What to Do Before You Hire Marketing Help (Before Q4 Hits)

Thinking about hiring help before Q4 hits? Before you post that job or book that discovery call, there's one thing that decides whether any hire actually works, and it has nothing to do with finding the right person.

In this episode, Ruthie breaks down why hiring help doesn't give you your time back right away, the real timeline for bringing someone on before Q4 (and why waiting until September or October backfires), and the difference between handing off tasks versus handing off thinking. She also gets honest about her own hiring decisions this quarter, including where she's over investing and why that matters for what she hires next.

Whether you're considering marketing help, operations support, or something at home, this episode will help you figure out what kind of help you actually need and whether you're set up for it to work.

What you'll learn:

- Why hiring help costs you time before it gives you time back, and how to plan for it

- The Q4 hiring timeline: when to start so you're not onboarding during your busiest season

- The real difference between delegating tasks and delegating thinking

- Why documentation is the thing that makes any hire actually work

- How Ruthie is thinking through her own next hire this quarter

- The signs you're not ready to hire yet, and what to do instead

Join the next Marketing Mixer, a virtual networking event for mom founders. 

Don't forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode, and follow along over on Instagram!
@ruthie.sterrett
@theconsistencycorner

Transcript

Ruthie (00:01.174)

Welcome back to The Consistency Corner where last week we planned your whole Q4 from a summer afternoon. Now, if you did that work, there's a decent chance you got to the end, looked at everything on your page, and thought, there is no way I can do all this. If you haven't listened to last week's episode, you're still gonna find value in this one. But if you want to know how to plan your Q4 strategy, marketing strategy, what I like to call Christmas in July this summer, go back and listen to last week's episode.

But whether you listened or you didn't listen, you did the plan or you didn't do the plan, you've probably had the thought of there's no way I can get all this done. If you're anything like me and every other highly ambitious woman I know who likes to put way more on their to-do list than they humanly have the capacity to do. And that's why we're here today. We're talking about getting help.

And let me be transparent about what this episode is really about because it's not what the title might sound like and it's not a big old pitch fest. It sounds like this episode is an episode about hiring. And we will talk about hiring. And we're not just talking about what it would look like to hire me or my team. We're talking about the thing underneath it. The thing that decides whether any help you bring in will work and whether the thinking in your business has made it out of your head.

And onto paper. So hold on to that. That's where we're going. But first, let me start by talking about a tree. There's this old line that the best time to plant a tree was 10 years ago. And the second best time to plant a tree is today. Hiring is the same. The best time to have built your team was a while back, before you hit capacity. The second best time is right now, before back to school and the craziness of Q4. So

Let me tell you why now specifically is a good time. When most people hire help, they expect it to give them their time back immediately. But it doesn't. Not at first. When you're bringing someone on board to support you, there is a ramp up period. You're teaching, they're learning, you're both figuring out how to work together. And for a stretch, it costs you some time before it gives you time back.

Ruthie (02:25.836)

That's normal. And knowing that it's coming is half the battle. So that you can plan for the onboarding time, for the giving feedback window. And it might take longer than people expect because the work isn't only the tasks. There's this whole set of skills sitting underneath delegating that you have to figure out where handing things off literally is a skill.

Collaborating with a new person is a skill. Trusting someone and letting go is a skill. Giving clear feedback is also a skill. And if you've been a one-woman show, those are the muscles that you maybe haven't had much reason to build, or you haven't built them in this specific area of your life and they take some practice. I mean, think about it as a mom. How many times are you like?

my God, it's just faster, easier, more efficient if I pack the backpack myself, fill out the forms myself, get, you know, the teacher gifts myself, whatever it is, because there's all of this context that you've been carrying around in your brain that feels like it would take a hundred years to pass off. And so you might as well just do it yourself. But you continue to do that and you get burnt out. And it's the same thing in your business. But there is good news.

The right level, level, notice I said level of support will help you with this part. A good partner will ask you the questions, pull the feedback out of you, and helps you get clear even when you can't articulate it on your own. So you don't have to already be an expert at delegating before you start. You can get better at it by starting, especially with the right person.

