749: Outsource, Delegate, Manage: Embrace Change and Build a Business That Runs Itself with Robert Plank

Robert Plank 0:00 Marketer of the day. Episode 749, outsource, delegate, manage, embrace change and build a business that runs itself with Robert plank.

Speaker 1 0:13 Hey everybody, what is going on? I know it sounds like a different voice, but you're listening to the Robert plank show, and I am the Special guest host, Lance thomashiro, and I always enjoy being here, but today more important than ever is I have a guest that you're absolutely going to love. He's going to share with us some thoughts about hiring employees, how you can get to actually doing it and overcoming, you know what is scary about hiring employees, and more importantly, why you should do it and how you can make them effective for your business, no matter how big or small that you are. So help me welcome Mr. Robert plank and Robert, it's good to have you on the show today.

Robert Plank 0:59 Glad to be on my own show. I would love it if more people did this. It would be so cool to, like, cycle in the same four or five people and have people on my show and ask me questions. But I'll take what I can get.

Speaker 1 1:11 I mean, better Better late than never, better few than not than too many, right? So Robert, the first thing that I sort of wanted to talk to you about was, you know, this whole idea of hiring employees. Some people will say outsourcing. Some people talk about sites like fiverr.com and I know that for you because I watched sort of the transition of this. I mean, it was, it was a hard move for you to make, to sort of embracing having employees. And so I think to start off, I'd like for you to sort of discuss sort of the whole evolution for you from getting to I don't need employees to, oh my gosh. How did I ever survive without them? Well,

Robert Plank 2:02 like you, I heard this same advice so many times for years, and kept ignoring it, and I kept hearing it in different pieces and worded to me in different ways. And the earliest time I heard about this was there was a guy named Joel, Christopher, and his niche was outsourcing. His niche was, whatever your business is, I'll build your team. They'll run your business for you. And I had the same objections as everyone else, which was, I can't afford it, or if I can't afford it, I don't want all the money that's coming in to go back out, or I don't want to replace what I'm doing with suddenly managing all these people. And this one thing he said blew my mind, which was, hire someone to do a task and hire more people to do more tasks, and if that becomes too crazy, then hire a person to manage those other people. And that's a simple idea, but that blew my mind a little bit, because I thought, okay, like, let's say that if something blows up and you have this crazy business with 2030 employees or more. It's not like you have to email 20 or 30 people a day. You might have one person managing all those people, and you can build it as you go, and it can become dynamic. And I think the thing that finally pushed me over the edge to fast forward closer to present day was this idea that if the person you're hiring makes more money than you're paying them, then that's the only goal. And I think that a lot of people, when they present this idea of outsourcing or employees, they look at it as what percentage of my business am I going to spend on other people? And then you end up with this idea in your head of making them 100 grands a year, but then only keeping $10,000 for yourself. It's more scarcity thinking. And I've heard you talk about this a different times, where you say, as long as they're breaking even, that's the most important thing, because then it's just free money. It's money that you you got it happened on its own or happened with minimal effort, and then you can cash flow that you can recycle that back into your business. And I think that's what, what pushed it over the edge, for me, was have the employee make money. Don't just get someone to help you be more organized, and that can be a part of it, but hire someone that makes you money,

Speaker 1 4:22 yeah, and, I mean, I think that that is like a big concept. And there was something else that mentioned, that you mentioned in there that really stood out to me, and that was you sort of talked about this idea of scaling like you started by saying, like, well, you can hire a person to do XYZ, but what we all hear in our head is, I have to manage 30 people or 20 people. And I think that you know the whole idea of, why don't you just start with one person, and then you said, like, get them cash flow, even, right? Basically, is, is the first goal. And. And what, what I thought was really interesting about that is the whole idea of starting small, but then not giving them tasks like right away that are like, check my email, do my calendar, let me know that I have a meeting, which I think, like a lot of people, get stuck in this idea of, I mean, the only place that really my, my model of what a virtual assistant or employee or outsourcer was is like what I saw CEOs have, right, like the the executive assistant, the person that sits in front of their office and sort of schedules appointments and does all that. And that's always what I thought, in my mind was like, well, that they'll check my email, they'll do this. None of which are actually, they're all helpful, right? They like decrease the amount of time I have to do things. But none are earning money directly, right? And I think that's the one thing that you mentioned, is get them sort of earning their own keep directly before you start having them do indirect tasks that make your life easier.

