Jake Randolph Teaches Hiring 101 for Beauty Businesses [How to Delegate and Build a Team] | Ep 12 The Beauty Biz Pro Podcast

Hiring can be difficult and frustrating sometimes. In this video, I’m sharing my top pro tips on how to hire the perfect employees to help your beauty business thrive. From defining your ideal candidate to providing an awesome onboarding experience, I’ve got you covered. 

Don’t miss out on these game-changing hiring strategies! 💼✨ 

Transcript

So don't hire dumb people.
Well, that was actually the first bullet point on my brand manager, Kylie. That was she literally, we have a list, you know, for content. And she's like, don't hire dumb people. That's valid. But let's talk about hiring right now. Look, you know, how do you hire? You know, what are some of my best tips for it? And you know, what are some things to look out for. Because, you know, for the first couple years in business, I try to do everything myself, and it was an absolute nightmare. I lost a lot of sleep. You know, quality of life went down all that. And so I understand that a lot of you guys may or may not be in a position to hire, and we're going to talk about that first. When do you have your first hire? Well, if you're watching this and you're like a small business owner, or, you know, audiences, beauty businesses. So if you're a beauty business owner, and maybe you just started recently, and you have a very limited budget, well, maybe you have to do a lot of stuff right now that you're don't necessarily like doing, and that's just part of honestly, starting a new business, like you're not going to have the budget to hire and delegate every single thing. And I think that's why most people go out of business the first couple years, first two or three years, because they never put in enough effort to do the things that I don't want to do to get to where they need to be. So they don't have to do those things anymore. My first hire, when you get a chance, would be, and I know I'm a little bit biased, because I run a marketing agency, but I would say marker would be the first hire. Because, let's face it, you guys are running your salons or spas or whatever you're you're doing the service. You're staying on top of all that. There's a lot of hats you're wearing for that. But anyways, yeah, so with with marketing, that's one thing that, yes, you have to do some things yourself. And I teach about all that in the channel, and I've got free courses on it, so I'm not sitting here trying to sell you anything like you can literally go through my free courses and and learn a ton of stuff of what you need to be doing yourself. But then what would you hire a marketer for? Well,
some people say, you know, I'm going to hire a marketer to post social media content. And I always say, why? You know, typically, someone charges 300 to $600 a month for that. And do you know what the hardest part about making content is it ain't posting it. That's the easy part making content. The hard part is scripting it out, doing the videos, doing the photos, taking the photos, thinking of the idea, like all that stuff, actually creating the content. That's what's harder. So if you're just hiring an outside agency now, if you have someone coming into your studio and filming and filming and everything for you, that's a different story. That actually is pretty helpful. But if you're just thinking about hiring some random agency just to make post for you, like, organic posts, one don't really even matter that much anymore. I mean, they're kind of important just for the fact that, you know, you got to have something on your content. But so many people think with organic content, like, Okay, I'm gonna make, you know, six posts a week, and I'm gonna get all these followers and all these views and all this stuff doesn't really work like that anymore. Like you've got to find ways to build your audience. And then, yes, once you have an audience, once you have attention, then it's great that you have content. So that's why you should be posting some content. But you can't rely on it, because if you're relying on organic content, you're doomed to fail these days. Now, five years ago, yeah, organic content, great. Now, not so much. So you do need paid ads, and that's kind of where the marketer comes in. Paid ads are very, very important, but they're also very, very challenging. Now, Facebook and Instagram make it easy for you to blow your money. You know, there's that Boost Post Button. You know you can do that, and you might get some results. You might not, but I guarantee you, you're not going to get the same type of results that you would doing it through ads manager, doing it in a more professional way. Having a marketer who knows what they're doing now, you're probably thinking like, Okay, what marketer started to hire for that? And I'm not going to spend much time on this, because I've done other videos, but find someone in your actual niche, someone that has actually had experience with clients like yours, because just because someone's good at marketing for, you know, a roofing company or some, you know, whatever, doesn't mean they're going to be good at Microblading or doesn't mean they're going to be good at marketing a med spa or facials or permanent jewelry, and so find someone that's done those services before, not the actual service, but has marketed for those services before, and advertised for
