How to Build a Team For Your Small Business

Today Natalie asks: How will you build a team around your vision and work smart instead of hard?

After asking and answering this question in numerous ways, and I have yet to find the perfect combination. Here are a few of the things I have tried, along with the successes and failures I have encountered.

Hiring a Team to Help My Business

Elance – Freelancer – oDesk – Oh My!

My first attempt at hiring a contract laborer was through Elance. I like their model because it gives you so many tools to help you find a contractor. Plus, the “back end” management tools are very good.

My primary use for Elance has been to find writers, data entry people, and graphic designers. The key is a willingness to test and pay more than rock bottom prices. If you are always looking for the cheapest price, your results will show it (at least that has been the case for me).

In more than two years with Elance, I have probably hired 15 different writers and found 2 that really resonated with me. In fact, one of them is still writing for one of my niche sites. Interestingly, those are not bad odds.

Freelancer is another site I have used with some success. My primary use was to find an HTML and CSS coder to redesign one of my niche sites. With over 100 applicants, I used reviews and correspondence to find a great guy in Europe. We still correspond periodically to see what each of us is up to, and I occasionally send a little work his way.

oDesk, like Elance, has been a place to look for writers. I hired a few and subsequently let them go. One was pretty good, but not quite what I expected for what she charged.

This is not to say oDesk isn’t a great platform. It is. I just haven’t had much luck finding what I need in a writer. This is probably my fault as I have very high standards and often hope to find someone who writes like me.

Here is a little clue: If you have hired between 20 and 30 writers and none of them has resonated, it’s time to recognize something. You are probably best suited for writing your website’s content. I recently came to that very conclusion and that, alone, should help me get back on the content creation wagon.

Next Stop: How to Hire a VA

After hearing about VAs from Tim Ferriss and then multiple other online business people, I decided to give this a try. Several attempts at Elance and oDesk landed me exactly zero prospects. Next stop? A VA finder service.

Without naming names, it quickly became apparent that there are dozens of VA finder services who source and/or hire VAs from India, Russian, and the Philippines. I chose the Philippines because I have been there and I am familiar with the Filipino people.

Three weeks and $350 later, I was the proud boss of a Filipino VA. Three weeks after that and they were fired, just 10 business days beyond the guarantee offered by my finder service.

Next stop, OnlineJobs.ph. This is another service I was familiar with because of a podcast or blog post, I don’t recall which. The service included access to an online job board with thousands of Filipino applicants, as well as video-based training for the VAs I might hire.

The most difficult part of using this service is finding viable candidates and then narrowing the search to just a few you might want to interview. A dozen interviews later and I had hired not one, but two VAs.

Why two? If one is good, two must be better, right?

It has been 9 months since hiring my first 2 VAs and they did accomplish a lot for me, although my business did not grow during that time. Whose fault was that? Certainly not my VA’s. The growth of my business is my responsibility, not the responsibility of someone who knows little about what I do.

I chose to let one of my 2 VAs go last month, only because I was not clear on how to create a sustainable business model that I could run, with the support of a team.

Let me repeat: I was not clear on how to create a sustainable business model that I could run, with the support of a team. The two operative phrases here are “I could run,” and “support of a team.”

My VA Epiphany

Here is what occurred to me today: running a small online business with a virtual team is not much different than running a $2+ million dollar a year brick and mortar business with an on-site team of 25. That, incidentally, is what I have done for the past 20 years.

Why the disconnect? Good question.

The Difference Between a VA and an On-Site Employee

What I do at work is hire people to fill roles within my business. Each person has a specific set of tasks they do on a daily basis, plus they are flexible enough to do additional work if and/or when I ask them to do so. There are two keys here:

1. I or one of my department managers will train each individual person to do their specific set of regular tasks.
2. If additional work is assigned, it is also my responsibility to see that a staff member is trained to do that newly assigned task, whether I do the actual training or a department manager does.

So, what’s the difference between what I do in the physical world with on-site employees and what I do in the virtual world with employees that may be located half way around the world?

Nothing.

This is where I failed in my first attempts to use VAs. My expectation was that I could wind them up like a toy and let them go . . . on my business. Silly, at best; really stupid at worst.

If you want success with a VA, Work The System

Years ago, I read The E-Myth Revisited by Michael Gerber, a book about creating systems to run your business. This is what McDonalds did and what dozens or hundreds of other franchised businesses have done.

In recent years, I read another book called Work The System by Sam Carpenter. This recent work was written by a resident of my own state (Oregon) and encourages readers to do something similar to what Gerber recommends:  create systems for everything in your business, including what your staff will be doing each moment of the day.

With systems, you have success. Without systems, you have chaos.

That was my problem with VAs. I did not create a system for each VA hired, so they would know exactly what to do each day, how to report what they had done, and how to prepare for the next day.

Systems also provide a framework for ongoing training, so your VA can continue to learn new things and become a more valuable employee. This is good for the VA and good for the business owner.

No system. No success. Know the system. Know Success.

Now to today’s challenge: How will you build a team around your vision and work smart instead of hard?

By simply walking through the last few years and realizing how many mistakes I had made working with VAs, I discovered why I had been failing as a virtual boss.

Here are the steps I will begin taking to build a team around my vision and work smarter instead of harder:

1. Take time to create a Painted Picture of what my business will look like in 3 years, regardless of how I will get there and regardless of who will help me along the way.
2. Share my Painted Picture with the world, and especially with my team.
3. Begin building a detailed plan for making my Painted Picture a reality.
4. Create detailed systems for every process or activity in my plan that will or that needs to occur each day, week, month and so on.
5. Use my newly created systems to train my staff, whether virtual or otherwise.
6. Expect great things from my team members, especially because they know what the business will look like in 3 years. With clear cut objectives, set by me, this also gives team members an opportunity to add value to my company and everything I do. Team members will not be frustrated when they don’t have work to do – because this just won’t happen.
7. Celebrate my success along the way, and celebrate the successes of every team member.

This is Day 16 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge from Natalie Sisson. Go here if you want to check it out.