Hiring Best Practices with Patrice Perkins

Interviews, Show Notes

Hiring Best Practices with Patrice Perkins
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The Nitty Gritty:

  • When a team member should be a contractor and when they should be an employee (and why you’re likely not following the letter of the law on this one)
  • What “at will” employment means and why you’re not nearly as committed as you might think you are when you hire someone
  • The kinds of questions you need to avoid in an employment interview
  • How to protect your intellectual property when bringing on a new team member
  • What to avoid when you make an employment offer
Listen On iTunes & Subscribe!

During last week’s class, Create a Hiring Plan & Grow Your Standout Business, I was lucky enough to be joined by Patrice Perkins, the founder of Creative Genius Law.

I was able to ask her your most pressing legal questions on the topic of hiring… and probably a few you didn’t know you should be worried about!

CreativeLive was gracious enough to release this interview as this week’s Profit. Power. Pursuit. episode.

Navigating the Growing Gig Economy with Marion McGovern

Interviews, Show Notes

Navigating the Growing Gig Economy with Marion McGovern

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • Who falls into the gig economy
  • Why “job” is a pretty modern concept
  • How entrepreneurs are creating personal safety nets as the gig economy evolves
Listen On iTunes & Subscribe!

On this week’s episode of Profit. Power. Pursuit., I speak with Marion McGovern, founder of M Squared Consulting, one of the first gig economy companies before the term was even coined, and author of Thriving in the Gig Economy and A New Brand of Expertise.

Since I’m so passionate about the emerging new economy, I was eager to pick Marion’s brain on the subject. We discuss who falls into the gig economy, how “job” is actually a pretty modern concept, the challenges of navigating your personal safety net as an independent worker and more.

Who falls into the gig economy?

A gig is work that is of uncertain duration and done not tethered to a particular client or single employer.

– Marion McGovern

Since the government stopped tracking numbers for independent workers, it’s hard to figure out exactly who and how many professionals work in the gig economy, but it’s truly not all Uber drivers. Those who work in the gig economy are people who are not tethered to a particular client or single employer and who take on work that is uncertain in duration. Even though the gig economy has gotten a lot of press lately due to digital platforms, gigs have been around since jazz musicians in the 1920s committed to playing gigs and moved around from club to club.

Job versus work

It’s all about the work they are doing as opposed to the JOB they are doing.

– Marion McGovern

“What do you do,” is a common question at any cocktail hour and illustrates our current focus on the jobs we do rather than the work that we do. Interestingly, our current concept of a job—a regular remunerative position—came to be in the 1920s and 1930s when it became associated with regular employment at a singular employer. As Marion explains on the podcast, she would like us to get away from defining ourselves by the job title and get back to the work we do and why we do it.

Safety nets

Professionals in the gig economy are starting to deal with being cut off from the benefits and safety networks that they were accustomed to in a traditional economy. Entrepreneurs are building businesses to address their specific needs and businesses that rely on independent labor are working to help solve the issue. Handy has worked with the New York legislature to create a portable benefits structure—a structure where benefits would associate with the worker rather than the employer—since its business is a network of household service providers. ShiftPixy is another company that is responding to the needs of a gig economy by consolidating opportunities for shift work in one place so that workers can build full-time consistent employment. Another example is Bunker Insurance who makes it possible for freelancers and independent contractors to get the liability insurance they need for some jobs under flexible terms and in an affordable way. They are totally disrupting the insurance market to provide gig economy professionals what they need to succeed.

To get all the nitty-gritty details of the gig economy, tune in to the full episode and hear our entire conversation.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode as I talk to today’s entrepreneurs about how they are making their businesses thrive.

Building a Business on The Side of a Job You Love with Laptop Lifestyle Creator Alexis Teichmiller

Interviews, Show Notes

Building a Business on The Side of a Job You Love with Laptop Lifestyle Creator Alexis Teichmiller
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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How to balance time between a full-time job and a thriving side hustle
  • What unique offer she makes that allows her to love her extra time working
  • How to define success for your side business
Listen On iTunes & Subscribe!

