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You’re not saving money by doing everything yourself.

In this episode, I challenge the belief that you need millions before you can delegate. I hired my first employee before I was ready, and it created the capacity I needed to take things to the next level.

I share how to be ruthless with getting things off your plate, how to turn your day-to-day into a role you can hire for, and why hiring help usually needs to happen before you feel ready.

If you can’t take 30 days without your business falling apart, this one’s for you.

Key Takeaways

• Why not hiring is the most expensive thing you can do
• The 15-minute time audit I use to decide what to delegate and who to hire
• What the CEO role is really about
• The tradeoff for being an entrepreneur

 _____________________________________

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READ THE EPISODE TRANSCRIPT

Emily Hirsh:

As a CEO, you are in the 1% of doing something that the majority of people do not wanna do. Why? Because at the end of the day. Who does it all fall back on the CEO Also as a CEO, you are throwing yourself into a reality of constant unknown. I need to have the capacity to think about this future problem that nobody else is seeing.

Because they’re so deep in the day to day, and I have to come up with a solution and I have to see the vision and then bring that back to my team. If you wanna grow your business past the point that it is right now, you have to delegate this or you’re going to stay in the same place. So become ruthless with getting things off your plate and operating as the CEO of your future company.

Embodied CEOs don’t chase trends. They pave the way they lead from within. Move by purpose, unshaken by noise. When you are the source, you do not need permission.

Hello everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. I hope you guys are having a great week. I can’t believe we’re, time is so weird. It’s I, it feels a year ago that it was the holidays and at the same time, just yesterday, and the fact that we’re going into May is crazy, but also it’s only been four months of the year.

Is anyone with me on this like time? It’s insane, but we’re starting to head into the summer, which is always fun. I do lots of adventures in the summer with my kids because I try to get out of the Texas heat as much as possible. If you are a long time follower, you know about this. So today’s podcast episode, I feel inspired to talk about something that’s been like on my mind, on my topic list for a while, but I recorded today a social video.

That this just came out in the social video and I’m like, this will be a good podcast. ’cause a lot of people need this. And it’s something that I find myself coaching a lot in, especially my mastermind with entrepreneurs who are starting to build their team or have built their team and really being able to structure your business to where it runs without you in the day to day.

And how to do that, how to navigate, when to hire, when to delegate, and also even deeper than that, one thing I see a lot is the guilt that entrepreneurs have when they build a team and they build their company to where their team is maybe working more than them in terms of like actual hours behind a desk and.

Then they feel like who am I to have this? And I had this experience with a couple of mastermind members, especially the last round, and I wanted to talk about this and how to navigate this and that thought of who am I to have this business that runs like this or to have this?

So first of all, on building a. Business that runs without you. I think that is so critical that, that be, that is a goal. It doesn’t have to be a goal, right? But if you don’t have that, like if you have a business where if you get sick or you go on a trip, everything stops. It’s a very vulnerable business.

Because something could always happen, right? We don’t know what’s gonna happen in life. And if you are that relied on with your business, it’s just in a very vulnerable place where you can’t step away. And it feels like for sure, like you have a job, but almost worse, right? Because even in a job, you have paid time off.

And so I think for every entrepreneur, the goal. To an extent should be to have a business that runs without it, without you. I understand there are some entrepreneurs out there who are like, I do not wanna build a team, and they build their business up to a certain point and then they’re like, I just don’t wanna do what’s required to have a team.

And I do oftentimes challenge that because I do think that a lot of people think it’s way worse than it is, or way more pressure than it has to be. Don’t get me wrong, it is probably one of the hardest things you will do as a business owner, but it also has the biggest upside. That’s my opinion. I’ve had a team for eight, nine years and majority of the worst challenges in business have come from people management and having a team for sure, but also.

I could not imagine my business without my team, and I could not imagine living the quality of life that I have without my team. Not only that, but also delivering the quality of a product that we deliver because one person just can’t do everything. Like one person does not have all the skill sets that come when you bring together multiple people with really incredible skill sets.

And so as hard as it is, it’s like one of those things where the upside is. A hundred times worth it. So when people do come to me and say, I don’t wanna build, I get this a lot. People are like, I don’t wanna build an agency, I don’t wanna build a team. I can’t handle that pressure. You can do whatever you want, right?

Like you do make the rules. You are building this business to whatever level you want. And some people don’t wanna build it to the multi seven, eight figures. I also do challenge that and say. Is there a world where it’s not as hard as you think it’s gonna be, or it’s not as bad as you think it’s gonna be, and can you step into that discomfort to build this next level?

