Melissa asks: “I’m told to hire a virtual assistant, but their paycheck comes straight out of mine. How do I know when my business is truly ready?”
In this episode of Fix My Business, Scott Todd reveals why the fear of hiring is actually masking a bigger problem: you’re undervaluing your time. Learn the exact framework to calculate whether hiring will grow or shrink your income, plus how to “dip your toe in” without committing to full-time help.
You’ll discover the time-value audit system that shows exactly which tasks to delegate first, how to estimate the true cost vs. opportunity, and alternative pay-for-performance models that remove the risk. If you’re stuck doing $15/hour work while leaving $100/hour opportunities on the table, this episode will change how you think about leverage forever.
Do you have a business question, ask Scott Todd here: https://www.scotttodd.net/ask
Key Topics: virtual assistant hiring, first employee, delegation strategy, time management for entrepreneurs, small business hiring, valuing your time, outsourcing tasks, business leverage
Full Transcript
Scott Todd (00:00)
our question today comes from Melissa and Melissa says, I’m told I should hire a virtual assistant to free up my time, but here’s what scares me.
Their paycheck comes straight out of my paycheck. How do I know when the business is truly ready for a hire and when hiring won’t just make my take home pay smaller?
I’m Scott Todd and this show is dedicated to help you answer your business questions.
Melissa.
Every employee you hire is going to be scary. It’s true. From your first one to your hundredth one, it’s scary because what you’re saying is so accurate. Every business expense comes out of your paycheck. Every personnel expense comes out of your paycheck.
So you’re right, this is coming from you. You’re funding this thing because it’s money that you don’t have to take home or out of the business anymore. Flat out, you’re 100 % correct. However, what I think you’re missing is I don’t think that you understand how valuable your time is or how to value your time.
And I think that’s what holds a lot of entrepreneurs back from their first hire or their second hire is that one, we’re scared because we look at this and we’re like, Hey, I need the dollars that I’m taking out of the business to survive, to live on, to pay my bills, et cetera. However, there is probably work that you’re doing that is not worth your time. Let me give you an example. In a couple of days, I’m going to go to the dentist and
As much as that dentist wants to see me and is excited to see me, I know she is. She can’t wait. You know what? She’s not calling me to ask me if I’m going to come. See, she has somebody that’s doing that. The dentist, the doctor has determined that, getting Scott on the phone and calling me to confirm my appointment is not
the highest and best use of her time. So as a result, she has someone that’s going to do it. And technically that’s, let’s say, $15 to $20 an hour work. That’s it. Now, if she were to pick up the phone and call me because she wants to save $20 an hour, she could do it, but she’s leaving hundreds of dollars on the table. And she’s trading. She’s trading
a hundred dollars worth of labor or opportunity for a $20 phone call to save $20. That’s the difference between valuing your time and basically saying, I’m just going to do it myself. Now there are some other trade-offs here because let’s say that my dentist, let’s say that instead of, I don’t know, going out and making more money or multiplying her time, she decides to waste that time.
Well, then yeah, it’s a fair trade-off or it’s a fair exchange to say that the money’s come out of our paycheck. But the whole point of hiring somebody is simply to multiply your time, to give you more time.
to earn a higher dollar, to get the clients that you need to get, to service the clients that you need to get, to chase the sales that you need to get, to do the work that only you can do, that your clients pay you to do. Whatever it is. Maybe in your business, it’s being the CEO. The CEOs of most companies are paid very, very high. And they’re not on the phone talking to customers. That’s just the way that it is.
They were dealing with investors and they’re dealing with the media and they’re doing what CEOs do. So when this comes back down, I think that what we experience is this devaluation or an undervaluation of your time and the opportunity costs that’s there. Now, here’s a way that you can ease into this because you don’t have to jump in and hire someone 40 hours a week. You don’t have to do that. You can dip your toe in the water.
to kind of build some understanding of how this is going to work and to see if in fact it really does work for you. And here’s what I want you to know. I love making lists. I love making lists. So I want you to take out a piece of paper and I want you to list out the stuff that you’re doing. take a daily inventory. Boom. Do all this stuff. I called my clients to confirm their appointment. I did this. I did that. In the left side, make the list.
Next to each item, I want you to do two things. First thing I want you to do is I want you to write down how long it took you to do it. So let’s just use the dentist example. Let’s just say that the dentist was calling Scott to confirm his appointment. She might write, confirming appointments. How long did it take her to do it? 30 minutes.
What’s that value worth to her? Meaning, what does she think she can hire someone to do that job for? Is it $15 an hour, $20 an hour? So write that down. So now we have the task, the time, the estimated cost, and what we’ll find if we just multiply it out is we’ll find that, the calling of patients,
is not really a $20 job unless it takes a whole hour, but it might take 30 minutes. So I’m literally paying $10 to have that work done. So now all of a sudden, we can start to, as we look down our list, we can start to identify one work that we can give away, that we can give to somebody else in exchange for a lower rate so that we can go out and do higher dollar revenue generation ideas or projects or strategic plans.
And when we do that, all of a sudden we can see like, hey, listen, I can get rid of all of these tasks and it’s only going to cost me 10 hours a week, 10 hours time. So it’s going to cost me $200 a week to get rid of these tasks. But if I had 10 hours a week, how much more could you make? See now all of a sudden we’re trading some of the tasks so that we can go make more revenue. So that’s really the secret here.
Because when you make the list and you look at what it’s really going to cost you, therein lies the opportunity. Now, the other thing I would say to you is this. What you could do also is you could look for opportunities to pay for something as the work gets done. So let me give an example. ⁓ Maybe it’s sales. So instead of paying someone a salary for sales, maybe you pay a commission. See, you’re paying for performance of something.
in kind of my one of my businesses, which is real estate investing. We have people that write ads, those ads we don’t pay per, we don’t pay an hourly rate, we pay per ad. So you see, anytime I can take something and have it converted to a pay per unit option, now I’m just paying for production. I’m paying per widget that comes out the door. I want you to think about that, how you can put that into place too.
Alright, hopefully that helps you out. If it does, shoot me back a note. And if you have a question, you can head over to scotttodd.net forward slash ask. I look forward to answering your question on this show. And I will see you in the next episode. But until then, keep moving your feet.