those services before. Because here's the thing, like I've seen a lot of amateur ads, even by marketers, and it's just it makes me feel bad, because you guys don't know what a good ad is or not, and so you're blowing your money. But if you're currently working with another marketer, you want me to analyze their ads, and I can quickly tell you, like, Yeah, I think this is going to work great. Or, you know, this, this company doesn't know what they're doing. And I'll be honest, I'm not just trying to steal, you know, their business, like, I want to just give you help you guys out then, you know, comment below or send me a message that I can help you that. So that's the first thing. Is that advertising agency, I would definitely get some ads running. Because when you get ads running and let me take a step back, what do you need to hire the other people? What do you need to hire your staff? What do you need to hire a virtual assistant? What do you need to hire all that? Well, the answer is money. If you don't have money, you can't hire anybody like not many people take bread and water as payment any. More like the 1500s so yeah, you got to have money to pay people. So how do you get money? Well, you advertise your service, and then you do your services and make money. And so that's why step one is advertising. Now, what problems is advertising going to create? And yes, that's right, I said problems. Well, the first problem is, oh crap, I'm getting all these leads. So either I have to be good at sales, or I have to respond to all these leads and book them myself. So and even if you are good at sales, it's taken up your time. Also, even if you're good at sales and converting the leads, as you start to get more booked up, we all know, or hopefully you would know, response time is key. And so if you respond to a lead within five minutes, versus responding to a lead in 30 minutes or two hours, like for my microblading artist or my facial people, you might you might be in a treatment for two hours, and then guess what? You check your phone and you haven't responded to your leads in two hours, and that's if you don't have back to back clients. So the problem is now your conversions are going down because you don't have anybody replying to your leads. You don't have anybody you're not answering your leads, essentially. And so you've got to either have one, a virtual assistant that's going to do that for you, or a front desk person that's going to do it for you. But that's usually more expensive because you have to hire locally, and Americans are more expensive than VAs overseas. So if you don't have a virtual assistant, and it's hard to find one, but I'm going to teach you guys you know some some things to ask them, how to hire them and everything. But if you don't have a VA, and you don't really know how to find one and stuff yet, and you'd rather keep it a little bit easier and more simple, simple, there's AI. So we've actually implemented probably 100 different AI bots for beauty businesses over the past year, and it's, it's incredible what that stuff does. And like I said, I'm not trying to sell you guys. I'm just telling you, like, what the possibilities out there are. Because if you ever played with chat GPT, you know that AI is very smart, like it can have conversations with you. It can. It knows context, like everything. And so imagine having the power of chat GPT in your inbox. And so when Pete, when you get leads like it can literally answer questions. You can you can give it all the data and customize it up front, aka training the bot, and then it does everything for you. So that's and when I say does everything for you, it answers the leads for you, and like, has a conversation with them that's very, very powerful, but it's also cheaper, because it's a software and it's very scalable, versus, you know, having a BA that only works, you know, six, eight hours a day, but then now you gotta have multiple VAs if you want to cover the shift. And let's talk about that for a minute. What shift should you put them on? Because when do most people want to work? What are normal business hours? I would say nine to five, eight to four, whatever. Well, when do most people message back or are on their phones the most? What I found is usually people are on the phones the most. One when they wake up in bed, which is usually like six or 7am maybe 8am depending on how lazy they are or in the evenings, after they've cooked dinner, while they're on their phone, chilling out in the recliner, after their kid put their kids to bed, you name it. When do most people want to work again? Nine to five? When are your leads coming in the most and the most responsive after hours in the evening? And so step number one would be make sure you got your evening shipped covered. Now that is a little bit easier if you're hiring somewhere in like the Philippines, because with their time zones and stuff, our evenings in the US are their mornings, and so it makes it great. So they can easily cover the evenings. If you have someone from the Philippines doing that, or somewhere in that general time zone, or, you know, you can find someone that is also willing to work evenings. But I just, I find that it's better to fit with people's sleep schedules. That way they're freshest and they're, you know, we all like if you guys didn't know that some people are morning people and some people are evening people, or night owls, I should say, why is that? Well, think about it. Before we had security cameras and police and all that stuff, what was there? There was a campfire and a camp, and the enemy could attack at any time. The Saber toothed Tigers could attack any time. If everybody went to sleep at the same time everybody went to bed at 9pm Well, the sabertooth tigers, or the enemy, could just attack at 10 or 11 midnight, and bam, everybody's caught off guard. And so genetically, some people are night owls, because