Building a Hybrid Modeled Business
Episode 574: Show Notes
Today, we’re talking about what it is like to start to view your business through a new lens, specifically the new lens that we’ve been looking at our business through; the hybrid. What is a hybrid business model and how does it infiltrate into all the areas of our business that we’re running? Our hybrid thought process is something that has shifted how we view our business, from looking at each piece separately to understanding it as a coherent whole. A lot of this new thinking centers around our approach to hiring people and managing their roles, as well as our own roles, in our business.
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As you guys know, when we learn or uncover something we like to immediately turn around and workshop it here on the podcast because it helps us wrap our brains around it. We are by no means at the point where we have a complete understanding of what our hybrid business model means, we’re still at the early stages of discovery. It’s important for you to have context so you need to hear a bit of the background and how a late-night moment allowed us to open our eyes to the value of a hybrid model. So, join us on the journey!
The New "Hybrid" Way We're Treating Our Entire Business
We’ve been growing a hybrid business from day one, but we just didn’t know what to call it. The difference now is that we’ve started to think about this term in every aspect of our business. We’re a membership that acts as a service; we’re looking at the SaaS industry and modeling ourselves after that, and we’re also stealing from the membership world and what it’s like to sell in a recurring fashion. A large part of our hybrid model is how we run our actual team, using a combination of traditional and more casual, progressive management styles.
The Importance of Maintaining a “Life-First” Approach
Our culture was accidental in a lot of ways; we were running the business and doing things, and then we started to think about what we really wanted and how we could shape it. We asked ourselves what we wanted our business to look like with growth. We’ve been talking for months on the podcast about the growing season we’ve been going through, but you have to understand that there was a period in our business where we didn’t have the time and energy to focus on growing our business and we were very comfortable sustaining the business that we had. You are allowed to have seasons in your business, and sustaining profit is actually amazing. It also allowed us to realize the importance of maintaining a life-first approach; our lives will always be more important than the business we run. While the business does have a massive impact and changes lives, it’s also not critical to anyone's existence, including our own, and we cannot rely on it for self-worth.
What We Have Learned About Hiring
We’ve recently dived back into the employee realm. We hired an employee once before and it didn’t work out for various reasons, so we took a break, learned a lot, and finally felt ready to dive back in. At first, our brains tried to go, “If we’re going to hire employees then this is exactly what they need to be doing because that’s what we’re hiring them for.” It was really interesting to come to the realization that we could still have flexibility. We’ve recently hired two new people, and we’re so excited about the roles that they are filling. Something that we learned from our coaches about hiring is that you have to have a mix of styles of tasks in your role because that will help shape someone to feel successful. For example, if you are in a leadership role in your business, outlining your vision, and setting big goals and intentions is fantastic and a good use of your time, but on some days, you need mindless things to check off your list, and when you don’t have that and you’re stuck doing big thought work you can feel like you’re not actually making movement. We’ve reassessed and reorganized our roles so many times so why would we not do that for the other positions in our company? Although it’s critical to have some specific metrics, because if people don’t know what they’re measured again then it’s hard for them to know if they’re being successful, but you must keep in mind that you have the freedom and flexibility to adjust roles based on peoples’ personal skill sets.
How To Avoid Hiring A “Jill Of All Trades”
When you’re early on in hiring you need help in so many areas, but you don’t necessarily need a lot of help in all of the areas. It requires a special kind of person who can jump into everything for a short amount of time. A way in which you can create a hybrid position without dumping everything on it is really making sure that you have a clear job description, revisiting the job description on a regular basis, and having a clear project management system that matches the job description. You can tell people what you want them to do but if you’re regularly assigning tasks that are not related to the thing which you hired them for, you either need to rewrite the job description or you need to take those tasks off their plate.
Healthy Business Break-Up’s
One of the most critical lessons we’ve learned along our business journey is that the team that you have right now might not be the team that is going to get you to the next growth phase in your business. Relationships don’t have to last forever, and they don’t have to stay the same forever. The team that you have around you can change and grow as you and your business change and grow. Sometimes ending business relationships can feel dramatic and heartbreaking, but there is a healthy way to break-up with people, and we shouldn’t have to feel guilty about it.
Quote This
You are allowed to have seasons in your business, and sustaining profit is actually amazing.
Highlights
The New “Hybrid” Way We’re Treating Our Entire Business. [0:04:09]
The Importance of Maintaining a “Life-First” Approach. [0:09:53]
What We Have Learned About Hiring. [0:13:03]
How To Avoid Hiring A “Jill Of All Trades.” [0:26:58]
Healthy Business Break-Up’s. [0:33:04]
ON TODAY’S SHOW
Abagail & Emylee
The Strategy Hour Podcast
We help overwhelmed and creative entrepreneurs break down their Oprah-sized dreams to create a functioning command center to tame the chaos of their business. Basically, we think you’re totally bomb diggity, we’re about to uplevel the shiz out of your business.
