Transcript
Speaker: Welcome to the Solarpreneur Podcast, where we teach you to take your solar business to the next level.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: I went from $50 in my bank account and struggling for groceries to closing 150 deals in a year and cracking the code on why sales reps fail.
Speaker: I teach you how to avoid the mistakes I made and bring in the top solar dogs of the industry to let you in on the secrets of generating more leads, falling up like a pro, and closing more deals.
Speaker: What is a solopreneur, you might ask?
Speaker: A solopreneur is a new breed of solopro that is willing to do whatever it takes to achieve mastery, and you are about to become one.
Speaker: Hey, solopreneurs.
Speaker: Today, we're going to be talking about the next hire you must make in your business.
Speaker: Whether you run the company you're at, whether you're a manager, whether you're a rep,
Speaker: I think everyone should make this next hire.
Speaker: Let me tell you why.
Speaker: Hey, welcome to the show.
Speaker: My name is Taylor Armstrong.
Speaker: We're here to help you close more deals, generate more leads and referrals, and hopefully have a much better time in the solar industry.
Speaker: In this case, we are here to help you also free up more of your time, be more effective.
Speaker: I think part of the secrets of success are to really just be as effective as possible with your time.
Speaker: And part of that is hiring other people to help you in this job.
Speaker: And that's part of being an entrepreneur.
Speaker: That's part of being a solopreneur.
Speaker: Hey, and so welcome to the show.
Speaker: If you have not left us a review already, that would be much appreciated.
Speaker: We are free and available on Apple, iTunes, or Spotify, wherever you want to listen to your podcasts.
Speaker: We are also on YouTube.
Speaker: And I'm starting to upload the video version.
Speaker: So if you like video content better, you can catch us over on YouTube.
Speaker: So let me explain why I did this episode.
Speaker: For many, many years, I was hesitant to get this one particular hire.
Speaker: And that hire was someone to help clean up my stuff.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: That might sound ridiculous, but hear me out.
Speaker: Some of you know, I recently just had our third kid, actually, absolute madness.
Speaker: I don't know what I was thinking.
Speaker: It's fun, but three kids, it is a lot of kids.
Speaker: And I had a four-year-old, a two-year-old, and now we have a newborn baby most recently.
Speaker: And so if any of you have dealt with kids, it's especially boys.
Speaker: These people are just making messes, ripping the place apart.
Speaker: You feed them dinner.
Speaker: The 70% of the food is on the floor.
Speaker: They just toss it everywhere.
Speaker: I mean, these kids are savages.
Speaker: And so I was hesitant for a long time.
Speaker: We're in an apartment.
Speaker: We've been in our house here in California for a little over a year now.
Speaker: And especially now with the baby, I started realizing, okay, I'm coming home from knocking, coming home from closing deals.
Speaker: And now I'm just coming home, picking up the house, trying to get it to at least base level, level where I don't go nuts.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And I wouldn't consider myself a clean freak or anything near that for that matter.
Speaker: But for me, it just affects me mentally.
Speaker: If it's not at least like a base level of cleanliness, I started to go insane.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So I think anyone who says they're not affected by it, I think you're lying to yourself.
Speaker: You need to have a decluttered space.
Speaker: You need to have a place you can go back to and just be able to recharge a place that's not just wrecked, that's not cluttered up.
Speaker: Hey, and my wife, she's here.
Speaker: She helps.
Speaker: But, you know, with three kids, especially the baby, you can only do so much.
Speaker: And I had to apologize a little bit.
Speaker: to her because I was coming after her.
Speaker: I'm like, all right, what are you doing all day?
Speaker: Why can't you clean?
Speaker: But I have spent my share of time watching three kids and it is it's not easy.
Speaker: So a little tangent there.
Speaker: But what happened was I just started realizing that there's so much to do and I have an assistant already.
Speaker: I'm like, why can't I get someone to help take care of our stuff, right?
Speaker: Clean it.
Speaker: And decided to bite the bullet and get a housekeeper.
Speaker: Hey, her name's Mari.
Speaker: She's coming twice a week right now.
Speaker: She may be coming three times a week.
Speaker: Hey, but the reasons why I think you should get one, even if you're not in my situation, maybe you don't have 20 kids like myself.
Speaker: Maybe you don't really know
Speaker: need as much help.
