Wondering how to get the most out of your team?
In this episode of “The Business You Really Want,” hosts Gwen Bortner and Tonya Kubo explore the critical role that people play in your business. Whether you’re managing a small team or you’re a solopreneur navigating how to leverage contractors and vendors, this episode offers insights into maximizing your human resources effectively.
—
Listen to the podcast here
Resources – Making The Most Of Your People
Introduction To People Resources
Your team can be your greatest asset or your biggest liability. Tonya here and I am back with operations expert, extraordinaire Gwen Bortner, CEO of Everyday Effectiveness. I think, Gwen, every business owner wants a high-performing team that embraces accountability and drags the organization forward. I know, the question I always hear and I’m imagining you hear it too, it’s how. How do you get that team? How do you make it work? Do you find those people just out on the street already, like out of the box, ready to go? Do you have to train them?
If so, what all goes into that? This is what we’re going to be talking about. Before we go there, I just want to do a really quick recap. In the show, we have been unpacking the five key operational functions that make up the engine of any business. Gwen, we’ve covered goals, we’ve covered effectiveness, we’ve covered accounting, and now we’re entering the exploration of resources, which you have previously defined, if I get this correct, anything that’s limited in the business, which typically is money, time or energy, but also includes people, because there’s only so many humans to go around in any given business.
They have limited time and energy.
We have limited money to pay said people. What I’ve heard you say in the past, I’ve heard you tell clients this, is that people, team members, are a business’s most expensive and most valuable resource. What I want you to do is expand on that for me.
They are both things. They can be both things at the same time, or they can be only one or the other. Sometimes they’re only really expensive and they’re not actually very valuable. Sometimes they’re super valuable and they’re not actually that expensive. Generally, they’re usually both things at the same time. The trick is to know that that’s okay and to do it in a way that you’re doing it with intention. Now I do say that for most of the people I work with, that’s true. If you actually have a physical location, then your people may not be your most expensive thing.
Your lease may be, your physical pieces may be, but a lot of the people that we work with are doing what I’m going to call a virtual-based business that doesn’t actually have a physical location. Doesn’t have all of those additional expenses. Even when you do, if you get into larger organizations, still, usually their biggest expense is their payroll. The payroll number is one of the largest lines out of all of their accounting piece.
Challenges Of Working With People
The trick is that creating a return on that investment. I would love to say there is just a super simple formula. All you have to do is, and I would be the giantest liar in the whole world because it’s just not that easy. You’ve heard me say many times, that people are problematic. It is the nature of being a people. I’m talking about all people. I’m talking about you people, I’m talking about me people.
I was going to say, I’m a problematic people. I know this about me.
All people are. It’s the nature of just being human because we’re independent, we have our own brains, we think about things differently. There are all sorts of things that go along with that, which makes working with people immediately challenging because they’re not in your head. Even if they think like you, they don’t think exactly like you because all of your experiences have not lined up, just right along the line. That’s where the challenge comes in and finding the right people with the right experiences, with the right attitude, with all of the right things is where the challenge is.
It is not simple. I have been in a variety of roles over my career where I’ve hired lots of people. I’m relatively good at that process. That doesn’t mean that I’ve nailed it every time, even in this business where I haven’t been hiring lots of people. It’s been much smaller and it’s been less urgent. I’ve had the time and the flexibility and I still haven’t always gotten it right because of people. People are the common denominator. When we’re looking at this, we have to know that this is not simple. It’s never going to be simple.
Solopreneur Resource Management
That makes me feel better about my past history with people in my own organization. Also, what about the solopreneur? Right now, I’m running a solopreneur business model. At one point I had a sizable team for me, still smaller than five but when you’re looking at making the most of people as a solopreneur, how does that fit in? I mean, does the solopreneur just say, “This episode isn’t for me?” How does that work?
Very few solopreneurs aren’t interacting with anybody else in any other capacity. Now, they may not have an employee. Technically, I don’t have any employees. I would actually almost call my business a solopreneur business. Now, you and I work together a lot, but you’re an independent contractor. We have a few other people on our team that are independent contractors. Depending on how you define a solo printer, I could be considered a solo printer. That’s the first thing but even if you’re a really tiny business and you aren’t outsourcing anything to anybody, you’re still probably working with some a vendor.
