Who am I? What do I do? & How I am going to help you!
Tell you a little bit about me, I am 28 years old. I live in Vancouver, British Columbia, where I have built a number of different businesses. Businesses that I’ve built so far are a digital marketing company called The Magistrate, as well as a couple outsourcing companies, so marketing outsourcing companies, companies that would support digital marketing companies. The fourth that I’m working on right now is a big data company, something that is more from one of these other companies that I’ve built.
Of course, I’m looking for five and I’m looking for six as any other sort of serial entrepreneur might. We are remote. We do not have an office, and we like it that way. We’ve been like that more or less from the start. We used a little bit of shared space once upon a time, but for the most part we have been entirely remote. Our company itself is based all over the world, in just about every continent now. We are 50 strong, and quite honestly growing just about every single week.
What else? Our goal, right now we’re doing about $1 million in revenue. So last year we did $1 million, and going forward our plan is to basically triple that by the end of the year. So what my hope is, is that you will join me on this little journey from $1 million to $3 million, and we’ll just see how that goes. It’ll be really in the trenches. We’ll be looking at things that we’re doing, things that work, things that don’t work, and we’ll just see how it goes.
Now, I’m not going to reinvent the wheel with this show. We’re just going to do question and answers. I have reached out to my audience, what little they are, my email list, my social media. I reached out to Anchor. If you haven’t checked out Anchor, check out Anchor.
I got a bunch of questions. Thank you so much for those questions. I did not expect to get as many as I did, so I appreciate that. I’m just going to jump into them and answer them totally off the cuff, and just see what comes out.
So here we go. Question one, “What is your experience and recommendation for scaling yourself?” I think there are some things that definitely shouldn’t be scaled. For example, I know this one guy, this blogger, a well-known blogger, among other things. He gets a ton of questions all the time on his blog, by email, via Twitter, and he doesn’t reply to any of them. He has an assistant reply as him, and I get why he’s doing it. Like, I understand how tough that must be.
However, I think it comes off really disingenuous. I think, well actually, I know a gentleman who ran into him, and started talking to him about a conversation they had had via email, and the guy had no idea. So I would suspect that sort of thing happens fairly often for him, and I don’t think that does him any favors. So there are some things that ought to be scaled or can be scaled, and then there are some things that you really shouldn’t touch, like social media, like email, like pretending. I don’t think in the long run it’ll work out very well for him.
But as far as things that can be scaled, I like to think of it like this. When I’m doing something, I ask myself, “Do I need to be doing this? Am I the only one that can do this? Is there somebody who can do it at least as good as 80% as well as I can?” And if I can answer “yes” to that, and that’s pretty much everything, if I can answer “yes” to that, then my first instinct, or my first instinct should be…and it’s a process. I still struggle with that. I still feel like I have to micromanage everything from time to time.
But my first instinct now, or what I’d like my first instinct to be, what your first instinct should perhaps be is, “Let’s record this. Let’s write this down. Let’s turn my screenshare.” Something like Snagit, or, I can’t remember some of the other software out there that captures your screen, captures audio, turn something on like that and just walk them through it as you’re doing it. So you’re not really spending any more time trying to accomplish that task. You’re just doing it as you normally would, while narrating someone through the task.
If you do that for everything that you do, you’re going to start to find that you’re doing a lot less and you’re able to scale. You’re able to start to back away a little bit and focus on other stuff that perhaps deserves your attention a little bit more than say, writing that piece of copy or building that website, or whatever it might be. So that’s how I scale myself, and so far I think it’s worked out pretty well.
Question two, “How do you know when it makes sense to outsource, and how do you do it?” This question is super-related to the last one, I’m glad this one is following the other. As I mentioned in my previous answer, when it is time to process something, when it is time for me not to do something, it’s time to start writing it down. It’s time to start, as I mentioned, doing a screen capture of what I’m doing.
The way I generally do things is, unless it’s something like web design, like I’m not going to learn Photoshop at this point. I was able to get away with not learning it when I first started my business, and I haven’t really had to learn it too much so far. So something like that, it might make a little bit more sense to outsource the process from the get-go. But when you’re starting out, all you have is your time.
Generally speaking, or at least the entrepreneurs that I know, they didn’t really have much in the way of startup capital, so they did it themselves. They did their website. I did my first website myself. I did my copy myself. All that, set up my payment processor, blah, blah, blah, I did all that myself. So I would encourage everybody to do these things themselves. But when it’s time, when it’s, I suppose, starting to impede your ability to run your business…
Like, I remember one time, I was doing my own bookkeeping. Not only could I not do it nearly as well as anybody else, but it was taking up such a large chunk of my time that I couldn’t run the rest of my business. So you really need to think about that, and my suggestion would be, do it yourself first. Again, some things you’re not going to be able to do yourself, or just might be too large of a learning curve to do yourself, but try and do it yourself.
And do it yourself for a while, and really get to know the ins and the outs. Because when you know a process, when you know how to do something as well as the next guy, you can actually teach it and that’s what you’re going to be doing. That’s how you’re going to scale. That’s how you’re going to be able to outsource it to somebody who has potentially never done this before, that has a blank slate. You’re going to be able to teach them, because you know the ins and outs of that particular process, of that particular function that you’re hoping to get accomplished by somebody else.
So the way that I put these things together is from the get-go I start putting together a process document. If I know that I’m going to be outsourcing this at one period of time or another, I start to put these things down on paper, or in a Google Doc typically. And every day, I just pick away at it, I pick away at it, and it’s going to morph a million times before you actually end up giving that document to somebody. But along the way you’re making edits, you’re making edits, and it’s becoming a much stronger document, a much more detailed document.
And then, once you’ve actually got it and you’re able to go ahead and give it to that individual that’s going to take over for you, you’re going to be able to answer their questions, because you’ve done it. You’ve done it a million times over already, so that makes you a much better resource to them, a much better manager to them, and their learning curve is going to be much less steep, because you’ve entrenched yourself in whatever that task is.
So that’s how I approach it, and I can’t say that I’ve really come across a better way to do that other than hiring somebody who already knows exactly how to do that. But a lot of the stuff that I do, and I’m sure a lot of the things that perhaps you do, are things that maybe haven’t been done before. Maybe it’s just something very creative, something very new that just hasn’t been done before, so you have to teach it to somebody else.
So that’s how I accomplish it, and I can’t really think of a better way to do it. If you can think of a better way, I hope you will let me know. So guys, that’s the show. I hope you enjoyed. I hope that I provided you with a ton of value, and can continue to do so, that you keep coming back.
Now, please ask your questions in the Comments section on YouTube, or just fire me a tweet with your question and be sure to use the hashtag #AskSteele. Thank you very much for your attention. I do, do appreciate it, and if you have a moment, subscribe. Thanks, guys.
