Welcome to the Rich Coach Club, the podcast that teaches you how to build your dream coaching practice and how to significantly increase your income. If you're a coach and you're determined to start making more money, this show is for you. I'm master certified life coach Susan Hyatt, and I'm psyched for you to join me on this journey.

Oh hello, Rich Coach Club peeps. Today I’m spilling some tea about curating a business squad, AKA team building is the boring way to say it. And why team building is so important for the success of your business.

Now, if you don’t know what spilling some tea means, Urban Dictionary is your friend. So for those of you who know me, you know I’m fiercely independent and I can be kind of a lone wolf. Even with exercise, I have my best friend who’s my running buddy, but honestly, if I didn’t know Francis, I would probably run alone.

I do work with a personal trainer but I refuse - he laughs at me every time he brings it up - I will not do group training. No. I really enjoy having people to myself, time to myself. I am a great team player and great collaborator but my preference is to go it alone, and maybe that’s where you are right now.

And maybe this kind of independent nature seems like it might not be a natural fit but I’m here to tell you that getting over myself and building my dream team is exactly what had to happen to take my business to the next level. It’s exactly what my business needed.

Now, I didn’t start out that way. So, many of you listening may be what we call a sole proprietor, which means you run your own company and you work by yourself and you do everything yourself, which is totally cool. I did that really for the first nine months of my business, and even then, I had to hire some part-time help.

And so let’s say you’re like, no, it’s just going to be me, I want to keep it manageable and small where I can do everything. That’s fine, but I’m just going to impress upon you that you’re still going to need a dream team on the home front. You’re probably going to need things like a housekeeper, an errand runner.

And for those of you listening to this for business purposes, I really want to challenge who’s on your dream team because there’s your dream team for your actual business, and then yes, there’s your dream team on the home front. Because I can tell you right now, my fridge is empty and my laundry is piling up because I lost the infamous Emily Rosenquist who moved to Indianapolis who was with me for like, 12 years, 14 years.

God, I lose count. I’ve been replacing her with things like Instacart and barking at Scott Hyatt to do laundry but I need somebody. So when you’re running a successful business, you really have to think about what’s the support that I need to really pull this off.

And you’re probably fooling yourself if you think you can do it all by yourself like me. And I’m going to go through all the various phases that I’ve gone through as a business owner. Today, what you see today is that I have a growing and amazing team who’s helping me expand this company to new horizons.

Huge changes are actually coming so I want you guys to stay tuned for that because I mean, big news, people. Big news. But let’s return to the reason why I created a team and how they became my dream team and why you should consider creating one of your very own.

And it sounds so romantic and easy, right? No, it’s not. Finding the right people and you just have a team, it doesn’t work that way. It’s not all that easy but if done correctly, can make all the difference in the world to the success of your continued growth.

So over the years, I’ve become better and better at team building and curating the right people for my team. In fact, people often ask me like, how do you find these people? It’s after making some pretty epic mistakes, y’all.

Let me go back to when I started this company in 2007, you might be aware of a little book called The 4-Hour Workweek by Tim Ferriss. I remember reading that and being like, what? He only works four hours a week? Which of course, I’m laughing at that.

Tim Ferriss works more than four hours a week, okay? Okay. But it was my first introduction to the concept of having a virtual assistant, a VA. I had never heard of such until I read that book. I was at the point in the beginning of my business where I was doing it all myself, I was spending hours and hours formatting an email newsletter.

And you may be there right now and you know this can be exhausting. Quite often it’s counterproductive, and it most definitely kept me from growing and expanding at the rate in which I could have early on, but you got to learn what you got to learn.

So eventually I got tired of spending my whole day trying to format a picture and a newsletter header, and I hired a part-time VA. And this was back when I remember sealing the envelope and licking the stamp and snail-mailing her her $600 retainer. It was $600 for the month and I believe I got 20 hours for that. Maybe 30.

And I had some epic fails. Like that first person took my retainer and really didn’t do anything for the work. The next VA that I tried had a lot of turmoil happening in her life and she really never got around to doing anything. She didn’t take her business seriously, she certainly didn’t take my business seriously.

And it was when I decided, okay, I need to stop trying to get the cheapest per hour person I can find and hire a really professional executive VA part-time. And I did that and she was great. She stayed with me for years. And so that first year in business, I was just shy, $500 shy of six-figures, $99,500, with the help of a part-time VA.