Robert Plank 6:12 I agree, and I think your audio got a little bit quiet. I don't know if there's something for you to like, boost up a little bit there, but, but yeah, I agree completely that we we have either like, these huge ideas for what the employees can do, and so many times we don't have that clear picture, and then it leads to self sabotage, because we say, Well, I I want them to just handle my email. I hate dealing with an email. They should just open up that inbox and they should go answer all these, and it's exactly the way that I would answer all these messages. And there's no clear plan, and a better way is to ease them into it, and a better way is to and kind of another mind blowing moment was we have a friend, John Jonas, who said, have them take something off your plate, and and so many things that you mentioned there are now done automatically, right, done by technology, reminding you of an appointment, pop something up. That's Google Calendar. We don't need people for things like that, but there are things that require some amount of manual work, like sending thank you cards to your customers, or sending personal messages to people who you want to be on podcasts for. And that's one task that I'm going to be setting up later today, is I want to appear on a few podcasts. And I'm going to say, Can you find me about 12 or 15 podcasts for me to just to contact, for me to be a guest, and can you look up the name of the podcast, the website, address the host, and maybe listen for five minutes on one of the recent episodes. So I have something unique to remark on. You can't really do that with software, and that's something that I've always wanted to do, but is time intensive, but then I don't mind paying for that, because it frees up time to do the more important things.

Speaker 1 8:05 So one thing I want to do is, and then I've got another sort of area I want to go into. Can you talk practically like? So the whole idea of like being on a podcast like, again, to me, that almost feels like indirect money, right? Like that's something that you can now do and something that you wanted to do, but you can do it because you've got an employee that is now self sustaining. So from a practical like, if I'm listening, if I'm reading this book or listening to this podcast, like, what is something that that? And I'm going, like, well, that's great for you. You've got products, you've got tasks, you've got things that that somebody can do for you. But I'm just starting. I don't I don't know what I want to sell. I don't know how I have a business. I just know I want to start something like, How can I justify spending money on an employee, and how can I get a return? Well,

Robert Plank 9:11 the the quick and easy, there's, there's two answers on that. There's the quick and easy and there's the more long term, when the quick and easy answer is, decide on your budget, how much you want to spend up front and decide on your time frame and how long you want to make this work. But then the longer answer is, first of all, the thing that was most helpful for me as far as getting my head around this whole having a business thing versus a hobby, is this idea of lists, traffic and offers, unless you are thinking in terms of these three buckets list, traffic and offers, then you do not have a real business. And I was explaining this concept to someone a couple of years ago in terms of, well, say you say you have a career, right? Like setting aside the business idea for now, say you have a career and you want to get a higher paying job. What do you do? Well, you go and register. On a site called LinkedIn, you upload your resume, but then there's all these little tasks that they say you should do, right? You should go and add friends to on LinkedIn. You should send messages, you should post articles. And the thing that that accomplishes is getting traffic from LinkedIn. Right? LinkedIn says if someone else logs into the platform, they say, hey, this person posted this article. If you're a recruiter or an employer, check out their profile. And that part of that is the traffic, and that's why it's worth the hassle of going on some of these platforms, like, say, eBay or Amazon or Fiverr, because these are these huge platforms that have traffic, where you you jump through their hoops, and you do the things that they want you to do. So that way you get traffic. But then what is that traffic leading to? Well, that traffic is leading to some kind of an offer. And if you're on LinkedIn trying to get hired, the offer is that you get a new employment, a new job. But then just those two things on their own, just traffic and just an offer, you're leaving things up to chance, right? There's a lot of waiting involved, and that's what so many people go wrong, is they make a website, they wait for Google to send traffic and and the thing that makes both of those things work is your list. Now, your list. Sometimes people think in terms of an email list or their friends list, but so many times the list is going through the legwork of contacting people one at a time or doing some kind of Time, time involved task. And so say you're on LinkedIn, then you might go and message 10 people per day who have job openings or apply for 10 different job openings on this platform, and that is your list. And maybe there are people that respond to you, that you begin conversing with, and that's your list of maybe 10 or 20 people that you you contact. And I think that's an easy way to jump into this idea, because anyone can understand this. But if you are building a business, and especially if you were intending to have someone run it for you, run all of it, or run some of it, these same three ideas apply because now let's say that. Now let's say your name's Lance Thomas, and it's 10 years ago, and your daughter wanted to know about selling physical items on Amazon, Amazon e commerce, right? Well, instead of just setting up a website saying, buy these camping fire starter sticks and hope someone finds it, you set up on Amazon. Why? Because Amazon has traffic. Amazon has people searching and looking for these things to buy, but then you need to sell something on Amazon, and that is your offer. And then you might, over time, get one offer working and but then later on, say, Well, I'm selling these, these fire starter sticks. Maybe I'll sell a compass, maybe I'll sell para lighting cord. And then now, once you have something that's making any amount of money, even $1 even one sale, then you can look at which of these three buckets am I lacking in, and what can I increase? So maybe you create a product line of five different camping products, and hope to catch some of that traffic. Maybe to work on your traffic, you bid on more keywords on Amazon. So if someone is searching for camping, compass or or like, I don't know, fire blanket, things like that, then now people come and find your offers. Maybe you send outside traffic, maybe you post on YouTube, you post on Twitter, you post on Facebook. And then over time, you have this customer list of people who bought something from you one time, and then buy from you again and again, and then maybe you even find people who leave reviews on other products. And that's more of the list that you're building. But to to get your head wrapped around practical terms hiring someone to do something, you need to have all three of those pieces and and that kind of throws out a lot of the bad ideas that you might have as far as, what can I have someone do that does not lead to any money? And things like creating putting out books, like books on Amazon Kindle, or putting out Amazon e commerce products, those are examples of things are like an Etsy store. Those are examples of things where there's something to buy, right? There's an offer, there's traffic, where it's on some kind of a platform, where there's all kinds of people who are looking to buy something. And then there's an ability to build a list, which, again, does not necessarily mean email list, friends list that can be part of it. But there's also things that can be done every day to go out there and get new people coming in, or get existing people to come back.