they're, you know, going back to the old days, they were stay up and watch the campfire, make sure the fire doesn't go out, especially on cold winters, and protect the camp. And then you got to other people who wake up early and take over the shift, while those people other people go to bed. And so genetically, some people are better at night. Some people are better in the morning. So that's one question I actually like to ask on interviews. Now this is not legal advice for what to earn to or ask or not to ask on when you're hiring. I'm not an HR rep. I am not an HR expert. I'm just basing it off of what I've done before, and I haven't been sued yet. But, you know, consult with your lawyers. Are that crap? All right? So. Going back to the problem you have with ads. Well, now you got leads coming in, you've got an inflow of leads, but you're also getting bookings. You're booked up, and so you don't have time to respond to leads. So we've talked about AI, we talked about vas. Let's talk a little bit more about vas. So where do you find them? Well, you can find them on Facebook groups. They have all kinds of virtual assistant Facebook groups. They have. You know, there's some websites out there where you can hire them directly, and a lot of times you can find someone to reply to your leads for you, maybe, like, let's say that you've created the post in your studio or salon, you've created or you've created the content. So maybe you've made a video, you've made a photo, whatever, where you can actually just upload it, send it to them, and then they could schedule it out and post it for you and stuff like that. And the cool thing about that is, instead of trying to remember, Oh, I gotta post today, I gotta post today or tomorrow or whatever, and keeping up with that, because you're already wearing, as you guys know, I don't have to tell you this, but you're already wearing a lot of hats. As a business owner, you don't have to need you don't need to be thinking about when do I need to post? And so either use a content scheduler that's automated, like beauty biz AI, if you want more info on that, or a free demo, let us know. Or with your virtual assistant, they can, you know, schedule that out for you. That's one of the roles you can delegate and assign. One good exercise, one of my mentors taught me years ago was, you know, write down all the things you're doing day to day in your business. And when you have a list of everything you you're doing every day in your business, go back to your list, look at it, and go line by line, and say, like, Okay, what requires me? So if you're a Microblading artist, obviously doing browse, doing Microblading that requires you. And so you mark that off the list. You can't, you can't really delegate that until you, until you, until you get big enough to have other artists in your studio. So that's marked off for now. All right, let's look at posting content. Oh, okay, maybe I can delegate that. But like Jake said, I don't necessarily want to hire an agency just to post content. So maybe I found a VA. They can do, you know, posting content. Maybe they can, you know, write, do email marketing for me, they can answer leads. And so now you're finding all these things that, okay, instead of me doing this, I can find someone who might be better than me and delegate that. And so using this list, you can kind of figure out, like, what are the things I can take off my plate? What are things I have to keep doing right now and then? What are things I want to delegate in the future. I just have the budget for it right now, but I'm going to get to that point. Another thing that one of my mentors taught me was, by the way, guys, if you're enjoying this and you're like, wow, Jake's just giving away everything, comment below, I want to hear I need some feedback. I love to see your guys's comments. I appreciate it. So another thing you can do is do a calculation and think about like, Okay, what is the value of my time? You know, whether it's $50 an hour, $100 an hour, typically, when I ask this on webinars or Zoom events, people say you see about 100 to $200 an hour in the beauty industry. And so like, okay, let's say your time is worth $100 an hour. Well, if you spend 10 hours a week trying to figure out ads. How much are you spending of your time on ads? That's $1,000 a week, so that's $4,000 a month. So in theory, if you found an advertiser that was cheaper than $4,000 a month, you just saved $4,000 of your time. Let's say you spend five hours a day responding to leads, which is very, very reasonable. Once you start to follow up, start to manage leads, start to get a lot of leads incoming, and you're, you know, you've got a good business going. That's, that's very normal, is to, you know, be spending at least five hours on that. And so five hours of your time a day, that's $500 of your time per day. Multiply that by, let's say, seven days a week, so that's 3500 and then multiply that by four, that's somewhere around $14,000 of your time that you're using to respond to leads. And so if you can find someone for $1,000 a month to respond to those leads and save even if they only do 80% good of a job, do the math, even if they only do 80% of good job as you. Because that's one of the things you're probably thinking like, well, they can't do it as good as me. That's one of the things that held me back when I was hiring, is I always felt like I needed to find someone to do it just as good as me. And another mentor of mine actually told me, like Jake, if you can find someone that does a job 80% as good as you to take you 100% out of the that role or out of that responsibility, then it's a huge