Build to Enough

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Keila Hill-Trawick: Hello. You're listening to Build to Enough, a podcast for entrepreneurs who want to scale at their own pace. I'm your host, Kaela Traywick, and I'll be your chief storyteller and cheerleader in a world that glorifies endless expansion, we're tuning out the noise and discussing the beauty of enough. Each episode will dive into inspiring stories, practical insights, and strategies to cultivate sustainable success on your [00:00:30] own terms. So whether you're a solopreneur, small business owner, or aspiring entrepreneur, get ready for a refreshing take on the entrepreneurial journey. This is build to enough.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Hey, and welcome back! So if you've listened to our past episode about benefits to a team, you might have started thinking like, what if I don't have a team? Or what if I'm trying this new hiring aspect within my firm? I got you. Today we're going to [00:01:00] talk about how hiring quality people increases capacity and saves you money. Now, even for entry level positions, any time you hire somebody, the whole goal is that they're giving you more space to be able to enhance service quality and to treat what you do with more care. Right. It is very hard to do that when you are the only person. Or maybe it's you and one other person. And so every time you add someone, you really expand what you're able to do and hopefully the ideas that you're leading to cost savings and [00:01:30] time savings over time.

Keila Hill-Trawick: But the thing is, there are costs to hiring, right? So not just money, which is what it requires in order to be able to hire and retain somebody. But when you hire poorly, you wasted that money, you wasted that time, and you potentially wasted an opportunity to hire somebody who is a better fit for you. So when you hire quality the first time, you can reduce errors, you have better efficiency and you enhance team performance. Everybody is lifted by the newest, [00:02:00] best hire and at the same time, everybody is lowered. When somebody is not doing the job that you're paying them for. And there's a reason why quality over quantity matters. Now, you know, here at Build to Enough, we are all about you staying small and really a smaller, more skilled team can outperform a larger, less experienced or more spread out team and a lot of different ways. So for example, if you've got a small, competent bookkeeping staff and then you've got senior [00:02:30] accountants who are reviewing their work, the better those bookkeepers are, the more excellent they are, the more on top of it they are, the more that the senior accountant can spend on higher level work and focusing on financial analysis, instead of picking out all the errors that are happening in the books. Right. But that means that both of them have to be good so that you are not doing a review that is picking out those smaller things when we think about the impact of quality hires.

Keila Hill-Trawick: I want to give an example of a senior accountant. Now, I know for [00:03:00] a lot of firms, the senior accountant is like the unicorn because we know that they are really the linchpin in everything that we do. They are serving as the review for all of the work that actually gets moved up, and they're serving as kind of the first level analysis for the person that's going to report to the client. So let's say that you have a senior accountant that is spending way too much time on bookkeeping tasks. So they are doing all of the bookkeeping work. They're doing all of the transactions and categorizations. [00:03:30] They are reviewing it and they're building financial reports. One they are only one person, so their bandwidth is limited. And so your solution is to hire a highly skilled bookkeeper that will make sure that it's accurate. And the senior accountant can focus on more complex tasks. That requires two really quality hires, right? The senior accountant has to be ready and able to be a good reviewer, and the bookkeeper has to provide accurate financials that are being reviewed. This means [00:04:00] that once both of those are really good, you can bring on new clients, right? You know that the senior accountant is not full. They have space because they're being supported by a quality bookkeeper.

Keila Hill-Trawick: You can provide higher level services. Everybody that levels up allows you to expand how you can have a deeper relationship with client services. And all of that is to increase revenue. We want to make more money, and it is very hard to make money on the lowest level of service. But those services are absolutely [00:04:30] necessary in order for us to provide the highest level of services and quality hires. Don't just start and stop with accounting hires, right? So if you are trying to do marketing efforts, hiring a copywriter or somebody that can build out social media is going to be a much better use of your time and money than you running the firm and also being responsible for it. Ask me how I know. It also allows you to be able to focus on growth and what [00:05:00] kind of clients you want to bring in, and have somebody else message that out to the world so that you can focus on providing the best service in-house and then customer service. Is there somebody on your team that can help your clients fix their password, log into something, know exactly where to find a copy of their contract. The better you can hire somebody that can keep that organized and resurface it very easily, the easier it is to provide redundancy within the team when that person is out, or when that person no longer works [00:05:30] for you, the better that structure is set up for that role, the easier you can kind of delegate when there are any shifts within the business.

