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Episode 124: Reflections on Building a Team
228 Plays4 years ago
Krista is back on the podcast and this week we're chatting about what we've learned over the past few years about building team. Everything from the fears we had before hiring our first team members to why we decided to primarily hire employees instead of contractors and some tips that we have for the hiring process. We hope that you find these reflections helpful especially if you're considering starting to grow a team yourself.
For show notes visit...https://daveyandkrista.com/btb-episode-124-reflections-on-building-a-team/
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Transcript
The Power of Systems and SOPs
00:00:05
Speaker
You know, every time you do something, if you're thinking you're going to hire a team in the future, and in general, I just think it makes you more organized, create a system for everything. And I think one of the things that we've done a really good job over at Till, not to suggest we haven't done a good job over at DK, but we have the benefit
00:00:22
Speaker
of all the lessons learned is that we have standard operating procedures for a lot of our different systems. We have a lot of canned emails that we've had just from the start, and that just makes it really easy. One, to make sure that you're onboarding people in a uniform way, like kind of everybody sees the same sort of expectations that they need to see. Two, that people understand exactly what's expected of them.
Hiring: Employees vs Contractors, with Krista
00:00:45
Speaker
Welcome to the Brands at Book Show, where we help creative, service-based businesses build their brands and find more clients. I'm your host, Davy Jones.
00:00:55
Speaker
Krista is back on the podcast and this week we are chatting about what we've learned over the past few years about building a team. Everything from the fears we had before hiring our first team members, to why we decided to primarily hire employees instead of contractors, and some tips that we have for the hiring process. We hope that you find these reflections helpful, especially if you're considering starting to grow a team yourself. Just a quick note before we get started, we are not lawyers, we are not accountants,
00:01:24
Speaker
and the information that we share in this podcast is not meant to be construed as legal, accounting, or any kind of professional advice. If you are considering hiring team members, we'd recommend reaching out to both a lawyer and an accountant to learn more about labor laws and the tax ramifications of hiring in your local area.
00:01:43
Speaker
Be sure to check out the show notes at dvandchrista.com for the resources we mentioned during the episode. And we want to hear from you. Let us know what kind of content you'd like to see on the Brands at Book podcast as we move forward. To leave your feedback, just send us a DM on Instagram at dvandchrista. Now on to the episode.
Personal Update: Family and Team Support
00:02:05
Speaker
All right, we are back with another episode of the Brands at Book podcast after a little bit of a hiatus.
00:02:10
Speaker
but for a really good reason. By now, some of you have probably seen that we are expecting baby number two in October. And just like with Jack, I was super sick, spent most of the past two months in bed, and there's just no way that recording was gonna be happening.
00:02:29
Speaker
Yeah. And I know you still don't, you don't feel great today and you're still recording. So I appreciate that. Thank you. But, and we've, we've released a little bit of content in the, in the meantime. And I think one of the reasons that we were being able to release at least a little bit of content in the meantime is because we've been able to build a team. And so I think it's a perfect conversation to have because just, you know, this entire season night and day different than when we were expecting Jack.
00:02:57
Speaker
I mean, last time it was just us. And so on the days where I was just way too sick to do anything, no work happened. And now we have several other people on our team who can keep work going even when I'm too sick to do
Personal Preferences and Announcements
00:03:12
Speaker
anything. So I am so grateful for our designers and everybody on the team.
00:03:16
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So just I think night and day difference. I know for me, I mean, of course, if you're less stressed, then I'm less stressed. Probably true in reverse too, for sure. But anyways, excited to get back to recording and even better, it's starting to get warm out, even though we've had maybe a few chilly days here and there, spring has sprung. So excited about warm weather and the summertime.
00:03:40
Speaker
Davey is one of those people who loves 90 degree days more than like a 65 degree day. Anything less than 70 is not warm. One of our neighbors that I run with Buddy, a good friend of ours, he's always giving me grief because he'll be like, it'll be 65, no humidity. He'll be like, it's a perfect day. I'm like, no, 10 more degrees, add a little humidity. I want the sun out. I want to feel the sun.
