128: 3 Signs You Need to Hire a Leadership Team
Have you moved from being the bottleneck with client work and management to being the bottleneck when it comes to implementing internal operational projects and leading your team? If so, you may be in a position to need higher level support inside your business. Enter: the leadership team.
In this episode, Nicole walks you through example leadership configurations and the three phases she implements with her clients when establishing their leadership teams.
What’s in this episode:
- How much revenue you need to make before hiring a leadership team
- What should be included in your hiring plan
- What your leadership team should take off your plate
- How to transfer ownership to your department heads
For full show notes, resources, and links, head to https://nicolejacksonmiller.com/128
Nicole is currently taking on a select number of 1:1 clients to support them with building and developing a leadership team. If you’re interested, send us an email at hi@nicolejacksonmiller.com
Links:
EPISODE 128 TRANSCRIPT:
Hey everyone, Nicole here, and welcome back to the show. Today we are going to talk about one of my favorite topics: leadership. We’re going to talk about some indicators that you can look for that may be happening already, or may happen in the future for you. Indicators that you might need to start hiring in a leadership team. This conversation is inspired by several conversations that I’ve had with business owners who have moved from being way too involved in client work and management to now being way too involved in leading their teams and on internal projects and making systems better. And they’re really looking for that next level of strategy and support.
And so I’ve started helping business owners. In a more intense kind of focused way one-on-one inside of their business when it comes to actually helping them revamp and up level their operations. And one of those areas is. Really. Identifying leadership teams, mentoring leadership teams, so that. They have the ability to continue to grow your business, grow their businesses.
Hey everyone, Nicole here. And welcome back to the show today. We’re going to talk about one of my favorite topics, which is leadership. And some signs that may be happening now, or maybe happening to you in the future. Where you might need to hire in some leadership team support. And so this conversation is inspired by several.
Hey everyone, Nicole here. And welcome back to the show today. We’re going to be talking about one of my favorite topics, which is leadership. And three signs that you may be in a position now. To hire in a leadership team, or maybe here are some signs for you to watch out for if maybe this is not happening for you at this moment, but maybe happening for you in the near future.
This episode is inspired by several conversations that I’ve had with business owners who have found that they once were very heavily involved in client work and management of client delivery. And now are feeling like they are extremely heavily involved in their operations and in leading their team in, spearheading operational projects to be able to continue to grow and.
And they moved from being the bottleneck of client work to now they’re the bottleneck of leadership and just know that something needs to shift in order to allow them to continue to grow. So I want to share a few signs that, or at least indicators that you may be in this position so that you can know.
What to look out for and if maybe some of the challenges that you’ve been having lately are because. It’s time for you to really focus in on bringing in higher level support. We’re going to talk a little bit about some example configurations of what this might look like, and then the different phases that I recommend implementing if you are in this position and looking to get started with bringing in a leadership team. Okay. So some signs.
So the first sign is that you right now are feeling like you are at capacity with the number of clients that you have. And this doesn’t necessarily mean that you couldn’t take on more clients. But it means that maybe you can’t take on more clients without rearranging some things internally. You also see that there are very obvious ways for you to be able to continue to grow your business, but perhaps you felt a little overwhelmed on the operational side, or maybe that your operations aren’t quite in order for you to be able to do that. And so maybe you have turned off your marketing.
I talked to an agency owner that has just recently done this because she knows that she needs to make some internal shifts in order to be able to continue to grow. And so she’s like, you know, we’re just not. Accepting clients for awhile and I’ve stopped my podcast. And so that could be an indicator or maybe you’ve continued marketing efforts.
But you’ve continued to put people on wait lists because you just know that you can’t continue to be able to lead your team. And the most effective way to be able to serve more people. So the point here is that your services are very in demand and you can see the opportunity. All around you to serve more clients, right. But something needs to change on the operational side.
I’m also going to throw out a financial figure here. And I always like to just add that this is very dependent on your business, the services that you offer the clients that you work with. So I, I sometimes dislike throwing out financial figures because. There’s always exceptions. It’s not a rule. Like numbers feel very definite to me, and that’s not the case here, but I typically see.
