Hiring an Admin: The Business Move Most Painting Contractors Wait Too Long to Make

Speaker A: The first list is how do you get your time back? The second list is how do they really start getting your business ahead for you? How do they start paying for themselves and giving you an ROI on that position? Welcome back to the Elite Business Advice Podcast. My name is Chris Moore, the founder of Elite Business Advisors, your host of the podcast here. So it's not too late to get your 2026 elite business retreat tickets. You've been seeing all of the stuff we shared last week about the speakers that are coming, the content, the topics, um, our media team, by the way, huge shout out to Fitzer Media. They are absolutely crushing the graphics and the content and putting all this together for us this year. Jeff will be there with us getting a bunch of recordings, uh, some stuff for our sponsors, as well as even doing a session himself. So give him a big shout out for all the work, uh, that his team has taken on, uh, this year for promoting this for us. But last week was nothing but just content and speakers. You've seen it all over social media. Um, all of our speakers have been sharing stuff. They're excited to be here. Uh, and I can't wait for it. So get your tickets now. We're like five weeks out. It's not too late. Um, our room block is going to cut off here within a couple of weeks. So make sure to get in, get the discounted rates that we negotiated for all of you guys in your hotel rooms. Grab your spots, you won't want to miss it. If you haven't heard me ever talk about this event before, I haven't showed this a lot here this year. Um, I put this event on with one mission and one mission only. And it is to make you mad if you decide not to come. And what I mean by that is you're going to decide, uh, I don't need to go to that. I'm not going to go to that. I'm going to make an excuse, whatever that is, okay? And then the event's gonna come and you're gonna see about it all over social media from myself, our business page, our speakers, all the attendees. You're gonna get like 85 different angles of this event and you're gonna legitimately be mad at yourself that you decided not to come and to make an excuse. So I just want you to know that is always my intention. And I don't do that to be mean, I don't do that to be rude. I do it because I want to make this event that great. And we have the last four years, the Last three, for sure. Um, the first year was kind of a cool little test pilot, but the last three years, every time I get people like, man, I'm so mad I didn't come. I'm so mad I didn't come. So just don't let that be you. Get here. Lead business advisors.com retreat. That was a long enough promo. But if that doesn't convince you, I don't know what's going to. Just being honest. All right, today's episode, if you asked me, what's one common mistake that all entrepreneurs make, not just painting contractors, although, you know, we talk specifically to you guys, but all entrepreneurs, in my personal opinion, it is truthfully that they don't hire some sort of administrative help early enough in their entrepreneurial journey. I'm guilty of it. I bet you are, too. None, um, of us, honestly, are wired for it. I see. None of us is just entrepreneurs in general, administratively, typically. That's not our gift. Right. Our gift is vision. Our gift is leadership. Our gift is building something from nothing and figuring out how to make it happen. And maybe if it's, you know, modeling it financially or putting a business plan together and executing on it, or people or sales. Like, there's so many different gifts that typically go into being an entrepreneur as far as, like, what are our gifts and strengths. But yet, a lot of times what I find is this administrative piece. Like, probably the thing that we are the worst at is always, like, the last thing that we want to give up. And so I want to share some creative ways in which you can get some administrative help in your business and then what systems you need to make this a success, to implement and transition, to get it off of your plate so that you can focus on what you're good at and what you should be doing. So I hope it helps. Thanks for plugging in. This is the elite business advice podcast. So I already know you're going to make some excuses in this episode, and I'll allow it. That's a lie. I won't allow it. So we're going to go ahead and just knock one of them out right now. You're already thinking, yes, Chris, this sounds great. Yes. I would love to have somebody to do my job costing for me to update this, to reach out to customers about scheduling, to do XYZ thing that you despise doing, but I can't afford it. I just want to give that one, like, right off the table right now. No excuses on this. Okay. Um, there's a lot of different ways you can Think about this. Uh, you, we're going to talk a little bit here in a minute about virtual assistants and the costs, you know, associated with that. That is very, very, very minimal for what you get. I love this whole virtual assistant thing. It's not flawless, it's not perfect. But guess what? The cost for what you get, um, man, I have a lot of clients that this works well for. I know a lot of entrepreneurs that this works really well for. And I love that. It's a win win kind of relationship. Right. A lot of times for a VA, you may pay them anywhere from eight to $12 an hour, just depending on if you're going through an agency, what their skill set is, what you're needing. Like, let's just call it 8 to $12 an hour is a range. Um, you can't find that here in the US I'm just going to throw that out there. Okay? But for what you get from that person, and the cool part about that is, is you may think like, wow, like that's just dirt cheap. Well, there's a good chance that in the country that they're from, that, that eight to twelve dollars an hour is like a lot for them in their culture and in their economic society. I, I don't