How I Knew It Was Time to Hire

Feeling overwhelmed in your business? Discover the real signs it’s time to hire help and how to build a values-aligned team that supports your vision. In this honest breakdown, Ruthie Sterrett shares the exact steps she took to go from solopreneur to CEO—without losing her brand voice. Learn how to balance budget, personality fit, and strategic growth to scale your business with intention.

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@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie Sterrett (00:00)

How do you know when it's time to bring on help? Listen, whether you're a solopreneur or you've already built a small team, if your plate is full, and as a mom, it probably is already full no matter what's happening in your business, how do you know when it's time to bring on team members or actually build a team? How do you do it? How do you actually build a team that supports your vision without losing control, without losing momentum, without losing your brand voice?

Today I'm gonna take you behind the scenes of how I am building the consistency corner on the agency side and what that looked like as I am building my team. Now, first I wanna take you back a couple years ago, three and a half years ago to when I left my corporate job. If you haven't heard this story, I've talked about it before on previous episodes of the podcast when we first launched. But I had to my corporate job because my son was in kindergarten at the time.

needed more support than I could give working a demanding corporate job and after sending in my resignation what I realized is that I had never been able to find that perfect job with work-life balance because I was meant to create it and I was meant to create it not only for myself but for other moms and so it's always been a goal to build an agency and I could be a freelancer I could just you know I've done that and I do that a little bit on the side

But the goal was always to build the consistency corner into an agency and have a team of amazing women doing work they love in their zone of genius, supporting our clients so they can do work they love in their zone of genius, but for all of us to have more flexibility to take care of both our families and to take care of ourselves. So how did I know it was time? Well, the very first thing that happened that made me think like, okay, this is time.

is my inbox is out of control. mean, out of control. Thousands of unread emails. I knew I was missing emails from potential collaboration partners, maybe from clients, the doctor's office, the baseball team, all the things. My inbox was crazy. And so I thought, okay, it's time to bring on some admin support, like a VA. And then as I was starting to think about what I wanted in a VA, I was also thinking about this podcast.

and getting support in podcast production. Because honestly, producing a podcast every week, it's about a four hour commitment per episode. And I knew that that was something I could potentially outsource. But then, at the same time, while I was considering bringing on team members, I signed some new clients and realized, my gosh, I need some support with client work. I need another content creator on my team. And knew that a podcast production person, an admin support person,

and a content creator, if I was gonna find somebody who could do all of those things, that was probably a magical unicorn. And hey, magical unicorns exist, but they're really hard to find. So I realized, what if instead, I look for all three? And so when I started the interview process, I let the candidates know, and even in the application process, I let the candidates know the types of tasks that I was looking to outsource, and I asked them.

Which of these things are you interested in doing? Which of these things do you have experience doing? Which of these things do you want to learn? Maybe you don't have experience, but you want to learn. And we kind of went from there in working to fit the right people into the right roles. And I knew in thinking about cost versus time that a less experienced virtual assistant was probably going to need more training. And was I okay with that?

And I realized in both looking at both the budget and my hours that there was a collaboration that needed to happen across hiring expertise and experience versus hiring potential, but knowing that I would have to spend a little bit more time and training. So how do you find the right people? Well, here's what I did. First, I went to two women who run training programs for virtual assistants. The first one is

Sarah Wiles who runs the Start and Grow company or Start and Grow Co. And I reached out to her and said, hey, do you do matchmaking? And they do. They have an application process. And then they matched me with five candidates that had gone through their application process or their course. I also went to Michaela Quinn who runs a course to teach people how to be freelancers and virtual assistants. And she does like a job board. So you fill out a form.

and then they post it on their job board and then people can, the candidates, potential candidates can contact you. So I have five candidates from Sarah's team. had dozens of candidates reaching out to me from Michaela's team. And I realized like, whoa, this could get really overwhelming really fast. So the next thing I did is I actually created an application and it was a Google form. And I used ChatGBT to help me write the questions and I...

worked with chat GPT on what am I looking for in my team members? And here's the like super secret behind the scenes tip that I am so glad I implemented. I'm really into human design and the Enneagram and personality typing and things like that. So I told that chat GPT I'm an Enneagram three wing two. I'm a six two sacral generator in the human design.

looking at the types of tasks that I need to outsource. Let's think about the human design profiles and enneagrams that would be complementary to me. And so we put on the application an enneagram question and a human design question. Now, those are not like the only thing I looked at. Obviously, that was one piece of the puzzle. So we had the application, we asked about tasks, we asked about experience, we asked about values because I want

somebody who really resonates with our values at the consistency corner of serving moms. We asked about experience. We asked about personality and human design. And from there, I took those applications and I again gave them to ChatGBT. And I said, help me look through these candidates and determine who I should actually offer interviews to. Now I probably had 25 to 30 applicants.

And the next thing I used AI for, which was really helpful, after every single interview, I took the transcript from our interview and I dropped it into that thread with ChatGPT and I said, okay, here's my gut feeling on this candidate. Can you look through the transcript and see what you're thinking or what you.

can gather from what she talked about. What would her best fit be in terms of the tasks we're looking to hire for? Did she have growth potential? What are some maybe red flags that I should look out for? And so we went through that process for all of my interviews. And then we kind of said, OK, if I'm just going to hire an admin person with room for growth, who is the right person? If I'm going to hire an admin person and a content creator, who are the right people?