00:04:07
Speaker
You're crazy. We have a blog post that's going live with this podcast episode on how to hire a team. I think that's more of a linear walkthrough, just our thoughts on going about and building a team. Whereas the podcast episode, a little bit of that
00:04:27
Speaker
also just a little bit of our reflections on building the team and what we've learned over the past two years or so. We've built a team over at Davey and Krista and we're about what seven people strong about. Then we've built a team over at Till Agency as well. I'll be talking a little bit about our experience there and maybe contrasting it a little bit with what we've done over at Davey and Krista. The team over at Till is over 10 people. We've learned quite a bit I think over the last two years. I'm excited to talk about it because
00:04:57
Speaker
Really, when we're talking about scaling a service-based business, one of the primary ways that we're able to do that is through hiring people and building a team.
Scaling Through Team Building
00:05:07
Speaker
Unlike if you're just selling a digital product, building a team might be key for scaling because as you sell more of your digital product, maybe you have to bring on support people or
00:05:15
Speaker
you know, whatnot. But really, if you're a service-based business, you're a photographer, let's say, then building a team of associates is probably going to be one of the primary ways that you would scale your business, you know, or at least one way that you would scale your business.
00:05:29
Speaker
And before we grew our team, we had a lot of fears about growing our team. So what if we didn't have enough work to support them? What if a team member ended up not being a good fit? Would our clients and customers want to work with anybody besides us? And all of those are real fears, but I think we've learned a lot through the process that maybe they didn't need to be as fearful as we thought made them.
00:05:50
Speaker
Yeah, I think we waited a long time to bring somebody on. We were probably ready to bring somebody on earlier than we did and we just let some of these fears stop us. Hopefully, just hearing that, maybe you're in a similar spot, but those are real fears and those are things that we need to sit down and talk about and put a plan together before actually going about and hiring somebody. A few things that we did, and feel free to just jump in, but one of the things that we did was have a
00:06:20
Speaker
cash reserve in our business that was put aside specifically to pay this person for about six months, even if they brought in no revenue. We do that anyways. We try to have six months of expenses. We're big Dave Ramsey fans. But we had specific amounts even beyond that set aside for hiring this person. For hiring this person because we knew that whoever we brought on probably wasn't going to jump right in and be doing quite as much work as I was or you were.
00:06:48
Speaker
And so we wanted to give them time to settle in and learn our processes, learn our design styles, figure out what their talents were and how to divide up different tasks before we ran out of funds.
Training and Integration of New Hires
00:07:01
Speaker
Yeah, and we brought on, we have a great team. Everybody on our team, super talented. Oh yeah, we love our team so much.
00:07:08
Speaker
But with that said, when you bring on somebody new, even if they are super talented, yes, they might be able to jump in at certain things right away, but there's still a lot that they're likely need to learn from really just around your systems even and how work's expected to be done because even if you get close to the same result at the end of the day, you probably want work done in a certain way to keep you and the team organized.
00:07:34
Speaker
period of time that I think is longer than people expect it to be of training where maybe it feels like not less work when you bring on somebody. I think it's just important to kind of set yourself up with that expectation before diving into it. So one was putting together a cash reserve and the second one was saying, hey, listen,
00:07:54
Speaker
we're going to really commit to this for like six months. In the first month, we made less. It was not a net positive in bringing somebody on. That's okay because one, until you bring somebody on, you can't scale to that capacity or at least we didn't. Then two, we knew that once we brought people on, that we could scale up our work appropriately, but we weren't ready to do that right when we brought somebody on.
00:08:22
Speaker
one, because it was the first time we had brought somebody on. And we put a lot of time towards training. Yep, absolutely. And we're glad ultimately that we did because we were going into our busy season and that was intentional too. We kind of felt like, okay, we're going into our busy season of the year, so we think we would have
00:08:39
Speaker
Instead of maybe creating a wait list like we normally would, we would be able to scale up our capacity real quick. But point being there is we really committed to it for a certain amount of time and gave ourselves maybe more time than we thought we needed because we didn't want one to be stressed ourselves.
00:08:57
Speaker
And it's not good for the person you hire to bring them on and be like, hey, listen, you got to make this work in the next 30 days or, you know, you're out or something like that. We should also mention that we hire employees. We don't typically hire subcontractors. So when we decided to bring people on, we knew we wanted a long-term commitment. So that was another reason why we had six months and why we put so much time into training.