remember the exact number. Um, I really wish I did because this would be a great point. But there it was. It was nothing crazy. Like, it might have been like 10, maybe $12 an hour. Um, again, maybe look this up or Google it or something or AI at whatever we're calling that nowadays. Um, but it basically was like, you know, it, it, I think it was in the Philippines. Whatever that hourly rate was at 10, just call it 10 or $12 an hour was like the equivalent of them living as like a dentist in their country. Um, like to us here in the economy. So understand that. But here's the question. When I ask, what do you go VA route, you look for somebody at, you know, 18 to $25 an hour. Um, here in the States, whatever it is, what is your time worth? Okay, the reason why I say that, like, this is probably one of the most common traits and mistakes entrepreneurs make. And again, I am guilty of it. I will own that. It's something I'm working through as time goes on in our business too. Okay, so don't think that I'm sitting over here, Mr. Perfect, talking down to you guys. Um, I'm literally peer to peer talking sideways across this desk for me. But what is your time worth? I'm going to guess that if you if you do Dan Martel's, you know, calculate your buyback rate, if you do any sort of exercise, your time is worth at least twice as much as a $25 an hour employee. I'm just saying, right? If you were going to go paint a job yourself, you'd probably bill your time, at minimum, $50 an hour. Okay, so what are you worth? Strategically visionary, leading the company. Um, one thing I want you to think about, uh, that is a. Is a hot topic. AI, um, you know, is all over the place right now. What role can AI play in the administrative stuff? Um, I want to just kind of share, I guess, kind of two quick thoughts on this before I go on. Uh, number one, AI will obviously make your life more efficient in the meantime here. And so I would recommend to start utilizing that. Uh, in my personal opinion, AI cannot and will not, in most cases replace an administrative person. Now, I hear stories, I've heard. You know, I'm on a call with Dan Martell every single week. Dan talks a lot about stuff like it's coming in some ways. Um, but for right now, I think we can just accept that, like, AI will not be your answer to hiring somebody administratively. Right. Um, but what AI can do is it can speed up your efficiency with things. It can, if you really learn to leverage, will help with that. And then I would encourage your admin or your virtual assistant or whatever route you go to continue to use AI to increase their efficiency. Right. M. I've been using a combination of Claude, Cowork and Manus, um, for a lot of just kind of task type stuff. Um, we had a flyer, Honestly, here's a perfect example. We had a flyer, um, that our kids ministry director at our church sent over. And I handle the creative ministry at our church and all the marketing and just communication stuff. And, and she's like, hey, we need to, like, here's the flyer that the YMCA sent us. Um, can we get this, you know, created into a slide to have up on screen, you know, during announcements at church this week. And I was like, yeah, no problem. And kind of our assistant creative director or assistant to the creative director. Uh, if you're an office fan, you'll get that reference. Kelly was on vacation and so I was doing everything I could not to just put stuff on Kelly's plate for the last two weeks. Cause I wanted her to enjoy some time away. She's been a blessing to us. Uh, shout out to you, Kelly, if you ever just come across this podcast episode. Um, and so I just put it into Claude Cowork. I put the flyer into Claude Cowork and was like, create a graphic. That's this, you know, 1920 by 1080, which are the dimensions for a slide. Um, turn this flyer into a slide. And it like kept the branding the same, it kept the look the same, it kept everything the same. It just reformatted this flyer into it and it had like, something was weird on the QR code. So I was like, hey, redo this. And it did, and it was done. And the whole time it's working over here, five to 10 minutes in the background. I'm, uh, sitting here working on stuff probably for our clients or for something with EBA here. Cowork gets it done. I just click download email, done. And I spent 30 seconds to a minute of my actual time on this. Okay? That's the type of stuff that can change that because otherwise it would have taken me probably at least 15 to 20 minutes to go in and create that graphic, um, in Canva. And I'm pretty quick at that type of stuff. So understand the role that AI can play and how it can just speed things up and you need to start experimenting with it, with task, you know, with agent, agentic type things, um, like this. So let's just kind of talk a little bit about kind of stages of business in needs typically that we see administratively and understand that this is never perfect, but just as kind of a rough guide point. Okay? If you were under 500k a year in annual revenue or, you know, your monthly revenue right now is pacing that of a $500,000 company, which in this case would be about $40,000 a month right now. Um, you probably just need five to ten hours a week. Okay. This is where a virtual assistant works really well. Um, you know, whether you go through a placement agency, you find a way to connect in directly with somebody, whatever that looks like, okay? There's lots of ways you can do it again, talk to AI, talk to people and peers in the industry and friends on, you know, what they've done, where they found theirs, anything like that. Um, or maybe it's just somebody, you know, looking for some extra work, right? Somebody that, um, you know, has some capacity. They don't. They aren't looking for this to be like support their life necessarily. Uh, maybe it's something that is or has been a stay at home mom, different things like that. Just somebody that would be, you know, have five to ten hours