You're Hiring in the Wrong Order (Here's Who to Hire First)

Most business owners hire in the wrong order.

The instinct is to hire more people to sell, market, or deliver your service. But what if that's actually slowing your business down?

In this solo episode, Emma explains why the smartest first hire isn't someone who generates revenue directly, it's the person who removes you as the bottleneck.

She shares the three questions every business owner should ask before making their next hire, how to calculate the true value of your time, and why buying back your time creates more growth than simply adding more people.

If you're feeling busy but your business still relies on you for everything, this episode will help you rethink your next hire and start building a business that can truly scale.

📥 Get the Free Productivity Planner:
https://mi-pa.co.uk/planner/

🔑 Topics covered:

• Why most business owners hire in the wrong order
• How to calculate your true hourly value
• The hidden cost of doing your own admin
• Why you're losing opportunities without realising it
• The three-step framework for deciding who to hire first
• How to stop being the bottleneck in your business

🎧 Hit play to discover why your next hire shouldn't just grow your team, it should buy back your time, remove you as the bottleneck, and give you the freedom to focus on the work that actually grows your business.

Transcript

SPEAKER_00 0:00

Welcome to Focus on the Funster, the podcast of the business owners who want to build a business that they actually love. I'm your host, Emma Mills, a seven-figure founder of MyPA at the UK's leading virtual PA support agency. And since 2008, MyPA has helped thousands of business owners who buy back their time, get out of the weeds, and focus on what matters the most. And every week on the podcast, I'm sharing my own journey live as it happens and interviewing other business owners who've been exactly where you are now. And we're sharing practical tactics and real strategies to help you build a business that works for you and not the other way around.