00:09:19
Speaker
And we'll get into that in a second here as we talk about contractors or some employees. But yeah, as Chris has said, we were bringing on an employee and so it was somebody who was expecting a certain amount of work from us on a consistent basis. Unlike a contractor who basically when you have the work, you can send it over, but there's no obligation to send over work and there's no obligation on their part to accept the work.
00:09:41
Speaker
That was a little bit as well. But anyways, I mean, maybe your experience is some of those fears. So maybe hearing about our experience helps on that front. I think at the end of the day, we really thought through, okay, were we able to do this from a financial perspective? And were we able to do this from a work capacities perspective? Did we think we could either build up to that capacity or that we currently had that capacity and need somebody to step in?
00:10:06
Speaker
And the answer was yes. And so we decided, you know, there's fears around a lot of decisions in business. So try not to let those rule us. But anyways, you might be asking yourself when you should hire somebody. So maybe you can speak to why we decided to hire somebody when we did.
Motivations for Hiring: Life Changes and Growth
00:10:22
Speaker
Well, we were in the midst of habit. I mean, we just had Jack. We were four months into the new parent process and I was completely overwhelmed. I knew that I wanted to not work quite as much as I had before. I'd probably been working like 50 hours a week before Jack came along. And so I knew that that wasn't going to be feasible with a newborn and without, like we didn't want to put him in full-time childcare. And at that point we didn't have any childcare.
00:10:47
Speaker
And so we had a lot of design projects and then we also had a plan for what we're going to do once we brought people on that would allow us to scale. So we knew that if somebody came on we could put a lot more time into different products and really work on our shop and that would help us to scale.
00:11:02
Speaker
Yeah, I think that's exactly right. And I think just from a work life perspective too, one of the things that we should mention that people already know, I think if you've listened to the podcast is I'm not a designer. Krista is a designer. So Krista fulfilled at that point all of our client work. If it was designed, she had to do it. And if she was sick, when she was pregnant and sick, just talking about this season where for the last month and a half, you were basically in bed. And that's how it was with Jack too.
00:11:27
Speaker
I still worked just not nearly as much. And you don't want to feel that pressure. If you are so sick, you have to be in bed and it's hard to move. But anyway, so there's all sorts of reasons why we hired when we did. But then it also, I think one of the points that you hit on, which I think was important to think about is even though we weren't necessarily thinking, oh, we want to scale our custom side of the business as much as we possibly could, we did want to scale the product side of our business.
00:11:54
Speaker
People can come buy our templates and customize themselves and launch them themselves. But you needed the time to actually be able to work on that product. So that was one of the other reasons why we hired somebody as well.
00:12:06
Speaker
Okay. Do you want to go back to employees versus contractors? Yeah. We touched on that, but we didn't elaborate it. Yeah. One of the things when you're considering hiring somebody, you have to think about the relationship you have with that person. One of the things I want to say at the outset is we are not lawyers. We are not accountants. There are legal and tax accounting ramifications.
00:12:30
Speaker
for hiring an employee or a contractor. So you're going to want to talk to somebody who is qualified to talk about those things before you do that. And we talk to both an accountant and an attorney, especially because we are hiring people out of state.
00:12:43
Speaker
Yeah, and it varies from state to state. That's not to add another fear. It sounds more overwhelming than it actually was. Our accountant, it was really easy for him to look up the different regulations for each state. He helped us. You technically have to file your business in each state, but it's not as overwhelming again. He helped us take care of those things. If you have a payroll system like we use Gusto, they have directions for every single state on how to set yourself up there and they make it really easy too.
00:13:11
Speaker
Yeah, and we use Gusto for payroll for both Till and Davey and Krista. And it's a pretty scalable system in that it's not super, super expensive to use to start.
Deciding Between Employees and Contractors
00:13:20
Speaker
And then it just kind of nicely scales as the price goes up a little bit as you add team members, right?
00:13:27
Speaker
That made sense for us to use. But anyways, talk to a lawyer, talk to an accountant on the tax side of things. Of course, we talked to our accountant on the payroll side of things. We talked to our accountant on the lawyer side of things. We were mostly concerned with either a contractor agreement or an employment agreement. And so we had a lawyer come up with our employment agreement.