And for those of you who are trying to get to your first six figures, I’m actually working on a follow-up podcast episode to this where I’m going to spill the tea on all the mistakes and wins that first year in getting to my first $100,000. And if you’re interested, I have a mastermind that’s designed to help you do that called On the Six. I’ll talk about that later.

But I went from six figures with one very part-time assistant to multiple six figures with a full-time assistant and contractors, hired contractors like my website designer, my photographer, anything that I needed outside of a full-time assistant was a contract employee for a very limited scope.

Then I still, with just one full-time assistant, which is kind of miraculous, went to seven figures and I remember talking to Brooke Castillo and she was like, you just have one full-time assistant? She was like, no one does that. And she was like, and certainly no one gets to two million dollars with one full-time assistant. I mean, nobody.

She was like, not even two. And I remember thinking yeah, yeah, yeah, I’m going to though. And she was right. I’ve talked about this on previous podcasts and certainly on my blog that I really identified with Scrappy-Doo from Scooby Doo. That whole vibe.

Like, we’re a lean mean machine over here and I can pull myself up by my bootstraps and I can get it done. And it was really just fear. I’m going to talk about it a little later in the pep talk but this fear that I’m not great at managing people and therefore I don’t want to add to this team because I don’t want to deal with it.

So I had to really become a CEO before I understood what was really needed. And in 2017, I joined an all-female mastermind called The Collective and I was probably the smallest business in the group. I don’t know that for sure but that was my impression, and I remember people were talking about hiring different people and people were whipping out and sharing their organizational charts in the Facebook group and I was like, wait a minute, what? You have an org chart at what? I just have a full-time assistant.

And they all thought that was cute, but listen, I preach up and down about women not doing all the domestic labor and the invisible workload of women on the home front. Like you better get your housekeeper, if you want a chef, get a chef, you need to put everybody in that house to work and you don’t do it all.

And yet in my business, it was interesting. While I had professional full-time help, I didn’t have enough of it. And it’s been proven that the more you can outsource your work and stay in your zone of genius, the more money you can earn. It is not my zone of genius to be trying to figure out how to create a beautiful Instagram story.

So don’t fall into that trap that you have to do everything yourself and hoarding your money because you don’t want to pay someone to do what you can do yourself. Think about it. You can’t be the expert at everything in your business and I’m guessing, if you’re a coach, your zone of genius is coaching.

And you might be really great at some parts of the business. Maybe your background prior to becoming a coach is that you were an accountant or a teacher or in sales. Okay, recognize where you really have the most impact on your company and then outsource all the rest.

Because when you try to do everything, quite frequently, everything suffers. And maybe you’re like no, everything’s great, my money’s great, my clients are happy, I just want to introduce the idea to you that if you were to stick to just your zone of genius here, you could grow even more, even double your income.

But you may be like most of us that find yourself going down the rabbit hole trying to learn everything about a specific task. Let me learn Ontraport, let me build my own website, let me make my own sales calls. That was a tough one for me. I went for years and years and years without ever doing a single sales call. People had to sign up off of emails or my website.

And sales were good but then all my clients were asking me about how to do consult calls so I started doing them actually as research. And lo and behold, because my background is in sales, I was pretty good at them. So then releasing sales calls to somebody else was trouble.

I’m like, you never did sales calls, now you want to hold onto these? Forget it, Susan Hyatt. Maybe you’re writing your own copy, designing your own graphics and so on and so on. So it can become a never-ending downward spiral to learn and do and repeat. Because there’s always something new. Making money off of Instagram stories, it is only a couple years old.

And so I found myself taking Instagram story trainings. What am I doing? I need somebody on my team to do this. And what you’ll find if you continuously fall into that trap is that you’re not completing things and you get distracted. And eventually you reach this plateau where growth just stalls.

So in order to avoid that, again, you have to be open to the possibility that outsourcing things, creating a team can be what’s most needed, and expand your reach. I mean for me, the thing that finally got me over myself was understanding that if I wanted to have the impact that I wanted to have on girls and women with Bare, on female entrepreneurs with making more money through pleasure-based activities, I couldn’t do it alone anymore and I had to create a dream team.

So whether you want your team to be virtual or in-person with you, you want to think about what are the types of skills I need, personalities that I work well with, there’s all kinds of assessments you can use which we’ll talk about another time. But you really need to get serious and define your dream.

