Somewhere.com

In the early days of starting a company you have to get your hands dirty and do the work yourself. Delegate too soon and your company might fail. Make money first and delegate when the cashflow starts to pile up.

Hiring a virtual assistant for your real estate brokerage? Ask the agency who checks their work before you give them access to lease files or listings. You don't want to discover the review process after a document has already gone out with an error. Get specific: - Who reviews lease documents before they are sent, and who fixes mistakes? - Who trains the assistant on fair housing rules, and how is that training kept current? - Does another person check the MLS listing before it goes live? - What systems can they access, and who removes that access as soon as they leave? “We hire experienced people” is not an answer to any of these questions. Then ask about the replacement guarantee. Find out what qualifies for a replacement and how soon someone trained for the role can take over. Compare rates, of course. But also find out how the agency handles the work you cannot afford to get wrong. If they cannot explain it clearly, keep looking.

Communication is the number one skill that you need to learn to delegate and build teams effectively. As a leader or manager, you will spend 95% of your time crafting and sending messages to your team. This happens daily in meetings, emails, calls, slack messages, texts, social media posts, and more. It ALL comes down to clear and effective communication. If you struggle to write or speak clearly, delegation is going to be really difficult for you. First, you need to learn to write. 95% of your comms will be via the written word. Next, learn to speak. Work on your tone and practice your charisma/enthusiasm. Lastly, learn to simplify. Most leaders write/say way more than they need to in order to deliver a message or assign a new task. Before you press send, think twice about what you can remove. Your team and direct reports will thank you.

If you own an accounting firm, your hardest tax return should not be the first thing you hand to an offshore hire. Start with a few tasks that are straightforward to explain and easy to check: - Data entry from source documents - Routine bank reconciliations - Basic bookkeeping cleanup Show them how you want the work done. Give them a checklist. Review the results and fix anything that keeps causing confusion. Once they are doing that work consistently, give them more responsibility. Complex returns and sensitive client conversations can wait until you trust the team and the process. If the first assignment goes badly, your staff may decide that offshoring does not work. Now you have to rebuild their confidence while fixing the work. Give them a chance to see it working first. You do not need to move everything offshore at once. Pick a few manageable tasks, train someone to do them well, and build from there.

There are two types of employees: #1: Really good at their job. #2: Really good at making others good at their jobs. A company should be 90% #1 and 10% #2. Type 2 employees also earn 2-10x as much as Type 1 employees. Delegation and management is an art and is super profitable if done well. Find people who can do it and pay them well.

Great managers never yell at their employees. If people around you are messing up, it is your fault. You hired them. You trained them. You are responsible for them. Find a way to give clear and constructive feedback without ever raising your voice. This is by far the most mature and effective way to lead.

People love talking about hiring guarantees until someone quits. Then the questions get more practical. For an e-commerce company, an empty seat is not theoretical. Orders still need to ship. Support tickets still need answers. Peak season is still coming. Before you hire through any recruiting firm, ask: - When does the replacement search actually start? - How long will it take to see new candidates? - When does the guarantee clock begin? - What changes to the role make the guarantee invalid? A guarantee is only helpful if you understand what happens when you need to use it. At Somewhere, every Direct Hire comes with a 6-month Perfect Hire Guarantee. But we would still tell you to read the terms and ask the questions. You should know exactly what happens if the hire does not work out.

Entrepreneurship isn’t about grinding in the trenches all day and night. It’s about hiring, leadership, and delegation. The goal is to find many other great humans that can do a better job than you in their respective roles to join you and help you on your mission. It’s about building leverage through teams.

“Marketing specialist” is one of the most expensive vague job titles a company can use. One founder means: - Keep the email calendar moving - Pull the weekly numbers - Schedule social posts Another means: - Run paid ads - Build landing pages - Write the copy - Improve conversion rates - Figure out the strategy Those are not the same hire. The first person needs clear direction and solid execution skills. The second needs experience, judgment, and enough context to make decisions without waiting for approval on everything. That is why pricing varies so much. You are not paying for the title. You are paying for the level of responsibility behind it. Before asking what the hire will cost, list what needs to leave your desk each week. That is the job you should price.

Way too many entrepreneurs overthink their first hires. They look for unicorns and worry unnecessarily about having the right "corporate" processes. Just get somebody in the door, tell them what to do, and start working on your delegation/management skills today.

Hiring is the most important, high leverage activity in entrepreneurship. One high value hire can transform your business for the better. And one low value hire can cause more headaches than you can imagine. This is why recruiting and hiring good talent is so important.

Successful delegation requires significant and consistent cashflow. No cashflow means risky hiring because you don’t have the padding in your bank account. The more money that you are making each month, the faster you can hire and delegate. Focus on sales and accumulating cash first, then hire and delegate after.

As a leader or manager, you will spend the majority of your time crafting and sending messages to your team. This happens daily in meetings, emails, calls, slack messages, texts, social media posts, and more. It ALL comes down to clear and effective communication (both written and verbal). If you struggle to write or speak clearly, delegation is going to be hard for you.

People falsely believe that hiring and delegation is only for entrepreneurs. And that if you're working at a company as an employee you have no choice but to trade your time for money and grind away. However many companies (the best ones) encourage their employees to delegate and build teams. It's some of the highest value, highest leverage work that they can do.

Delegate too soon and you'll spin into the red with more expenses than income. Delegate too late and you'll become the bottleneck in your business and everybody else will be waiting on you. It's a tough balancing act. Early on, your instinct will be to save money by keeping the payroll minimal but to grow you have to build your team and take on some risk.

One thing most folks don't realize: Since inception, we’ve helped over 4000+ clients recruit and hire thousands of positions across their respective orgs. We estimate that our work has conservatively saved our clients multiple 8-figures in payroll expenses by helping them hire offshore talent for 50-80% less than US equivalents. If you are interested in learning more, start a search here: somewhere.com/contact

Agency margins usually disappear in the work clients never see. Not strategy. Not client calls. Reporting. Campaign setup. Social scheduling. Asset production. Research. QA. The question is not whether you can offshore those tasks. It is whether your senior team should still be doing them. Keep strategy, creative direction, and client communication close. Use offshore support for the repeatable work behind the scenes. That gives your senior people more time to do the work clients actually pay them for. Look at where your team spent time last month. The margin leak is probably sitting right there.

Delegation is a skill. The only way to get better at it is to practice. You can read about it and think about it and plan for it but eventually you just have to do it. You have to take action if you want to improve.

Offshore accounting usually does not fail because of the person doing the work. It fails because the file they receive is a mess. A strong preparer cannot do much with client documents spread across emails, phone photos, and random folders. Before you hire, get the basics in order: - Put client documents in one place. - Use the same file structure for every client. - Make workpapers consistent across the firm. - Make sure a reviewer can open a file and immediately see what is finished, what is missing, and what needs their input. If your senior team has to explain where everything is, chase documents, and clean up every file, offshore support will not save you time. Get the process right first. Then the hire can actually help.

How to live a stressed out life: Try to make a living changing other people. How to succeed: Accept the way people are, try to put them in the right position to succeed, train and coach them to the best of your ability, but adjust accordingly if it’s not the right fit.