And then from the podcast process, we had an interesting kind of turn of events while I was interviewing. I was also interviewing podcast agencies because I 100 % believe in outsourcing to experts in certain areas of your business. And I'll be totally transparent that that is like my next hire is a podcast agency. But I've been doing the podcast production myself for 200 plus episodes. know we've relaunched this.

version of the podcast, but I've done a lot of podcast production. So I realized I can do it. I have a really well documented SOP in process and I can teach somebody else to do it. And in that same time, while I was interviewing podcast agencies, I got connected with a local professor at a college in St. Pete who is a marketing professor. And she's put together an intern program for her students and she was looking to match them.

with local businesses to get some marketing experience, real world experience that they could put on their resumes. And I ended up bringing on two interns for the summer. realized with those interns based upon their availability, their skill sets, what they're looking to learn. And I talked with the two girls and their professor that I could outsource some of the podcast production process to the interns, which would be a really nice kind of placeholder as I

continue to ramp up and grow and get to a point where we can outsource podcast production completely. So in the month of May, I onboarded two clients, I onboarded two team members, and I onboarded two interns. And when I say that that was a lot of work, it was a lot of work. And I actually didn't anticipate it to be that much work. I thought...

We'll have a couple of calls, I'll share some documents, I'll share some processes, we'll do some loom videos, and everybody will be up and running by June 1st. And for the most part, that 100 % happened. I'm recording this episode in June, we are up and running, everybody understands what their tasks are, they are doing those tasks, but getting to that point was a lot of back and forth. A lot of do you have access to the do you need?

Well, this is how I do things. How do you do things? Let's talk about it. What makes the most sense? And I'm a super collaborative leader. And so I like to get input from my team because they might have ideas that I didn't have. And we've set up some systems and some processes that maybe even I wouldn't have thought of, but it's in these ladies zone of genius to do the things that they're doing. And so I'm relying on their expertise as well. So if you are thinking about bringing on support,

I know a VA is a lot of businesses first hire and I 100 % believe that that can be somebody who can really help you, but you have to know before you hire a VA, what is it that you want them to do exactly and have an idea of how you want them to do it because a lot of times, especially if you're hiring a newer VA, they are looking for that guidance from you. Now, if you're hiring,

an online business manager or a more tenured specialist, such as my content creator that I hired, they might already have processes in place. My content creator, while I had an idea of how we were going to do things and she's flexing into the way we create content for our clients, she already had processes in place and ways that she creates content for her other clients. And we kind of work together to work those things out. And I knew that because she was more seasoned and more experienced,

we would kind of need to figure out those processes together. So know that when you have a more experienced team member, they likely already have processes or procedures or ways they do things figured out And then the other process or thought process is if you're going to hire a full on agency, like I'm going to do for podcast production, they will already have

SOPs in place. They already have procedures. They already have an onboarding process. They already have systems and strategies and frameworks that they're going to use to support you. So you don't have to think about it as much. It's much more white glove plug and play. It's completely off your plate or it's a process that you can follow their direction versus you setting the direction for every step of the way.

in getting up and running and becoming an integrated part of your team. So what are my pieces of advice, my three takeaways for you? Number one, build SOPs while you are doing work that you are going to hand off. The podcast is a perfect example of that. I have a very robust SOP that I'm able to hand off, document a process to the team so that they can take it and run with it. Piece of advice number two,

Loom videos are my best friend and they will be your best friend too. So doing loom videos to kind of share your screen, walk through the process, walk through what you're doing, you don't know that you know so much. And so when you bring on team members, particularly if you are bringing on a VA or an intern maybe, you've got to share all of that knowledge that's in your brain because your team can't read your mind. And then my third piece of advice is

really know your own strengths and your weaknesses and look to bring in team members that compliment those. You don't necessarily want a carbon copy of you. While it's great and you want to connect with people on a personal level and you want people who get you and understand how you work, you also want people that can fill in the gaps of where it's not your zone of genius.

I asked them to DM me a funny meme or real that they had like recently shared with a friend. And obviously we're a social media agency, so I want to know that they are on social media.

experience with social media and that they are using it like a consumer. But also I want to know the vibe. I want to know what's your sense of humor. I want to know if you resonate. And those were important things for me to just kind of understand before I made that final offer and that final decision of who to bring on board.

I'm an open book, so don't hesitate to send me a DM over on Instagram. And if you are considering marketing support and marketing agency support, this is something that I tell my potential clients when we have discovery calls is, yes, you could hire a VA to manage your social media.

If you're going to do that, you are creating the social media strategy. You are going to be setting the direction and the VA is going to be filling in the gaps in taking over the tasks. If you don't want to think about the social media strategy, the analytics, the insights, the trends that we should be following, the tools that you could use, the tactics that are working right now, how each post individually fits into your business goals and moves the needle.

for your business and your brand, if you don't have the capacity to think about all that and you don't want to think about it because it's exhausting, that's when an agency might be the right fit, especially because not only is creating content and posting content something that you could take off your plate, but with an agency, you could also take engagement off of your plate and have somebody who's doing inbound and outbound engagement. Our agency, we also set up many chat funnels for our clients. We also...

offer our retainer clients like a bucket of hours that they can use for other marketing activities like scheduling emails or connecting with their podcast agency or building a launch calendar and thinking about and tweaking and updating some of their funnels. Those are all things that have to happen or should be happening to support your social media to make sure that it can do its job.

in you achieving your business goals. So if you're interested in what it's like to work with an agency, we are right now starting to look at onboarding or booking clients to onboard in the fall, in August or September. So don't hesitate to send me a DM. And if you're interested in learning more about working with the consistency corner, I'd love to help you step into your CEO role by being in your corner and helping you out with marketing and social media.

Thanks so much for listening friends and we'll see you in the next episode.