Richard Phu

Helping Solopreneurs & Small Businesses to Free themselves from their own business to be doing more of what matters most

Figuring Out What You Need To Hire For

So when TLG was formed we knew we needed specialists and experts to be part of our delivery team. The really challenging part that I find is different compared to most other businesses is that our business is all focused on providing marketing services for our clients.
What makes it different is that as we’re starting out with our lean team that often means that we would have members straddling both internal marketing and client delivery work. As you can imagine the line get blurred on what needs to get done first.
With this challenge already made aware it placed an even more bigger emphasis on the processes required for our client delivery. See what I realised for myself was that it’s all well and good when its just you, or just you and another virtual assistant. It’s a massively different story once that multiplies into many more people with varying skills, traits and personalities.
Once we nailed down the tasks/activities related to the delivery it makes it easier to define the type of roles you need to hire for. An easy way to work this out was really to do a Value Chain Analysis (which I learnt later on as kind of what we did organically without knowing the term!)

Value Chain Analysis

What a Value Chain Analysis is about is really getting down to creating your organisational chart without having pre-conceptions of the departments you might want to have. So it starts off with first understanding what are the core activities (at a high level) which your business needs to perform.
So for our Marketing Agency, it was:
  1. Business Planning
  2. Marketing (Internal)
  3. Sales
  4. Delivery (Client work)
  5. Customer Service
From this level, we would then go down to outline each of the tasks involved in each core activity. Some examples of the tasks you would list done are such as:
  1. Business Planning
    1. Conducting Budgeting Forecast
    2. Performing Strategic Reviews
  2. Marketing 
    1. Creating a Monthly Social Media Content Plan
    2. Editing the Podcast Interviews
    3. Repurposing Interview videos for Distribution
    4. Data Mining for potential new Partners
    5. Launching a new Campaign
  3. Sales
    1. Drafting up Proposals
    2. Creating and collecting Contracts
    3. Transacting Customer Billing
    4. Hand-over to Client Delivery Team
  4. Delivery (Client work/Operations)
    1. On-boarding new clients
    2. Setting up new Project Timelines
    3. Assigning tasks to the Creative Team
    4. Scheduling weekly meetings with the client
    5. Administration
    6. Finance Activities
  5. Customer Service
    1. Handling Client-Recovery calls
    2. Troubleshooting technical level 1 issues
    3. Seeking opportunities to upsell client
    4. Conducting NPS (Net Promoter Score) surveys with the clients
Example of our colourful value chain analysis of what departments we needed and who did what
The list goes on and once you’ve gotten as much as you can (you won’t have it all nailed down) then you start to assign ownership to each of the tasks. Now just because a task is under Sales, doesn’t mean it must be done by someone in the sales team. So we would then colour co-ordinate each task based on which core activity owner it should be.
Once completed we then have a very clear idea of where the tasks are sitting at and in our analysis we noticed we don’t need a dedicated customer service team because there just wasn’t enough tasks to justify it. So we’re better off rolling it up to our delivery team.
This then makes it much much easier to figure out what roles you need to fill in your respective teams. So for our delivery team, based on our product we were able to identify the following roles were needed:
  1. Videographer
  2. Video Editor
  3. Graphic Designer
  4. Funnel Builder
  5. Copywriter
  6. Ads Specialist
  7. Project Manager/Account Manager
  8. Social Media Scheduler
  9. Content Writer

Now was it possible to combine roles together?

Most possible, but it’s more of a question on skill and delivery quality rather than purely cost. As we want to produce the best possible experience for our premium clients then we need to invest more in our people.
So once you understand the tasks involved you can then know the roles you need to fill, but all this means nothing if you don’t have the processes to combine each individual roles to work in unison.
That’s what my next post is going to be about, how to design processes to turn the chaos into chemistry to have a working machine.

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