How to Grow Your Business Through Hiring Well with The Founder of Hello Savvy Abbey Ashley
Episode 698: Show Notes
Do you find hiring daunting? Do you want to find the right people that will grow your business but don't know how? Then this episode is for you! It’s been a minute since we’ve had a guest on the Strategy HourPodcast, but we absolutely had to bring our friend Abbey Ashley on so that you can hear more of what she's got going on with hiring, and get some tips from a multi million dollar CEO on how she has navigated hiring in her business, along with a few personal anecdotes from our experience over at BossProject.
Abbey Ashley is founder and CEO of Hello Savvy, a new hiring platform that focuses on culture and community. She’s been named one of Forbes Next 1000 Up and Coming Entrepreneurs and Inc.Magazine’s Top 100 Female Entrepreneurs, and Hello Savvy’s sister company, the Virtual Savvy has been placed on Inc.’s 5000 List in 2021 and 2022, along with being named one of Inc.’s best places to work. With a focus on team culture and a ‘serve first’ motto among her team, her team went from 6 to 14 team members and over 3 million in annual revenue.
Her passion is to help other entrepreneurs creatively carve out their own path forward via online business, and today we are talking about hiring well so that you can grow your business. We are sharing a lot of mistakes and some of the ways we needed to grow in order to fully step into our roles as leaders and co-founders. We touch on how to navigate some of the tough decisions that come with hiring, and how to truly understand your role as a co-founder and how that shifts as you hire, and how to do all of that while you focus on facts and feelings, which is something we love to do around here!
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Being Realistic About Employees Who Are the Wrong Fit
We know how difficult the burden of finding the right fit for positions in your business can be. Abbey has an incredible way to combat the pressure and responsibility associated with keeping employees happy.Abbey sets up the opportunity to revisit whether or not a job is working for both her and the employee after a certain period of time. That way, it doesn’t come as a surprise if Abbey needs to tell someone things aren’t working out and her staff feel comfortable enough to tell her if they are not satisfied.
It’s a continual learning process. Everytime you hire someone, you learn something new about the process and move onwards to something better. It’s hard for the people pleaser in us. But it helps to remember that your business isn’t the best place for everyone. Emylee and Abagail have talked about hiring for attitude, and realized that having those checkpoints at 60 or 90 days are essential to figure out what’s working and what isn’t. That’s how you’ll know how to move forward.
What You Absolutely Need to Do if You’re Going to do Great Things
No matter how you feel,you’ve got to make those tough decisions. It’s one thing if someone doesn’t have all the skills, but you have a good attitude. That’s what happens when someone is the right hire in the wrong seat. But if that role is very technical and you don’t have anything else that’s suitable, it might be better for them too if you let them go. It can be hard to accept that someone would be better somewhere else.
Being a business owner is hard! At the end of the day, if you’re going to do big things, you need to develop a thick skin. There has to be an element where you just make hard decisions. What Abbey tries to do when it comes to hiring and firing, is to take the human element out of it and make a decision based on what needs to be done. Once you’ve made a decision based on logic, and facts you can enact your decision in the most human way possible that shows that you do have compassion and you are good people.
Why Hiring is About So Much More than Getting Back Your Time
For years, Abagail and Emylee were trying to do way too many things, to the point where they were overseeing so much of the end result that they didn’t even have the capacity to grow. Team has been the only way they have successfully been able to grow. Abbey adds that handing over some of the decision-making power to your team can be an amazing growth mechanism. She used to have a sticky note on her desk that read ‘what do you suggest we do?’ to remind herself of exactly that. Sometimes, letting someone run with their solution leads to mistakes, but you've got to allow that to happen.
You’ve got to shift your understanding of productivity when you become a leader. That means you have to start seeing your team’s productivity as part of yours. When your responsibility is to manage your team, their output is part of your daily responsibilities. You played a role in those deliverables moving forwards. You have to accept and be a part of more of the group effort that your team has become.
