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Caitlin Bacher:
My name is Caitlin Bacher, founder and CEO of Scale with Success®, and I’m on a mission to help course creators all over the world grow their business in a way that is profitable and scalable. We are sharing revealing conversations about what it really takes to scale an online course business to millions of dollars per year. Join us here to discover the tough decisions we’ve had to make, the biggest failures we’ve had to bounce back from, and the learnings that emerged every step of the way. We are so grateful that we have the chance to share it all with you right here on Scale with Success®: The Podcast Built for Course Creators. Let’s get started.
So the question is should I hire a full-time generalist or a part-time specialist to increase profitability? Who is the next hire that’s really going to help me move forward in terms of my profitability? And so the first thing to ask when thinking about hiring and whether it should even be a specialist or a generalist or anything like that is to first ask yourself, is your profitability at 25% or more? And that’s pre-tax profits. So if it is, then great. Proceed with hiring. Awesome. And if the answer is no, then we really want to take a minute to think about why not. With an online course business, even an online course business that is growing and scaling, I get it, we all have dips from time to time, but on average, our profitability really should be at a minimum of 25%.
So that’s the first thing that I just wanted to cover in terms of thinking about hiring. The next thing, and I just want to remind everyone that we do have a training, it’s called The Accountability Builder, and inside of the accountability builder, there’s a training on how to create a company organization chart. And what I’m sharing with you today is really specific for businesses that are making less than 50K per month, so your organization chart is going to change and grow as your revenue increases. And this is just an example so based on everyone’s unique business, you might have a program where maybe you have a team of coaches, maybe you have this, that, whatever, so it might look a little bit different. But basically, we want to start out in determining who it is that we need to hire that will lead to maximum profit.
First, we need to take a look at what are the roles? What’s happening in the company right now? And especially for newer businesses, a lot of times, we, the CEO, will be filling multiple roles. So in this example, the CEO is also the director of marketing and sales. They are also the director of customer success. They are also the director of ops and finance. They also are the copywriter, they write Instagram posts, they write email copy, and potentially, maybe they’re the social media manager, so maybe they post things to Instagram or whatever.
This is just an example, this is not me telling you that this is what you should be doing. I’m just saying typically, we are doing a lot of that stuff. And then we have agencies or one off things. If you’re less than 50K a month, you don’t need even an in-house bookkeeper or an in-house legal team or accountant. So typically, that’s just for an agency, something like that. So that’s why in marketing and sales, I have that listed for ads manager and graphic designer. Typically, you don’t need a full-time graphic designer on staff for a business that’s making that level of revenue.
So the first question is, are there any of these, like for ads manager, is your ads manager creating the ROI that you want? Is that possibly impacting your profitability? You want to look at the things that you do have filled that are directly related to making money, so not really graphic designer, but from the ads perspective, you really want to make sure that it’s the right person in there. And then beyond that, you have some openings. So the openings that I have here are ops assistant, another word for that is executive assistant. I like the word ops assistant because typically in an online course business like ours, it’s great to have someone who’s techy, who can build the lead page and create the automations in Active Campaign* and da, da, da, da, da, all that kind of stuff. And that’s not something an executive assistant typically would do. An executive assistant is more handling the email inbox, scheduling things on your calendar, and so it’s a little bit different.
And then the other pieces are customer support and community management. Customer support is whoever is managing the inbox, and then community management is whoever’s answering questions inside of your student community.
The next thing that we want to look at is who’s doing what? So typically, one person can do customer support and community management because you can send them through your course so they learn about it, they’re able to answer questions via inbox inside of the community. Some sample tasks that this person would have are potentially managing the customer service inbox, answering questions in the group, sending customer emails, scheduling live calls like on Zoom or whatever, scheduling prompts in the group, resolving any billing issues so if someone’s late on a payment or if someone files a dispute with Stripe, they can go in and submit the evidence needed to counteract that, they’re able to survey students. Those are all things that one person should be able to do because at a revenue level of less than 50K, it’s very unlikely that you would need someone that is full time that is only doing this.
And the reason why I have you still listed as director of customer success is because you are still there, you are the person… And if you go back to the accountability builder, you’ll see the different KPIs that each role would be accountable for. And when it comes to customer success, you’re really the person that’s running the show. You’re setting the goals. The person underneath you is handling all this stuff but you’re still in that director role. Now potentially, maybe over time as the needs of your business grow, you might promote that person to director of customer success, or maybe you’d promote them to customer success manager, or maybe they’d be promoted from part-time to full-time or whatever it may be. But in any case, these are some example tasks that that person would do that would contribute to your profitability because it takes you out of fulfillment.
The name of the game and getting to a million dollars is to take yourself out of fulfillment as much as possible. You don’t need to be inside of the group answering questions. You don’t need to be doing this, that, and the other. So one of the really great things about really reaching your first million dollars selling a course is that it’s great because you don’t need a big team. If you’re trying to scale to first million, if you have a high ticket program, you need sales people, you need coaches, you need this, it’s so much. I love running this group coaching program but there is no way I would’ve started out with this. It’s too much. I love starting out with courses. It’s more freedom.
Now, the second piece is the ops assistant, and so these are some sample things that they might do. They might manage some of those contractor relationships. To take things off your plate, you might say, “You know what? I need you to coordinate the projects with the graphic designer. Can you be in charge of that? Can you be in charge of letting the graphic designer know when we need this and that, following up with them, collecting it, putting into files, whatever it is.” They can do that for you, and it’s just a matter of managing that relationship. And they’re still an assistant. They don’t need to be a director in order to help you manage some of those relationships. You might have them reach out to your ads manager. Maybe they’re in charge of following up with your ads manager each week or getting specific KPIs. They’d be in charge of troubleshooting any tech so if all of a sudden, someone emails in and is like, “Hey, I’m trying to watch a webinar and it’s not working,” they go in, they contact Easy Webinar, they make the problem go away.
