Why Hiring is Key to Creating a Turnkey Solution
Dreaming of sitting back and relaxing by the beach while your business handles itself? Read this first.
Many entrepreneurs dream of owning a business that gives them passive income and allows them to relax on the beach while it generates money for them in the background.
There are, in fact, people out there who are living this dream.
However, the reality for most of these entrepreneurs is that they aren’t letting the business run itself; they have a team actively managing the business for them.
The other reality is that the path to this freedom is long and arduous.
Building an online business in this day and age, when anyone with a laptop can start a business, is tough.
It can take months or over a year before you even start to see profits.
Buying a pre-established business is one solution that allows you to skip this building process, but you can’t just buy just any business and hope it runs for you, even if the current owner only spends a few hours a week on it.
Go Solo or Hire a Team?
Doing nothing to a business is a good way to let it die.
To keep a business profitable, you need to keep on top of it. For example, if you purchase a content site and don’t touch it for a year, some or all of the content is going to become outdated, there are going to be issues with the website, and some of the affiliate offers — which generate your income — are going to expire.
You should also be scaling your business, whether gradually or rapidly.
The industry is always changing; new competitors are entering the market, Google algorithms are being updated, and product demands are shifting, among other things. If you’re letting your business run on auto, then you’re not preparing it to deal with these changes, and it will result in the business’ failure.
If your business is small and simple enough, you can run it yourself with minimal effort — just a few hours per week.
It might not even make sense to hire a team for such a low-maintenance business. Plenty of automation tools can carry out basic tasks for you, so you can use those to your advantage.
You can just outsource irregular tasks to freelancers like content writing or graphic design.
If you have a bigger company that is more complex, such as an eCommerce store, then it’s probably worth hiring a team to carry out the day-to-day management tasks.
The types of tasks you can outsource include customer service, inventory ordering, article publication, and keyword and product research.
These are ideal tasks to outsource because they’re easy to do; you don’t need to provide much training to an assistant to handle the task. The tasks are relatively low risk. If your employee doesn’t carry out the task correctly or makes a mistake, it won’t be the end of the world for your business.
For more complex tasks, such as advertising, it might even make sense to hire a specialist who is more skilled than you are in that area.
Not only will it save you a ton of time to outsource these big tasks, but you can also see incredible results if you hire the right employee or agency.
With a business that requires a lot of maintenance, having a team managing the day-to-day allows you the freedom to focus on growing your business.
You can work on growth areas like branding and marketing to increase the lead flow, or if you have an eCommerce business, you can dedicate your focus to the backend of the business, strengthening the supply chain, and building foolproof inventory ordering systems to improve your service and maintain steady profits by avoiding stockouts.
When It Makes Sense to Hire a Team
The best way to determine whether it makes sense to hire a team for your business is to look at your business goals.
If you are making enough profits whereby hiring a team would be sustainable and you want to step out of the business, then hiring some employees to handle the day-to-day operations of the business might make sense.
If you hire growth-minded people, then they might even take it upon themselves to improve your processes and grow your business for you.
As mentioned earlier, employees with more skills and experience than you in certain areas can be a highly valuable asset in the growth of your business.
If you have multiple sites and you want to build your portfolio, then hiring a team to run your business so that you have time to pay attention to all of your assets makes a lot of sense.
Having teams run your assets gives you the ability to acquire more assets and diversify your portfolio further.
The more businesses you acquire, the more you’ll develop repeatable systems you can pass onto operator teams that are effective in keeping your assets profitable and generating an ROI on your investments.
You’ll also develop a stronger sense of what roles you need to hire for and what type of people you need to take on those roles.
The added benefit of this investment strategy is that you have the option to keep assets for recurring revenue or sell them for a profit and accelerate this asset flywheel.
There are some considerations when you’re trusting your businesses in the hands of employees, however.
The Risk of Being Too Hands Off
While you’re taking a step out of the business, it doesn’t mean you should step away completely.
Sam Walton, the founder of Walmart, talked about his “over-the-shoulder” monitoring strategy.
He would outsource tasks for his business but would look over the shoulders of employees to make sure they’re doing their tasks correctly and not making any critical mistakes.
Employees are humans and thus subject to human error, just like the rest of us. Even the most reliable and consistent employee can make a mistake at some point.
The risk of outsourcing all the main tasks to maintain your business is that you’re relying on the consistency of your employees to keep your business running.
This is where creating comprehensive standard operating procedures and providing your employees with in-depth training go a long way.
While it can be great for your business to take on employees, you shouldn’t completely disappear.
You also need to be ready for any external hits to your business, such as a Google algorithm update or Amazon taking down your product listing.
When this happens, you shouldn’t rely on your employees to deal with it. These situations are where you need to step in and take control.
Anticipating these external hits and putting processes in place to mitigate the risk of these changes is the best way to build a sustainable business. For example, instead of being solely reliant on Amazon for income through FBA, you can expand your business off of Amazon into eCommerce and start selling your products in your own store.
All things considered, it leads us to the question of what type of business to buy.
Which Type of Deals Should I Buy?
Deciding which type of business you want to acquire depends on many factors, the two main ones being your budget and your skillset.
When investing in digital assets, to mitigate the risk of businesses failing, you should invest in multiple assets instead of putting all your eggs in one basket by purchasing one big business with all your budget.
When building a portfolio of digital assets, it’s best to start with businesses in your area of expertise. For example, if you have knowledge of SEO, you should consider starting with content sites, which are almost always heavily based on SEO.
This way, you can use your strengths and learn the ropes of acquiring multiple businesses in terms of how to hire your teams to run your assets.
However, purchasing a single, smaller site might be more suited to your situation.
If you don’t have a lot of capital but do have more time, then you can start with one business, grow it yourself for some time, then build the team to run it for you.
When that business becomes hands-off for you, that’s when you can either keep it as a revenue-earner or sell it and reinvest in more businesses.
This is your path to potentially building a huge amount of wealth with digital assets, and hiring teams will be at the core of your investment strategy.
There are online business investment programs out there that allow you to invest in fractional pieces of online businesses that are run by experienced operators, just like our program EF Capital.
If you have no experience with online businesses, this could be a good opportunity for you to get in on digital asset investing.