So now let's talk a little bit about the timing math. If you want help, like in place and functioning by Q4, you're ramping up in Q3, which means we want to make hiring decisions in July, August at latest, so that we are onboarding in August and September and getting into that flow and rhythm by the time Q4's.

Ruthie (04:49.378)

Q4 hits and the holidays are here. Now you have a team that's already up to speed. If you wait until you're underwater in September or October, you're gonna continue drowning because you'll be onboarding in maybe one of your busiest seasons of the year, which is the worst possible time to teach anyone anything because you don't have time to teach, right? There's a meme that I always see around the fourth quarter.

Where like we've entered the season of circle back. Like, we'll just circle back to that after the holidays. We'll deal with that in the new year. And I don't want hiring help to be the thing that you have to circle back to in January because you're exhausted and you wish you'd done it sooner. Because that's the other pattern I see. Almost everyone who finally gets the right help says in the same sentence, my God, I wish I had done this sooner. I want you to get to say that in October, not in January.

And one more piece. The faster your systems, processes, and tools are in place, the faster a new hire gets up to speed and the faster you get your time back. I'm not, I'm kind of talking about SOPs, but I'm talking about some other things. And hold on to that thought because we're gonna get to that and it connects to the real point of today's episode. So I want you to name the cost of waiting.

Because it's real. If you put this off, your whole second half of the year gets harder than it needs to be. You might end up hiring from desperation instead of from a plan. And we've talked about this in past episodes that something that you do in reaction mode, in panic mode, made when you're drowning, is often not the right decision. You know, you might hire the warm body versus the right fit person because you're like, I just gotta get somebody in here.

To help me. So then there's this part of this that actually has nothing to do with you or your business. You're you're also maybe heading into the busiest stretch of the year as a person who runs a household. Back to school, fall sports, Halloween, Thanksgiving, the whole December machine, you know exactly how heavy it gets because you carry most of it. And most of what you carry is invisible. So if getting the right support in your

Ruthie (07:10.06)

business could create a little bit more calm in the rest of your life, why would you want to wait for that? And let me be, you know, frank with you, the help you might need maybe isn't marketing. Maybe it's operations. Maybe it's an executive assistant. Maybe it's a house manager. Listen, go follow my sage house on Instagram if you've ever thought about a house manager, because that continues to be on this girl's vision board.

but there might be a lot of there there's a lot of ways to take weight off of your plate. And I'm not gonna pretend like a marketing partner is the answer for everybody's situation. But if marketing is one of the places that continues to land on your desk and eat up your capacity, that's exactly who we're here to help. So when we talk about help, whether it's marketing, whether it's operations, whether it's your personal life.

W you have to decide what kind of help you want and where you're going to invest. And I want you to answer that with a question that kind of informs where are you already investing in your business? And I'm gonna take you behind the scenes for a little bit of what I'm living right now. Over the last few months, I've hired a content producer to increase my capacity around client delivery.

I've also recently added a LinkedIn specialist to our team to help with both client delivery and my own marketing execution. And I have a team member who supports the production of this podcast. Real team, real help. And I'm still, as I record this episode today, starting to hit capacity. So I set a goal this quarter to hire one more person because I knew that that would open up capacity.

But I had to slow down and do the work of what do I want that person to do to open up more capacity for me? Is it operations and systems? Is it another layer of client delivery? Is it marketing to keep our pipeline running? So I sat down like the CEO, I'm, I know I should be, right? And I ran the numbers.

Ruthie (09:30.669)

And they showed me something that was really interesting that I want to talk about because these are the types of conversations I want more female CEOs and female founders to talk about with each other. I am over investing in business development right now. Business development and marketing, whether that's coaches that I'm working with, marketing production, ad spend, memberships that I'm in, from a percentage perspective, I am over investing.

