Scaling Your Business: Hiring Strategies, Delegation, and Podcasting with Jamie Van Cuyk

Introduction to the Creative Visionaries Podcast

Welcome to the creative visionaries podcast. My name is Tori Barker, a digital marketing specialist, business owner, mom, and you guessed it, a creative visionary. This podcast is about inspiring business owners, building connections, sharing success stories, and motivating others. Join me on this journey as we tap into your true potential and unleash your inner visionary.   📍 📍 📍 📍

Hi, everyone. Thanks so much for joining us on the Creative Visionaries podcast.

Meet Our Guest: Jamie Van Kike

Today, I am super excited to introduce you to our guest, Jamie Van Kike. Jamie is the owner of Growing Your Team, a seasoned strategist in hiring and team onboarding for small businesses. With over a decade of leadership experience, Jamie helps clients find perfect fit for their business.

Long lasting team members and navigate the complexities of scaling without the common pitfalls. In this episode, we're going to explore why hiring is crucial for business growth, the impact of ineffective teams, the practical tips for delegation. So stay tuned while Jamie and I share the insights on diversifying your business and leveraging podcasting to grow your business, Jamie, welcome on the show.

Hi,

Tori. Thank you so much for

having me.

Jamie's Journey to Business Ownership

So tell us a little bit more about who you are, your business, and how you got to this point in your business.

Oh, yes. So, oh, I feel like there's so much I can share there. So,

uh, Take us down whichever path you'd

like. Yeah. So I'll just kind of start with the kind of like short thing of like how I got into this business.

I was in corporate leadership for years, loved it, but always had the draw to start my own business. I knew I one day wanted to be a CEO of a business that I grew from the ground up. I left that business in 2000 and uh, 16 to start a business with my husband. Six months into that business, I realized I hated it.

I was miserable, and I was like, I didn't leave a corporate job. I love just to start a business that I hate and be miserable every day, just so I could call myself a CEO. I'm like, Nope, I gotta figure out something else. And. It was a process of getting there, realizing I was doing some consulting work, what I love with that work.

I did some market research and it all just kind of fell together that my passion was people helping people really excel as leaders within their business and that I had a lot of experience when it came to hiring. And people needed the help with hiring. So it was like all this stuff that magically came together and, uh, growing your team was officially born in 2018 and been loving it ever since.

The Importance of Hiring for Small Businesses

So now we really help small business owners. Gain the confidence to hire like a pro. Many small business owners never hired before doing it within their own business, or they did it when they were working for some other company where they had HR teams and senior leadership and peer managers and all these people that were helping them with the process in ways they didn't know.

And now that they're on their own, they're like. What do I do? So our goal is to help reduce the trial and error so you can get the right person the first time. The person that's actually going to help your business excel. It's going to help you work less hours, take the stress off your shoulders, and not just Add different stress because instead of doing the work, you're managing people.

So we really focus a lot on education, training, making sure you have the right tools and even provide full service recruiting for the business owners. They're like, that's great, but I don't want to do it. Help me out.

I love that because I think. Uh, as entrepreneurs, like when we get started in, in growing a business or at least starting a business, hiring's not necessarily the first thing on our mind.

Right. So we're like, okay, yeah, we're going to grow this business. We want to get here. How do we do that? And there's so many books out there that talk about this exact thing, right? Like who, not how, and like all those different things. So I think it's. It's exciting to find a company that can support the business owner and educate them and, um, teach them about the right and the wrong way to do it because there are so many right and wrong ways, right?

There's troubleshooting when you do it on your own and, and just finding the right people because.

The Right Person for the Right Role

You know, I'm of the mindset of, you know, right person, right seat in your business. And so you want to make sure that you do have the right person in the right role, doing the right things with the right responsibilities, because otherwise that can poorly affect your business and affect the growth of your business.

Oh, 100%. And it's funny. I like that, that you brought up that thing about like right person, right seat. Cause a lot of times, sometimes in corporate, it's like, it doesn't matter what seat it is. If they're the right person for organization, just get them in. You can figure out the seat later. You can move them around, but that doesn't work in small businesses.

