The Biggest Mistake When Scaling Your Creative Biz | #51

It’s no secret that if you want to scale, you need to hire some help.

For photographers, filmmakers, and YouTubers, this is usually an editor. Maybe it’s a Virtual Assistant that helps with mundane tasks like scraping company emails. It could be a sales rep that gets clients for you.

Whoever you hire, you’re going to be trading your money for their time - freeing up your own time.

Now, what do we do with all this extra time?

There are a lot of entrepreneurs that free up their time and don’t do anything productive with it. They might focus on low-level tasks that don’t make up the money they're paying their new hires.

When you free up your time, you should focus on the high-leverage tasks that actually scale your business. What are these? Most of the time it will be client acquisition or fulfillment.

If we hire an editor, that could free up 2-10 hours per project for us. That time can be devoted to gaining another client. A new client signing on will easily pay for what it costs to pay our editor for their time. After they're paid, there’s revenue left over that normally wouldn’t exist.

This is how you actually scale.

Scaling your business means you’re able to focus on the high-leverage tasks that grow your business while your team focuses on the low-leverage tasks you were doing before.

If you hire someone and then sit around with all your extra free time, your business will shrink.

You’ll be paying your hires without taking on any extra income in your company. Bad deal.

Now I’m not saying you need to start a huge company if you decide to hire an editor. If you want to live a comfortable life and not work too much, you can aim for the sweet spot of still profiting with an editor, without working 24/7.

Whether you want to scale to the moon or just live a cushy life, there’s a right and wrong way to scale. Make sure that the trade you’re making is actually making you money instead of losing it.