Speaker 1 14:51 So I mean, I like this idea, and you sort of mentioned this, but I like this idea of like setting up an Amazon. Store, or setting up an Etsy store or a Shopify store, whatever. But one thing that really caught my attention was you said, if you hire somebody to run the business for you, right, or you have this employee that basically can run it autonomously without you. What the first thing that came to my head was, well, if I hire somebody that makes and builds me an Etsy store or Amazon e commerce Store, and they handle the orders, and they they manage to shop and add new products and all this stuff. Why would they not just do it themselves? Like, do you know what I'm saying? Like, if they know that you're making $10 on everything that you sell and they're seeing that you make, let's just use round numbers, $2,000 a month, but you're only paying them $1,000 a month to do all that. Like, why would somebody continue to do that for you and not just leave you and do it themselves?

Robert Plank 16:17 They could the I think the reason why our employees are sticking with us is for the consistent paycheck. They do not want to deal with the stress that we deal with, the hassle, the uncertainty and and we all know that every few years, the rules completely change. There'll be a Google slap, there'll be some other Facebook thing happening. There will be some new I don't know. Amazon will make doing business legal in some states, there is so much uncertainty, and they think that if you find the right type of person, there are so many people out there that just want to clock in, do their hours, get the steady paycheck, and they don't want to deal with all the extra things that we do with because there's a lot of hats that we have to figure out, right? We have to figure out how to be email marketers and copywriters, and we there's the tech support aspect of things, and there's, there's so many extra things, so much extra baggage, and and there. And there's so many times when you and I will have will assign a task for someone to do, and they just they don't like doing it, or they're not good at it. And in our case, we have to sometimes figure it out, right, or we have to go and hire some other person to have the the writer, or have the video creator. And so there is some some freedom in this employee that only does the things that they want to do and they like to do, and they don't have to stress about where the next paycheck is coming from. And it's for sure, not for everyone, but I think that we found the right people to do things for us.