Speaker: But I would encourage you just look at how much time are you spending cleaning up your stuff.
Speaker: If you're cooking, how much time is that taking?
Speaker: If you're shopping, if you're picking up groceries, how much time is that taking?
Speaker: In the very minimum, you should be using stuff like the Walmart,
Speaker: grocery delivery service.
Speaker: You can get Walmart Plus.
Speaker: They'll just drop off the groceries at your door.
Speaker: So that's the first step.
Speaker: I would never shop for your own groceries.
Speaker: But the next level is just realize how much time are you spending cleaning, doing laundry?
Speaker: Is it taking a whole Sunday?
Speaker: For me, it was like evenings I was cleaning a little bit.
Speaker: Then Sundays, it was practically all day Sundays.
Speaker: I was just cleaning just to get it back to like a livable level.
Speaker: And I realized that's not sustainable.
Speaker: I'm first of all, I need to be able to recharge.
Speaker: We're hustling during the week.
Speaker: We're closing deals.
Speaker: We're entrepreneurs, right?
Speaker: So we need to use our time to recharge.
Speaker: And if we're just cleaning the whole time when we're not working, then it's going to be tough to recharge.
Speaker: So I'm going to tell you guys how I was able to find a house housekeeper and how you can do the same thing.
Speaker: And hopefully it helps someone out there.
Speaker: Even if you think you're not spending a bunch of time, consider it.
Speaker: So step number one is just realize how much time are you taking to clean, right?
Speaker: So I already mentioned that a little bit.
Speaker: But how is it affecting your mental bandwidth?
Speaker: Maybe you're like me.
Speaker: Maybe you just came to accept that you're never going to live in a perfectly clean place.
Speaker: Maybe you've got kids.
Speaker: You're just like, OK, this is how it's going to be.
Speaker: But just think about how is it affecting you?
Speaker: How is it affecting your mind?
Speaker: And then consider just tracking your time throughout the day, throughout the week.
Speaker: Something I've talked about many times is doing a time study.
Speaker: It's just tracking how you're actually spending your time because then maybe you're spending more time than you thought.
Speaker: Just cleaning, cooking, doing dishes, doing laundry.
Speaker: It all adds up.
Speaker: And then number two, if you want to get a housekeeper, it's not as hard as you'd think.
Speaker: Part of what was blocking my mindset around it is just number one, that is going to be too expensive.
Speaker: I'm here in California where minimum wage is practically 20 bucks these days.
Speaker: And then number two, I'm just like, how do you find these people?
Speaker: It's like, do you have to, I don't know, know someone?
Speaker: Do you have to do all these complicated job posts, go through all these interviews?
Speaker: So it was just part of not knowing and then thinking it was complicated.
Speaker: I'm like, yeah, I'm not going to try and tackle this.
Speaker: But it actually turned out to be quite a bit easier than I thought.
Speaker: So here's what I did.
Speaker: I originally went and I started doing some job postings.
Speaker: I didn't really know what I was doing.
Speaker: I just put out a job post that said, hey,
Speaker: looking for someone looking for a housekeeper, working two to three times a week, part time, family of five.
Speaker: Let me know or apply below if you have two plus years in managing a household, have worked in housekeeping before, something along those lines.
Speaker: Pretty easy.
Speaker: You can ask chat GPT, Google, make you a job posting.
Speaker: Really simple.
Speaker: Okay, so I did that.
Speaker: And I posted on some job boards.
Speaker: That was my first idea is, OK, I'm going to post on like some Facebook groups in my area.
Speaker: I'm going to post online.
Speaker: I did that and it didn't work that great.
Speaker: I got a few responses back just on Facebook groups.
Speaker: Most of them were like, hey, stop being lazy.
Speaker: Clean your own house.
Speaker: No one's going to want to do that.
Speaker: So I'm like, okay, Facebook groups, people are just trolling.
Speaker: Okay, I'm not going to do that.
Speaker: So then I went to ZipRecruiter.
Speaker: So some of you already know that I run my own door-to-door sales team here in San Diego.
Speaker: And as we are gearing up for the summer, I realized if we do the same thing we always did, we're going to get the same results.
Speaker: But if I want to increase my deal flow, I need to do something different to get an advantage.
Speaker: Then we discovered an app called SolarScout.
Speaker: But it's not a door knocking app.
Speaker: It's a data platform that shows us who is likely to go solar in our market.