You only have so many seats. You might be in a convertible that only has two seats. So you can't. You can't get someone in the wrong seat. They need to be the right person, the right seat. And that other person that you loved might be a great future hire, but if they're not who you need right now, you can't hire them.

You can't add them to your team. Yeah.

Well, and something I want you to touch on is. I don't know if I would call it overstaffing or, or how you would categorize that, but sometimes I think as entrepreneurs, it's like we need to have, you know, this person, this person, this person, this person, but sometimes you can get a little too top heavy or, you know, um, team heavy, if you will.

And that will stunt your growth as a business. So can you talk about how you identify how many people you need on the team, the right positions and the right roles in order to grow and scale your business? Yes.

So one of the things that I will say here is when you're making the decisions on what positions you need on your team, you need to ignore the people you actually currently have on your team.

Because sometimes we love some of the people so much that we currently have on our team, we're like, How do I get the support I need? Well, keeping these people in mind. And then sometimes we end up creating too many positions because the fact that the people you have on your team, they don't want to, or can't do these expanded roles.

So you split a role that should be one role into two roles so you can keep this person. And yes, I support being people focused in your organization. I think Businesses thrive the most when they put their people first, but you have to make your smart business decisions while still being people first, not being people first and letting that make it.

So you make poor business decisions. So the 1 thing to look about, uh, there's kind of 2 ways to look at this is. You don't want to hire a jack of all trades that really excels at nothing, but you don't want to end up with 10 micro roles, let's say 10 micro roles in marketing, when you could just really hire one good marketing person.

Yeah. So, I always say is, you really need to look at, when you're going to add new positions to your team, is what's going to produce you the best ROI right now, and start with those things. And when you find out what's going to produce you the best ROI, you can then start adding similar tasks. To that role.

So once again, I mentioned marketing. So if you have a marketing person on your team, how can that marketing role expand to take other work off your plate to create one marketing role? You don't necessarily need five specialists if all of them are working only 10 hours a week. How do you create that one all encompassing marketing role?

How do you create that one all encompassing operations role? Then at the same time, If you need operation support, if you need marketing support, if you need sales support, if you need bookkeeping support, that's sometimes where you need to hire those micropositions because they are different expertise.

They're helping your business in different ways. They're, if you had like, let's look at a corporate organization, all these roles would be in different departments. So if it's, if it's tasks that fall in different departments, they need to be individual people. If it's all one department, then don't make it micro roles in that department, unless you need someone that's so highly specialized that that's all they do and you know you're going to get the best ROI for your dollar to get that, that specialization there, but everything else is combined into one role.

Yeah, and would you say that there are any key roles when it comes to scaling the business, like, as far as like, if you think of the traditional like CEO, COO, CMO, like, are those, um, roles Necessary for growth and scaling, or how do you think like, because I know that different companies have different, uh, quantities of team members, like there's small and mighty, there's big and robust, like there's different ways of scaling your business.

So are there any like key roles that you need to get to that scale, scalability for your business?

Yeah, so I would say the first thing to looking at when you're scaling is who is actually doing the day to day work. So the actual client work, the tasks that need to get done behind the scenes, the admin, and things like that.

The boots on the ground work. And those are some of the first roles to really hire for because you can't do it all. And sometimes you need some of that work or all of that work taken off your plate so you can really elevate yourself more to be that CEO of your business. There comes a time to then you need to start delegating the strategic thinking.

So you can't hold on to all the strategic thinking of everything. So a lot of times those higher level roles, so those C suite roles, come later. You can't hire a chief marketing officer. And have no one to execute the marketing work, you can get some of the chief marketing officer title, but if they're still executing the day to day work, it's, it's kind of a mismatch for tasks and responsibilities and title.

So you need the people first who are actually going to do the work. And then eventually you delegate the strategic thinking. Obviously there's many positions in between the person that's actually doing the boots on the ground work and the C suite work, but in a, in a small business, that hierarchy is going to be.

