of growth — you never stay where you started. And here’s a secret: your business will ONLY grow as far as you’re willing to grow yourself.
Being an entrepreneur is a journey with so many variables and unknowns, which can be difficult for most people. There is a constant demand to be flexible and always willing to step into the next best version of yourself.
Bottom line, you’ll need to get comfortable with being uncomfortable.