Speaker: It shows us who has previously applied for solar but later canceled the deal, who has moved in recently, and even how much electricity the homes are using in a given neighborhood.
Speaker: It's been working for a lot of teams across the country, and now I'm on board too.
Speaker: I'm going to be one of the first to use Solar Scout in San Diego, so I decided to partner up.
Speaker: But I told them, hey, I'm going to talk about Solar Scout on my show.
Speaker: You need to give my listeners a great deal, and they did.
Speaker: So go to solarscout.app forward slash Taylor and book a demo with them, and you'll get 10% off your first month when you sign up.
Speaker: That's solarscout.app forward slash Taylor.
Speaker: Okay, back to the show.
Speaker: And if you didn't know, you can go to ZipRecruiter.
Speaker: Indeed is the other popular one.
Speaker: They have free postings you can make.
Speaker: I think it's like your first post.
Speaker: They let you sponsor it for the first three days, I believe, at no charge.
Speaker: It's like a trial offer they have.
Speaker: And then if you continue it, it's like 50 bucks a day or something.
Speaker: so you can go on there you can have a free sponsor post that's going to get a lot of applicants and i had way more success with indeed and then zip recruiter but i threw it out there got all these applicants and i was like okay sweet i've got so many options now um but then here's what i finally ended up doing and you're you're gonna laugh because i just basically did all that for nothing but the way i would actually recommend getting one if you can
Speaker: And what I thought of later is I'm like, okay, you know what?
Speaker: There's people that I go to church with that might actually have recommendations.
Speaker: So I think what made it more simple for me and what I did is I asked a Mexican lady that I go to church with, hey, do you know anybody who would be interested in doing some housekeeping for us?
Speaker: And she said, oh, see, mi hermana.
Speaker: Yes, my sister, you know, she doesn't speak English, but yeah, my sister, she would, she has done this and she'd be interested.
Speaker: And so long story short, I ended up hiring the sister of a lady that I go to church with and made it simple, knew I could trust her.
Speaker: She came referred and plus trying to teach her kids Spanish.
Speaker: I'm always trying to improve my Spanish.
Speaker: I'm like, okay, perfect.
Speaker: Mexican housekeeper.
Speaker: Doesn't get better than that.
Speaker: And ended up going with her.
Speaker: Okay, so that is... So all the explanation aside...
Speaker: Step number two is just put the fillers out there.
Speaker: First, try to get a reference or referral.
Speaker: But if that doesn't work, then I would recommend just go straight to Indeed.
Speaker: You can get the free sponsored posts and just get tons of applicants pretty quickly.
Speaker: And then the third thing to do this is make sure you actually interview them, sit down with them, whether it's a referral or whether you are actually hiring someone from a job posting.
Speaker: Sit down with them, do an interview, ask them about their experience, you know, just like you'd interview someone in solar.
Speaker: Don't just hand them the job like you want them to take it seriously.
Speaker: Right.
Speaker: So make sure you tell them you're going to do a month trial period.
Speaker: I would not hire anyone right off the bat.
Speaker: Tell them you're going to do a month trial period.
Speaker: That way, if they're crazy, if they're late, if they're who knows, just not doing a good job, you don't like them.
Speaker: Remember, they're going to be in your house.
Speaker: They're going to be in your personal space.
Speaker: So if you do a month trial like that, then you're just going to say, hey, we're going to bring you on, see how this goes for a month.
Speaker: We may or may not bring you on permanently after that, but we're going to see how it goes.
Speaker: That way they will take it seriously.
Speaker: You'll be able to get a feeler if you think that person is doing a good job or not, and it's going to be much better.
Speaker: So make sure you do an interview, ask them their experience, and then bring them on for a month trial.
Speaker: And that's it.
Speaker: So for me, it's just been an absolute game changer.
Speaker: I can tell you, I'm just way happier when I come home.
Speaker: It's not a wreck.
Speaker: And what I would recommend you have these people start in is just have them come two to three times a week for a minimum of three hours.
Speaker: And in this time, I think the biggest thing you can offload right now is just have them help with your laundry.
Speaker: Okay, laundry, it was taking me at least five hours a week, probably, possibly more when you talk about all the laundry redo for these kids.
Speaker: Hey, but even if you're not spending a lot of time, like if you could free up an additional, I don't know, three to four hours a week, do you think you could put that additional time of something that could potentially make you more money?