Business owners start to take a look at. Higher level support inside of their business when they’re at about. About $40,000 a month or $50,000 a month. And then obviously upward from there. So that lands at about half a million dollars a year. And then obviously as they grow from there, the focus is even a little bit more stronger on that leadership level, but I typically don’t see
Businesses focusing on our leadership teams until they hit that half a million dollar mark. Now that does not mean. That they don’t have managers on their team. Okay. You can definitely still have a client and team managers or account managers that are facilitating for you and maybe operating at a higher level. But when it comes to more of the director and executive level, I’m typically not seeing that until.
Folks have reached at least a half a million. The next sign that you are ready to shift. In addition to what I’ve already talked about is you You’ve really shifted from being that bottleneck with client work, to being the bottleneck with leading. And so some signs of this is maybe, that there’s a lot of internal projects that need to happen in order to be able to move your business forward, but you either.
You either don’t have the capacity to do that, or it’s maybe not your area of expertise necessarily. And you have implementers who are actually doing the client work already, and you can see how you could just continue to repeat the process of hiring those implementers and could take on more and more clients. But the leadership level needs to shift and change.
So with this people often ask, okay, well, if I am in this position now, who do I hire first? And what is my, what? It was my leadership configuration look like, if I already have managers in my company, what did the directors, are they directors like what. What does this look like? And the answer is that it really does depend on not only the services that you’re offering, but the way that you’re offering them. I work with a lot of different types of businesses. And even when a business is offering.
Similar services to another business, let’s say accounting or copywriting or human resources. Based on the way that they’re delivering the services, their team configuration can change pretty. It can change. Pretty drastically. So I share this with you, just because I want you to know that
Really creating a configuration that works for you is probably going to be a little bit more in depth than just listening to this podcast episode. So let’s say you have a copywriting agency. A team configuration could be an operations director, a creative director, a marketing director. If you have an HR agency, it could be an operations director, a compliance director, a recruitment director.
Based on what you specialize in. If you have an accounting agency, it could be an operations director. If you offer tax services, a tax director, and a marketing director. So again, it really depends on what particular services your business offers and how you offer them. But that is, those are just a few examples.
So when it comes to actually implementing this. I recommend first, I usually will do this in phases. So something that I I’ll announce this here first, I haven’t really talked about this publicly is that I am now offering higher level support for larger businesses when it comes to operational strategy and really developing the leadership team inside of these businesses.
And when I go into a business of this size. I typically start here and I implement in phases. So today we’re just going to be talking about what phase one looks like. And hopefully if you’re in a position where, you know, you need to hire a leadership team, maybe you’ve already started, but you’re not quite sure.
Like where to go from here. Or maybe you’re not at the level or maybe right now, you don’t need to leadership team, but you want to know what’s coming. Here are some areas that we look at first. So the first thing that I typically look at are the foundations. And this is what that looks like when you are.
At the position where you are going to be having. Department heads, let’s call them department heads on your team. Right? I would call that the leadership team, but I’ll also call them department heads. So the first thing is to create an updated organizational chart based on not just where you are right now, but where you are projected to be in 12 months.
This is where you definitely want to take a look at your numbers. You want to create projections based on the opportunities that are around you, and then you could also use opportunities and a mixture of historical data to be able to project over the course of the next 12 months. So that could be something along the lines of taking on a certain number of projects over the next 12 months, or taking on a certain number of clients over the next 12 months, whatever is most applicable to your business.
Creating an org chart for where you are right now, an updated org chart. And then also for where you are going. And then based on that, updating your roles and responsibilities of your team members, and then also the key performance indicators or KPIs for each of those team members. I we can go much more in depth on each of these areas. I’m not going to do that today.
On the actual how to create roles and responsibilities and KPIs, but these are all things that you will want to update so that you can really see. Okay, what does it look like? You know, six or 12 months from now. Who are the roles? What roles am I actually looking to fill? Who on the team?