There are some people that you’re interacting with. Understanding how those interactions are playing? What the value is? Are you getting the most value for the money? This is why I don’t call the fourth gear human resources. I call it resources because it’s not just about people but people are often really involved. It can also be about the technology, but depending on the technology, it may be having to do with people. There are lots of places that it falls in. Will it be as applicable as a solopreneur? Maybe not, it’s possible. If you stay and you hang in and you listen, I bet there’ll be a couple of things like that’s actually useful for this other thing, which could be like your husband or your children because those are awesome people that we’re going to deal with.
As a solopreneur, what I find is I have a VA I work with, but a lot of times the people I’m actually managing are the people who live in my house. It’s going, I hired a yard service so that gives my husband two hours a week into his schedule so that he can now do the grocery shopping. During those two hours, while he’s doing the grocery shopping, I can be focused on my business. I’m not paying that person out of my business, but yet it all works to feed into my business.
Human resources always has an effect because we’re always interacting with other people. The relationship can change and how we’re using it. Like you said, where they’re getting paid, if we’re actually paying them, all of those can come into play. It really is looking at all of those relationships. Sometimes we don’t think about what I’m going to call our very part-time relationships. For example, your accountant, you may only work with your accountant once a year but that’s still part of that human resources relationship. It’s just not the way we think of it because we think of them as a vendor. Most vendors, actually all vendors have some person behind them.
Like we have an assessment that we have our clients work through and that we work other individuals through. When we talk about resources, one of the things we’ll talk about, especially when we’re talking about people is, whether the entrepreneur feels like they have a high-performing accountable team that’s driving the business forward. We’ve talked about it before. If they’re not driving the business forward, they’re likely driving the business backward, or they’re the bottleneck preventing growth. I hear you talk a lot about the importance of placing the right people in the right roles. Can you say more about that?
The real problem is and I say problem, I don’t know if I mean it problem, but maybe I do. I’m going to stick with problem for the moment, is we tend to think about people and then we think about the job that they do. It’s really a backward way of thinking about what needs to be done. What happens is, and I’m just going to pick on you, Tonya because you’re here and I’m talking.
I’m here. I’m easy to pick on. I fight back sometimes so it works.
It’s an easy piece. I started working with Tonya and Tonya is really good at this other thing so then Tonya starts doing this thing too. We realized we needed this third thing and Tonya’s like, “No, I know how to do that.” She’s doing this. Over time, all of a sudden, Tonya has a role, but it’s this very weird convoluted role that doesn’t necessarily make sense. The problem is then Tonya gets this amazing situation and she’s like, “I’m out. He’s out.” It’s like, “We need to replace Tonya. We cannot replace Tonya because there is no other Tonya. Tonya is the only Tonya.”
Tonya is the unicorn.
Yes, because we all are unicorns in that way. We’re all special snowflakes. We keep trying to replace Tonya, but there is no other Tonya. It’s because we define the role around Tonya instead of defining the role and finding the person who fits the role. Often what’s happened is that the role that is Tonya is actually four different roles. It’s four very part-time roles, but it’s four very different roles. Now, could you find someone to do it? Possibly.
Could you find two people to do each do two of them? Way more likely. That’s the issue is we get too focused on the people and what they’re good at as opposed to what do we actually need to have done and what are the skills that we’re particularly looking for and being really clear that when you’re doing this, you’re doing this role. When you’re doing this other thing, you’re doing this very different role. Now that still may both be Tonya, that’s okay. Understanding that the next person may not be capable of doing both roles.
How do you figure that out? How do you figure out what tasks or responsibilities are role A versus role B, especially if you’re coming from that place of, I’ve been a solopreneur and I’m just hiring, or I’ve had this tiny team like we do and I’m just starting to scale out and get bigger.
For me, it always starts with the roles. Pretend like you don’t have anybody working for you in any capacity whatsoever, that the only person that exists in the team is you because since you’re the owner, you always get to exist. Beyond that, assume that nobody else actually has a job, whether they’re an employee, a contractor, or a vendor. I don’t care what job description we have with them and say, “What do I need?” When I think about a role, for me, it’s what makes sense that these things would go together so that we aren’t having to pass things back and forth, but also where the skills make sense to be together.
We talked about accounting in the last episode. I’m going to use accounting as a nice example because people are at least vaguely familiar with it. We often will think of accounting as bookkeeping, accounting, and like a CFO role. These are three big roles. Now, technically, that could all be one person. You’re losing some checks and balances in there by doing that, but depending on the size of your business, that may not be necessary. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t have checks and balances, you should, but sometimes that just becomes too much of a challenge.