Speaker: knock a few more doors, follow up with a few more referrals, follow up with some leads, you name it.
Speaker: Even if you could free up maybe just three, four hours that you spend cleaning or doing laundry, what would that mean for you?
Speaker: What would that mean in your business?
Speaker: So consider that, just bring them on and have them do everything.
Speaker: three hours, um, at 10, three hours a day for three times a week.
Speaker: That's nine hours.
Speaker: Um, everyone should be able to afford this.
Speaker: It's not that expensive.
Speaker: Even if you're in an expensive place like California, um, ours, we're paying her $18 an hour, which, you know, is kind of the going right out here.
Speaker: Most places it's cheaper than that and that's it.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: So I come home, laundry's done.
Speaker: It's all put away.
Speaker: Um, wife's happier.
Speaker: Kids are happier.
Speaker: I can actually spend more time with the family because I'm not sitting there cleaning when I get back.
Speaker: And it's just been so much easier.
Speaker: Okay.
Speaker: And I got a lot of these concepts from a book called buy back your time.
Speaker: So if you're looking for more resources,
Speaker: or more ways to explore how you can free up more of your time, I would definitely recommend that book.
Speaker: It's called Buy Back Your Time.
Speaker: But these are the two hires I would make, whether you're a rep, whether you own the business, whatever.
Speaker: I think everyone could benefit from number one, some type of virtual assistant, which I've had for a while now.
Speaker: And number two, a housekeeper, someone helping clean things.
Speaker: And I don't love cleaning.
Speaker: I don't think anyone does.
Speaker: So it's just...
Speaker: It's been super helpful and didn't want to go another day without recommending it to all my friends on the podcast.
Speaker: So I hope this helps somebody.
Speaker: If you are spending too much time cleaning or doing things that you hate doing, then consider getting a housekeeper.
Speaker: It changed my business.
Speaker: I hope it changes yours.
Speaker: Hit me up if you have more advice, more thoughts on freeing up your time.
Speaker: This is a topic I'm fascinated by and always looking to be more efficient.
Speaker: So I'll
Speaker: Always be thinking about that and stay tuned.
Speaker: We got some exciting guests coming up here in future episodes.
Speaker: Actually, next episode, you're not going to want to miss this.
Speaker: We have Jordan Stupar.
Speaker: He is coming on and just dropping some bombs.
Speaker: If you have not heard of this guy, Jordan Stupar, he was Grant Cardone's top sales rep for, I believe, a couple of years before he went and started his own sales consulting company, similar to what Uncle G does.
Speaker: So this guy, he is blown up.
Speaker: You might've seen him.
Speaker: He has this little objection cards, cool product where he teaches people to overcome.
Speaker: It's like a deck of cards that has the objections on it.
Speaker: Really cool product.
Speaker: And this guy's blown up.
Speaker: So make sure you come and see what he has to say.
Speaker: He talks about how to scale your business, how to overcome objections better and a whole lot of other stuff.
Speaker: So tune in.
Speaker: He's coming on the next episode.
Speaker: And thanks again for tuning in guys.
Speaker: So we'll see you on the next one.
Speaker: What's up, solopreneurs?
Speaker: Hope you enjoyed the episode.
Speaker: Before you run out and start selling more solar yourself, wanted to let you know about an exciting new cheat sheet we created specifically for you in mind.
Speaker: One of the top questions I get asked on Instagram, on Facebook, by our listeners is, Taylor, where should I start?
Speaker: What episodes should I listen to in the podcast?
Speaker: You got too many podcasts, man, because now we have over 200 episodes.
Speaker: So what we've done, we created the top 10 most downloaded, most listened to, and I would say widely accepted, most useful podcasts that we've done here on Solopreneur.
Speaker: We put them together all in one sheet so you can go, you can hit the ground running, especially if you're new, you do not want to not have this sheet.
Speaker: So go download it right now.
Speaker: It's going to be at top10.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Again, that's top10, the number 10,.solarpreneurs.com.
Speaker: Don't forget the S on solarpreneurs.
Speaker: We will have that in the show notes.
Speaker: Go download it right now.
Speaker: And especially if you have not listened to them, go listen to them and you can re-listen to them.
Speaker: That's going to show you how.
Speaker: So go download it and we'll see you on the other side.