Anyways, that’s not necessarily what this is about, but I do wanna say that. So I do stand behind, I think a healthy business and really like you have a real business. Before that you have a solopreneur hustle, which is okay, right? I was in that phase for several years, but that can’t be the forever goal if you want to build a business that is sustainable and has that security of if something were to happen to you or you had something in your life that required you to step away from the business.

All of your revenue wouldn’t stop because it’s a very scary place to be. I think that’s even more scary than having the responsibility of a team. And so that, I think that should be everyone’s ultimate goal. So how do you get there? The first thing is you have to develop the mindset of valuing your time and energy.

Like it is the most precious resource, and I think this mindset for some takes longer than it does for others. S because there’s a guilt that comes behind this. There’s like a, who am I to say that my time is more valuable than somebody else’s? And I’m not necessarily saying that, but as a CEO, you are in the 1% of doing something that the majority of people do not wanna do.

Why? Because at the end of the day. Who does it all fall back on the CEO at the end of the day? In the middle of the night when you are stressed about cash flow or you lost a big client or you spent money on marketing and you didn’t make it back, and now you don’t have enough money in the bank. Like all those problems that we all experienced at all different levels.

Who does it fall back on? Who is up in the night worrying about that? The CEO and also as a CEO, you are throwing yourself into a reality of constant unknown. Something could happen tomorrow that takes my business down. Something could happen next week with ai, with Facebook. Like now, do I know that I’ll always know what to respond in those moments?

Do I spend a lot of time worrying about the what ifs? No. But what? But there is a tremendous amount of risk, responsibility, and pressure that is put on A CEO. And a CEO has to live in a world of unknown of trusting. I’ll always know how to respond to this, and I believe that the best CEOs and the.

Really people, only people who do make it as successful CEOs. One of the biggest traits that separates them from others is the ability to handle an immense amount of pressure. I truly believe that. And to be able to handle it as if it’s not, if, as if it’s nothing and almost even thrive in. And when I look at my friends who have eight figure businesses and the problems that get put in their, on their desk right, and the things that they have to face, the lawsuits the payroll numbers, it is an immense amount of pressure.

When I look at my day-to-day, it’s like it’s normal to me, but you put someone who is in a nine to five job and has that security, they couldn’t handle it, nor do they want to. So A CEO signed up for this, which means protecting their time and energy is not because they’re better than everyone else.

They’re different. Like we are different. We are wired different for sure, but we have to have a different type of mental capacity, meaning. As a CEO, your time and your energy actually has to be available for the unknown, for the unexpected, for the things that weren’t on the to-do list, that weren’t on the project list.

And so we have this switch that has to happen where. You usually start out in your business and you’re doing everything. You are tactically doing the copywriting, you’re doing the client work, you’re doing the billing, you’re doing the email, you’re doing all this tactical stuff. So you associate being productive with doing.

And we also do this a lot as a society because it’s tangible. I can check it off a box, I can check it off a to-do list. But as your business grows and as it evolves, and as it becomes a real business, now a lot of the things A CEO does is not like tangible, check it off the box. Sure. Some of the things are, but there’s also the moments of I need to have the capacity to think about this future problem that nobody else is seeing.

’cause they’re so deep in the day to day, and I have to come up with a solution and I have to see the vision and then bring that back to my team. How do you put that on a checklist? Because there’s a lot of unknown. There’s a lot of I don’t know what I don’t know, and I need to have the capacity, or I need to have the capacity to lead my team through a problem that came up this week that we weren’t expecting.

And I need to have the capacity to be able to step in and give these people attention. I can’t put that on a checklist for the week. So the way that you allocate your time and energy greatly shifts as you step into a role of A CEO, which means you have to value your time and energy. As if it’s the most precious resource because it is.

Which means anything that you shouldn’t be doing should be being delegated. Like the entire day to day of your business should be being delegated. And that’s the goal, right? That, that can’t happen overnight. And sometimes you’re in a place where you can afford it and sometimes you’re not. But, and it’s a process.

But I remember if I go back to when I first started building a team, this was like eight years ago, and I, this is when I hired my first real mentor because I was like, I got my business to this. Point by hustle. By grind. Working late at working when my baby was napping, doing everything myself, figuring it out was chaos.

And it worked. It got me actually almost to six figures because I’m such a grinder. Like you couldn’t pay me to go back to that season in business. And to me that was normal. But then once you have a taste of a different normal, like you couldn’t pay me to go back anyways. I remember when I started hiring a team, and I remember the conversations with this mentor where I was like, no one will be able to have a strategy call with a client and come up with strategy the way I do.