We’re doing something a bit unconventional on this week’s podcast. Alexis Teichmiller is my guest and we talk all about how she makes her side hustle work right alongside a full-time gig that she loves as an Affiliate Manager at ConvertKit. Alexis is host of The Laptop Lifestyle podcast and a content creator for hospitality brands.

On the podcast, we talk about how Alexis manages her schedule, the special offer she developed for a side hustle that enhances her life even though it adds work and how she defines success for her side hustle.

Schedule Management

I don’t know who started it, but I’m glad they did.

– Alexis Teichmiller

Since ConvertKit employees are 100% remote, Alexis can do her full-time job, that she absolutely loves, from anywhere. She started The Laptop Lifestyle podcast three years ago when she was inspired by all the people creating communities and businesses from their laptop and creating a lifestyle where they could travel and work at the same time. On her podcast, Alexis interviews successful online entrepreneurs and people who are building communities online about how they are doing it and making money.

She spends about 8-15 hours a week on her side hustle depending on the projects she is working on. When she is traveling for the side hustle, she will clock in to do her work for ConvertKit from 6am-1pm and then clock out to spend time exploring the city and working her side hustle from about 1-9pm to come back and finish her workday for ConvertKit from 9-11pm. The time segments vary depending on what projects she is working on.

Unique and Appealing Offer

Both Alexis and her business partner are excellent content creators. They noticed that many boutique brands don’t have lifestyle photography they can use on their social channels or websites. So, they decided they should pitch their services to create lifestyle photos for brands in exchange for accommodations and a small fee. This concept allows them to travel to exciting destinations while providing incredible value to boutique hotels that need good lifestyle photography. Alexis art directs, negotiates the deals and markets their service and her business partner is the photography/videographer.

How to Define Success

If I’m going to do something on the side, I want it to be life giving and not life draining.

– Alexis Teichmiller

Success will be defined differently for each person, so Alexis encourages entrepreneurs to be intentional about the goals they have for their side hustle so they have a way to define their success. In this season of her life, she is not trying to work her side hustle into her full-time gig, so it’s really important that her side hustle is fun. This is something that Chris Guillebeau talks about in his podcast and book, Side Hustle. For Alexis getting to $2000/month in recurring revenue from her side hustle would mean success.

Join me to listen to the full episode to hear more about how her pitch to clients has evolved, about the new course she is creating about online vulnerability and where her next trip will be.

Each week I talk the nitty-gritty details with entrepreneurs just like Alexis. Never miss an episode when you subscribe to the podcast.

Selling One Customer at a Time with Showcase Workshop Founder Millie Blackwell

Interviews, Show Notes

Selling One Customer at a Time with Showcase Workshop Founder Millie Blackwell
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The Nitty Gritty:

  • Why one-on-one sales strategy is beneficial and how to identify a new prospect
  • How to court prospects
  • How being “ridiculously helpful” gets customers to a success point
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My guest on this week’s episode of the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast is Millie Blackwell, the CEO and co-founder of Showcase Workshop. Showcase Workshop provides a sales content management tool for large businesses with sales teams that sell face-to-face and who need to be armed with videos, presentations, brochures, spec sheets and more on-site to make the sale. With a mission to eradicate ring binders and printed sales collateral, Millie and her team work to ensure that every field sales rep has the content they need on their tablet or smartphone.

Millie and I discuss one-on-one sales strategy and how she identifies a new prospect, the steps she takes to start courting them and how her team is “ridiculously helpful” to new customers and that makes it easy for them to stick around.

One-on-One Sales Strategy

Face-to-face selling is how large corporate companies buy things.

–Millie Blackwell

Like a lot of entrepreneurs, Millie and her co-founders had the idea that if they built it, sales would come. However, they quickly realized that one of them needed to go out and be the face of the company to sell the product. Even though traditional face-to-face selling was what Millie knew, it was also what the prospects of Showcase Workshop—large corporate companies—expected, so that remains a key sales strategy. This is also the strategy deployed by companies you might not expect from Facebook, LinkedIn and Salesforce who all have teams dedicated to selling face-to-face.