a week available. There would have to be some flexibility, right? This isn't a situation where they're answering phone calls for you or anything like that. They're just handling a lot of kind of task oriented type things. Um, in an assistant role. Okay, um, if you are somewhere in the 500k to 1 million, uh, I would say you're probably needing somewhere like 10 to 25 hours a week, arguably even pushing full time at that point. Okay. Once we start seeing north of that 700,000 again in annualized revenue, um, you know, I mean, we can kind of start making the argument about like full time employment. I could have maybe broken this up a little bit more so here. Um, but I want to just kind of put some rough, rough benchmarks out here for you guys. Once, uh, you're pushing over that 700,000, I mean, we're getting close to full time, right? At this point, you want somebody answering the phones, um, you know, you want them really doing some other things. We'll talk about here in a second. Uh, but maybe if you're just looking for this 10 to 20, 25 hours a week, um, you know, again, look into your network. Who do you know this is looking for some extra work? Maybe it's somebody is a, you know, kind of stay at home mom, but, you know, their kids go to school, um, situation where, you know, they have nine to three open every day, right? Like, there's, there's a lot of people out there that exist that may be looking for something like this. They may not realize they are. But some of the best hires that our clients have had, have had people. There's kind of been people in these situations that never approached them about a job. The business owner went to the person and was like, hey, you know, I'm looking for this person. Do you know anybody that might fit this role? And sometimes what's happened, a lot of times they go, hmm, I m might be interested in that. Right? So again, we can get creative. Uh, there are again, some virtual assistants that may be able to work this m many hours. Um, so I'm not gonna rule that out at this stage either. Um, but again, here's the thing. When you can kind of define the role, and I'm gonna talk through that here in a second, um, you can start to find people that fit what you're looking for. Okay? But you got to have it defined and you got to start just asking people. Uh, but it is amazing how many people in an administrative role, it's just somebody that just wants something to do, has some downtime. Um, you know, maybe it is somebody that works, uh, you know, at a great restaurant on, you know, evenings and weekends. And they just want, you know, 10 to 15 hours during the week, 20 hours during the week to just make some extra money. Right. Like, there can be a lot of different scenarios in which this plays out. You just probably don't think they exist because you've never asked around for it. Right. And so I think that'd be a great opportunity to start just asking people, uh, once you figure out what, what it is you need, once, um, you're over the million dollar revenue mark, you, you definitely need somebody full time. Not really any, any question on that one, in my opinion. So, um, you know, as far as kind of defining, like, what you need, uh, this can be a hard thing to do. But here's kind of the exercise I would personally recommend. Um, and real quick, I'm gonna back up here for a second. Uh, as I was talking through those stages, um, I thought about one of our clients that recently hired somebody pretty much full time. Um, they were right around the 500k, um, ballpark, and it became very evident that, like, organization and administrative stuff was a big weakness and that was going to continue to hold them back. And so, you know, they went the virtual assistant route. And, um, you know, I think we all kind of agreed that, like, it was the only way that they were ever going to go from here to where they want to go, which is, you know, closer to that million dollar mark. I'll share all their goals and dreams. But, um, you know, we kind of realized that like, so in some cases, like if administratively it's a struggle for you, and it's really truly holding you back from running your business, from doing that, like, maybe it does make sense to do that a little bit sooner than kind of, again, that the guidelines I'm throwing here, which are never true guidelines because everything's very case by case. Okay. Um, the exercise that I started to mention about. So a couple things on this, Number one, make a list of all the things that you just need somebody to handle. Okay. All of the administrative things that are sucking your time. And maybe you can sit down and make a list of this. Maybe it's during the week, as you're doing things, as you're looking at your calendars, you're just going through the week. Ooh, this would be a great thing for an admin to do, right? Start making a list. And then I would also compile a second list of, like, what are the things that they could do to actually help start moving your business further ahead. Okay. Um, some examples here would Be, you know, maybe social media postings, creating reels, different things like that, if they have the right, you know, gifts and talents for that. Google, um, my business postings, you know, asking for reviews, um, emailing previous clients, doing that monthly value. At email, we talk about, uh, maybe it's door hanger and kind of marketing coordination with like, direct mailers or certain things. Like, there's always the list of, like, we just need somebody to handle this. And then there's the list of, like, what are the things, you know, you need to do that you would do, that you need to do to move your business forward if you had somebody that had capacity to do it? Right? And that's where you can kind of make that second list. And I look at it like this. Like, the. The first list is, how do you get your time back? The second list is how do they really start getting your business ahead for you? How do they start paying for themselves