Three Swimlanes Abbey Uses to Boost Productivity
High level strategy, high level partnerships, and face of the company are the three swimlanes Abbey came up with to organize her output. These became the filters through which she would figure out which tasks to pass on to an employee, and which ones she needed to hold. It can be overwhelming to know you need to delegate something, knowing that you have to quality check it afterwards. Abbey reminds us that it's harder to delegate than it is to do the work yourself. She also shares that for her, she often finds that giving an employee a general instruction and letting them run with it is much more effective than giving them a breakdown of each task.
Often, the problem is not that someone wasn’t able to complete a task, but rather that they didn’t do it to the quality or standard you were looking after, which you didn’t even communicate! Delegation depends on who you’re talking to, how long the task is, and how different it is from their current role. It all depends on the person, but being mindful of how each employee learns is essential to getting the output you need. We’ve all made the mistake where we’ve treated our employees like an entrepreneur—you have to tell them what to do!
Avoiding the Hiring Mistake We’ve All 100% Made
We’ve all hired contractors who were not subject matter experts with the expectation that they would be subject matter experts, and we’ve all hired subject matter experts and tried to be way too involved in the process. We’ve made a million mistakes along the way. When you hire a subject matter expert, it’s less about telling them how to do that task well, and more about helping them to get into your flow through your processes. It’s about communicating your expectations.
The same goes for clients. Abbey shares with us the difference it’s made to get laser focused on serving one type of customer. That can change over time. She gets candid about the fact that every time she's gone down a road of chasing a hundred different approaches, she’s always regretted it. Her business is made up of three main things: a new paid ad strategy, short form content, and evergreen partnerships. Everything else stays the same. Instead of doing 100 things kind of good, she does a few things really well.
How Not to Make Your Employees Feel
Trying to do everything yourself is not only a terrible use of your time, it also makes your employees think that you don’t have any faith in their ability to do their job. To Abbey, hiring is about being able to focus on what she’s good at, and letting her team focus on their own strengths. Your weaknesses are someone else’s strengths! If you’re not happy not playing into your strengths, neither is your team. What You can do when you all focus on what you’re good at is pretty magical!
There are always going to be seasons when you’re working harder than others. That’s part of being a co-founder. But you’ve got to be intentional. If you let yourself do that forever, you will be burnt out. You'll Be unhappy and you won’t be able to foster the space that you want to.
Abbey’s been having these conversations with business owners for years now. She looked at the current hiring platforms and saw that they didn’t match up to the level of care and consideration she gave her own business, which she thinks of as her third baby! That’s why she started Hello Savvy, a place where you can find employees to hire who are congruent with your values. It’s not impossible without the platform, but it’s a place to find a long term freelancer fit. Somebody who gets it. We’re pretty excited about what that could do to our industry. If you’re looking for a place to hire, or get hired, this is the place for you.
Quote This
You need to remove the feelings, decide on fact, and then put the feelings back!
—Abbey Ashley
Highlights
Being Realistic About Employees Who Are the Wrong Fit [0:07:20]
What You Absolutely Need if You’re Going to do Great Things [0:12:33]
Why Hiring is About So Much More than Getting Back Your Time [0:16:38]
Three swimlanes Abbey Uses to Boost Productivity [0:22:50]
Avoiding the Hiring Mistake We’ve All 100% Made [0:32:30]
How Not to Make Your Employees Feel [0:36:05]
Today’s Guest:
Abbey Ashley
Virtual Savvy and Hello Savvy
Abbey on LinkedIn | Instagram | Facebook
Hello Savvy: Website | Instagram
The Virtual Savvy | Virtual Assistant Checklist & Starter Kit
Abbey Ashley is the founder of The Virtual Savvy and Hello Savvy, online courses teaching people how to be virtual assistants and helping people create, launch, and grow their businesses. With a master’s degree in management and organizational leadership and an entrepreneurial spirit, Abbey helps people turn their passions into profit through marketing.
Key Topics:
Hiring, Leading, Delegating, Business Growth, Online Hiring Platform