Millie learned by trial and error which industries would be interested in the Workshop’s tool and determined that her ideal prospect needed to be companies that were selling products with a fair amount of complexity, have a sales team that sells face to face and use collateral to sell. She shares all the nitty-gritty details about the Showcase Workshop’s sales process in the full episode.

How to Court Prospects

Create some credibility right from the start.

–Millie Blackwell

The Showcase Workshop has a two-pronged approach to sales. They advertise on LinkedIn to reach small- and medium-sized businesses. For enterprise customers, Millie narrows down her search on LinkedIn Sales Navigator to specific job titles and sends intro emails to those contacts. Since enterprise deals are more expensive to acquire, Millie works a small number of those leads. She spends about one-third of her time on sales at the enterprise level which involves searching for a new lead, contacting those leads and nurturing them.

“Ridiculously Helpful”

Showcase Workshop is a little more complex than other software systems, so when prospects are within their free trial window and Millie’s team sees them sign in, they will be “ridiculously helpful” and reach out to the prospect based on certain actions they are doing. Their goal is to help the prospect get to a “success point.” After they become a client, the Showcase Workshop team continues to provide exemplary customer service which allows them to boast a client churn rate below 2% annually.

When you tune into the full episode you can learn more about Showcase Workshop’s sales process, Millie’s learning experiences with content marketing and what’s next for the business.

I invite you to join me each week by subscribing to the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast so you can listen and learn from today’s most innovative entrepreneurs.

What the Heck Is drop shipping? with Portlight & Freeeup founder Nathan Hirsch

Interviews, Show Notes

What the Heck Is dropshipping? with Portlight & Freeeup founder Nathan Hirsch
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The Nitty Gritty:

  • What the heck is drop shipping
  • How outsourcing some aspects of your business helps you to focus on what you do best
  • Why it’s important to know what you’re looking for before hiring
Listen On iTunes & Subscribe!

On the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast this week I speak with Nathan Hirsch, author of Free Up Your Business: 50 Secrets to Bootstrap Million Dollar Companies, serial entrepreneur and cofounder of drop shipping company Portlight and FreeeUp.com, a remote hiring workplace that helps business owners “hire the top 1% of freelancers.” Nathan started his first business in 2009 out of his dorm room to drop ship products on Amazon.com and by 2014 he had sold more than $20 million in products. Through his learning experiences growing and scaling Portlight and building remote teams in the eCommerce space, Nathan co-founded FreeeUp.com to help other businesses around the world hire their freelance talent online.

What is Drop Shipping?

A lot of people don’t spend time researching what’s coming up and what’s on the horizon.

— Nathan Hirsch

When Nathan was a college student looking to make beer money, he didn’t have to look any farther than the campus bookstore to find an opportunity for entrepreneurship. He started buying and re-selling people’s textbooks and ultimately learned he was really good at selling baby products, toys and home goods online. Although he didn’t refer to his business at the time as drop shipping, that’s essentially what he was doing—his business listed and optimized products on Amazon and handled any customer service issues while passing on the order info to the vendor or manufacturer so they could fulfill and ship it. This business model doesn’t require the drop-shipping entity to hold any inventory. Drop shippers realize profit from the difference between what the customer pays and what the item costs.

Faster and Foolproof Way to Hire

Business owners can go back to expanding and growing their business instead of using all of their time recruiting and finding workers.

— Nathan Hirsch

As any business owner knows, as you grow and need to hire help you can get 100 responses (and oftentimes more) to each job posting. Before you know it, you’re spending all your time on human resources functions rather than on the things you do best. Nathan always wanted a better way. FreeeUp.com was founded based on Nathan’s own experiences building a freelance army to help support his first business. Today, FreeeUp.com has instituted a referral program for both workers and clients that is on track to pay out $150,000 in referral bonuses this year. This referral program keeps the business growing and helps find the top 1% of freelancers. Nathan said creating a referral program is one of the better business decisions he has made.