00:13:43
Speaker
And I think it's important to have an employment agreement, especially if you're going the employer route. I mean, it's important to have a contractor agreement as well. Some sort of agreement is important, is the bottom line, in order to establish expectations, both that the expectations that your employer contractor can have of you and the expectations you can have of them as well.
00:14:01
Speaker
We also fill out different benefits in our agreement and so forth. Yeah, absolutely. One of the reasons, as I was thinking about why we went the employee route, and we had a lot of conversations about this, because there is less pressure in going the contractor route. If you do have some of these fears we talked about in the beginning, the contractor route might make sense because with a contractor, there's not necessarily an expectation that you'll be sending over a certain amount of work.
00:14:27
Speaker
that relationship is a little bit more loose than the employee-employer relationship. And I don't want to go into the specific differences between the two because, like I said, I'm not a lawyer. But I think one of the things that sort of just summarizes why we went with the employee route was just expectations, right? You can have clear expectations for when work is to be done and how work is to be done. Then you can, if you have a contractor. With contractors, typically it's
00:14:56
Speaker
You can't tell them how they're going to do their work. They have something they have to deliver, and as long as they deliver that, that's what they're supposed to do. Same thing with when they're supposed to work. They might have a deadline, but that doesn't mean that they're going to be available between the hours of nine to five when your business is typically open.
00:15:14
Speaker
We also, team camaraderie is important to us because especially for our design project, most members of our team are touching that project in some way. And so we knew that long-term we wanted people who could become experts in our niche and who were experts in our business and how we launched websites. And we really wanted to invest in our team. And I think that you don't really get quite as much commitment from a contractor as you do an employee.
00:15:40
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. I don't think you have that same level of buy-in and especially people working with us and wondering when we bring on a client, we want them to know that we are actually, as a team, fulfilling their services. That it's not being outsourced to Fiverr or something like that. We don't want to give this impression that we're just
00:16:00
Speaker
bringing all these contractors to complete their work and then we're just acting as a general contractor because that's not how we work. You're managing every single project, everybody on the team, especially if they're doing both brand and website design, is likely going to touch or work on that project at some point. That's what we wanted to communicate back to our clients. One of the reasons that we decided to go with employees versus contractors
00:16:23
Speaker
Like you said, I think the biggest things too were team culture, camaraderie, and then also being able to provide some benefits that don't really make sense to provide for. Like paid time off, why would you give that to a contractor? Yeah, or even profit sharing, something like that. Or we have an education fund for our team members. So things like that you probably wouldn't do for a contractor. Yeah, I guess it's not that you couldn't. I don't know. But again, talk to a lawyer or accountant. So those are some of the things that we were thinking through when we decided to hire an employee versus a contractor.
00:16:52
Speaker
So, and then both for Davey and Krista and Till, and really that's been our approach for Till as well. Most of the people who are working over at Till are employees. We do have a few contractors. Typically, one of the things that we're thinking through as well is, I guess, is that person going to be fulfilling client services?
Prioritizing Roles and Task Listing
00:17:10
Speaker
Typically, if they're fulfilling client services at all, we're bringing on an employee, whereas some of the contractors we're working with, especially over at Till, maybe they're doing stuff specifically for the Till team or the Till marketing, let's say, versus fulfilling client services.
00:17:24
Speaker
At Dave and Krista, we've also had contractors before for Pinterest for copywriting, video editing, stuff like that that would be more on a project basis. Yeah, absolutely. I think one of the questions that we often get to is who someone should hire first.
00:17:40
Speaker
Yeah. And I think that's interesting because it's going to be so different for every business. We decided to hire two designers first, a website designer and a brand designer. But I know that if you are not maybe providing as much client work as we do, it might make more sense to hire an administrative assistant. Or if you're an overwhelmed photographer, it might make more sense to hire an editor first.
00:18:03
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So I think one of the things that you can do is just, and what we did was write down all the things that we needed help with, and then really kind of prioritize, okay, what was most necessary at the time. And really, the deciding factor for us, as I suggested at the beginning of this episode was, I'm not a designer.
00:18:21
Speaker
And what could only I do at the time? And what could we train other people to do? And so there are plenty of other people who are talented designers. Could we teach them how to work the way that we do and then serve our clients better because there's more heads on a project.
