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Lesson Info

How to Shop for Freelancers

Okay, in this last section I just want to help you get over the complete overwhelm of hiring someone. So I'm gonna tell you where to look and go over a couple of best practices for bringing people on board. It's not as scary as you think it is and once you do the first one you're gonna feel so relieved that you're gonna want to do it more. So for sure, best hiring practices, what you want to sort out from the beginning is what you need help with, establish your expectations, and then determine what your non-negotiables are. What does this person absolutely have to do. People aren't perfect, right? So you can't say I want the absolute perfect person to do this, but you can set expectations and goals that they need to meet in order to continue to work with you. Whenever you're hiring someone, you do want to consider having a contract, laying out the terms, of course discussing costs up front and if you're going to hire someone in an ongoing relationship, perhaps a virtual assistant, cons...

ider nondisclosure agreements or noncompete clauses. It might sound like a bit much but if you're only hiring one person like a virtual assistant it could even be worth consulting with a lawyer for a half hour who could draw out some of these sample documents for you or you can look around online to get sample documents just to make sure that your covered for all eventualities. Alright, let's talk about a couple sites. So one site is Fivrr, you can hire so many things on Fiverr. It began as a site to hire something, get someone to do something for five dollars. But it's gone so much bigger and beyond that. You can get someone to do graphics, design, digital marketing, writing, translation, video, animation, music, audio, programming, technology, business, and lifestyle. So let's take an example. Let's go into the graphics and design page on Fiverr. This is a great place where you could hire someone to do your logo. So what you'll see is listings of places that will have your logo. So you can hire a logo for five dollars, you can also get a new logo for 30 dollars. So there's all kinds of price points and what's really great about the site is you can also see reviews. So you can see how, what rating a person has, that gives you a bit of confidence for working purchasing that particular product, and you can, a lot of the options, like I said, it's no longer all five dollar things there are a lot of premium options available. So if you dig down into the listing a little bit you'll see that you can you know, check the difference between a basic or a premium product. For example, so this is where you would hire a task to be done, you're not really hiring the person on Fiverr, you're hiring the task. So you would hire I want a video made or I want a logo, or I want you know, this ebook created. And so that's a great resource to go to and find someone. Another site to go to for hiring freelance lawyers is Legal Zoom. So Legal Zoom is basically freelance lawyers who could help with business formation, trademark and patents, wills and trusts, intellectual property, any kind of attorney advice. And I'm just gonna say as a disclaimer, when you have a new person in the family you always want to consider your will situation as well. Just to make sure that everyone's covered. Also, especially if you're running a small business there's lots of things you might need to take care of and so Legal Zoom has a prepaid legal plan which allows you to get small bits of advice from attorneys. So that's a, if you feel like it's really overwhelming to find your own attorney, this is a great resource to go to. One of the most popular sites for finding freelancers is Upwork. So different from Fiverr, this is a place where you hire a freelancer, right? So you're not just hiring for a specific task you're actually hiring the freelancer possibly on an ongoing basis. So here you can hire someone local to you or worldwide, and the categories are designers and creative, programmers and developers, administrative support specialists, those are sort of like VAs, writers, translators, finance people, sales and marketing people, I'm hiring a marketing and ads guy right now. And so you can find someone local to you if that's important to you or it might not be important to you. And then if you go into one of the categories there are so many options available. So even under finance, boy, there are a lot of them. So if you need a bookkeeper this is a great place to go shop around. There's also email handlers, so if you were looking for someone to manage your email, you could go to this site put up a job request, and accept applicant. So what's great about this site is you see the person, you can see how many jobs they've done, how many hours they've put in, their keywords, all sorts of success rankings. So you feel a lot more confident hiring a person knowing that they have a successful track record. They way Upwork works is that you post a job with keywords and you can invite freelancers to apply to the job or people will look and find you. One really nice feature about Upwork is that it allows you to have screenshots of what the people are working on. And so, you know, if you're paying someone per hour, you want to make sure that they're really working on your stuff, and so here are a few screenshots from Mei Pak. So this is for her ad person you can see from these screenshots that the person really was working on her photos and uploading her ads. So that can give you an additional level of comfort especially if you've never hired someone before and you want to make sure it's really your work getting done. A great site also is Thumbtack, so this is more about your local area and also for home stuff too. So events, home, lessons, wellness, business, crafts, designs, and web. You search, you would put up like a job the same way as before or you can browse categories. So if you are a craft person and you need some hands on production help, this is a place where you could put up an ad and say yeah, I need someone to help with jewelry or crocheting, or whatnot. And you