So I work with all kinds of entrepreneurs. Everything from, like I said, people who are trying to get to their first six figures, I freaking love that, but I also work with high-level entrepreneurs who are making - I mean, I have an eight-figure client.

So what’s crucial though is to understand - and this can change - but what’s the dream for your impact, for your business, for your work? So how big do you want it to be? How far do you want your reach to go? And how quickly do you want to get there?

I like things fast, but that can be a problem in and of itself as well, but anyway. So all of the answers to those questions, what are your dreams for your business? How big do you want it to get? How far do you want to go? How quickly do you want to get there? That’s going to help determine who you need on this team, who you need to hire, and in what order.

And if you’re looking ahead to 2020 or five years from now, even 10 years from now, you might not have a clear idea there but if you can allow yourself to dream and look at the big picture, you can start to backtrack and determine what your more current needs are. This is developing a strategy for your team.

So what I used to do is try to do everything myself. Me and a full-time person, and then I would come up with this big idea and want to implement it like, yesterday. And what that can do is create quite a bottleneck in your company because you’re already - maybe you’re doing one-on-one coaching sessions and facilitating retreats and trying to create killer content on a weekly basis.

And if you’re an idea machine and you’re not planning it out properly and not getting the right help for it, it can really cause things to go sideways. So knowing where you want to go ultimately can help you know where you need to start. And it’s okay if you’re like, I don’t know, I have no idea what I want to do in five years, 10 years.

That’s okay, but often when I challenge my clients to think about it, like okay, if you want to be the next Mel Robbins and have speaking as your primary way of earning money, you’re going to create a different team than if your business model is I just want to facilitate international retreats and coach one-on-one.

So knowing where you want to go can help you decide who you want to hire and you also have to really think about defining your purpose here. So my team is pretty clear on what my business purpose is. It should be clearly defined.

So having a team that works in tune, understanding the purpose of the company, then they can understand how to pool their energy towards a common goal. So identifying short-term and long-term goals, creating a plan of action that’s easy to follow, and identifying the right people with the right skills are your next steps towards your ideal team.

So remember, these team members will be working as a collaborative unit. This is why understanding where you’re going, what the purpose is, communication is key, so that you can develop lasting relationships. So as I got over my Scrappy-Doo complex and started hiring people, I started thinking about what do I want Susan Hyatt Inc to be, and I really want it to be the hub for women, for inspiration and empowerment.

And there’s an online hub, but there’s in-person stuff that happens too. And so it was really important to me when I looked at all the things that we were doing on a daily basis, Larissa and I, who could do this better? And that’s when we brought Holly on, and then we added a head coach and then I hired a COO, but I digress.

You also want to consider what’s the type of culture you want to create in your business. When I look around at all the different life coaching agencies that are out there if you will, there are different vibes. Each coach has her own, his own flavor. And the company they’re going to build is going to reflect that.

I was actually reading handbooks from a variety of different companies and there are people who have things in their handbook like this is how you need to dress if you work for my company. I’m much more easygoing and laidback but I do - it’s a ride or die kind of culture with my company.

So this will help you decide and make hiring decisions if you think about the company culture. Because it’s important - we’re actually hiring another executive assistant who I want to be local to me, and I was really think about this interview round and how important it is to communicate, this is intense, fast-paced, super deadline-oriented, but fun.

We laugh a lot, we get shit done, and I want people around me who are so committed to the mission here that they are just ride or die, because that’s how I am. And so when you think about what your dreams are as a coach entrepreneur, your dreams are just going to stay dreams if there’s not enough time or resources or people to make it happen.

So I remember I would get frustrated about wanting to leverage certain things and then being like, there’s just not enough time or people on this squad to make that happen. And so you may find yourself doubting your decision to grow a team of your very own, but remember that time is your life energy and you must use it wisely. So the sooner you map out your plan and you put those plans into action, the sooner you’re going to be living the impact of your dream.

Okay people, here’s your two-minute pep talk for the week and this is the part of the show where I share some encouragement and inspiration to get your week started off right. And I try to keep things to 120 seconds or less.

So I mentioned before, something that I had to get over was my own mindset around growing a team. So instead of - if you find yourself when you think about your mindset of objections you might have to hiring people, something that’s really common is something I had to get over, which is the belief I don’t like managing people.