ROI. And same thing for you guys, going back to the example of you know, $14,000 of your time per month is doing, you know, responding to leads? Well, if you find someone for $1,000 a month to respond to month to respond to your leads, for you, what is the difference in that? That's $13,000 you're saving, plus you just freed up all that time. Or you can do other stuff. You can, you know, spend time with your family, do a hobby, have a real life. You know, do other forms of, you know, marketing, outreach and. There's so many things, and that's how it compile compounds, is because you're, you know, and that's the, really, the key to sculling, like, honestly, this video should be titled, really the key to scaling your business. Because what I'm showing you guys is, okay, I got to start off on step one. When I start my business, I got to, you know, I got to make enough money. I got to do the thing. I got to do everything that I don't want to do to make enough money to hire, to start hiring. So I hire the advertiser. Now I'm making a lot of money, or more money. Now I hire somebody to respond to leads. Now I'm making even more money. Now I hire somebody to do this, or I hire another artist. Or, you know, there's you just keep scaling up, and you keep finding ways how you can save your time. Because as you grow your business, your time is going to go from, you know, worth $20 an hour to $50 an hour to $100 an hour to 1000 like my time, I've calculated is about to work $2,000 an hour. So if I spend an hour mowing my yard, okay, I saved $100 because I didn't pay somebody to do it, but I just lost $1,900 of my time. And so that's how I think about everything the ROI. So what questions you guys have? I'd love to know. Post them in the comments, and let's go this, honestly should be like a multi part series, but we're just going to make a long video. Hope you guys enjoy it. So hiring, so some some key things I look for when I'm say, looking for a virtual assistant, I know I'm not going and this is what I told Kylie, my brand manager, I don't like talking about things. Talking about things that I don't know about, and so I'm not going to sit here and tell you how to hire a hair stylist or how to, you know, hire a front desk girl, because that's not something I do. But what I I'm really good at hiring virtual assistants, or virtual teams, remote teams, I guess, is what you call it these days. I have a team of over 20, and I've, you know, I've had a lot of them stay with me for over five years. They're like family now. I've even got, I had, Andrea. What are you guys? If you work with us, you know, Andrea, she's awesome. She does the social media audit, she does the onboarding, the customer experience, you know, she even came with us to the Vegas PMU conference when I spoke to him in that last year. So they're like family. To me, it's not just somebody on a computer screen. These are real people with real lives and real, you know, feelings. And that is one thing I want to call out, is a lot of people are just especially in America. Like, I see this on Facebook groups, they're like, oh, he has somebody working from him from the Philippines. Like, what are you an elitist? You think you're better than somebody because they're from a different country. Like, they're making a living for their family too. They're making a great living for their family. So what? Who are you to judge, like, what country somebody is from that's, that's pretty like, that's like the rate, that's like, the country version of racism. So like, Stop doing that. Crowd, guys, if somebody is good, they work hard and they're good at their job, and they help you. What does it matter where they're from? They can be from Mars. For all I care, it's all about ROI. But anyways, that was the first time I've ever had a tangent about that. That's cool. Going back to hiring, what do I look for? What I ask, what questions do I ask? So first thing I'd like to do is quickly filter out people. So what is the best way to filter out someone? When you post your job role? Put some instructions in there, because what are the biggest things that really grind my gears? Is people not reading instructions? And so if I say, you know, email this keyword to this email, like, let's say I put email that the job, email job in a quotation marks as the title of the email, and send me an email here. Well, if they send me an email and they just has, like, resume or something like, if they don't follow the instructions, then bam, they're instantly deleted. Because if I can't have someone follow basic instructions, I don't want them on my team. So that's an easy way to filter out people, right there. That's going to get like, 80% of people honestly, and then the 20% of people who actually passed that test. Okay, let's, let's have them fill out a form, and that way you can like, create, and you can do this for free. You can create a Google form that you know, where you ask questions of like, things like, you know, what are your goals? What are ambitions? Because if someone's like, you know, my goal is to make $10,000 a month and start my own advertising agency, I probably don't want to hire them because they're just going to rip me off and they're in there, you know, clearly, you know, the the ambition doesn't match the role. And so I look at that as first, I also look at things like, you know, what would you say? Your key characteristics are your skills, you know. And it's not just about the question or their answer. It's also about, you know how they answer it like, are they descriptive? Are they do they have good answers, or is it full of grammatical errors, sloppy crap? Because if somebody