And on paper, that says that my next hire should probably go to operations or client delivery to balance things out. But then the real question comes up of like, okay, but where does that revenue come from to support another hire? Because if I pull back on business development and marketing and reallocate some of that money, I could hire somebody right now. But if I stop that investment in business development and marketing, what happens to

My pipeline. And that right there is a real CEO decision. And those are the types of decisions that we talk about when we do a cornerstone strategy, because business goals and the revenue that you have to fund where you are investing is a real constraint. And I don't want to just pretend like you have unlimited money, time, and energy because none of us have those. So it's a real

CEO decision. And it's a bet, right? I'm investing in marketing and I'm taking that risk. I'm betting on the pipeline. If it's a bet you never take, you never get the reward of it. Investing in operations or capacity or client delivery or systems or even support at home, those are bets too. And only you can decide which one makes sense for where your business or your life is right now. And

Like I said, I love having these conversations with clients and other female CEOs. These are the things that we sometimes talk about in the marketing mixer, which by the way, our next one is August. Check the show notes if you want to come. It's a networking event with real conversation about both marketing and business. And I'll save you the pitch, but go check it out. And I want you to be there. but I you can only decide which business investment makes the most sense when.

Ruthie (11:59.225)

You sit down and look at the numbers and you get clear on what are the tasks this person is going to do? What is this the thinking that this person should hold? And what is my actual return on investment, even if that return isn't money or it's not immediate money. That third one matters because sometimes the return is revenue, sometimes it's hours back, sometimes it's

or being fully present at soccer practice or on vacation versus half working your way through the weekend. A return on your investment doesn't have to show up on a balance sheet to be real, right? So let me take that whole tasks versus thinking distinction and make it a little bit more concrete because this is the part that decides whether you the help you hire

actually helps at all. I'm gonna share a client exam example. And this is a service-based business that every year they create a holiday gift guide, right? It's a curated list of gifts that fit their ideal audience and connect to the service they sell. They've been doing it for a couple of years. They know how to produce it. It's on their campaign calendar and they could probably build it in a day or two. But here's what they hadn't thought about is the gift guide built so that people can find it.

From search? How are we getting people to the gift guide? Are there tracking tools or links so that we can analyze where the traffic and the opt-ins are coming from? Is there an optimized email sequence behind the opt-in to nurture and measure the people who asked for it? And the big one, if you build it, they will come, is a lie. So building a gift guide is one thing.

Figuring out and thinking through where you're sharing it, how you're getting it in front of people, and how do you make the whole effort of building even worth it is another thing, right? Building the guide is the task. All the rest of it, the why, the who, the where, the how, the what happens after, the before, that's the thinking. And if you hire someone to do the task while you keep holding all of the thinking.

Ruthie (14:26.156)

You maybe have not solved your problem. You're still the bottleneck, now with a teammate to manage on top of it. The help you get, it it's real. It does open up some time and it does get tasks crossed off your to-do list. And it gets that out from, you know, under your own task list. But you've layered in new tasks, right? You've layered in managing that person, giving them feedback.

And then figuring out if they have the context to do the job and do it well, which is how often we get stuck into that, like it's just faster, easier, more efficient if I do it myself. So the real point of today's conversation, what I told you we would get to, is that none of all of this works if the thinking only lives in your head, whether it's household help, operations, client delivery, marketing.

If all the thinking only lives in your brain, whether you hire me, someone else, another marketing partner, another team member, it doesn't matter how good they are if everything they need to know is locked inside your brain because they can't read your mind. They cannot succeed because no one higher can read your mind. They just can't. So let me give you a small example of like in my own house, where this is one of those

Ruthie (15:59.757)

Okay, stop. Rewind cut that last part. I'm gonna cut this section.

So your business is full of like lists, nuances of your brand, your voice, the way you talk about your offer, the reasons behind the decisions that you've made, the testimonials that you use, the client stories that make sense, the why we do this instead of this and client delivery. If all of that only lives in your head, any help you bring in is set up to fail from day one.