A lot smaller than in a large corporate company. So, like, that's part of the thing is, first with scaling, who's going to help you do the work? Then who's going to help you do the thinking? If you're sitting there saying, but sometimes I don't know what to do. I don't know how to create those right strategies.

I don't know how to do this yet. That's where a lot of times consultants come in. Or you have your fractional team members. So maybe you have a fractional CMO or a fractional. Chief financial officer or things like that, where you only have them a few hours a month for that high level strategic thinking, but they're not a day to day employee in your company.

Right? Well, so I love that because I totally agree. And I think that's, um, you know. A lot of the people in my circle and my network are in that same kind of mindset and position in their company. So I love that you said that because it's totally aligned. So I wanted to talk, you talked a little bit about delegation.

The Challenges of Delegation

So, uh, I want to kind of go back to that and talk about why is it so hard for these business owners to kind of relinquish control and embrace delegation?

Yes. Yeah. So if you think about it this way, if you're working for a corporate company and you have your team members do something and that team member screws up, yeah, it might be a little bit on you and you might take a little bit of the fault as well, but you don't necessarily feel the financial pinch.

You're still getting that paycheck. Yeah. There's a lot of things when it comes to, um, how that that mistake is felt that you don't feel. You feel the emotions of it. Maybe you have to have a strong feedback conversation with your team member. Maybe you have to have those tough conversations with your boss, but that's about it.

It's a lot of just kind of that emotional thing when you're in a small business and you are running the business and you've built that from the grounds up. You know how many, how mistakes actually impact the organization. You know that if you lose money on this project, how it impacts your ability to afford things, how it impacts your ability to reach your scaling goals, how it impacts your ability to pay yourself, pay your team members, and there's all these other things that you're responsible for.

So we have all this additional level of responsibility and it can impact us and impact our personal lives. We're like, I don't want to put that in the hands of someone else. The best person to control the impacts on my life is myself. Cause if I screw up, I screw up no big deal. I have myself to blame, but if they screwed up, but I could have done it better.

I could have done it myself and not had that screw up being there. So we're, we're so afraid of what could go wrong. It stops us from getting the benefits of what goes right when we hire. So we really need to get into the mindset of we can make mistakes too as the business owner. We're not immune from making mistakes.

So yes, our team members might make mistakes. Yes, your team members will make mistakes along the way, but so do you. And that the benefits of having a team member, especially the, that right person in that right seat, far outweigh those occasional mistakes that will

happen. Yeah, absolutely. And I think, like you said, we're all human and we're, we're not perfect.

And it's the way that you approach it and the leadership approach that you take, um, when stuff like that happens to correct it immediately and to educate, train, you know, make sure that it doesn't happen again, um, so that you can continue to move forward, obviously, if that's the right person, uh, for the organization and it hasn't uncovered, you know, an issue that.

You didn't see beforehand, right? Um, so there's all those different layers that you have to, uh, think about and consider as a, uh, an owner and business, you know, you know, CEO or whatever it is. Um, so I want to talk a little bit, we talked about scaling your business, having the right team in place and the delegation, all of that stuff.

The Power of Podcasting for Business

stuff and, and I know that you're also a podcaster. And so I want to talk a little bit about podcasting and how you incorporate that into your business to possibly diversify your marketing through podcasting, um, the approach that you've taken and how you help your clients as well with, you know, looking at podcasting to, to grow their business as well.

Yeah. So for me, I started my podcast because I would sit there and. Meet people and I would say my audience needs to know this this person. I would love to introduce this person to to all my clients and and I was just like. Okay, if I had a podcast one day, this person would make a great guest. And finally I was like, why am I saying one day?

Like I have all, I have this huge list of people. I would love to have the guests and introduce my audience. And they have so much expertise to share. Like I just need to start the podcast. I just need to do it. So I started it as a way to bring this additional expertise to my clients, to my audience, and not just have it be.

I'm talking about these topics all the time. It's like here are people that are not me talking about these topics. Here are people that actually have applied this type of stuff to their business that are sharing about their success stories and things like that. So you can see that what I talk about actually works.

