When to Hire Your First or Next Employee

Healthpreneurs, what’s up? Today, we’re going to talk about when to hire your first or next employee.

We don’t actually consider them to be employees. We consider them to be team members.

So I want to give you some context on this because if you want freedom in your business and you want a business that’s scalable, at some point you’re going to have to have other people helping you in the business. Right?

 

Having a Business, Not a Job

So a couple of years ago, I think it was 2016, I decided to take a two month sabbatical. So I took two months off everything — no phone, more or less, no email, no computer, nothing to do with my business. I took two months off in the summertime and all I did was literally just like sat in the park, hung out with my dogs, lay in the grass, look at the sky, think about stuff and played a lot of tennis.

It was amazing and it was such a breakthrough experience. I learned so many things from that and maybe I’ll shoot another video on that specifically because it’s something I’d recommend everyone does in some way, shape or form, whether that’s a week or a year off or whatever it is.

Anyways, the only reason I was able to do that is because I had a team in place to be able to support the business while I was gone.

My brother who runs operations for our health and fitness business, we see each other a few times throughout the year and I’d asked him, “How are things going?” And he’s like, “Honestly man, it’s better off without you here.”

And that’s exactly what you want to hear because it’s not a shot to our ego or anything else. It’s just that when we can remove ourselves from our business and the business continues to manage itself and multiply without us having to be there, that is truly the essence of a self managing or a self multiplying company. That’s essentially a company, not a job,  because if what you do depends on you all the time, then you’re screwed.

So if my entire business was dependent upon me shooting these videos and that was the only way we generate revenue, I would be pretty frustrated.

 

Three Ways To Determine When to Hire Your Next Employee

I want to walk you through three ways you can determine when it’s time to hire that employee.

 

Cash Flow

So first and foremost, you have to look at your balance sheet. You have to look at cash flow and you have to say, “Okay. Do I have enough cash flow to be able to hire someone?”

I don’t even hire people for the most part, like six figures off the bat.  I think I may have done that once or twice. But honestly, I like to test people out on a project basis or a certain timeframe and then if they perform well and exceed our expectations, then we can just increase their involvement, if you will, in the company — their time, their pay and all that kind of stuff.

The big thing is you have to manage cash flow because if you’re bootstrapping it, which I think most people are, which is great, you have to be very cognizant of the fact that you can’t just throw your money hiring people because those people also have to be generating revenue in some way, shape or form for the company.

So you have to look at cashflow. So number one, you have to cover your expenses and you have to be able to pay yourself because if you run a business that you don’t pay yourself from, what’s the point of having the business, right? You end up becoming a martyr for what it is you’re doing, so as long as you can cover expenses and pay yourself, whatever that might be, that’s great.

Now I’m not saying to yourself a million dollars because if you have to pay yourself a million dollars, you’re going to slow down the ability to grow because you’re taking all the profit out of the company. And I’ve had this happen to myself when I’ve done this in the past and saw the ramifications it has on the business.

So take out what you need, but not necessarily that much more unless you want to do what you want to do with your money, but honestly you can expense most of the stuff through your business anyways.

Everything I do travel wise, is business. I take very minimal stuff out of my company personally. So that’s the first thing, is make sure you can cover expenses and your basic personal income.

 

Are You Able To Deliver On Your Promises?

Second is you need to understand, are you able to deliver on your promises.

If you’re making promises to help clients achieve certain outcomes and you’re quickly finding yourself overwhelmed, not being able to satisfy that promise,  you probably have to look at bringing some people on board, whether it’s additional coaches or people to help you systemize things because the last thing you want is to over promise and under deliver.

It’s a tricky scenario.  I know number of people in the health and fitness space, mostly a little bit more on the digital side,  in terms of selling products, where they grew so fast that they didn’t even have the support to keep up with it. And they said it was actually worse than not having enough growth to meet the support.

So you never want your customers or clients to feel like, “Whoa. Like what just happened here? I just bought something. I just enrolled with you. I haven’t heard from you in six months.” That’s not cool. So make sure you have the capacity to deliver on what it is that you’re promising.

 

Trading Profit For Freedom

And third is you’re going to get to a point where you might be willing to trade profit for freedom. So when I mentioned taking that two months sabbatical, I knew I need a couple more people or I need a certain team in place and be okay having less profit in my business to give me a lot more freedom in my life. And still to this day, that’s still my modus operandi.  I would rather hire amazing people and build an amazing team that gives me an immense amount of freedom than having all the profit for myself and working my ass into the ground.

So that’s more of a personal decision that you have to make. But for me, having the freedom to come out here and shoot videos and hang out with my dogs and play with my kids and play tennis and work maybe 20 to 25 hours a week, that’s pretty cool, right?  Having the freedom to take off on vacation whenever I want.

As you get older, you realize that the value of time increases and the value of money decreases. When you’re younger, it’s the opposite. We value money more, time less. We’re grinding away. We want to make a lot of money. As you get into your late 30s, 40s, 50s, and beyond, you start to recognize how important time is and you’re willing to pay for that.

So those were three distinctions that I’ve used to help figure out when it is time to hire people and I hope that serves you as well. Now, if you’re growing your company, if you’re growing your team and you want help on this and you want to really take your business to seven figures and beyond, let me know.

Send me a DM. Let’s chat. We’ve got an amazing group of clients that I work with very personally and closely, and helped them do just that.

So if that’s something you’re interested in and you want my help to support you in that scaling process and you want to be surrounded by other great people who are building awesome teams, let’s have a talk because we’re doing some awesome stuff and we’d obviously love to support other visionary health entrepreneurs grow their businesses without compromising their life in the process.

That’s all for today. I hope you enjoyed this one. If you have, please share it with a friend and I’ll see you soon.