Speaker 1 17:58 And, you know, I sort of, you know, as you were talking about that I was thinking of like just real, real world, right? Stuff. And it's like, if you're a mechanic that knows how to do an oil change, I mean, the same argument would apply to, why do you work at Jiffy Lube? Right? Like you don't need to work at Jiffy Lube, you could make twice as much money keep all of the profit working for yourself. And what I was thinking is, but you may not have all of the equipment. You don't have all of the certain all of that applies online, right? Like maybe they don't own by the time they go buy their own Adobe Photoshop and get their own hosting account and and do, like, all of the little tools that that business owners have to have it, like you said, it just becomes a hassle. I'd rather have a steady paycheck and let the owner absorb all of those costs. So I think, like, you know, if you really step back and look at it, well, every I mean that that sort of argument applies to every task job business in the world. And so I think like, as far as this is one of those places where, as a aspiring or already successful business owner, you need to remove like you need to think a level higher, right? You need to become that CEO. And you need to really start thinking about, well, could they Yes, but so could they in any other business as well. And the question is, can you find the right people? Are you willing to put in the time to find the right people and and understand that? Yeah, they might go do that. But that happens every day in the real world, the real world too, right?

Robert Plank 19:57 You could be flipping burgers that make. McDonald's and say, I want to go out and start my own McDonald's? Yes, you could, but why would you and there are, there have been ways where you and I can have our cake and eat it too, because we we've landed clients sometimes, right? We've landed monthly clients where we get to live vicariously and work on a bigger business, work on someone's business that is making a few million dollars a year, that has 6000 monthly customers. And so we there's always a bigger fish, right? And there's always some amount of money that makes it worthwhile. And and this is a lot of fun for us, because we we use our marketing, our salesmanship, to land a monthly client, and then they come to us with a problem, and we break it down, and then some of the busy work we assign to those hourly employees that we have, but some of the strategy, the big picture thinking, or some of the things that We just haven't figured out how to outsource yet. We add in our own work to I don't know what the better term is, but we put in our own hours, we use our own skills and combine it together. So it also does not have to be one or the other, right? You can, you can create your own products and your own websites, but there's also some degree of fun in making someone else's book, in creating someone else's podcast, and how you've done things like have like policing trademarks for clients. So it doesn't necessarily have to be either you only work for someone else or you as a business owner, right? You don't have to only work for someone else, or only create your own, you know, your own products and your own websites. And we talk to people all the time who are agency owners, and they just, all they have are clients. All they have are clients, and then they just figure out what to delegate, and then what they have not figured out how to delegate yet. And I

Speaker 1 21:58 like that sort of, I mean, I think that that's important is a lot of times when people are attempting to start a business, they only think of B to C type businesses, right? Like business to consumer. I have to sell a product, I have to sell a service. I have to create something and then find people that want to buy it. And what we've really done, and a lot of people see on the back end, is we turn our clients into B to B, or business to business clients through somebody buys a course on how to make a book. They don't really want to go through it themselves, so then we actually make the book for them, right? Or somebody wants to create an, you know, any other type of thing. And I think that that's what you mentioned. I think mindset wise, for anybody listening or reading this is that they that they actually start thinking in both terms business to business and business to consumer. Because the truth is, like the business to business type stuff are better clients, and it's easier to sort of play middleman, I guess, for lack of a better, a better term, where they don't want to do something, you find those people that don't want to do it, and then you hire somebody to do it for you, and then take the cut In the middle and manage, manage in between and