And my mentor was like, Emily, you’re not that special. You’re not this like special marketing unicorn that only you can come up with this. And I’m like, yeah, I am. Like I, I can’t imagine somebody else being able to do it to this level. And he’s you have to create a process. You have to create a process that you can train your team on.

And that is actually what, where the process was born that we still use today, which looks like the layers of marketing, of messaging, of visibility, of lead gen, of sales, of how I look at it. And so I actually originally created that eight years ago and then we called it like the Hirsch marketing method or something.

And that was just to train my team. And then from there it became like an external thing. I teach it on webinars and everything. At first, that was just to train my team. And so that, that’s the first thing is like you have to value your time and energy. You have to be ruthless with how much you get off your plate and the value shifts from you doing everything to a team, running a process, running a method that they are trained on.

And so I made this transition and I, it definitely took time and I know that a lot of people are like how do I know. You know who to hire and when to hire, and how much to put into that expenses. And so here’s what I say as with business, nothing is black and white. So nothing is as straightforward and simple as like when you hit this number, this is the role you hire.

You have to look at a few things. One. Where are you spending your time and energy and doing something like a time study is one of the most effective tools. My mentor, who I’ll name Alex Sharpen, this was years ago. He doesn’t even teach business strategy, but he taught me this and it was like, every 15 minutes, write down what you’re doing and then you do that for two weeks.

And you take that and you say, okay, how could I create a job from this? And I think you can do it over and over, like you might have some team you might not like, how do you offload as much as possible? And you look at either what is taking a huge amount of your time that somebody else could do, or what are you also doing that you’re not very good at?

That an expert could come in and do in a quarter of the time and probably do a better job. And I think that does come up with a lot of marketing stuff. If you are writing all your copy and doing all your tech, I guarantee you someone could do it way faster. And this is the mindset block that entrepreneurs have is they think they’re saving money, but they’re wasting so much time that it’s actually costing them money.

And this like very limiting belief of I don’t have enough money to pay for someone to help me, but if I did pay for someone, I’d get this much better results and I’d get this much time back. And so then what could you do with that time? So you look at how could someone come in and take a lot of what I’m doing?

What am I spending my time on? Or how could someone come in and take what I’m doing that I’m not very good at? And then you play out, okay, if I invested in this role, is it an assistant? Is it marketing? I think marketing is one of the first things that. People should outsource. I know I’m biased, but I think there’s so many people that try to do all of their marketing and their business does not grow for months and months because they’re trying to do it all and they suck at it, and I think like client delivery for a lot of people is actually easier. So I delegated. Marketing first. Now I am a marketer, but I delegated like a copywriter, I think was the first hire that I made because I was writing all this copy and there was no AI also back then to even help me. And it was taking me forever.

I was writing my copy, I was writing client copy, so I did a copywriter first. Then I brought an ads manager on because I brought someone on to handle all this tech and the pixels, and it was taking me so long. And so for my business, it’s gonna be different than yours. But I think finding those things and then saying, okay, if I spend this much on hiring someone and I get back this much time, and then I put that time into this business growth activity or this next thing, how much more money could I make?

And also if they did it and they did it triple the amount of time, like speed that I could do it, how much more money could I make? You have to look at what it is costing you to be in the day-to-day of your business way too much, and then you have to be relentless with it. And most of the time, hiring help happens way before you think you’re ready for it.

And I see this so much I see entrepreneurs say. Once I hit this revenue level, then I’ll hire help. Once I have this many clients, then I’ll hire help. Once I get this many sales, I’ll hire help. And it’s but if you hired the help, could you get there like 10 times faster? Probably. And so it’s a very limiting belief because there’s a lot of fear.

If I spend the money, what if I don’t make it back? And obviously there has to be good decisions and you’re gonna make some bad decisions. You’re gonna invest in something, you’re going to lose money. That will happen in business over and over again, that you will either spend money on something like marketing, or you’ll spend money on hiring a VA or hiring somebody to do something and they don’t do a good job, or it doesn’t save you time, or it doesn’t save you money.

Those are not failures. That is data, and that is a natural part of the process. But by staying stuck in a place where you never make those decisions, you are staying in the same place of your business. So that’s like the first piece of this is. Really challenging you to look at how you’re spending your time right now and look at how you could get out of the day-to-day of your business and be relentless with it.