This person could schedule the emails, so maybe you are still creating social media content, maybe you’re writing the copy or whatever, but they are going into Edgar or Later or whatever and scheduling it for you. They’re building landing pages, they are managing the company scorecard, maybe they’re managing the cash predictor. So those are all things that your ops assistant, which is a $20 an hour role, can be doing.
Now, the other thing to think about is that you might only need one person. It could be one person that’s doing ops assistant, customer support and community management. That’s depending on the number of hours that you need for each position. You might only need for the ops assistant, if the ops assistant is part-time, how many hours a week do you really need from that ops assistant to do those specific things? Is it 10 hours a week? You know what I mean? Maybe it’s 30 hours a week, I don’t know. But if it’s only 10 hours a week, then you still have time to give them also some of the tasks of the customer service assistant. So let’s say the customer service assistant is someone, maybe you need 15 hours of that. I’m just making it up. So 15 plus 10, that’s 25 hours so you just need one part-time person, one part-time person that you’re paying $20 an hour to.
If we look at the tech skills that are needed to determine, do we need a specialist or a generalist? Do we need an Active Campaign expert or that has some weird certification or something just to schedule and send emails, build automations, tag, pull data? Those are all things that if you have the right person, if you have someone that’s resourceful and is good with tech, they can figure that stuff out. Same thing for LeadPages. If you’re giving them the copy, they should be able to duplicate an existing lead page, change the copy around, change the graphics or whatever. To me, when I’m looking at these kinds of tech skills, they are general tech skills. It’s not necessarily something specific.
Now, if you were going to hire, let’s say, a Facebook ads manager, you would want someone who is a specialist. That should not be a generalist unless you yourself are an absolute wiz when it comes to Facebook ads and you don’t mind getting someone and really building them up from the ground up and being there to really coach them through. But the personality traits that you’re looking for is things like detail oriented, organized, resourceful, gets things done, clear communicator. And in The 30 Day Hiring Process, which is the training that we did last month, you can go through and it walks you through a way to create this for yourself, for the different positions, like what is a role description and all of that.
One of the things that I really enjoy about these lessons is that when you’re in it, when you are in the weeds and you’re like in it, in it, it is very overwhelming, but it’s easy for me to look at it from an outside perspective and to be like, “Oh, this is what I wish I knew then,” and da, da, da, da. Because when we look at the actual tech skills, it’s not that big of a… There’s a lot of people out there who would be able to do this kind of stuff, right? What happens over time is as one person starts to get more and more things loaded onto their plate, then your job becomes like, “How can I get things off their plate? Okay. How can I consolidate here? I see that this person has extra time. Are they qualified to do this?”
If not, then it becomes kind of like a puzzle. With the Accountability Builder, you can be like, “Oh, I can consolidate this and put this in here, and these traits would actually be really great over here,” and that kind of thing. It is possible to have someone that is good at customer success and operations.
It’s not necessarily easy, but you can find someone who is resourceful and techy, and who also has great communication skills, because when it comes to customer support, you want someone who is good at communicating, typically written communication, as most of us do emails or Facebook comments or things like that. It’s always going to be easier managing fewer people. If you have four people that are each working 10 hours a week, that’s going to take way more of your time and energy then to manage one person that’s working 40 hours a week. If new things are coming up and new tasks that you need done or whatever, as much as possible, utilize those two people that you already have a good relationship with, that they want to do more.
A lot of times they’ll determine whether or not they get more stuff, because they might be like, “You know what? I actually only want to work part-time.” That’s fine, but then that makes the decision, and then you can be like, “Okay, well now I’m in a place where I need to figure out who the next person is that I need to hire.” What I’d like to reframe for you is that it’s not awkward. That’s normal. I like to color-code organization charts, because it helps me see how many roles one person is doing, because what you initially want to grow to is that one person is not in multiple departments. Now, when you’re first getting started, this ops assistant is going to be in the ops assistance, they’re going to be in customer success. You might have them do some marketing and sales stuff. You might have them do a little… and that’s normal. That’s just what it is.
But over time in being a good manager, you want to make the context switching less. You want to lessen the context switching for that person. It really helps organization if you can get them into… Maybe they’re doing a lot of different roles, but at least it’s in one department. You know what I mean? Maybe your organization chart, maybe it has 15 different roles and maybe you have only three people including yourself, so either one of you three for every single position, but it really helps to see it with the color coding, because then you can start to see, “Oh, whoa, this one person, I didn’t even realize it, but they are spread all over. How can I make it easier for them? Maybe I can exchange this over here and all of that.”
Everyone does that. That’s just start-up culture is everyone has their fingers in all the pots, because that’s what’s needed. The question, what if you like doing this? I mean, if you like it, if you want to do it, that’s fine, of course. But what’s going to happen is, as you build your team, you’re just not going to have time to do it. Even if you like it, you’re not going to have time to do it, because you’re going to have to be doing some other focusing on the $1,000 per hour task, the $2,000 per dollar task, and if you can pay someone 15 or $20 to do this, then you can’t pay someone $2,000 an hour to send an active campaign. I can relate to that a little bit. I mean, I kind of used to like some of the tech stuff, too. It was kind of meditative. It was an easy thing for me to check. I’m like, “Okay, I can like watch Netflix and build my lead pages,” or whatever.
So there’s three additional trainings that I would recommend that you watch that will support you in what we just discussed. So there’s The Company Scorecard, The Accountability Builder and The 30 Day Hiring Process.
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