Robert Plank 23:42 when, when you're explaining that the what's going through my head is tweaking the offer and tweaking the list in traffic. I mean, they're like when I began attending offline events, when I began going to conferences, I noticed that there were some people that were super chatty, super talkative about their future. Ideas about I want to make the next YouTube. I want to make an app and sell it to the masses. And then sometimes I would find myself sitting next to a really quiet person who would be in a weird niche that you never would have heard of, and was just make making so much money, just quietly and sometimes, like I have, sometimes I have these podcast guests. I have one guy who his niche is, he makes websites for industrial companies and construction companies. So if some company makes just this right type of bolts, he'll make a website for them, and it's the ugliest website, but and the average person would not even like no understand anything on the website, but if someone was making a huge office building, they would be looking for this specific bolts for this specific purpose. And there's all this money to be made in this I know this other guy who his only niche is that he lives in. Hollywood or something, and he contact talks to has been actors and film directors and people who have a lot of money but want to leave a legacy, and it's just this really quiet niche. And you, I mean, he definitely does not appeal to the masses, but he makes a lot of money doing this, and so sometimes we have to figure out, well, let me play around with whatever that that offer is. And at the moment, we're experimenting. We mentioned Fiverr, right? We're experimenting with getting, landing some Fiverr clients and some off Fiverr clients. We landed a few on people who want their podcast notes made, people who want their podcasts edited. And sometimes we try out different kinds of offers and say, is this, have any demands? Are people buying this? Can we make enough money with a short amount of time or a tiny bit of work? Is this sustainable? Do we enjoy doing it? Is it is this task, or is this offer too much hassle based on what we're getting paid? And then sometimes we shift over and focus on the traffic, right? Maybe we get traffic from other freelancing sites. Remember, we post on social media or YouTube, and it even makes me think of, you know, there's been times when, you know, we've had, sometimes had consistent traffic sources, right? We kept on attending specific offline events, and we'd get a steady flow of customers there. We used to post on specific online message boards and get steady flow of customers there. But then the traffic was only so much, and then we would go and dial up the the juice on the on the offer bucket, and start putting out more and more products. But then we got tired of that, and then switched over more to the list building. So if, if you're listening to this, or you're reading this, and you're stuck and you're not sure how to get to the money part, then one of those three things is lacking, and it might be that you need to run some experiments and try selling some of these things and put out the web page and create the offer and contact that short list of 50 or 100 people. And it might be a matter of contacting more people than you you thought you might have to your offer might need tweaking. But I think if you think of, does the Do I need a bigger list? Do I need more traffic? Do I need more offers or better or different offers then? Now the problem is, is more easily attackable. Now you can focus on something small and not this big, huge unknown, awesome.

Speaker 1 27:35 I think that that's really wise, that whole idea of rethinking lists, traffic and offers, and understanding that online business, offline business, business in general, you can silo everything into one of those three buckets, and once you do that, you can see where you need to dial something up and easily hire somebody that can tackle that for you and increase your sales and marketing at the same time.