SPEAKER_01 0:37

Most business owners hire in the wrong order, and I think the natural instinct is to just add more people to do the thing, to sell the thing, to market the thing. And it's not necessarily a bad instinct, but for me, it's just not the first move. And before you keep adding more to your business, I think the smartest thing a business owner can do is to remove themselves as the bottleneck. So in the next 15 minutes, I'm going to give you three things to decide exactly who you should hire first. The third thing I think is something that almost no one ever talks about. And by the end of the 15 minutes, you'll know who to hire and exactly what to hand off first. In my experience of speaking to for sure, it must be thousands of business owners by now since 2008. I think the natural instinct for a lot of business owners is to add more people that are going to contribute to growth in the most common ways that we think of. So that might be selling the thing, generating more leads into the business, doing the thing that you sell. And whilst it's not a bad instinct at all, what also happens as a consequence of this is that you, as the business owner, become the bottleneck for everything that gets generated off all of this new activity, whether it's emails, whether it's opportunities, whether it's follow-up with quotes, whether it's customer service issues, like bigger, bigger businesses, and I'm not talking about super scale, even if it's like you know, you've grown by 5%, 10%, you're going from 5k months to 10k months to 15k months, all of these stages of growth generate more. You end up like with 10 assistants off you doing different things, and we become like everything flows back to us, whether it's more emails, more admin, and we think it's okay, like well, the business is growing, and I'll pick it up, and I'll figure it out in the evenings or figure it out at the weekends. Most of us get stuck with well, I want to keep pushing the growth, I don't want to hire someone to support me because I can handle it all, and it's just a cost to the business. And on paper, that feels true that someone to support you as the business owner feels like a cost, but it misses completely how the maths work in your value to the business. So the most important thing any business owner can do, and there's a podcast episode on this, which I'll link to in the show notes, is to understand your hourly rate. And I don't mean what you charge out to clients if you have an hourly rate, I mean what is it that you want to generate this year as revenue in the business? What do you want to earn? How many weeks do you want to work? How many hours in that week do you want to work? If you divide the amount you want to earn by the weeks, number of weeks, by the number of hours, you will get the hourly rate that you need to generate, and whether that's £100 an hour, £150, £1,000 an hour, like in so many cases, it will be north of £500 an hour that your hourly rate becomes. And so for me, the right first hire doesn't generate revenue directly in your business, it generates time back for you in which you go and generate revenue and 10x that return you've got on buying back your time. And this hourly rate will eat will be multiplied on your highest value activity. So, like this now, recording is a very high value activity for me because I record something once and multiple people will see it, will buy from it, will generate leads from it. Like this is a very high value activity. But if I was to spend this hour instead clearing down my email inbox, scheduling something in my calendar, what I'm effectively paying to do my emails is my hourly rate. So if I want to earn £100,000 this year, I want to work 40 hours at 40 weeks of the year. I'm gonna take 12 weeks holiday, I want to work uh 20 hours a week in those weeks that I'm working. My hourly rate is like £125 an hour. So for every hour that I'm doing my emails, I am charging myself, I am I am costing myself, I'm costing the business £125 for every hour I spend on the things that that somebody else could support you with. So the natural first instinct of support for you being a cost, it's actually a multiplier on the hours you already have, and it is the one of the fastest ways to leverage and generate the revenue that you want in the business. So I want you to imagine for a minute the version of your business where the emails get cleared down, the the appointments get scheduled in your calendar, the follow-ups happen, the quotes get chased, and that's not just have that's not just having a tidier business, that's having a business where you are now going to be focused on the highest gen revenue generating things, like the things that only you can do. That for me is the quicker path to a bigger business, making sure that you are not the bottleneck from the start. And honestly, I think it takes some bigger thinking to get on board with that because our natural instinct is well, it's gonna be a cost, but if you treat your own time first as the most expensive thing in your business and doing everything you can to buy it back, to leverage it to protect your time, that is gonna be the quicker path to growth. I just did it myself recently in April with MetaRad, so I started to learn them. I was had a course that I was making my way through. I'm much more informed because I started to do this, but the time gap it was taking to implement them, implement them well. I actually just bought back that time on Upwork. And if you don't know Upwork, it's a place where you can find anybody to do anything you need at the level of experience that you want, at the price that you want. Like there's so many people out there you can find exactly what you need. I am constantly looking to how can I buy back my time, and so I'm more informed on MetaRads now and I can make better decisions. But me doing that on an ongoing basis is not the best use of my time. I think what we should all be aiming for is how can we buy back the time that we have. So something I just want you to think about for a moment is how much growth in your business is sitting behind your to-do list. Like if your to-do list was leveraged, you weren't the one doing it all. How much growth is sitting behind? Getting that out of the way so you can be hyper clear on the things that you do best. Step two in who you're gonna hire next, and I think often overlooked, people get obsessed with the word saving time, but I don't actually think saving time is that appealing to a lot of business owners. Not everybody wants to work less. Most business owners love it when things are on fire, when you're moving fast, when there's a lot happening. So I think saving time is the wrong way to look at it. But opportunity lost, that for me is one of the biggest decision makers on who you hire next. So, do you know when you're you know, as the business generates more activity and every email that needs to come through you, every decision that needs to come through you, every follow-up is coming off you, yep, you might feel busy at that point, but it is definitely a hard ceiling on the business of what's possible. Because every hour that you are in the thing in your email, spending that £150 an hour for you to do your own emails, is an hour that you are not ringing up that contact that you met last year at the conference. Is ever is every hour that you are not messaging that person on LinkedIn that actually you would love to work with is an hour where you are not just thinking about how you're gonna get the next 10 customers into your business. And I have ex every single episode I do comes from personal experience. I very much like to talk about what's worked for me, what hasn't. And in 2024, particularly when I was and I've talked about this at great length, not firing in my business. I was kind of very much stuck in the weeds of not having the hard conversations, not making the quick decisions. There is one particular opportunity that I lost in that year, and it was about purchasing some customers