As you grow, you may discover that you need more time in a bookkeeping role. Now, does that still need to be the accountant? Maybe not. Maybe the accountant you’re paying too much for to be doing the bookkeeping role. Could the accountant also be the CFO? Possibly, but not always. There are a lot of variables that go in there. I happen to like the finance part of my business. I’m a weirdo, I know it.
I actually do my own bookkeeping, which most people would tell me is a really bad use of my time. I enjoy it, I’m good at it, it allows me to keep my finger on the numbers and really know what’s going on. I do use an accountant for filing my taxes, but I don’t use a CFO because I currently don’t have a business that is justified for that. I have enough of my own financial knowledge to be able to do a reasonable job of CFOing my own business. I understand that all of those roles are actually separate roles. For the time being, I fill two of them. Now, at some point, I may not fill those roles but because I can think of them as a role and not as my job, it’s easier for me to think about when would I hand them off to somebody else.
That’s really where defining the roles and the responsibilities that fall beneath each role or within each role. That’s really where it becomes important is when you’re looking to hire help. I mean, oftentimes I see job descriptions, and everybody loves to send me job descriptions because I tend to know a lot of people.
Defining the roles and responsibilities that fall under each position is crucial when you're looking to hire help. Share on XYou do. It’s true.
Blessing curse over here. The label will be virtual assistant, VA. They will want somebody who, I call it the kitchen sink job. First of all, everybody thinks they know what a VA is and gives me ten VA descriptions and none of them will match. They’ll say they want a VA and then under there, it will have calendar management, and inbox management. Sometimes it’ll have an appointment setting. They always love to lump some social media management in there and sometimes they mean true social media management. They want strategy in addition to creation and coordination.
Other times they really just want the coordination piece. They want accounts payable, and receivable. I would love to maybe help a reader out here by figuring out what are the jobs that go together. You can imagine as much as I can that if I’m a solopreneur and I don’t have a lot, I feel like I have to throw a bunch of work to a VA to justify their five-hour-a-week minimum, for instance, or their five-hour a month minimum. How do I keep these things straight? You said, look at what goes together but if all I’ve been exposed to are job descriptions that are chicken sink style, I’m not necessarily going to know what goes together. Help me out here.
For me, it’s always if you were writing it as a list of things to do, step 1, step 2, step 3, step 4, at any point does it make. Where do these connect and do all of these things connected? Are they separate? Using the example you just threw out. The idea of inbox management and calendar management probably makes sense together because you’re usually using a similar tool, you’re using the Google Suite or you’re using Outlook or something of that nature. It’s things that are happening pretty dynamically.
It’s stuff that probably needs to be addressed at least a little bit every day. You can feel how that goes together. Now, someone may say, “That’s social media too.” It’s like, “No because social media can be scheduled ahead of time. There’s nothing really happening in my email and my calendar that is directly tied to social media. Now, maybe I’m having an event that’s in my calendar that is tied to social media, sure. There’s no absolute touch point there.” That would be the thing to say, “The whole social media piece maybe is a separate role.”
Where do those pieces tie together? What are all of the things that we need to have? The question that I’m always asking is, can this be done at any particular time or does it have to be done in a consistent way at a consistent time? I’m going to keep using this as an example, social media, we have all the tools now. It is easy to do a ton of social media at the beginning of the month, get it all laid out, get it all scheduled out and not have to touch it again until the beginning of next month. If you planned it and done all the things.
You may need to do a little bit of tweaking, but for the most part, it can be done. It’s done at one time and could be done. It also could be done a little bit every week. There are all sorts of ways to do it. I don’t know about your inbox, but every inbox I’ve ever seen needs to be managed at least a little bit almost every day. It’s dynamic. You don’t know what’s coming in. You don’t know what to expect. You cannot really plan for it in the traditional way. That’s a different role, where we’re doing something with it every day a little bit.
It’s not necessarily a planned thing where we cannot say, “In three weeks we need to be talking about this or I’m expecting this email in three weeks.” That’s just not the way email works. Starting to think about, I think it was Sesame Street, one of these things doesn’t belong. Remember back in the day. It’s that. It’s like as you look at the list to say, “Do all of these things belong together, or does something feel out of place? Does one of these things, or maybe 2 or 3 of these things, not belong?” Look at those together and say, “Where do we start seeing the logical groupings?”
