Now here’s the thing: you obviously can’t pay a salary starting out.
You have to find someone that already has a nine to five, who already has their bills covered for the most part, and they’re trying to build their own little admin assistant business and their operations manager business.
You are adding value to them by being their case study and vice versa. Right? So that’s hard, but that’s why it’s so important to be connected with other business owners who may have found someone.
I basically asked a colleague of mine who also has a poetry business about who he uses or if he knows of anyone and, and we shared and use the same person ops manager as well.
It’s connection in relationships ultimately. No surprises there.
You’re not going to find that on Indeed and expect them to accept pay for what you have. It’s just not, it’s not going to happen.
People also look at virtual assistants, such as someone in the Philippines who may be cheaper. I’ve had a virtual assistant as well. She was my scheduler who would take the lead with the leads list and start reaching out to people, but also DMing poets and people a script that we wrote to sound natural and spark up that conversation.
Oftentimes the communication can be an issue with virtual assistants because when you’re trying to explain some things just through text, or when Zoom really zooming like you want it to, it’s a little difficult. So you kind of want to work with someone in the States ideally who is willing to even travel when there’s an event and things of that nature.
There are also internships.
It can be a college student who’s looking for social media experience. There are teens and early 20 year olds that still see the value in an internship for the experience.
Cause I think again, a lot of poets are going to be thinking like, I’m already not making money from this. Why am I going to pay? A lot of people are going to have that mindset. I think a lot of people are also missing out on some of the financials. There’s a whole lot of accounting and tax things that can work to your advantage.
Now, I am not a CPA. I’m not licensed to give any financial advice. There can be advantages like if you have kids that are younger and you get them working for you, there are tax advantages that can come with that.
There are things like write offs and business expenses for submission fees, you know, anything you’re doing related to writing that you get to pay for. So you actually, you can save a whole lot of money.
I’ll be honest and transparent, though.
What we’re currently talking about right now I would not suggest for a poet starting out. This conversation is for someone who has made the transformation from individual to entity. Right. And even years beyond that, you know, because you, the business owner needs to know how to do these things before you hire somebody, because how will you onboard someone?
How will you train them if you’ve never done it yourself?
See the full talk at https://youtube.com/live/KW5scBrFCqI