from another business that would come across to ours because they were going to stop doing a particular service, and that didn't happen. And the one reason why it didn't happen is because I lost the opportunity because I was too stuck in the weeds rather than being hyper focused on only the things I could do, and I don't want that for you. And I just think as much as we think we can do it all, just because we can do it all doesn't mean we should do it all, and if we start to do it all, you will lose opportunities that you could get to quicker that you would spot. Like, I don't know if you ever open LinkedIn or open Instagram and you might see um a business that you haven't noticed before, or somebody that's doing something that you could apply in your own business, and you think, Oh, actually, that's a really great idea, I could do that. Those kind of things only come from having the time to be able to think and spend your time on the right things, and the more that you are in the thing, you are gonna lose more opportunity. So for me, unblocking your time, leveraging it, and understanding I'm actually gonna lose opportunities if I don't focus on myself first. It's the age-old adage put your oxygen mask on first on the airplane before you help other people. It's the same thing in your business, focus on buying back as much of your time as possible, focus on continually leveraging it every single day. What's the new thing that somebody else can take? Because that for me is the unblocker to growth to having a business you enjoy. So the second step to who you hire next is what can we leverage from you, and the third thing to consider in who you should hire next, and I feel like this one never really gets talked about that much, is somebody with an opposing strength and opposing skill set to you. I think quite often we can add people to the team that are like us, and that isn't helpful to a business owner. If you're anything like me, I love a good idea, my brain is full of 10,000 things we could do as a business. Ideas I am absolutely full of, but my ability to take that idea and see it all the way through to the end is very, very low. I could count on both hands and both feet the amount of things in my asana that I have started and done a bit of and got excited about, and it has sat there gathering dust. And I think it's the same for so many of us. Invariably, as business owners, we are starters, we are the ones that will get things to 50%, 60%. Like in 2023, I had the idea that we would we got asked about following up on leads a lot, so I created our my follow-up service. I got together what I thought the bones of it should be. I sent some emails, I did a wait list, we got it to 10k a month. But the ability to continue that department, grow it, like that isn't me, that isn't my thing, so I quickly handed it off to somebody else. And it's nothing to do with laziness, it's a lot to do with shiny object syndrome, and we love new things, but just fundamentally, business owners are very rarely starters and finishers, and I think understanding who you are and what you need, and having somebody with opposing skill sets and strengths to that is what every business owner needs. And yes, so for me, I need someone that can complete stuff, I need someone that is going to take absolute delight in the finer detail of making sure that this project happens because I'm very good at the big picture, and I can do the small picture, but I don't want to do it, I don't enjoy it, and that's when my energy drops off a cliff. So for me, it's a very important person in my life, my EA, my assistant, who can take my ideas, my things that I want to make happen and actually make them happen. So, your next hire, the one who's gonna unbottleneck you, the one who's gonna leverage your time, it shouldn't be more of you, it should be the opposite of you, and I think that ultimately lies in an implementer. And it's been talked about in traction, Gina Whitman book, I think from Good to Great with Jim Collins. It's talked about like having someone that can take what you want to happen, and most often that lies in a really outstanding executive assistant. So I've got some really easy homework for you from this episode for the next week, and we have actually a productivity pad which I'll pop in the show notes that will help you do this. But just take a pad, take a pen, whatever, use your Apple notes. I just want you to use your calendar, I think that's a really good way to do it as well. Put exactly in your calendar what you did hour to hour for the next week. Track what you do for the next week, track it wherever is easiest for you, and then highlight or move into a column or put into a group all of the things that don't need to be done by you. So the things that do need to be done like by you are things like me recording a podcast. I can't hand that off to somebody else. Maybe it's an important client call. Group together the things that you truly know, like be honest with yourself, that that is the best use of my time. Everything else, like these become the tasks, the job description for your next hire. The projects that you haven't finished, take a look wherever your to-do list is, the project software that you're using, what are all the things that are overdue, have been sat there for ages? What are all of those things? They become the list of things to hand off to your next hire. And I think when you properly do this, yes, it takes a little bit of time, but the payoff is so much bigger when you get this list of what you've actually done because I think you get proper clarity. I've had so there's so many people that I've spoken to and they've said, God, yeah, well, I actually did the exercise and I realized that I just spent 10 hours last week in my inbox. Like, that is an inordinate amount of time that you can buy back to grow your business, to do the things that only you can do, and you don't have to hand off everything at once. Like, start with the things you dread the most or hate the most, things you really don't want to do. But that next hire, that unblocking of your time, that leveraging, that getting those opposing strengths, getting an executive assistant, and I've done other YouTube videos as well to explain why I use the word executive assistant, virtual assistant is wide, like there can be many different iterations of it. An executive assistant is going to be someone that's gonna take the things, run with it, and make it happen without loads of instruction. I think that as the first hire to every business owner, and definitely your next hire if you don't have one, is one of the biggest unlocks, like getting that hire, whether it's employed, whether it's using a business like ours, like getting that hire nailed as someone that can really make you effective, it's game-changing. Getting truly clear on unblocking your own time first and how important your time is. It's the most important resource your business has is the win, is the win in your next hire. So there's one thing that I want you to take from this: your first hire isn't about just someone that's going to add revenue, it's about someone that will free up the time of the person who can add the most revenue, and that is you. You are the asset in the business, your ideas, your focus, your time, not your ability to clear an inbox, not your ability to hold it all and do the stuff in the evening and catch up at the weekends. Protecting you as the asset is the most important first move. And if you want to know exactly what to hand off first, and you're still not convinced by this episode to go and track your time over the next week. I've put, I'm gonna put a link to our buyback your time assessment in the show notes. It takes literally two minutes to fill in some questions. It's gonna give you a personalized report on what you can hand off and it'll show you the jobs that should never have been yours in the first place and are the biggest step to unlocking your time and growing the business that you want to do.