So it was a lot of that, just bringing that additional level of knowledge and expertise with my podcast. It goes every other one for the most part guest episode, a solo episode where it's just me, those solo episodes tend to be much more on the shorter side. And it's those quick things. I'm like, yeah, here's something you really need to know.

Let's get to the tactical. Let's talk about this one little piece of the hiring process or the onboarding process or the leadership process. Yeah. And. One of the things that I noticed that makes my podcast 100 percent worth it is when I get referrals, they always say, I knew, or so and so told me you had a podcast, or I saw on your website, you had a podcast.

I listened to a few episodes before booking a call with you. And that's how I knew I wanted to book a call with you because I listened to your podcast. And so many people would be pre sold because, like I said, we're talking about our packages, hiring education, we're teaching you how to hire. And they could go and listen to how I talk about topics, my approach to certain topics, and they knew it aligned with what they were looking for before they ever had a one on one conversation with

me.

I love that. It's, you know, the no like and trust, right? Podcasting is the, for me, I mean, as a marketer and a podcast host and, and marketing strategist, like pod, I think everyone should have a podcast. I'm crazy. I have two podcasts. So it's like. There's so much, um, value that comes from podcasting, not just for like personal growth, growth, business growth, uh, client relationship, authority building, thought, like thought provoking community.

Like there's just so I can go on. And so I love. When companies like yours utilize that as a tactic in, uh, educating your audience, growing your business, building connections, you know, helping to scale, um, and, and teach other people what you've learned along the way through podcasting and that medium. So, um, I just love, I love that about, you know, Our connection here as podcast hosts as well.

Delegating Podcasting Tasks

So now since we're talking about your business, and then now we're talking about podcasting, now let's talk a little bit about delegation when it comes to podcasting, right? Because if you bring podcasting into your realm as a business owner, as one of your marketing, uh, avenues, um, There's going to be work behind the scenes stuff that needs to be done, and you can hire an entire team, literally, to help with your podcasting.

So talk a little bit about, or maybe share if you have like three specific tasks that you advise your clients who have podcasts to delegate when it comes to scaling.

Yes. Oh, it's one of those things. It's like you can do all the work yourself at first and maybe you will. I know I did everything myself at first, but there comes a point where delegated you're not starting a podcast.

To manage a podcast, you're starting a podcast to get your content out there. So you don't need to be doing everything behind the scenes. The three things that I would say are key to delegating is first the editing to have someone else do the editing, unless you're an expert at all that stuff, because they'll, they'll help make sure the sound is good.

They'll help, you know, really make sure people want to listen to your podcast. Cause it's not hurting their ears when they go and listen to the podcast. So the editing is great. It's also most of us don't want to listen to our own voice and ourselves speak so they can go out there and do that for you.

They can help say, especially if you're doing solo episodes. Okay. That was really confusing. I don't get what you're talking about, or that was really great thing. Can you dive into this deeper so they can give you tips and ideas for maybe future episodes. Yeah. The next thing is your show notes. And especially if you want to be, I think, really visible with your podcast, you have to give people a way to find your podcast.

And typically that's going to be through SEO. So having someone that can write your show notes for you so you don't have to do it. It's a great thing to delegate, especially because if you're bringing guests on your podcast, most likely your show notes are going to be templated and it's plug and play a lot of it based on the information the guest gives you like their contact information, their bio and all this stuff.

So it's really easy to delegate because a lot of it doesn't, the show notes, because a lot of it doesn't take thinking. The part that takes thinking is maybe writing together that description of what the episode is. Yeah, but they the episodes there so they can listen to it and they can write the description and the beauty about someone else writing it is.

They're writing it based on what they're hearing versus you writing it based on what you're saying. So they sometimes pull out different things than what you were thinking about when you were going through things. And once again, you're the expert on it. So sometimes you just view things a little bit differently than what your audience is going to take away from it.