Keila Hill-Trawick: There's also long term benefits, obviously, to hiring quality because you have increased capacity. You can also bring on more clients. And when you bring on more clients, you can best serve serves them with best practices. You've got more people in the pot that you can look at what they do and how they're working, so that you can see those pain points that are coming up more often and be able to better serve them for people. [00:06:00] That allows you to expand services or take on more projects without overwhelming the people that already work with you. You've also got cost savings when you mess up a lot. It costs to fix it, and so if you have fewer mistakes and less rework time, you can save money and time in the long run because you're able to just keep moving forward. You're able to move to the next month's financials or the next week's bookkeeping without spending a lot of time in the past. Finally, when you have more efficient processes, you don't [00:06:30] need as many resources. You will be able to take better advantage of your software and your team without paying a whole lot in redundancy that you didn't really need because you haven't had time to look into it.

Keila Hill-Trawick: Lastly, and I would say maybe most important is improved employee retention. We're not at a place where people are going to work at the same job forever. But quality hires are more engaged and satisfied with their work, and so they're more likely to work for you for longer. That's really good, not just for them, but also for the rest of the team. [00:07:00] When you can keep a cohesive team that's been working with each other for a while, you build in some of this, um, synchronized way of working because everybody is used to doing it in a similar way and bouncing ideas off of each other. The more turnover you have, the harder it is to continue that. So let's say you're ready to hire and you're trying to figure out, how do I even start attracting a team that I can retain? The first thing is create an attractive job offering. Be clear about [00:07:30] what people are doing and what you're expecting of them. Offer competitive salaries and benefits if you have questions about benefits, we did an episode on that. Definitely go back and listen. But also, what would their career path look like? Who are they reporting to? What are you expecting from them? Make sure you emphasize your company culture and the value of the role, especially with a small team. Again, everybody has to be excellent, and because of that, everybody needs to know that their job matters.

Keila Hill-Trawick: There are no low roles at [00:08:00] Little Fish. I need everything to be really good no matter what your position is, and you want to make sure that that's really clear from the very beginning. Make sure that you're focused on behavioral and skill based interviews. Your interviews and onboarding needs to be effective because just like with your clients, it sets the tone for how somebody will work with your firm. And if you can set that up before they even get in, you have the ability to find candidates who really fit your needs, not just because they can do the task, but because they will fit with your team. How [00:08:30] you work your processes, how much technology you use and how you communicate. And then once they're in, provide comprehensive onboarding. Make sure that you or somebody on your team is talking to them, get them into the work as soon as possible so that you can see what they can do, and so that you can set new hires up for success from day one. And then finally, make sure that everyone is getting ongoing development and support. It doesn't just stop with the teaching when they first get there. Invest in training and development so that they are constantly enhancing [00:09:00] their skills and offer mentorship and leadership opportunities. Maybe you can't offer it in-house because you're so small, but look at the organizations around you who you might be able to sign your team up for so that it doesn't take away all of your bandwidth, but they're still getting what they need to grow.

Keila Hill-Trawick: One of the things that we do at Little Fish is that we have a 90 day assessment, but we're tracking performance metrics every 30 days. What am I expecting you to have learned by now? What am I expecting to have been able to transition to you? Are you able [00:09:30] to do that? And if not, what is getting in the way for us? We also want to start looking at overall, how many errors are you making? Are you saving us time and is everybody else getting increased capacity since you work here. Finally, our clients noticing a difference. Do we have client satisfaction surveys that help us know how they were before we added on new hires and how they are after? And were we able to take on new clients? If the goal of this is that we can scale a bit more or make more revenue. Is [00:10:00] that what we're seeing at the end of this? Remember, bad help is not better than no help. And when you remember that, you'll want to make sure that from the beginning, you're hiring the right person on your team that is providing a quality experience both for your team and your clients. Make sure that you're regularly reviewing how they're doing so that you can keep them up to date, where there are changes that need to be made, and recognizing them when they're doing really well.

Keila Hill-Trawick: And then finally, assess your hiring strategy like this is a [00:10:30] long term hire. You're not hiring somebody just to sit there and you're not hiring just so that you can save money in the short term. You really want to make sure that you're reviewing what this looks like overall, so that you can have a team that you can grow with and can grow with you, and not just somebody who can, like check a box for you. At the end of the day, your team is going to make or break how well you're able to do as a company and making sure that you have the right person in the right seats takes you a far way towards [00:11:00] getting a deeper relationship and deeper services with the clients to make you both a better company and a more profitable one. See you next time!

Keila Hill-Trawick: Thank you for tuning in to another episode of Build to Enough. If you enjoyed today's episode, don't forget to subscribe, rate and share the love with your fellow entrepreneur friends, and make sure to sign up for the Build to Enough newsletter. The link is in the show notes. Stay tuned for more episodes as we continue to redefine success one intentional step at a time.