When scaling a business, it’s natural to reach a point where you feel like your limited capacity is slowing down the business’s growth.
In this episode, I talk with Bruce Ackerman about his experience hiring a BELAY virtual assistant. Bruce is the founder of Printavo, a software company that helps screen printing shops stay organized as they grow.
Bruce will also talk about some of the biggest challenges he’s overcome while building his business and will share advice for other entrepreneurs as well.
Here are some takeaways he shared:
1. Standardize your hiring process. This will help you measure which candidate is a good fit for you and who may not be.
If you have a list of questions that you ask everyone, you will understand the baseline, and that will help you identify who is above the baseline. That’s your hire. And now you can rinse and repeat this process.
You can then identify which roles you can start to hire for so that you can do more important things with your time.
2. Start to bring on managers. Anytime a new process is established, document it. This will help answer questions like how you deal with sales or how commissions are paid.
This will provide a resource for your employees to rely on and make training easier before getting to the stage of bringing on managers.
When it comes time to start bringing on managers, it’s important to note that every two contributors should have a manager or some sort of lead that you work directly with — and then they delegate down. Use this process to continue to scale.
3. Hire a BELAY Virtual Assistant for you. A business owner should be able to spend as much time on their business as possible instead of spending time doing the things they simply don't enjoy doing.
With a Virtual Assistant, you’re able to focus. You’re able to think about how to start working towards a goal instead of putting out fires that could have been handled by your VA in the beginning.
There’s always somebody else who’s more passionate about doing the things that you don’t want to do. Figure that out so you can keep running to the next stage.
How can you make your personal life easier? How do you optimize everything possible? Once you figure that out, delegate it to an assistant and allow yourself more time to grow your business.
As a best next step, head to Printavo’s Print Hustlers podcast on Youtube to check out our CEO, Tricia Sciortino’s, interview!