Either that I already have, can fill those roles or that I need to hire, can fill those roles. And then once they’re here, How do we measure their performance? Okay. So that’s all in the foundational area. The next area that we take a look at is the actual management. And this is either promoting someone internally who fits who fits the position.
And either fits the position right away or can be transitioned. Or mentored into the position, or it might also be hiring someone. Externally to comment and fill the role. If you don’t currently have someone on your team, who’s either a interested or B has a skillset to be able to do it. So there’s a few things that you’ll want to do when you’re bringing somebody in. And I think if I were to really take a step back and.
And summarize what you would want this level of people to do inside of your business. It’s really to be able to take ownership. Of two things. When it comes to their department. The first is team performance. So it’s really their responsibility to own their team’s performance. So their team will be reporting to them. And they’re responsible for doing things like meeting with them, checking in with them, reviewing their performance.
And delivering. Feedback really also being the visionary for their department for really leading their team members and sharing what that vision is and creating a really. Meaningful culture. That’s also obviously you have company culture, but then really making sure that’s infused to each one of your teams.
So that’s one area. The second area is really being able to take ownership over any projects. That needed to happen within that department to improve the department’s performance. So this could be something like implementing, like purchasing and implementing new software. It could be streamlining a delivery process and rolling that out to your clients and customers.
And it doesn’t, it doesn’t necessarily mean that person is going to be the project manager doing that, but they would be the ones partnering with a project manager to be able to implement those projects. But ultimately they would be taking ownership over team performance and those projects.
So that’s the second area that we focus on. And then the third area is the actual implementation of this. So the first two areas, foundations and management, there’s starting to be some implementation work. Obviously you’re updating. Different tools like organizational charts, roles, and responsibilities, KPIs in the management, you’re identifying, who needs to fill that leadership role and what that looks like starting to either mentor someone on your team or, start the process with someone in your team or start their hiring process.
And then there’s implementation. And this is really what I would, I could, if I could compare this to something. That you might already know about, it would be like an onboarding plan. And so I love when hiring new team members, or if you have a current team member who’s fulfilling a new role. I’d love to create a 90 day onboarding plan.
And within this plan. We have, over the first week, what they’ll be responsible for over the second week, what they’ll be responsible for all the way. To the 12th week, right? Four, four is eight, 12. I’m like 12. 12 weeks and in 90 days, so what did, they’re going to be responsible for each and every week, and then checking in with them to see how it’s going and where that plan needs to be adjusted because sometimes.
We have a different idea of what is possible versus when we’re actually implementing where we realize either something takes a little bit shorter or it actually takes a little bit longer. And then determining how you want to adjust the plan moving forward. Either it may be extending the deadline out and giving it more time, or maybe changing the scope so that you are able to do something faster.
But that is really that third phase is really the implementation where you are already have some momentum going. You’re working on that transitional plan, that 90 day transitional plan. You’re seeing how people are doing, and then you’re able to modify it accordingly and be able to either. Give folks more mentorship or make those timeline adjustments. And ultimately what we want to do is really see.
Whoever it is that you need to hire on your leadership team right now, we want to see them start to take over the reins and then eventually take that complete ownership. Over their team and their projects. Okay. So this is what I would love for you to do. If you are in a position right now where you feel like you need to hire in a leadership team, or maybe you already have a leadership team.
And, it needs to be working better. I would love for you to let me know. Where is it that things feel a little heavy or confusing to you? Send me an email at hi@nicolejacksonmiller.com. And let me know or if you are someone who is not in this position yet, but you’re thinking you might be there in the next few months.
I’d love for you to send me an email. Let me know. What do you need support with when it comes to hiring a leadership team? Because I’m going to be continuing to create more podcast episodes based on your feedback. There’s a lot of different areas we could go into when it comes to leadership teams.
And so based on your feedback, I will be creating and crafting more episodes to help support you. All right, everyone. Thanks for joining us this week and I will see you next week.