I had one of the girls in my mastermind the last round, she had such a block to this, like she wanted to do everything and I just, each week was like pushing her you have to delegate this. If you wanna grow your business past the point that it is right now, you have to delegate this or you’re going to stay in the same place.

You have no more time. You are maxed out. You have hit a ceiling. And so at that ceiling, now it’s grow the team or stay right here. Do you wanna stay right here? That’s a choice you could make? No, of course. I don’t wanna stay right here. Okay. So we have to grow the team and we have to be relentless with delegating and retrain yourself at how you look at your role.

I had this conversation with Mallory, who I think she talked about it. At one point in some content where I, we, she went to my Alaska retreat, this was almost two years ago, and we were on a hike and I said, you are still operating like a bootstrapping CEO when you have a almost seven figure business and you’re still taking things on and doing things for your team and solving the problems and operating as if you are bootstrapping this business when you’ve built, almost at that time, she was almost at a million dollar business.

And she was like, oh my gosh, you’re so right. And so this is also where, like as a CEO the version of you that got you to the first few sales that got you to the first six figures that got you the seven figures for me the version of me at eight figures is completely different. The way I operate my beliefs, the way I show up, the way I look at my role, the way I look at my team, the way I, and you have to figure out, okay, what would that future CEO do?

So that’s on of course, delegating and building a business that runs without you. And the way to do that is to look at how you’re spending your time and then just be ruthless with how do I get myself out of the day to day? And what I actually told one of the mastermind members last time was, I said, if I told you that you had no other option but to take 30 days off, let’s just say that something came up.

You have to take 30 days off in two weeks and you have no choice. Okay. If you had that pressure put on you and you had that deadline, what would you do? What help would you hire? What would you delegate? What would you get off your plate? You had to, you have to take 30 days off and your business still has to run without you.

And that’s the exact question you could ask yourself. ’cause I guarantee if you were pushed up against a wall and you had no other choice, you would figure it out and you would figure out how to get all that off your plate. That’s the answer, right? Like you already do know the answer. I know for me, every time that I had one of my kids, really the second two, ’cause the first I started my business with, it was such a deadline of getting myself out of the business.

And it was beautiful because it pushed me to. Get the help to do everything I could. It was like wild, productive at nesting in my business of getting me out of the day to day. Now I feel like I, I have such a structure that I really am rarely back in the day to day. Very rarely. I do have a lot of things I do, but that’s the other piece to this I wanna talk about.

So I work about 20 to 25 hours a week and. Th There are people that say, don’t you feel bad that you work that much and you have a team that they work 40 hours weeks? And also the one of the girls in my mastermind is she was hiring help. She was like, I feel like, who am I to delegate all this and then not have something to do?

And I get that. I get it. Because that’s because you’re associating productivity with the hours that you work. Here’s the thing. I’m always on, partly by choice. Do I have to be? No. Can I fully unplug? Yes. But when I’m at the gym, I stop work around 2, 2 30. I go to the gym. I still am answering messages, like I still am there for the things that my team needs.

I still am on. I’m still thinking about problems. I’m still processing the day when I’m driving to the studio. What do you think I’m thinking about? I’m thinking about the content I have to create. I’m thinking about this problem. I’m thinking about where our sales numbers are at. Are we on track to our goal?

If you’re a CEO. Your value is not in the number of hours you sit behind your computer and actually work. Your value is in your mental capacity and clarity in how can you lead your team? How can you guide the business, and how can you have the capacity to handle the things that nobody else can handle?

And until you see that as your role, you’re gonna constantly feel bad, not to mention. You are paying your team a full-time salary and giving them a job. And that’s what I told this mastermind member who said, I feel bad. I said, you shouldn’t feel bad. You’re giving these people an opportunity. You’re giving them a job.

And they wouldn’t otherwise have this opportunity, in her case, to work from home, to make money, to help support their family. Like you are providing an opportunity by having your company. And guess what? Your company relies on you as the CEO to have mental capacity to handle the things that only you can handle.

Also, didn’t we build this for the freedom, right? For me, this is how I look at it. I exchange the time and money freedom that I have for the pressure and. Weight that is sometimes on my shoulders that comes with running a company and comes with being the last stop and being the one that’s no one’s coming to save you as a CEO.

You can save the employees, you can save the company, but no one is coming to save the CEO. It stops at the CEO. And that is something that not everybody wants to sign up for, but I signed up for it. Knowing that’s, that is the exchange. I get the time freedom. I get to make my own schedule.