So delegating that is, is great. And then the last thing that I'll share is the marketing. This was something that I definitely learned by looking at my analytics. I would be busy, so sometimes I wouldn't market my episodes at all. And when I didn't market my episodes at all, my downloads went down. The months I really spent a lot of time on the marketing of the episodes and getting that content out there, letting people know that new episodes were dropping, my down Downloads skyrocketed, and so I could see this up and down, up and down, up and down, and I'm like, ooh, marketing of the episodes really does make a difference.

So there's no point of having a podcast if people aren't listening to it. So you need to market it. You need to get it out there in front of an audience. I will add a caveat to that. People listening to it does not mean you have to have a huge download like huge download numbers. You can have small download numbers, but they're the right people.

I will say for my podcast. It's still if you look at number of downloads considered a really small podcast, but. I have a loyal audience. As I said, my podcast helps me get clients. My podcast serves the purpose that I want it to serve. Now, if you're starting a podcast where you want to make a lot of revenue directly off your podcast through ads or things like that, sponsors, obviously, you need higher download numbers and marketing is going to help you get

there.

Love it. So true. I couldn't have said it better myself. I love that.

Final Advice for Small Business Owners

So let's wrap this up with one final piece of advice that you would have for small business owners who, um, haven't yet hired a team or, um, are, are in the process of hiring just any tips that you would have for, for them kind of taking this next step.

Yeah. So one of the things I will share is it kind of goes back to, as we were talking about delegating is they'll, they'll become, they'll come points where you're like, is it worth it to hire somebody? You'll be in the hiring process and you're like, this is a lot of work. Do I want to keep going through it?

You're managing someone and some days those things will just not go well. And you're like, I'm just going to pull it all back to being me. And I just want you to ask yourself, does it have to be done right? Or does it need to be done by you? If it needs to be done, right. you can train somebody to do it. So think about things that way.

If you're struggling, but to delegate, but it doesn't actually need to be done by you. And we're talking about need. We're not talking about that control factor. We're talking about absolutely needs to be done by you where you can clearly say why it needs to be done by you other than I just do it best.

Yeah, it needs to be done by you at this point in time in your business. You need to delegate. You need to, you can train someone on what it means to do it right. And that's one of the things that we tend to overlook as that training part of when we hire team members. Even if you hire someone who has done this exact work for another organization, they've never done it inside your organization.

They have never worked with you. So you need to train them on your expectations. You need to train them on how to access things within your file system. You need to teach them on your processes and everything. So they need to learn from you what it means to do things right from your standards. And they don't know that unless you teach them.

They're not mind readers, even their most, um, ambitious team members that are very much self leaders that are very proactive. They still don't know how to be proactive in a way that's going to serve you unless you teach them. So they could be proactive and taking you 100 percent down that wrong path. So take the time to train your team members, teach them what it is to do things right.

So that way you're happy with their performance.

I love that. Jamie, thank you so much for sharing your insight, knowledge, and just all of these wonderful, you know, golden nuggets of information. I think that everyone listening can definitely take something from this and apply it, uh, to their, to their business, um, and to how they're going to grow moving forward.

Connecting with Jamie Van Kike

So how can people get in touch with you, get ahold of you to learn more about, um, possibly working with you or just maybe listening to your podcast or connecting on social?

Yeah, so you can learn more about me by going over to growing your team.com. There you'll be able to access the podcast, which is the Growing Your Team podcast with Amy Van Kike.

It's available on all major pod podcasting platforms and you can find me on Instagram under Growing Your Team. That's where we spend the majority of our time, so, and if you go to the Growing Your Team website, you can find links of scheduling calls or other information that we have out there as well and all about our services.

Awesome. Well, thank you so much for being a guest. It's been a pleasure and, um, I just had such a great time chatting with you.

Yes. Thank you. I had a great time.

Closing Remarks

Thanks so much for listening to the Creative Visionaries Podcast. If you've enjoyed this episode, make sure you subscribe, leave us a review, or share with a friend. Also, make sure to visit us online at creativevisionariespodcast. com. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, or LinkedIn, and stay tuned for more episodes to come.

And remember, it's time to tap into your true potential and unleash your inner visionary.