00:18:38
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And it keeps everybody fresher too from a creative perspective. But again, I think that also goes back to the fact that really all of our client services were being filled by you. So that's a lot of pressure for one person. So that's why we went the design around. I think maybe if I was a designer, that it would have been different. You're laughing because you can't even imagine me as a designer. You're so offensive. You're screwed.
00:19:02
Speaker
Everything would be so colorful and bold and the fonts would be massive. What's wrong with colorful and bold and fonts? You know, people like to be able to read what's on the screen. I think if you go to our website and you're thinking to yourself, oh man, this is easy to read. It's easy to read because of me.
00:19:18
Speaker
I keep making them bigger. As I get older, I realize, and I work classes too, I feel like as I get older, I realize, wow, the fonts on that are way too tiny. They need to come up. Well, if you just looked at, if you just listen to me, all over the world, anyways, you just over, she's over there laughing at just the idea of me being a designer. But if I was, then maybe we would have hired like a marketing person or an admin first, right? Because we wouldn't have felt that pressure of like, okay, literally every job that comes in has to be fulfilled by you.
00:19:46
Speaker
So, that's what we did, but since then, we've hired administrative assistants. You might be thinking to yourself like, oh, contracts, invoices, emails, all those are super easy to do. Scheduling, workflow stuff. I would say it's not that it's super complicated necessarily, but I will say that when my administrative assistant is out, like if she's taking a day off or she's sick or on vacation or whatever it might be,
00:20:12
Speaker
I realize it very quickly. All of a sudden it becomes very apparent exactly how much I don't have to respond to or manage on a given daily basis. So I'm very grateful for Kate and formerly Emily. Emily, yeah. So that's how we would approach it. That's how we approached it anyways. Right. And since we brought on Renee for support and yeah. So writing job descriptions and maybe we should talk about the actual hiring process.
00:20:39
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So what we did, we created a list of, you know, we figured out who we were going to hire and then we went about writing the job description. And when we wrote the job description, we took a lot from that initial list that we put together on what sorts of things that person would be doing. So we want to make sure that there isn't like people get a sense for, okay, what would I be doing on a day-to-day basis? Like what task would be involved there?
00:21:04
Speaker
And then we also included a lot about just working with us as a team. So our work style, the fact that we're remote, the fact that people have a lot of responsibility on their own. So if they needed a lot of handholding, we might not be the best fit for them. Yeah. And that's always, I mean, just as an interesting side note when it comes to building a team.
00:21:22
Speaker
I think that when you bring somebody on, you might have that same sense. You don't want necessarily, you probably don't want somebody who needs to be spelled out. Everything needs to be spelled out. Most people are probably looking for go-getters, people who are going to maybe first try to figure it out on their own and then ask a bunch of questions.
00:21:42
Speaker
With that said, I think the flip side of the coin is, especially with a remote team, you do need to over communicate. You want to make sure that you're not just assuming that people know exactly what to do. We record an insane amount of loom videos every day for feedback, for new projects to explain what we're doing. Especially because everybody's remote, everyone's all over the country. Our team has flexible design hours, so we're not always working at the same time as other people.
00:22:12
Speaker
Yeah, and over on the till side of things, one thing that I found helpful is that I meet with everybody from the team at least once a month, or at least the creative team once a month. And I think just making that time is important. But anyways, we got sidetracked from talking about job descriptions.
Interview Strategies and Team Fit
00:22:28
Speaker
So day-to-day tasks, but then also qualifications. What sort of qualifications should this person have? We're pretty
00:22:36
Speaker
laid back maybe isn't the isn't the right word when it comes to qualifications we look at them because like if we're hiring a designer you should know how to use the Adobe suite but if you're a really talented website designer and you haven't used sketch yet that's okay because a lot of things can be taught
00:22:52
Speaker
Yeah, so I guess what I mean by that is it's not like we're looking for a four-year degree in design or something like that. I actually don't know what any of our – I don't remember what everyone on our team has. Yeah, yeah. So that kind of stuff doesn't matter to us. I mean, of course, when it comes to a position like brand and website design, people need technical skills.
