Caitlin Bacher:
Episode 74: 6 Shocking Truths about Building and Leading a Team
If you would’ve told me that one day I would be leading a team of 7 full-time employees, I would’ve laughed in your face and said that would never happen.
Now, I’ve always been a very independent person and the idea of having to check in and follow up with people day after day, which I thought I had to do if I had a team, sounded like my worst nightmare.
It took me a long time to figure out how I needed to show up and structure things in my business so that I could build and lead a team without having to micromanage every little thing.
Turns out the problem was never my team, it was me.
Today, I’ll be sharing 6 shocking truths about building and leading a team, all things I had to learn the hard way.
➡️ But before I dig into that, I want to invite you to sign up for my free masterclass, “How to Generate Launch-Sized Revenue Without Launching“.
- In this free training, I’ll share how you can begin to generate consistent revenue inside your business with a powerful, Profitable Sales Engine™ that runs on autopilot, turning your leads into customers day after day.
- Now, all you have to do to get started is click the link around this episode and I’ll see you in there.
Back to today’s topic, 6 Shocking Truths about Building and Leading a Team.
So some of what I have to say may surprise you and trust and believe, it surprised me when I experienced it firsthand.
One of the reasons I created this podcast is because I was tired of seeing online marketing experts position themselves as people who talked about their successes, but we’re never open about their failures.
Mistakes or perceived failures are totally normal, and as you listen today, whether you have a team or not, I want you to know that you are not alone and there is not a day that goes by where something doesn’t go wrong in my business.
It’s all learning.
Let’s get started.
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.
Six shocking truths about building and leading a team.
Shocking truth #1: You will hire the wrong person at some point.
I spent so much time before I hired my first employee stressing about whether or not I would hire the right person.
In fact, I put off hiring because I had built up hiring the wrong person to be some sort of catastrophic event that I’d never recover from.
If you feel the same way and are putting off what needs to be done to avoid the risk of hiring the wrong person, I have news for you.
No matter what, at some point, you will in fact hire the wrong person, or maybe it’ll be the right person, but you won’t have your stuff together and that right person will seem like the wrong person.
But my point is that making mistakes when it comes to hiring is unavoidable.
You will do it again and again and again.
Now, you’ll get better at it over time, but mistakes are bound to happen.
One of the high level coaching programs that we run, I’m not talking about our 30 day program, Scale With Success® Accelerator where you’ll build a Profitable Sales Engine™, but one of our other high level coaching programs, we actually teach course creators how to build a team.
We teach them how to make a job posting, what the full hiring process should look like, how to have your candidates complete a test project, how to design an onboarding plan for them to increase their chance of success and help them get up to speed faster and so much more.
➡️ Now, that particular program is 90 days, and if you’re interested, then all you have to do is email us with the word “Team” in the subject line over at hi@caitlinbacher.com and tell us a little bit about your business.
- We don’t do sales calls for this program, but we do want to email you a few questions just to confirm that we’re the right fit.
So I think one of the main reasons that we are so scared of making our first hire is simply because we haven’t done it before.
And if you think back in time to the first time that you did anything in your business, it was probably pretty scary.
Your first offer, your first refund request, your first sales call.
“What if I make an offer and no one buys? What if I uphold my refund policy and they don’t like it? What if I have a sales call and they tell me to get lost? What if I hire someone and they don’t do a good job?”
Like anything else, if that happens, you just take it one step at a time.
You’ll let them know what improvements you’d like to see and ask them what you can do to help.
You’re there to help them do and be their best.
And modeling for your team what it looks like to give direct feedback without making judgments about their character or assumptions about their intentions is incredibly valuable.
The only way to learn is to do, to make mistakes and to use each failure as a stepping stone to your success.
Shocking truth #2: Your team will reflect all your bad habits back onto you.
Are you routinely one to five minutes late to any meeting?
Do you struggle to give honest feedback because you don’t want to hurt someone’s feelings?
Do you procrastinate and rush to get everything done at the last minute?
Well, your team is going to start doing the same things.
Sometimes it’s easier to find faults in others than it is to find fault in ourselves, but the harsh truth is that your habits and behaviors create your company culture.
So you can have long-winded core values about integrity and personal accountability, but if your actions are not aligned with them, nobody else’s will be either.
And it can feel like a difficult transition to go from being accountable to yourself as a solopreneur with a couple contractors to being accountable to yourself and your team.
But what’s even more difficult is not being accountable to your team and then having everything fall apart.
So learning to show up on time and get things done on time is more difficult for some than others, and if you have a particularly hard time doing that despite your best efforts, then don’t be ashamed to ask for help.
There are so many options out there available now, but if you’re really struggling, a good place to start is your Primary Care Physician.
Let them know some of the symptoms you’re experiencing and have a chat with them about next possible steps.