Corporate Roles Vs. Small Business Roles
You also can go to plain old corporate America and say, “Let’s look at their big categories and think about where things lie. The administrative assistant is not the social media person. That’s somebody in marketing. Those are two very separate roles if you’re looking at big corporations anywhere. Social media is not being done by someone’s administrative assistant in corporate America. It’s being done by someone in marketing, in that marketing department. You can start also thinking about where those roles fall based on the type of work it is.
Another thing that we talked about early on here that I think is important to address is you talk a lot about the importance of having the right people in the right rules. Something else I’ve heard you say is that sometimes being a business owner, especially when you’re in a growing business, means that you have to come to terms with the fact that the people who got you here aren’t necessarily the people who are going to get you there. Talk to me about that.
Different people have different skills. We have skill sets of things we learn. We have attitudes and behaviors that are often way more inherent than skills that can be taught. All of these things play into whether or not a person is a good fit in a particular role. Most businesses when we start really need people who are willing to do a little bit of all sorts of things, but rarely are they exceptionally good at any one thing. It’s a bit of the whole concept of a jack of all trades. I’ve got more thoughts and feelings on that, but we’re not going to go into that.
The general assumption of what jack of all trades means. It’s not a bad thing. You need someone who can do lots and lots of different things. There are some people who appreciate the variety of work that comes with that. I had a virtual assistant a number of years ago. That was part of what she really liked is that she did a little bit of a whole lot of things. As I discovered I needed more directed work of a particular type, she decided that it was probably no longer a good fit for her. I applaud her for that because that’s really the right place to say, “This role that you need now is no longer one that I actually want.”
Unfortunately, very few people are as self-aware as she was. We keep trying to take our good people because she was a good person, she didn’t do anything wrong. I didn’t have any problems with her in any technical way as you would think of letting someone go. We try to keep finding something, someplace where they fit. Often as the business changes, there isn’t a place where they fit anymore because most of the people I work with are people who are really caring people, which I appreciate and I’m happy and we like caring for those people.
They’re worried about letting someone go. They’re good people. They’re still doing good work. It’s like, they really aren’t doing good work for you anymore. My answer always is to release them to go find the place where they can do the amazing work that they did for you but is no longer available in your business. It’s tough because you’re still letting someone go and you feel like I’m letting them down and all of the rest of the things. Keeping people who are not really a good fit means that either other people are compensating or you’re paying more for a role that doesn’t need to exist.
Letting go can be tough, especially when you see the good in people. But if they’re not thriving in your business, it’s time to release them to find a place where their talents can shine again. Share on XI’ve got so many situations that I can talk about where this has happened. They all look different every one of them looks different because it’s always a slightly different situation but it is not uncommon for at least some of your early-stage folks to not be able to transition because part of it is they don’t want to transition. They don’t want to take on this different type of role of responsibility or whatever goes along with it. You also need to know it’s not your job to keep them employed. Your job is to keep the business healthy.
That’s a hard distinction. My job as a business owner isn’t to keep other people employed, it’s to keep my business healthy.
Your job as a business owner isn't to keep other people employed; it's to keep your business healthy. Share on XYou can keep employing people.
Even if it’s not the people I have right now. I’m struggling with the idea of getting from here to there.
You should because it’s hard.
Good. You’re validating the difficulty I’m experiencing right now. I understand the importance of having the right people in the right roles, both because I want my organization to be healthy. Also, because I’ve only got so much money, and people only have so much time. If they’re in the wrong role, then there’s going to be a lot of waste, whether that’s wasted time, wasted money, wasted energy. There’s a lot of waste.
Tons of friction, friction for you, friction for them. Everything’s harder than it needs to be.
Setting Evolving Expectations
To get from here to there, my people, my person, how do I tell them, as the business grows, how do I lay out the expectations I have of them, like my evolving expectations? I think that’s the other problem we run into. I hired you under a certain business model with certain things. As my business grows, I am expecting different things from you. How do I lay out those expectations as they happen? In turn, I don’t want to say hold them accountable, but maybe that’s the right terminology. How do I make sure you’re meeting my expectations as we go so that I can figure out if you’re the right person to get me there?
For me, it’s always being as transparent as you can as soon as you can. Sometimes we get further down the road before we realize it’s like, “Wait, this actually has changed.” We didn’t tell anybody, not because we were trying to be all secretive, we just didn’t notice. As soon as you can. As soon as you’re aware. It’s like, “I realized now that this job is changing for whatever reason.” I’ll take the bookkeeping as an example. Instead of you doing the bookkeeping, we’re actually hiring an accounting team to do the bookkeeping because they can interact with each other faster. In the end, it’s going to be cheaper. You’re no longer going to be doing the bookkeeping role, Tonya. I know that would disappoint you to know that you were no longer doing bookkeeping.