00:23:11
Speaker
With that said, if they don't know, Sketch is the art design platform of choice, right? For websites. For websites, yeah. So if somebody doesn't know Sketch, like you said, we'll train them on that if they're a great designer, right? We're also going to weight TeamFit, too, and a little bit more heavy. Reliability and trustworthiness are two things that are really important to us. And so if we can find somebody who's reliable and trustworthy, even if maybe we have to train them up a little bit on the technical side of things, we're going to do that.
00:23:40
Speaker
And of course, how much we weigh those are different for different jobs, right? For like the admin assistant, you can pretty much train anybody to respond to an email or manage a calendar, right? And so we're going to weight trustworthiness and reliability super heavily on that for something like that position because that person has access to
00:24:00
Speaker
everything. All of our emails, all of our calendars. For design, those are definitely really important, but you also need to have some design skills. Yeah, you can't be starting from scratch. Yeah. Yeah, for sure. So anyways, I hope that's helpful in terms of writing a job description and putting a listing together. You can see just an example of what our listings look like if you go to daveyandchrista.com forward slash careers.
00:24:22
Speaker
We have one open right now. Yeah, we actually have a listing open for a brand designer right now. You'll notice that there's some information about us as a company and then exactly what we're hoping to see, what that person can expect to do on a day-to-day basis, and then directions for going about and applying. We also pay very much attention to who follows directions and who responds to emails quickly.
00:24:43
Speaker
and how they respond and if they seem to know us. We've gotten plenty of applications before where I don't know how they came across it. Somebody must have forwarded it to them. They seem to have no idea who we are or what we do or the kind of people we serve. And don't get me wrong, we're not saying that from the perspective of, oh, how dare they not know us. That's not what we're saying. I feel like if you're applying for a job, you should probably read the about page. Yeah, you want to demonstrate that it's not random. It's just like one of my friends,
00:25:12
Speaker
emailed this to me and I just thought I'd fill it out. And that's the vibe that we get from people. For us, it's really important. Like we said, team camaraderie is super important. So we want people to feel like they're going to fit with the rest of us. And feel excited about potentially being part of the team. But then also just email us back and we're not, it's nothing crazy, but like within a business day or so, but occasionally people won't email us back for like a week.
00:25:36
Speaker
And we're like, we've already had the interviews and you missed the process. Sure. I mean, that's happened before too, but just also just like, okay, well, you know, are you really interested in this position at that point? So paying attention to those sorts of things, even when it comes to the interview process, I mean, one episode that's worth checking out on building a team is an episode I did with Nancy Ray. And that was, I don't know, within the first 50 episodes probably. So a while back now.
00:25:59
Speaker
Yeah, because Nancy has a really in-depth process. She follows J for MC's process and she does seven interviews for each member. Yeah, something like that. And the last one I think is in person. And I will say though, I think interviewing people more than you think you should is important. Right. Anybody can fake it for 30 minutes.
00:26:18
Speaker
So, at Dave and Krista and you do something similar till typically one of us does an interview with someone or we'll do like a round of people and then like if I go first and maybe you would go second you would interview the people who I think you should talk to and then from there when we don't talk about it at all beforehand we both want to kind of come into it blind and make our own impressions and then from there we'll interview people together.
00:26:43
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. So that way too, I mean, you know, people can have a bad day and not be reflective of their ability, you know, to hold that position. So it's kind of nice because if that person does have a bad day, maybe in their interview with me, but Chris is like, Oh no, they were great. And I thought this and that, you know, so they'll likely get another interview.
00:27:02
Speaker
Right. And we ask different questions. We don't talk about what questions we're going to ask either. And so I think that we just get different things out of people. Like I've interviewed people who from positions at Dave and Krista that I actually thought would be a better fit for a different position at Till. And so it's interesting from that perspective, like what we each pick up.
00:27:20
Speaker
Yeah, and we found some people until from that. But anyways, and until we do something similar, where typically each of the partners is going to have an interview individually, and we'll talk about that. And you know, we'll bring in anybody, you know, who we the three of us agree agree on again for another two interviews. So we've just found that to be super helpful. Thankfully, had that episode with conducted that interview with Nancy Ray prior to hiring our first person. And so I think that's served as well, because we haven't had a lot of turnover, which
00:27:47
Speaker
I mean most of the turnover has been for babies or just like regular life kind of stuff. Yeah. So we've had a lot of good luck going that route. Yeah, that's right.