So that’s fine. You may not like managing people or you may have the wrong idea of what it’ll be like managing people, but if you hold onto that thought, I promise you, you will never grow a team that helps you leverage your genius.

So I want to encourage you to pivot from I don’t like managing people to I can learn how to create a dream team. I will grow people as well as a company. That’s my new one. So I am a great nurturer. I really am. And I have had to start to think about how do I grow these team members as people?

So one thing that I did recently, and this is a small but fun example is that Larissa, who is my right-hand righthand, she is my project manager right now, but she’s growing with the company as well. She has really struggled, she’ll tell you, with finding time to move her body.

And she does these beautiful soul strolls in the morning but she lives in Vegas and the weather’s not always cooperative and I sent her a Peloton bike. I’m like, you know what, you want one, you work hard, you deserve it. I know as a business owner that her riding that bike is going to grow her as a person. It has grown me as a person.

It literally, as I have strengthened my core physically, it strengthened the core of my business, as my best friend Francis pointed out. So my new thing is I’m going to grow people as well as a company. And for coaches, that should get you pretty excited, right?

And the other thought that you can borrow is that my work deserved ride or die people and nothing less. I’ve had people on my team who were not ride or die and it’s really obvious when the rest of us are. They stick out like a sore thumb.

And so my friend Rachel always says, hire slow, fire fast. And I want you to adopt that attitude that yes, we’re going to grow people but we’re also going to put our time and energy into people who match the company culture, which for me is ride or die, man. We are here to serve and help and spread the word of body positivity and of women breaking glass ceilings. And if somebody on the team can’t get excited about that, then they got to go.

Our topic this week has been building your dream team, team building. Once you build that team, it’s important also, I think, to create personal relationships with your team as well as just a business relationship. And so in October we had our Finish Strong event out in San Diego and I decided to fly my whole team out there.

And spending those days together, working alongside each other was both empowering and fulfilling for me. To see my team come together with a plan and work so hard to serve the women who showed up to finish the year strong, it was just fabulous. And when we all celebrated at the end, we were all tired, but it was such a happy tired.

And I was just so proud of each and every one of them. And when you operate a virtual or online business like most coaches do, and you outsource work to other virtual employees or contractors, it’s easy to fall into the trap of focusing just on what needs to get done instead of the people behind the work.

And so getting to know your team members and growing them creates really valuable results. So establishing and maintaining those connections are going to serve both you and your businesses well.

So again, here’s the top three qualities I look for in team members. I’m looking for people who have time and dedication to commit. Having clear expectations for them is key. I look for people who have an unshakable belief in what I’m doing.

So as a coach, your coach programs, your signature programs and products are centered around a theme or a focus, and it’s important that your team members believe in that mission and they’re encouraged to promote it. I have actually hired Bare coaches to be on my staff because I know they’re ride or die with the Bare process.

And they’ve got to have belief in you. So you’re the queen bee here. Don’t kill the queen. God protect the queen. And as with any team, their devotion and commitment to you and preserving your energy so that you can rock out what you do best is paramount in your team’s success.

So reciprocating that between yourself and your team is the special sauce. So once you get to know them and understand what they’re about, that belief can grow. So your team, I’m telling you guys, if you get over yourself and start to really curate a dream team, finding ride or die people will help you create unbelievable results with the team of your dreams.

So right now, I mean, the year’s not even over yet and my income is up a half a million dollars over last year. And it’s pretty incredible to consider that the company gross income has grown that much when we had a book tour. We did a lot of things that took me away from a lot of my major money-producing activities.

I’m probably going to do a series of episodes for people interested in writing and promoting books. But it’s been really interesting to see how I mean, I was all over this country with that book and not doing what I typically do to grow the company and it grew anyway.

And so I’m really excited for 2020 as we continue to grow the team and I’m going to be home more with my fingers in everything so soon. You’re going to be creating unbelievable results as well with the team of your dreams.

Now we’re moving into the part of the show where I give shout-outs to you; shout-outs to listeners, clients, all the wonderful people in my business community. And today I want to give a shout-out to Dr. Erin Weisman.

So Erin took the time to send my team and email about a previous episode that I did called Front Seat Living with Jessica Butts. And she writes, “Such a great episode, Susan and Jessica. I totally nerded out with you, Jessica. #healthcarenerdsunite. So excited to tune into Jessica’s podcast for more. Keep it rolling, Susan. Love your bomb ass content and your bomb ass too.”

