Growing a team is one of the most rewarding parts of owning a business that thrives.
There’s nothing like the feeling of connecting with awesome people who share your vision and can bring their own unique talents to contribute to the change you’re making in the world.
But let’s be real for a second. Hiring a team can also be an incredibly challenging part of being an entrepreneur. A lot of us started out doing everything ourselves (lots of us since childhood!), and so there are a lot of forces that come into play when we start hiring: trusting others to become a part of our vision; knowing who to hire first; and making sure we’re getting the best out of the people we bring into our world.
This is a topic can’t be underestimated! I’m really excited to share Part Two of our Team Truth series, recorded live in Mexico on our Team Retreat last month, to shed more light on exactly what to consider when hiring, or getting the most of those you already have on board.
I gave my team full permission to share the real deal on what you need to know – what to look for, what to avoid, and how to grow your relationships with people you work with so that you can grow a thriving business you love to work in.
Today I’m talking with Marta Costa about hiring support around Marketing. Specifically, we’re looking at how to hire someone to help you with marketing – when you know it’s not something you’re great at.
Marketing is an area that many services providers don’t enjoy, and wish to have someone else ‘just do.’ Yet it’s hard to know if the person you’re hiring will actually be able to create the results you’re looking for.
Marta has some great advice on what questions to ask, what red flags to look for, and just how much you need to know about marketing to make sure you’re making smart choices and getting the support you need.
Hiring and growing your team is something to always be conscious of if you’re committed to making the biggest impact possible.
This is Part 2 of 5 in our Team Truth Series!
Darla: Hello! Welcome! This is Darla here in Tulum. We are talking team. I am here with Marta Costa.
Marta: Hi there.
Darla: We are right in the water, which is Marta’s favorite place to hang out. As you can see, she’s just out of the ocean and she’s about to head back to her flight, but I wanted to ask her a couple of questions to really help you guys with hiring a VA. So we’ve got crazy hair, wet hair, all of that.
The question I asked Marta to think about was posted by Mary Beth around hiring a marketing VA specifically and how do you hire someone. If you’re not good at marketing, how do you get the right support? There’s a variety of different ways you can get support in your marketing, so I won’t talk. I’ll let Marta share a little bit her experience, and she has called herself a marketing implementation specialist for a lot of years, so she has a lot of opinions about this.
Marta: Yeah.
Darla: And experience with those of us who probably make her crazy sometimes.
Marta: So I think the most important thing is to get clear about what your intention is for marketing and when you’re hiring someone to do marketing for you, what is it exactly that you need? Are you good at coming up with the copy and the content and just need someone to implement the strategy? Do you simply need someone to hand everything off to them, your sales page, your optin page, your email campaigns and just have them purely implement. So the first step is to get clear about what it is that you need.
When you’re looking for a marketing VA they don’t typically do much in terms of consulting. They can brainstorm with you, they can give you ideas of what they’ve seen work for other people but they’re not really the strategy person for the most part. There are marketing agencies, there are marketing coaches, that will help you with that piece, but typically when you’re looking at a marketing VA they’re going to help you implement. Take the plan and bring it to life is what they do usually.
Darla: What experience have you had with people who like it was a mismatch, like they didn’t understand what you could do, or what they needed to be responsible for. Do you have any …
Marta: There have been lots of people who have hired me in place of coach. They really needed direction. They needed someone to help them create the overall plan and they thought that hiring a VA would help them with that piece. I think that those have been the biggest mismatches for me over the years, have been people who want me to be their coach and their implementer and it’s two different mindsets.
Darla: Yeah and what about … so in my perspective as business owners we have to understand marketing. We have to understand it enough to be able to tell if what’s happening is good or not. If you don’t know and you expect someone else to it for you what will happen is you’ll pay a bunch of money, something will happen, they’ll do something most likely, unless it’s really a bad match, but you may not get the results and then you’re left scratching your head going I don’t understand.
What should someone look for when they’re hiring help with marketing? Let’s say they’re hiring a marketing VA, what should someone ask to find out like what the skills are. So assuming that the business owner knows marketing and they’re going to be responsible for their own message strategy, what should they ask?
Marta: Ask them what software they use, what they’re familiar with. Ask them to show you examples of work they’ve done in the past, sales pages they’ve created, optin pages, email campaigns. Look at the different pieces that you’re going to need and ask them to show you examples of that they’ve done in the past. Ask them what training they’ve done, or what coaches they’ve worked with because for me a lot of what I’ve learned has been at my own expense, what I’ve learned hiring coaches and working through other programs to learn what it is that my clients needed first.
Darla: Yeah, and if someone has done that training and invested in themselves you want to be prepared to pay them more than someone who hasn’t. If you have to train them you can pay them less, but if you’re not a good trainer, which I’m not the best trainer believe it or not I like training you guys but I’m not very patient with training a team and so it’s never worked out really well for me to hire low level people and try to train them myself. If they’ve invested in themselves they’re going to charge more and you want to be aware of that.
And I believe that there are people who charge a lot that haven’t invested in themselves and that’s a red flag. You want to, that’s a great question to ask.
Marta: Yeah, ask them for sure what training have they had.
Darla: Awesome, anything else?
Marta: Well just that the training piece will show you if you align with them or not too because they may have marketing expertise but it might be in something different than what you want to do, so that’s another thing.
Darla: Yeah, because the online marketing world and marketing intangible services like coaching, consulting, healing, is different than marketing a retail store or a product.
Marta: Or a gym or … yeah.
Darla: Cool. Awesome. All right we’ll be back with more. Bye guys.