Robert Plank 28:08 And I think that it's important to have goals and have deadlines, but also don't panic. And you and I were talking about this five minutes more where we started recording is that sometimes it's easy to make a lot of stupid decisions or say a lot of weird things just because you you don't even know what's going on. And I think that there, there is something to be said about having goals and my my recent the most, the thing that's helped me the most, as far as making progress and continually making progress and reminding myself that it doesn't all have to be done in one day. What's more important is to consistently do things every day. Is if there's a task that I that I know I need to do and I don't do it, and I don't do it, and a day passes and a day pass and I still can't get that task done, then I will cut the task in half and just try to do a smaller version of that task. And if that doesn't work, cut the task in half and try to do a smaller version of that and if that doesn't work, then contact one of our employees and say, can you just take a stab at this? Can you just get something going here? And so an example of that is something that I'm getting to this week is we, me and the wife, want to put out some some Kindle books, some like self help books and some recipe books, things like that. And we want to not even have to touch we just want these books to just get cranked out because Amazon has the list or Amazon has the traffic, and then we can have links in the book and build the list, and then the offers are these other Kindle books. And it's a thing I've wanted to do forever, but after this call is done, I'm going to be assigning a task, and I'm going to say, just spend an hour, and I have 10 ideas. For this, for this ghost written book, for this person. And I will, I'm going to say, choose one of these 10, spend an hour and make me an outline. And I'm going to record a five minute screen capture of just starting on the outline. And I'll say, whatever you come back with in an hour. Let me just see what there is. And there has been so many times with these employees where I'll say, just, just create this part of it, right? Just create this logo, just create this graphic, or just like, write this title, or just make these bullet points. And then if I don't finish what they started, then I feel like I'm letting them down. And so many times they just get the ball rolling, because they, they just, they get that very first piece done. I'll say, Make me a website. I want the website to have these four things in it, and then once I see it in in place, once there's something visual, once or something concrete, I can say, well, now I want to add this and remove that, but it's less of something in my imagination, and now it's something that is in real world terms. And I think that that it's important to get a little bit done every day. And I was a few weeks ago, I was reading a book that was supposed to help with habits, and it's like one of the top selling Amazon self help books right now, and it was going off and it was adding all these crazy terms. And the more I like read, I was like, they're taking, like, some really simple foundational stuff, and they're making it way more complicated than it has to be. Like we keep mentioning here list traffic offers, and that applies to Amazon. It applies to Fiverr. It applies to Etsy. But then as far as getting momentum right, as far as us getting things accomplished, as far as us taking action on this employee thing there, I think there's nothing simpler, and there's nothing better than this concept of SMART goals, S, M, A, R t, where your goals need to be specific, which means you can just say it in one sentence, that and that way it keeps it small, and that way you know exactly what you're working on. Maybe you're just naming your Etsy store. Maybe you're just creating a web page with with a headline. It needs to be measurable, so that you know that you've completed it. And it's not just some some thing where you're 90% done, you can say, I can provide proof that I did this. It's actionable. So that way it's you have all the tools in place, and you know that you can get started with it. And something else that is kind of a good mind hack is know where you'll be taking action on something. If you say that you want to land some podcast editing clients, and you'll contact 10 people. Well, maybe you know that you'll be contacting those 10 people when you're sitting on your kitchen table with your laptop. And it seems silly, but so many people don't use their imagination for positive results. They just say, I'll get it done, it sooner, sooner or later, but they don't know what that will look like, right? They don't know what things will look like when their task is accomplished. They don't know where in the house or where in the office they'll be doing it. They don't know which computer they'll be doing it. Make sure that things that you do are actionable, and then the last two parts of that smart goals acronym are relevant and time bound. And the relevant thing, I think that's what so many people overlook the most, is that the goal or the tasks that you have needs to be related to other tasks. And like you said earlier, I'm looking to get on podcasts, but the point of being on podcast is to then plug our websites at the end. So there is a path to making money, but sometimes people will just think they need to do something, right? Oh, I need to be on podcast, just because. Well, if you don't know what you're going to talk about, if you don't have an offer, then you'll burn out very quickly, because there won't be results from that. But so the R in smart goals is relevant make sure that you have a task that relates to your other future tasks. So that way, when this thing you're doing is done that leads to the next thing. And then the the T and smart goals is time bound, which means that you have a real date, a real deadline. And something that I was reminded of recently was it's important to have a time and a date, right? Don't just say you'll have this thing. Don't just say that you'll have this opt in page, or this web page done, or your LinkedIn profile done. Don't say you'll have it done by Friday. So you'll have it done by Friday at nine o'clock PM, and even if Friday nine o'clock pm rolls around and it's still not done, then publish what you have. And in the worst case, even if you can't publish what you have, then by Saturday at nine o'clock PM, readjust and publish half of what you have. But I think that, like as far as what we've been talking about today, list traffic and offers, that way, you have a real. Business that way you you know the the minimum tasks that you need to build up, that Etsy store, that Amazon store, that fiber presence, to at least have one offer, have one traffic source, have least somewhat of a list that you're building. And that way, then you have a business that you can then think of because you're the boss, right? You're you should not be the worker. You should be the person that thinks about the strategy, the big picture, solve the problems, and then assign the small tasks or people to do that. And then you can work on enlarging the list, enlarging the traffic, or enlarging the offers. And then as far as getting there, as far as getting things done, smart, goals, specific, measurable, actionable, relevant and time bound. There's a lot of noise out there. There are a lot of people that take simple things and try to chart it into all these crazy extra terms, which you you can do that if you want, but so many times, just the simple foundational ideas are the ones that that get us there. And

Speaker 1 36:01 what I love about the way you sort of wrap that up is it forces you, as a current or future business owner to start thinking more like a CEO, right? Like I don't care necessarily all of the details, even though I need to know about them, I'm just worried about these high level things and understanding that everything fits together, relevancy in the way that I like them too. So Robert, I really appreciate you being a guest on your own show, allowing me to be a host on this amazing show. So if people want more episodes, more type of information that you provide. Where can they check you out? Marketer

Robert Plank 36:46 of the day.com,

Speaker 1 36:49 marketer of the day.com go there right now. Subscribe, check out the hundreds, literally hundreds and hundreds of different episodes that are there for you, where you can find out different nuggets, find out different business models, hear what other people are doing. It's an easy way for you to start thinking about your business at a different level, a way to start implementing it in a different way, and a way for you to start considering how you can use employees to actually boost your business and move yourself forward. So this is Lance thomasurel for the Robert plank marketer of the day podcast with my special guest Robert plank, thank you and have a good day. You. I

Robert Plank 37:43 want to listen to more fantastic marketers of the day. Subscribe to us at marketer of the day.com/itunes and browse past episodes at marketer of the day.com