Look, sister. I know you want financial freedom. I ALSO know you want to knock this biz outta the park and make bank.
But also also?
You need to make sure your biz is sustainable long-term. Aka, you don’t want to be consistently overwhelmed or burnt out and you DO want to make sure you bring some balance to your life.
And the very 1st place you gotta do that?
—> Outsourcing.
We need to be really clear about the fact that there is a maximum amount of hours you can (and want to) spend in your biz doing work. Meaning, in order to keep yourself sane AND grow your bank account, you’re gonna have to let some shit go.
Maybe the first place you outsource is in your biz. (That’s what happened to me and my first team member was something that majorly propelled my biz forward!) Or maybe the first place you outsource is at home… and you hire a house cleaner, laundry service, grocery delivery, or childcare.
Either way, you CANNOT do it all on your own. All of the people you’re idolizing on social media and all of the big businesses you admire? This is what they’re doing.
They’re outsourcing like a MOFO.
“Wait Sara, but how do I actually know when it’s the right time to bring on a team in my VA, OBM, or SMM biz?”
This is one of THE most common questions I get asked. And I totally get why. It’s because in order to grow your biz you eventually *need* to outsource some of your work.
For example, I started my VA biz and quickly found success. So, because I was only able to work about 20 hours a week (thanks to my little one at home), I booked all of my available working time pretty fast. Meaning, I got to a point where new clients were wanting to work with me and current clients were wanting to increase hours and I couldn’t say yes.
And honestly?
That felt really silly! I was getting rewarded for doing great work from clients who were sending me referrals or asking for more hours. And yet I felt like I couldn’t actually reap those rewards because my hours were already maxed out.
I realized I needed to take on a team member who could work with me and at first that was scary as HECK.
Who would I hire?
How would I train them?
What would I pay?
How do I account for this?
It was nerve-wracking to hire my first team member but I also knew that *not* making this leap would stunt my growth.
And, y’all, I wanted to grow.
I find that this is true for a lot of my clients, too. They either hire their first team member once they max out the amount of time they can bill… or they max out on the skills and tasks they can tackle and need an expert to fill the gap. (Meaning, you want to offer Facebook ads but you aren’t an ads expert and so you hire someone to join your team in this way.)
If you want to sustainably grow your VA, OBM, or SMM biz, then you HAVE to learn to outsource and let go of some work.
But that’s not the only place you need to learn to release.
For those clients of mine who scale quickly… it’s because they’ve gotten comfortable releasing the need to do #allthethings themselves AND because they’ve gotten comfortable releasing a little something called perfection, too.
I remember when I first interviewed for the start up I worked for before starting my business. When talking about strengths, I brought up how much of a perfectionist I was.
Well, thank GOD for the woman who was interviewing me because she called me out in a way no one had ever done before. She said, “Sister, that’s actually not such a good thing because if you’re always stuck in perfection mode then you’re never in action mode. You’re so busy trying to make things perfect that you’re not busy making things happen.”
WELL HOT DAMN. She was right.
Perfection is what happens when we try to escape judgement. We’re hoping and praying and wishing that if we just do something perfectly then no one could possibly say anything mean or rude or hurtful to us.
But sweet sister, perfection isn’t your friend. She doesn’t actually keep you safe. In fact, she keeps you stuck.
I have a client who started working with me a couple of months ago making $0. Now, she’s all the way up to $7k a month. There are exactly 939470 reasons why this is happening but one of the main reasons is that she’s NOT worried about perfection.
Does she care about serving her clients really well and at a very high level? You betcha.
Does she get concerned with her logo, email signature, or IG hashtags? Not in the slightest.
This client is killin’ it because she’s more concerned with taking the action she needs to take to continue serving her clients really well AND do what she needs to do to grow.
Now, look. I know this is WAY easier said than done. But the truth of the matter is this: If you want to scale… then you’re gonna have to get comfortable with the mess… because you’re gonna have to get comfortable having some MESSY conversations.
You gotta embrace having convos about hard things (like money) and be willing to show up even though it might not be perfect when you do.
For example, I had a client recently who had a miscommunication with one of her clients. Basically, my client thought her rate was one thing and her client thought that rate was another. (Oops! Happens.)
So. many. women will not have this conversation because it can be massively uncomfortable at first.
But if you can embrace the discomfort, remember that you’re running a business (that needs and deserves to make money), and know that it’s OKAY for these kinds of conversations to come up… then you will have so much more ease in your life and you’ll get paid what you should get paid.
My client wanted to run away from the situation but instead she ran at it with full force. And you know what happened? She got paid what she wanted to get paid and she kept the client relationship strong too.
You see, these conversations are only uncomfortable until they’re not. Perfection only holds you back until you let it go. Outsourcing is only hard until you’ve done it.
The more you SHOW UP for these pieces of your VA, OBM, or SMM biz, then the easier they will become. The more you run from these foundational truths of running a successful business, then the less you’re going to get what you want.
It’s as simple (and as true) as that.