So the foundation before you hire or right as you hire, having a plan to get that all out of your head on to paper. If it's marketing support, we want your business goals to be clear. We want your offers to be documented and prioritized. We want your brand messaging, voice, positioning written down so someone else, even someone else who's digital, like an AI tool, can use them.

And that's part of what we do in the Cornerstone Strategy. And it's one of the big reasons that we start there with clients, not because it's a nice extra or like it's a little bonus that we do before we start creating content for you. It's the thing that makes every single hire work after it, whether that's us or internal team members. Now, let me be honest with you. Who do I think shouldn't be hiring yet? Because

I'd rather tell you the truth than tell you something to go do something that you're not really ready for. If you haven't done the internal work of being okay with someone else doing something for you, you're not ready to hire. If you truly believe only I can do this, you're not ready to work with me. Because what I would want is a collaborative partner.

Ruthie (18:02.136)

The clients that I want to work with, and I would say most service providers do, is someone who will have open conversations, give and take, give feedback, ask and answer questions, and ultimately be okay letting someone else carry part of the load. If you're gonna hand something off and then hover over every comma, every cross T and dotted I, hiring help won't give you your time back.

It'll give you new things to manage and worry about. And if you have hired team members to help with client delivery, you've already crossed this bridge once. You cannot scale by doing every single piece of client delivery yourself. So you've had to learn to trust a team to expand. You've learned to stop micromanaging there. You've learned to let someone else do the thing and be okay with how they did it. Now it's time to do that for marketing because

You didn't start a business to be the marketing department, right? It's the same headspace, the same letting go pointed at a different function. You already know you can do it because you have done it. I believe in you. I know you can. So here's what I want to leave you with today.

We've been talking about the corner office and about bringing in a marketing team. Because that's what we're here to do. We are here to be the marketing team and the marketing director in your corner. But the real first step, whether you hire us or someone else, is the clarity and the documentation. And that's why we start every single client with a cornerstone strategy. That's where we get everything out of your head on paper.

Where we get your goals clear, your offers documented, your messaging, your positioning defined, and we build a marketing strategy that fits your budget, your capacity, and your real life and is informed by all of that information that's been living in your head. And I ask you the questions and take you through the process so you don't have to figure it out by yourself. And you don't have to decide when we do a cornerstone strategy if you want a long-term retainer. The cornerstone strategy is step one and it can be the only step.

Ruthie (20:14.304)

Maybe we take that strategy and you hand it over to your existing team. Maybe you bring on someone else entirely to help you run it. We design the strategy with that end in mind, if that's the part you want to do. That part stays open. You don't have to commit to it in the beginning. Because the goal is never to make you fully dependent on me. The goal is to get you thinking out loud, out of your head, on paper, so that whoever helps you.

Whether it's AI, a team member, or even yourself, just being like, my God, I just need a plan to follow. It's set up for success. Last week we talked about Q4 planning and we talked about whether or not you had the capacity to do it alone. So just consider this a nudge. It's it's not a panic hire. I don't want you to be like, my God, I have to find somebody right now. But if it is time to take the first real step in getting marketing off of your to-do list, let's have a conversation.

There's a link to book a call with me in the show notes. And whether that means starting right now in back to school season or starting later in Q3 or Q4, let's talk about it. And if we have a call and it's like, you know what, this is not the right next step for you, I am happy to tell you that. You know, I just as much as I want you to be set up for success, I want to make sure that we're the right fit to support you. And if we're not, we're gonna say that. So

Thank you for listening today. Thank you for being here. If you want to talk through hiring, whether that is operational or household or something else, these are the kinds of conversations we need to be having transparently as female founders together. So come to our next mixer. It's in August. The link is in the show notes. We're gonna have conversations about outsourcing, about getting support, about hiring, about delegating and letting go. And you get to have those conversations with real women. It's not a pitch fest.

Just conversations to get you thinking. Because the more we talk about it, the more we talk about it together, the better off each one of us will be. Because we really do need to cheer each other on as female founders. And I'm I'm definitely here in your corner cheering you on. And I'll see you in the next episode.