Spend the Time Vetting Your Employees

FreeeUp.com vets a candidate’s skills, attitude and communication, and Nathan only hires his own employees from the FreeeUp.com network. They look for people who are honest about what they can and cannot do and have a track record of success. Attitude is also very important, because a bad attitude can spread like cancer. Employees need to be good communicators and be proactive with communication. On the flip side, an employer needs to be able to outline expectations to an employee so they understand what is expected.

Tune in to the full episode to hear all of Nathan’s insights about entrepreneurship and online hiring, diversifying clients and team members, finding the right team and the lessons he learned growing two businesses very quickly.

Never miss a single episode by subscribing to the podcast. Each week I talk to today’s entrepreneurs about how they’ve built their businesses and teams and the learning experiences they had along the way.

Creating a Personal Filter For Honest Social Media Marketing with Wild Soul Movement founder Elizabeth DiAlto

Interviews, Show Notes

Creating a Personal Filter For Honest Social Media Marketing with Wild Soul Movement founder Elizabeth DiAlto

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The Nitty Gritty:

  • How Elizabeth determines what she wants or needs to communicate to her audience
  • Why Instagram Stories is a great way to be authentic to your followers
  • How the Wild Soul Movement’s core offerings have evolved
Listen On iTunes & Subscribe!

My guest on this week’s episode of the Profit. Power. Pursuit. podcast is Elizabeth DiAlto, an Integrative Spiritual counselor, creator of Wild Soul Movement, an author and host of Untame the Wild Soul podcast. Elizabeth is known for her raw, honest and grounded approach to self-help and spirituality, and we talk about how she determines what she communicates to the women who follow her, how she uses Instagram Stories and how her core offerings shifted based on how she can be of highest service.   

How to Discern What and How to Communicate

If I’m feeling obligated to respond, it’s always a red flag for me.

– Elizabeth DiAlto

Although most decisions about what to communicate to her audience are made moment-to-moment, she relies on what feels true and feels appropriate based on the conversations happening in her community and in the world. She doesn’t watch the news, but she does have a couple of sources she trusts and curates insights from.

“I really do my best to only source from people who are in alignment themselves as well who are not unconsciously feeding into the perpetuation of dramas, the traumas and injustices but are diligently and persistently educating themselves and also presenting things without a lot of spin or extra bias or drama to it,” she said.

She always tries to get as close as she can to the details and facts of a situation, then she can discern for herself how she wants to sponsor or share with her audience.

Instagram Stories

Instagram Stories are the place I get to show exactly the way I am on any given day.

– Elizabeth DiAlto

Elizabeth has a really raw and honest way of showing up on Instagram Stories—she really is the same whether behind the scenes or interviewing people on her podcast. She uses Instagram Stories to use 15 seconds to show up and share whatever. Sometimes that’s directing people to something she’s posted, but most of the time she’s just entertaining herself. In the process of doing so, she lets people know what her life is like on a day-to-day. And the quirky things going on help demonstrate her living her message and being her values in all areas of her life.

Being of Highest Service

I swung the pendulum to only do what I want to do, but that’s not going to take our mission and service to where we want to have the highest impact.

– Elizabeth DiAlto

After taking a break from one-on-one work, Elizabeth found herself in an online-only model and  Wild Soul Movement, her core offering, being virtual. But, people are craving to be together in real life and need the energy that type of connection provides, so she recently revamped her one-on-one and semi-private offerings so she could be with people in real life. She now offers two-day immersion sessions in her home and Untame Yourself Weekends, where four to six people attend a session at the same time. In November, she is leading an Untame Yourself Intensive Visionary Leadership. Next year, she plans to update the content for Wild Soul Movement, as well as create two additional courses that will help lay the groundwork—and create an even starting point for everyone—for the Wild Soul Movement course.

You’ll want to join me for the full podcast where we talk more about how Elizabeth’s authentic, raw approach helped her build a passionate group of followers and a business that serves.

Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast so you never miss an episode. Each week I talk to today’s innovative entrepreneurs about the decisions they make each day about their service and product offering, pricing, marketing, team structure and more.