doesn't care enough, you know, if they don't, and you'd be surprised at how many people don't, but if somebody doesn't care enough to even put effort into applying for a job or filling out a questionnaire, how much effort, and that's for their own livelihood. How much effort do you think they're going to put into your livelihood, into your business? And you'd be surprised at the pieces of crap. And I say that respectfully, not really, but that I see that are just like, don't take the time to do anything. They just like, have the worst answers. They're freaking lazy. And I'm like, Yeah, I can instantly tell from the way you answered this form, you would not be a good fit. For my company. And so that's, that's the second way to filter out people. Now let's say that they, you know, pass all those tests. Well, now you can set up a quick interview with them. So I would say, like, you know, hey, great. Thanks for filling out the questionnaire. Would love to set up a quick call with you, quick 10 minute call on Zoom, just to see, you know, get to know you make sure we're a good fit, or see for a good fit, and then I'll send them a Calendly link to schedule a call with me, and you can set up a free Calendly account. Notice how I'm giving you guys all the free stuff, Google, Google Forms Calendly, because I know you're on a limited budget, and these are all the things I still use to this day. And so you don't have to spend a ton of money to have a hiring process. And so let's say they get on your calendar, they book you meet with them on Zoom. Now what? Well, I would have some questions listed out, because if you don't have questions listed out, you're just going to get on there, and it's easy to get distracted or not be focused, and and then you're like, Oh crap, I forgot to ask them that, or I forgot to ask them about this experience. And so have your questions written out that you don't have to go in exact order, but you know, it's good to have an outline of what you're going to ask them, and then if everything sounds good, and here's, here's the big key, if you're not listening to anything else, listen to this. It's not just about their answers, because a lot of people know what to say. They know the right thing to say. It's also about the vibe, because I've had people who are highly qualified knew exactly what to say, but there was just something about them that was like, you know, I don't something that something doesn't feel right. And every time I've gone against my gut, it my gut was correct. I was wrong, and I shouldn't have, I shouldn't have gone against my gut feeling. And so always follow your gut feeling when it comes to hiring, because if you don't jive with them, then you're not going to work well with them either, and you're not going to want to work with them, and it's going to cause tension. And so even if they're a great candidate, even if you feel like I'm desperate to hire someone right now, don't, don't do it, because hiring is not just about finding someone, it's about training someone correctly. And that takes a lot of time. And so if you're you know, if you're sitting there training someone that you don't jive with and then, you know, three months later, you realize, you know, I just I can't stand working with this person, or this person just gives me bad vibes. I don't really trust them. You just wasted all that time training them. So always follow your gut feeling. Now, I think I'm gonna do actually, a part two series, because we're almost here at the we're doing a mastermind next month, and I'm going to the venue right now. So if you do want to come to an in person mastermind at the beach, shoot me a message, and I'll put you on our wait list, and I'll give you the like. Whenever I announce a new mastermind, I'll give you Heads Up first, but we'll do a part two of this video eventually. If you like this, if you if you want to know more about hiring, let me know. I'd love to do one with Tony too, because he does a lot of our hiring these days, and so I'm sure he has a lot of good advice. Hiring is something we could do a full course on. So it's hard to put into just one YouTube video. The other thing is, if this all sounds like a lot of work to you, which it is like finding someone, training them, all that stuff, just for them to potentially quit on you, and then you have to do this whole process again while you're trying to run, run a business. If that sounds hard to you, and you're like, you know what, I'd rather just, you know, have Jake set up an AI bot for me and do it like, respond to my leads and do that for me and run my ads and stuff. Like, we have options for all that, and so just shoot us a message. We'll set up a free, no obligation zoom call. We'll show you a demo of how the bot works. We can we have them for every single service, whether it's micro billing, pro sell, perma jury, like any kind of HydraFacial, like we have bots that, and if we don't, if, for some reason, you have some service that, you know, we've, we don't have, which, we have over 50 beauty services in our bots, you know, we can program it for you. We so we do custom bots. So if that's something you want to know more about, book a call with this. We'll put a link below to do a strategy call. And when I say strategy a little just we'll get on Zoom. We'll show you how the bot works. You'll see if you like it. We'll go over some pricing and packages and options, and then if you want to do it, great, if not, no big deal. So that's how we do our calls. We're very no pressure, compared to some of the other marketers, but yeah, if you guys want to do that, let me know, and we'll see you on the next one. Thank you.