I just cried a tear right there.
In doing that to say, “Where we need help is this position. Now I know this was the position we hired you for, but we think that you’re capable of doing it. If you’re interested, we’d love to have you start working on this and lay out what the expectations are of we’re going to have a conversation every two weeks for the next eight weeks so that we see how it’s going and make sure that it’s making sense.”
Some of them say, “I really don’t want to do that.” Say, “We understand that, but that means you no longer have a role here.” Just be straightforward about it. It doesn’t have to be a big dramatic thing to say, “These are some places where we need your help, and based on your skills and your attitude and all the things we would love for you to be able to do it. If you’re not happy doing it, then we don’t want you here, not because we don’t like you, but we don’t want you to be unhappy.”
We don’t want to shove square pegs into round holes. I feel like we’ve landed in a good place, but I want to recap, I want to give you the opportunity to tell me if I got anything wrong here. Really the topic is making the most of your people in your organization. Though you oftentimes say people are a business’s most expensive, most valuable resource the question that oftentimes comes up, especially for the business owner who’s on this growth or scale trajectory is how do you get the team? Your answer to that, well, the first thing is making sure you’ve got the right people in the right roles.
Building a successful team starts with placing the right people in the right roles. It’s essential to clearly define responsibilities, ensuring everyone knows their part in the bigger picture. Share on XIn order to accomplish that, it really comes down to assigning responsibilities to specific roles. You suggested looking for things that go together. Calendar management and inbox management goes together. Social media stuff goes with marketing, wherever marketing sits, whoever holds the marketing hat in your organization. Once you’ve accomplished that, you’ve gotten your responsibilities that fall under a role. You’ve got the roles assigned to the right people even if each individual has multiple roles. Like if you’re a solopreneur, you’re going to wear all the hats in the organization. The next step is really setting clear expectations. Early and often is what you said.
Early and often.
You talked about how, when you’ve got the wrong people in the wrong roles, or you’ve meshed too many different roles together, that’s the friction, which ultimately leads to waste, wasted time, wasted money, wasted energy, all of those things. You didn’t say this, but what I’ve drawn out of what you’ve said is these early, often conversations where those expectations and that accountability just is part of the natural course of how we check in with each other. That then creates that culture of accountability that I think every business owner wants and they don’t know how to create. Am I missing anything?
No, you aren’t. The thing that occurred to me as you were saying all of this is that we didn’t say that I think is also important is we often will get in the habit of hiring a lot of part-time people and every person who is on the team adds an exponential level of complexity and communication. Early on, you’re going to have a couple of really part-time people and that’s fine. Often we get in the habit of now I’ve got fourteen people all working for me.
Two hours a week.
That’s another place to be looking as well do we need to hire a different person at a different level who can take on broader roles instead of narrower roles? We simplify communication because too many people also is a problem.
Final Thoughts And Call To Action
Thank you for adding that because I think that is something also that gets lost in translation when we talk about business growth is a number of people. Nobody at the end of the day wins because they had the most people. They win because they’re the most effective with the people that they have. Now it’s time to turn this over to our readers. I’m just curious if you’re reading, how you feel about the people in your organization, including yourself.
Whatever your thoughts are, good, bad, and different, maybe you have more questions than you have answers, I want you to email me. You can find me at Tonya@EverydayEffectiveness.com. Tell me your story, and we just might use your story, maybe your problem, to inform a future episode of the show. Until then, we will see you next time. I just want to say thanks, Gwen, thanks for being here.
About Your Hosts
Gwen Bortner has spent four decades advising executives and entrepreneurs in 45+ industries. She helps women succeed in business without sacrificing happiness by identifying their true desires and aligning their business functions. She spots overlooked bottlenecks and crafts efficient plans toward sustainable success that center your values and priorities. Known for her unique approach to problem-solving and accountability through the G.E.A.R.S. framework, Gwen empowers clients to achieve their definition of success without sacrificing what matters most.
Tonya Kubo is a marketing strategist and community builder who helps entrepreneurs build thriving online communities. As co-host of The Business You Really Want and Chief Marketing and Operations Officer (CMOO) at Everyday Effectiveness, she keeps conversations on track and ensures complex business concepts are accessible to everyone. A master facilitator with 18+ years of experience in online community building, Tonya takes a people-first approach to marketing and centers the human experience in all she does.