Shocking truth #3: You are going to have more meetings and you are going to like it.
Now, if you’re an introvert like me, then you’ve probably wondered why in the world I would say something like that.
So here’s the truth.
When done correctly, meetings can save you time and give you more uninterrupted space for you to do your best creative work.
Clients at our higher level program are given detailed processes, decks and agendas to efficiently run meetings for their team in this way so that everyone on their team looks forward to those meetings because just like them, they leave the meetings feeling fired up and ready to take action.
Monday’s are the days when I host all my meetings with my team members.
I host group meetings and I host one-on-one meetings all in one day so that I have the rest of the week to work on tasks that only I can do.
There’s an important transition that all course creators who are a personal brand go through as they begin to build their team and really step into their role as the CEO, which is spending your time leading your team as opposed to leading your customers.
This is a very difficult transition for many CEOs to make because they feel like they are the only ones that can help their clients, but in my experience, I have found the opposite to be true.
I’m able to focus on creating and refining our intellectual property, which is the proprietary teachings that we share with our clients, and my team is able to help those clients execute.
Now, if you sell a course and the only person in the world that can answer questions about it and help your clients complete it is you, then your course needs an update.
You need to take the way your brain works and put it into frameworks that others can understand.
Over time as a CEO, you’ll find yourself shifting from creating trainings for your clients to creating trainings for your team to ensure that they have what they need to help your clients for you.
This is leveraged leadership and requires you to have, you guessed it, more meetings.
Shocking truth #4: Your first hire should NOT be a high level business strategist.
Without fail, nearly every course creator I talk to who is thinking about hiring their first employee believes their first hire needs to be some sort of high level business strategist, manager, or integrator.
Now, when they do this, the foundation of their business starts to crack because you are skipping a huge number of steps that need to happen first.
You’ll get there eventually, but not at first, and certainly not if you’re making less than $3 million a year.
If you’re making less than $3 million a year, then the first employee you ever hire should be an assistant.
Your assistant can almost immediately begin to take things off your plate.
Everything from customer service to scheduling social media posts to scheduling interviews for you to make your next hire.
Will they be making high level strategic decisions in your business or managing a big team of contractors?
No, but they will be freeing up your time so that you can make strategic decisions about what you need to do next to improve your sales and marketing.
It’s your job as the CEO to learn how to strategically hire and onboard new people into your company.
How to create a culture where your team values the collective outcome over their own individual success.
Outsourcing your leadership if you’re making under $3 million is incredibly risky.
Most business advice out there on the internet is not created for businesses like ours.
We don’t have outside investors and we don’t have a three year financial runway where we can hire a hotshot COO to come in and manage everything.
Your business requires you to be profitable and to reinvest a portion of those profits back into the business so that you can sustain extended growth over time, not to go out and hire a five person leadership team all in one day.
Shocking truth #5: You are going to make big mistakes in front of everyone, and you’ll have to own up to it.
Can you imagine having a team of people working with you and none of them are ever willing to admit their mistakes, learn from them and move forward?
That’s why it’s so important for you to make mistakes and not beat yourself up over it.
If they see you being extremely hard on yourself, that’s teaching them that you are also going to be extremely hard on them if they make a mistake.
Making mistakes is sometimes embarrassing, and I really don’t like making mistakes when I know those mistakes have made things harder for my team, but I’m human.
It doesn’t serve me or them to get into a shame spiral over it.
Reframing how I think about mistakes from,
“Oh my gosh, I’m embarrassed and want to hide it,”
to “Oh my gosh, this is a great learning opportunity for my team and I can’t wait to show, it”
has been really helpful.
It’s not about you, it’s about them.
When you talk about the mistakes that you make with your team, it doesn’t have to be this… ‘big dramatic’ moment.
“Hey, team, I did this and here’s what I learned from it. Just wanted to share in case it helps someone else.”
Easy peasy.
Shocking truth #6: You are going to find your own unique leadership style.
Today, I’ve shared my six shocking truths about building and leading a team, and one day I hope to hear your shocking truths about doing the same.
The great thing about being a leader and leading a team of leaders is that we all bring our own lived experiences to the table.
Those experiences give every single one of us a unique range of gifts that deserve to be expressed and shared with others.
Just like building and refining your offer took time, so does building and refining your team.
It all begins with taking the first step.
That’s all for now, and I’ll chat with you next week on Scale With Success®: The Podcast.
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Sign up for my free masterclass, “How To Generate Launch-Sized Revenue Without Launching” and I’ll show you how our clients are making MORE money in LESS time than they ever did while launching.
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Today’s episode is brought to you by Scale With Success® Accelerator — an online course designed to help you generate launch-sized revenue without lanching. If you want to learn MORE about our proven method for success, click here to watch my free masterclass. See you in there!