Onboarding: Systems and Expectations
00:28:01
Speaker
So I mean, I think that's a pretty good overview. There are a few other questions that we asked people just in our Facebook group, you know, as we were getting ready to write this blog post and record this interview or I'm sorry, this episode. Maybe we could go through those real quick.
00:28:16
Speaker
So, one question was, what are some tips for onboarding an employee? And we talked a little bit about this throughout. Yeah. One, systematize everything. Every time you do something, if you're thinking you're going to hire a team in the future, and in general, I just think it makes you more organized, create a system for everything. And I think one of the things that we've done a really good job over at TILL, not to suggest we haven't done a good job over at DK, but we have the benefit
00:28:44
Speaker
You started months later. Yeah, exactly. We have the benefit of all the lessons learned is that we have standard operating procedures for a lot of our different systems. We have a lot of canned emails that we've had just from the start. That just makes it really easy, one, to make sure that you're onboarding people in a uniform way. Everybody sees the same expectations that they need to see as you onboard them.
00:29:07
Speaker
two, that people understand exactly what's expected of them. Because I think that I'm not as good at this, I think, as you are, Krista. You do a very good job of recording the loom video, getting that sent over, really explaining your expectations. I sometimes fall in the trap of, oh yeah, I'm sure they're fine. They understand what they need to do. He does this to me.
00:29:29
Speaker
Really, I'm just saying that. Like I said, you do a better job of that than I do. And I think that's one thing I really want to emphasize to people is training takes maybe a little bit longer than you think it's going to take. And just because you have to spell things out in the beginning doesn't mean that that person is not a good
00:29:48
Speaker
fit. I think it's so much better when people really understand expectations. That's different I think too than micromanaging. We give people a lot of flexibility but at the same time we want to make sure that everybody understands what success looks like in a given task.
00:30:03
Speaker
Do you have employees and contractors sign contracts for each project? So I'm going to assume that this is maybe coming from a photographer who's hiring a second photographer, maybe a different one for each wedding.
Contracts and Marketing with Associates
00:30:16
Speaker
In that case, I would say yes, you probably, each project is unique. Somebody may not be with you from wedding to wedding unless you have like
00:30:23
Speaker
a commitment from them that they'll be with you all season. In which case, if that, I would probably just do one contract. But if you know that like you have Davey with you on two Saturdays in a row and then the next Saturday you have me with you, you'd probably want a different contract for each or different agreement for each wedding.
00:30:42
Speaker
Yeah, and this is one of those things you want, you probably want a lawyer to create a contractor agreement or employment agreement. Because of course, if this is a second photographer and he or she is an employee, then of course, typically you just have them sign an employment agreement and then they work for you. So there's no reason.
00:30:58
Speaker
that I could think of why they need to sign an agreement each and every session from there on out. With a contractor though, like Chris has said, I would think you could put together a contractor agreement with somebody that's more long term. But if you don't, then I would think you would also want to make sure that you have a contractor agreement in place or some sort of agreement in place for each individual date or session or project.
00:31:20
Speaker
So, or, you know, if you're a web designer, for instance, and you're using an associate designer, then like I said, that's not something we do. But I would assume that you would want, you know, to outline the scope of each project. Right. How do you continue to market yourself while also marketing their collections? So this is probably somebody who has associates. Yeah, it's probably another photographer, I would guess. Yeah. Yeah. There are a few different ways that you can do this.
00:31:42
Speaker
Yeah, like you said, there are a few different ways that you can do this. I would say, one, not worrying too much about marketing their collections. So for instance, let's say you are just a solopreneur, you're a photographer, you are shooting all your own weddings and you decide, okay, I'm getting so many requests for work that I can't take them all. And maybe I'm getting requests for work that are a little bit below my typical price point or something like that. In that case, if you were to bring on associates,
00:32:09
Speaker
you could still just focus on marketing yourself or your business rather. Then when the inquiries come in, you can funnel them to the right spot. If somebody indicates that maybe their budget is a little bit lower than what it would cost to have you specifically come out and shoot that wedding, then you can say, hey, my associates are available. These are their collections. These are examples of their past work. Let me know if you want me to set up a call and how you handle it from there. It would be on a business to business basis.