I get to go be with my kids on their birthdays. I get to go travel for a month and work throughout that time. I get to make those decisions in exchange for the fact that when we have a three payroll month and there’s no cash left over, I don’t get paid. That is what we signed up for, and I don’t say that oh, poor me at all.

No that’s the exchange, that’s the trade off. And my job is to have the mental clarity to be able to lead this company and lead this team. And I cannot do it if I was bogged down in the day to day. No, I don’t feel bad. Now, when my team’s overwhelmed, I’m the first to be like, let me help. I wanna jump in there.

Let’s solve this problem. I’m here. Like this even happened in the last month where I was like tasking out things in Asana to help our team because we had such a huge influx of growth that we were hiring. Yeah. Also, the job of a CEO and a leader is to come step in when needed and support a team.

It’s not I’m so much better than you and I’m not gonna work at all. this is not a nine to five for me. I didn’t create this business to have a job. And some people wanna have a job, and that’s great. We need those people. But as an entrepreneur, you have that joke of I quit my nine to five to work like 80 hour weeks.

If you look at how much I’m on, I think about business all the time. I can’t turn it off. Once I start, I can’t turn it off. Like it’s actually why I don’t have Slack on my phone. And it’s why I don’t work on the weekends anymore. Because if I do, and once I get myself in that mode, I cannot stop. And so in order for me to be present in my life, I have to be like, it’s nothing on the weekends usually.

Because otherwise I don’t stop and I love it. I’m not, I love it. I love business. If I didn’t have kids, I would do, I would work way more. I only work as much as I work because I’ve designed my life to make sure there are other non-negotiables that are being met, which is time with my kids and my training.

And so then work fits in everywhere else, and that’s just how it works out. So all this to say not very many people understand how to build a business that runs without you, that the day-to-day runs without you. But I believe that you don’t have a real business until you’ve done that, because if you haven’t done that, then the second something were to happen, your business is gonna crumble.

So if you’re still very much in the day to day, it’s okay, that’s, there’s a season for that. But that can’t be the forever plan. And you have to start looking at what do I need to do? To get myself out of the day to day, and the most successful entrepreneurs I know, I truly mean this. They delegate so fast and they invest in that growth faster than everyone else.

I really believe that speed is one of the biggest contributing secret weapons to business growth. And because if you are operating with speed. And then what are you not operating with fear When you slow down and you don’t get help and you don’t take action and you don’t move to that next level as fast as possible without sacrificing depth, without sacrificing true connection to yourself, right?

We’re not being reckless, but we have urgency. We have speed. When you don’t do that, typically it’s because why? ’cause you’re scared. Because you’re overthinking. Because you’re saying what if I spend this money and it doesn’t work? What if I do this and it makes it so I lose this money?

What if, okay, what if, who cares that you’re gonna make it a better, you are gonna make the next decision? And also having that mindset, which just took me time. This took me time to build. I think I’ve always had this mindset, but as I did new things like build a team, it took me time to build this. But having the mindset of no matter what, I will be okay.

No matter what happens, no matter if that team member works out or doesn’t work out, no matter if I lose that money, I lose that client. I do this. As long as I show up and do the best that I can and make the best decision with the information that I have and the skills that I have and the wisdom that I have today, I’ll be okay.

Anything can happen and I’ll be okay. And I truly do know that, and I’ve said that. I know I’ve said this before on the podcast. And so operating and making that decision to get yourself outta the day to day. To get the help with your marketing, to get the help with your client delivery, to value your time to start acting like a real CEO with speed and urgency.

You can’t be also operating in fear. And a lot of times for entrepreneurs, fear is running the show fear and the anxiety and the overthinking, and nobody can get rid of that. But you first, you gotta see it and you’ve gotta say, okay, I see that I’m doing this to myself. I’m telling myself these stories that are not true, and then you choose to not show up that way.

And that is like literally the secret, right? Because then you become the CEO of the future company, who has the team who values their time and who’s building that business. So some things for you guys to think about today, of course you probably already know this, but if you’re like, yeah, let me outsource my marketing.

This is literally why we do what we do. It’s why I built our offers our two new offers that we have, we built in the last 90 days. That are implementation support because I want CEOs who aren’t ready for the full done for you to be able to offload the copy, the funnel building the tech, like all of these things that bog them down and make it so they take 3, 4, 5, 6 months to launch a funnel.

You can’t do that. You gotta move faster. What is it costing you to try to do everything yourself? If you really sat and thought about that, you would realize it’s costing you a lot. So become ruthless with getting things off your plate and operating as the CEO of your future company. Everybody, thank you so much for tuning in and I will talk to you next time.