Well Dr. Erin, I love your bomb ass as well. And hey, if you have something to say about this show, please send an email to my team, post a five-star review wherever you listen to podcasts, post something on social media and tag me, and you might hear your name on a future episode. I love giving you guys shout-outs so holler at me. Thank you for the love. I love you right back.

So throughout this episode we have been talking about your dream team and we’ve been focusing on building your office or business team. And I slid in there you also have to think about your home team because my friend Denise Duffield-Thomas, she actually, I think, spends more money - she has three little kids, a thriving business. I think she spends more money on her home team than she actually does business help.

So there’s no right or wrong way to do it but you need to get your dream team. So how many of you have already worked with groups? And if you have no idea what this would feel like or how it would run, you can start by joining a coach group sooner rather than later.

So for me personally, I spent years leading groups without nurturing myself and being part of a group. I always had a one-on-one coach, which is by the way, highly recommended, but when you work with a group and you’re working alongside people who are going through the same things you’re going through, there’s really nothing like it.

So for example, I mentioned earlier in this podcast, I have a mastermind group called On the Six for women who are scaling to six figures. I also have a higher-level mastermind just called The Mastermind for women who have already earned their six figures and they want to make multiple six, seven figures, eight figures.

My mastermind group puts a small group of like-minded women together who are at about the same level, ready to take their business onwards and upwards. So basically, we work together to get shit done and scale. My On the Six program really helps coaches who either they’re new or they’ve been working at this a long time and aren’t getting the results they want.

But I help them boost their business to the six-figure mark. We work on mindset, motivation, confidence, money blocks, it’s so rewarding for me to work with these peeps. And in fact, one of my masterminders in On the Six just reported that she had some money blocks. She had some mindset blocks. After we had a couple of coaching sessions together, she is reporting a new $8000 in new revenue earned from new clients.

So if she had been a lone wolf and not sought out to get the help that she could get from a program like that, from a coach like me, she might still be sitting there spinning her wheels. So my point here is in addition to creating your dream team for business, there’s your hype squad, there’s your mastermind team of coaches that’s another powerful example of how team building in a mastermind can change and grow your business.

Not to mention how making connections and establishing relationships inside these groups can lead to ideas, resources, and countless other benefits along the way, like referrals. So they say - who’s they? But they say that all coaches need a coach and I fully believe and support this.

Get inside - I don’t care if it’s my group or not, but get yourself inside a paid coaching group. Get your coach on. Thank you for listening to today’s episode. Now it’s time for you to start building your own dream team. So I’m going to invite you to outline your own goals and dreams for the next quarter.

Consider all the things you do in a day, a week, a month, and evaluate. My COO would call it rolls and holes. Evaluate who’s doing what and what you could outsource to others, and what would that extra time in your day, in your week on your calendar do for you.

Would it allow you to brainstorm big decisions? Would it allow you time for creative thinking and product creation? Would it allow you the opportunity to finally take a vacation or experience your own rewards for the time and energy that you’ve already spent building this business?

There are so many benefits to having a team and even just adding one person, one part-time person can make a world of difference. So I challenge you to take the leap. Start the search for your first or your next team member because it just starts with one move at a time.

Look inside your already established community and see if you have the perfect person right under your nose all this time. My lovely Larissa was like, in programs and hanging around Susan Hyatt Inc for years. Right under my nose. I’m so glad she raised her hand and said hire me. You might be surprised at who you find.

And soon, you’ll be living the dream with your kickass team. It’s time to build that empire, coaches. Let’s do this.

Thank you for listening to Susan Hyatt's Rich Coach Club. If you enjoyed today's show, please head over to susanhyatt.co/cash where you'll find my brand-new money magazine. Now listen, we designed this magazine to be entertaining, educational, and help you make serious bank.

So you can download the magazine, there’s a money quiz inside, there’s an interview with one of my favorite clients who went from making no money and being served eviction papers, to making over six figures in a very short amount of time. So the magazine includes that feature, lots of resources to help you do it, lots of resources about creating wealth and investing money.

It’s pretty robust, y’all. So head over to susanhyatt.co/cash to get that magazine. And you’ll also find a link to join my free Facebook community, especially for coaches called Rich Coach Club. So bring your coaching practice and your income to the next level at susanhyatt.co. See you next week.