00:32:36
Speaker
I would really focus just on marketing your business, especially if they're part of your brand. Abby Jew, who has been on the podcast, she does this. She shoots and then Lisa also shoots under her. When you go on Abby Jew's Instagram, she'll say if it was shot by Abby or if it was shot by Lisa, but it's all seamless and you can't tell. They're just marketing the business. They're not marketing one over the other.
00:33:01
Speaker
Yeah, absolutely. And then you also have, I believe, I don't know if Erin Youngren was on our podcast or we were on her podcast or both. You might have done both. Yeah, it was both. Sorry. We've done a few different interviews with each other, so just trying to keep them straight.
Delegation and Training Challenges
00:33:14
Speaker
But at least in one of those interviews, it was, she talked a little bit about their business model where they have the Youngrens, which is their brand.
00:33:22
Speaker
Then they have their associate brand, which is a whole different brand that they market. I don't know how the business is set up, but it's marketed as a different business, essentially. Yeah, there are several different photographers within that. And then they have their commercial brand. So how they do that is a little bit different, but still they're just focusing on they have a whole different brand for their associates and they do a good job of marketing that business. What have been the best tasks that you've handed off to people?
00:33:50
Speaker
Oh, there's so many, I mean, for me specifically, email, podcast editing. I mean, anything that's going to take me a long time that, especially if it's, if it takes longer than it should, you know, like podcast editing, video editing, those things that, you know, if I have to listen to myself, like if I have to listen to a podcast episode that I just recorded, I want to correct every little thing.
00:34:18
Speaker
Yeah, you're such a perfectionist. And it's ironic, right? Because I'm not perfect. I guess no one is, but I'm not like, you know. Anyways, point being is it would take me forever to edit my own podcast. So it's best that I just send it off. Somebody else edits them and basically that's, and then I have Kristy to listen to them if she didn't record with me. You know, as long as she gives me the thumbs up, I just trust that, you know, that was good enough. So.
00:34:46
Speaker
For me, just having more design help because it means that I don't have to do every single element all by myself. And stay fresh. And stay fresh, yeah, so that the team can work collectively. Yeah, absolutely. I think it's just been such a... Yeah, we really do have such a great team.
00:35:02
Speaker
What are the biggest pain points or challenges in hiring a team? Yeah, I mean, I think we've had mostly smooth experiences, which is great. I would say training takes a little bit longer than people expect. They've already said that. Yeah. And yeah, what about for you?
00:35:19
Speaker
Yeah, I think just that training takes longer and it took a little bit of time for us to figure out the best way to communicate with people. So discovering Loom and figuring out how to send a video with our feedback saves everybody so much time as opposed to like trying to type out every correction in a list that is hard for people to understand sometimes.
00:35:40
Speaker
I'd also say that team size matters too because at different team sizes, there's different systems that need to be put in place and others that no longer work. So for Till, I think we're big enough or we're at a point where really I need to make sure that I'm meeting with people individually because our group calls are so big that you're not hearing from everybody individually.
00:36:07
Speaker
Like over at DK, we spend time, you know, each person gets to share a little bit of, you know, we get to hear about what's going on in people's lives on a weekly basis. And we also talk to, I probably talk to everybody every day. Yeah, because we're smaller. Sure. Whereas at Till, we're big enough where it's like, especially when we have different sides of the business. So I might not talk to one of our team members who's working on other stuff for the entire month if I didn't make time to do that.
00:36:32
Speaker
So that's also something to be cognizant of is how different systems you put in place to really connect with your team members scale or don't scale. So yeah. Yeah. Cool. Well, that's
Conclusion and Further Resources
00:36:44
Speaker
it. I think that if you have any other questions about hiring, definitely check out the blog post. There might be a little bit more different information in there. And then of course, drop those questions in really, you know, wherever we're sharing this post. So the blog, Instagram, Facebook,
00:36:58
Speaker
Yeah, and we'll make sure that we get back to you on those or send you a resource if we have it. So yeah, thanks for recording with me even though you're not feeling great. Yeah, thanks for having me. Yeah. Thanks for tuning in to the Brands That Book Show. If you enjoyed this episode, please consider subscribing and leaving a review in iTunes. For show notes and other resources, head on over to dvandchrista.com.
00:37:32
Speaker
you