would get responses. So you go ahead and post a job and get people in your local area to come and help you. Because it can be hard to find local people sometimes. And that's especially crucial for production work. Tidy is a really great app, so it's a way to find a housekeeper near you and you just do it on your phone and you can schedule someone to come on a regular schedule. There's help available for everything. This place is only in Minnesota but I'm sure once you get the idea in your head you can start looking around for similar things so Let's Dish is a place where you can get pre-made meals delivered to your door. And if you want to save a little money you can actually go in in person, cook two weeks worth of meals, put them into your containers, and just bring them home and put them in your fridge. So you may find with your schedule that it works a lot easier for you to just do four hours, get all your meals done and then every night you're just hitting the microwave. So many solutions available. Craigslist of course, always available. If you're looking for someone local to help you with production work you can always put up a craigslist posting and hope to find someone. Again, all of the same tips I've been giving. Interview the person, chat with them, see if they're the right fit for you. People like I said before aren't always the answer. So if you're hiring a person you can hire that person per hour but you might be able to pay a little bit extra money for a software solution and not have the hourly cost that's ongoing. For example, Neat like I sad files your receipts. Quickbooks is a technology solution that would help with your accounting, Follow Grower, Board Booster, are technological components that help with your social media. So you may go the route of hiring a social media person or you may spend some money buying a little piece of technology. It's all just delegating, right? So what it's about is taking things off of your to do list and handing them out over to someone or something else. So I'm gonna show you a bit of how I used help to overhaul my business. So back in the day I told you, I was running a kit club. So I was running a physical club where I was shipping hundreds and hundreds of boxes a month. So I got to the point where the boxes wouldn't fit in my car anymore. That's a lot of boxes. And I was shipping out a lot a lot a lot of boxes and it wasn't really compatible with my life anymore. I could've hired employees to come into my home, but that didn't really seem very practical to me. I didn't have the homeowner's insurance to cover employees in my house, I didn't really have the space to handle multiple people coming in, so I decided to convert my entire bestselling product into a digital subscription membership site. So people thought it was kind of crazy to kill my bestselling product but I could see that I could grow so much bigger by changing it around, and I said you know, I'm gonna put money into doing this and I'm gonna do it right. So I hired, I already had a web developer, but I also hired an illustrator. And so I just want to talk to you a bit about how that process goes because you know, maybe you've never hired someone like this before. And it's pretty interesting to look at it. So this is StudioAM Design. I actually found her as a referral from a friend, so that's like the old school way of finding help, is like asking a friend who they use. Some online groups can be really useful ways of starting to network and so you can meet others who are doing what you're doing so you can share resources. So I wanted to redesign my logo, which was an owl, and the way it worked is that I gave her my sketch and she sent me a lot of totally different options, right? And then I would say things like, oh I like AC, or you know, A3, but you know, like a little bit smaller pupils and kind of like this. And part of your contract in working with an illustrator is how many revisions are gonna be part of the package. And then once we had worked on our nice little owl, she put him into different configurations. So one is an advertisement for my new club and one's the smaller sized logo. And she worked together with my web designer to get the right font that I should use for my website. So what I really love about this example of hiring expertise is because the person was a professional and did this full time, she had a holistic, just like a whole perspective of not just doing one cute little logo but how it would sit on my website. Talking to my web designer, what width the images should be. And it allowed me to do so much with my site but not require a lot of time from me. I mean what I needed to do was, that owl needs some smaller eyes. Yeah, okay sure that one's fine. So I was really easily able to do this in my half hour of checking emails let her go ahead do the work and then she'd check in back with me. So it is possible to make really huge changes to your business if you're delegating the tasks to the right people and you have a clear vision about where you need to go with your business. Thank you so much for participating along with me in this class, I really hope that I've given you a clear system so you can delegate, eliminate, streamline, and breathe flexibility in your business. And I hope that you see it's practical with using the different stages that I've shown you to take a short leave, to put your business into maintenance mode, and then to rev back up with a newly streamlined business so that it can be better than it ever was before. It's never easy to balance our home life and our work life but I hope I've convinced you that it's worth giving it a try and we're looking at the long haul of our businesses. So our goal is to keep this business momentum rolling while still fulfilling what we want to get done in our home lives. So I hope you had a blast working along with me, I thank you for really doing the work, for thinking deeply about your business because I'm sure it's gonna pay off for you. I hope that you find me online, my email is staceytrock@gmail.com, you can find me on Twitter, stacey_trock, Instagram staceytrock and my website is staceytrock.com, thank you.