RebuildingI am starting to rebuild my business, and I’m taking on my first salesperson. So, currently, I have Lauren who has been my PA for six years or she was the company administrator, but she’s now pretty much my PA and right-hand lady. I heavily rely on her, and I couldn’t do as much as I do without her. But equally, Jack’s been with me now for 12 months. Started as an apprenticeship. He’s doing a marketing apprenticeship. He pretty much takes care of 50% of the social media with me, he is my video editor. And again, I couldn’t do all that I manage to do without him.
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| Now, for the majority of you that are potentially one man bands, or you’ve got a small team, I do believe that if you’re starting out in business, the first thing you need to do is get yourself a PA. You need to increase the time that you save on doing your administration work. You need to invest in a marketing strategy, lead generation and generating more inquiries for your business. That’s going to ultimately increase your income and your profit. By doing that, you’re also going to leverage the lower income generating activities by giving them to your PA to enable you to focus on more income generating tasks like the Lives, like the videos, like the lead generation, the networking and everything else. Because it’s cheaper to employ administrators than it is to employ salespeople. We all need administrators. Lauren loves admin way more than I do. That’s ultimately why we work so well together as a team.
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Sales PersonMy first salesperson is starting in the business. Three years ago, I had a team of 12. I then have downsized from going from an insurance broker to a mortgage broker, and I am in the process of rebuilding my team after that pivot.
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| My new salesperson is Elliott Smith. He has the mortgage qualifications, but he doesn’t have any previous experience. So, I’m going to be coaching him, I’m going to be mentoring him, I’m going to be giving you my 15 years’ worth of experience as a blank canvas to show him everything that I do; the systems, the processes, the sales, how to speak to clients. He’s come from a bit of a sales background, so, that’s going to be an advantage.
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| The scary part for me taking on my first salesperson is where do I get the extra income from? I’ve now got another mouth to feed. I’m already feeding two mouths, two non-income generating individuals who actually by leveraging my time help me to generate more income. So, What have we been doing over the last couple of months? Well, Lauren, and I have actually been working more hours first of all, because as much as I believe you need to build a business around your lifestyle, and it’s so important for me to get home and have dinner with my kids who are six and four. To get home and have dinner as a family at six o’clock is so important to me now. Why I go to the gym at five o’clock in the morning is because I can see them for an hour, I can play around with them while I’m getting dressed before I come to work for eight o’clock. So, I’m generally in the office from eight o’clock in the morning through till 5:00, 5:30 at night. And then I work again once the kids are in bed, and we sit on the sofa and then my wife gets an hour of my time at nine o’clock.
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More HoursI would love to be able to finish at 4:00 and go ice skating with my girls. But at the moment my business isn’t in the position where I’m able to do that. When Elliott Smith starts, we have had to make sacrifices enable me to pass on more of the advisor type elements of my job, which are a little bit more admin orientated that normally an advisor would do in a bid to allow me to spend more time on income generating activities.
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| My time has been more focused on strategy, more focused on lead generation, more focused on getting the leads in to enable me to feed Elliot as well. Because I’m still going to be a salesperson, but I need to generate more inquiries to make sure that Elliott has the leads to deal with. Now, we’ve always managed to work on a basis of 24 to 48 hour turnarounds, and we’re still sticking to that. But the only way that Lauren and I are sticking to that is by putting in the extra hours are making the sacrifice.
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| The thing you need to understand when you’re growing a business is there are periods, one, two, three months where you have to make sacrifices, where you’re going to go back to working all the hours that God possibly sends in a bid for growth. I literally worked all day Saturday from seven o’clock in the morning. I went to the gym at 9:00 till 10:00. And then from 10 o’clock until seven o’clock I was on my computer, sorting out a new CRM system, sitting in my home office, having a little bit of a break during the day to play with the kids. But I worked all day long. And I worked pretty much all Sunday morning until lunchtime as well. And then said, “Right, I need to have some family time.”
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| Loads of you I’m sure, do seven day weeks. It’s not effective in the way in which you can look to grow your business. You need to be looking at taking on that first administrator, you need to be looking at leveraging a part-time VA or PA so that you can actually look to grow your business. And then in doing that, you’ve got somebody who can support you, write your systems, write your processes and prepare you for that first sales person that you’re going to take on.
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The FutureJack and I have had a chat and we want to share almost a weekly vlog particularly for mortgage advisors because I run a Facebook group for mortgage advisors. Were just about to hit 300. My passion is to really help them become more productive. I think mortgage brokering is so much easier when you have the right systems and processes. I think that comes back to any job that you do. If you can break down the steps that you do in your job and watch my other Facebook Live on this and blog articles, it’s going to make it easier for you to train, to grow, to take people on.
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| We’re starting to hit growth point. It’s going to be harder, and I can imagine that I’m still going to be working the long hours because not only have I got to fit in everything that I’m doing today, I’ve got to now add additional time to be training Elliot to make sure that he is as good as he needs to be. He’s bringing in the income and he learns the job quickly. So, I’m going to have to check every bit of work he’s doing in a coaching, mentoring kind of role as well.
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SummaryWhen taking on this first salesperson, to summarise, I believe you need to have somebody who’s going to support you and you both need to put in the extra work to be able to focus you, as I have on more income generating activities, to bring more leads into your business. In bringing more leads into your business, it’s going to feel like you’re not able to meet your service standards, or you’re going to have to put in the extra hours to be able to meet your service standards. Some of my clients did get some emails at four o’clock in the morning on Sunday last week. But you got to have to put in those extra hours to maintain your service standards and your levels of business.
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| In doing that, next week, I’ve now got extra appointments. And when someone comes in rather than having to wait a couple of days to speak to me, they can be given the option to speak to Elliot and I can coach them and mentor them and being able to do that. And I can start to leverage some of my additional activities across to him in a method to train, which is going to free me up to generate more leads.
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| So, it’s all about building entrepreneur at the top, or business owner at the top. PA supporting, and starting to slot in the middle, that sales person who can feed it down. I’m still going to be lead generation, I’m still going to be sales, but I’m now adding an extra layer in between Lauren and I, which will be Elliott.
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| I hope that gives you some insight into how you can look to grow your business. Do leave me any comments, any thoughts, any feelings. If you’re going for a growth phase in your business, I would love to hear about it. I would love to hear how these Articles help you. And as I learn and develop and improve, I will hopefully keep bringing these knowledge bombs to you that are going to help you to do the same.
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| Have a good day.
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