and giving you an ROI on that position? Okay. And so I would encourage you guys to kind of look closely, have those two lists. What are the things that I can do to buy my time back? What are the things that they can do to help us get where we want to go? Um, because now we have somebody with the capacity and the ability to get us there. Okay, um, um, the last thing I want to kind of share here is what do we need to have in place to make this a success? Okay, what systems? What things? And I would boil this down into kind of two things that are really necessary for success, um, in bringing on an administrative person, whether, again, it's a VA or somebody right next to you in your office, uh, part time, full time, whatever it is. Uh, the first thing is there needs to be some sort of a to do list system. Um, what do we need them to do? What are the daily tasks, the weekly tasks, the monthly tasks? How do we track this? What are the projects we have them working on? Hey, I need you to go through mailchimp, um, and clean up XYZ or do xyz, right? Whatever it is. How do we track or assign or have a cadence in a system of the things that they need to be doing? Okay. Um, I know I've shared about this before on previous episodes. I'm a big fan of Trello. Um, we. Trello is kind of a project management software. Um, I use that for my to do list. We use that for our teams to do list here. We've had a lot of clients implement Trello. It works really well because you can build a Template, Um, and so it just kind of systematizes a lot of these tasks and kind of builds SOPs into them, um, as well. So I'm a huge fan of Trello. Happy to chat more. If anybody ever wants to reach out and chat more about that, happy to do so. But I would recommend again, number one, you have to have some sort of a system in place, um, to not necessarily track what they're doing, but to make sure that just things aren't slipping through the cracks and we can build some cadences and some routines, um, into their schedule. Because typically administrative people are going to be a little more task oriented and they need regimented routines, uh, to be successful. So the second thing, I take this out of my, my good friend Dan's playbook as well. Or, uh, well, I kind of gave that away. Um, an administrative playbook. We have an admin playbook here at eba. This is kind of basically where all the sops live for how to do the different parts of their job. Um, again, I recommend putting some of that into Trello cards if you're going to do that, if you're building out templates and stuff. Um, but this is a great place where you can house all your Loom videos. Loom is huge, huge for this role, right? Hey, here's how you go into Paint Scout and you know, do XYZ thing. Hey, here's how we build our mailchimp emails. These are all the things you have to do. Here's a loom video. And then if you pay for the AI version, it will actually create the SOP in addition to the loom video. Right? Have it all linked in this document. Um, I love Google Docs for this admin playbook because you can create like an outline over off to the side based on the heading text. So it's super easy to search through and find. Okay, this is the task I'm doing. Here's what I'm right. If you have an estimate scheduling call sop, um, and somebody calls is a lead. They can, you know, have the playbook open in a window and they can just go click on that and it's the, you know, get their information, ask them what they want done, ask them how they heard about us, ask them what their time frame is. Okay, Schedule the estimate. Like, you know, you can build all that into it. And so I love just having an admin playbook where all the SOPs, everything they need, um, is kind of there in one place. And again when it's in a Google Doc laid out um, in that outline format, it makes it really easy for them to search through and find things, um, in real time. So, again, leverage Loom videos. You can link Loom videos in the Google Doc. You can link sheets and Google sheets and stuff in there as well. So it just makes it super easy. Um, one thing I will share on this. So a lot of times, I'll show people our admin playbook, and immediately they're like, oh, my gosh. Like, this is crazy. And I'm like, yeah, I know, I know. I get that. Um, you know, I didn't sit down and create this entire thing before our first admin started, right? And they're like, huh? Huh? What are you talking about? I'm like, I literally built this as we went, right? And so if you don't have something put together, yes, I think it's great to have some stuff prepped. Maybe before you would hire someone. But if nothing else, build it as you go, right? As you're training them how to go through and do the different tasks and different things in your business. Build out this playbook as you go. Have them document the steps, right? Record a loom video, send it to them and say, great. Add this to the admin playbook and document the steps, right? Um, and so don't feel like this has to be perfect before somebody starts. Don't feel like, oh, my gosh, you know, I'm going to hire somebody here in two weeks. I got to. I got to build out this whole playbook Chris was talking about. Do it as you go. Okay? It's the camcorder method that Dan talks a lot about. Um, just do it as you go. If nothing else, you'll tweak it again. An sop, A playbook, is just a living document that will always be tweaked, updated, and changed. That's okay. All right, here's my parting thought for you. Uh, that I want you to think through everything I just shared. And if I still haven't convinced you yet, maybe this last thought will do it. Or if nothing else, it'll seal the deal on you going out and taking action. What would you do with your time if you could get five to seven hours a week back? How much further along would your business be? And what would the ROI on an investment like this be for you, your business, and your family? Thanks for plugging into this week's episode. I hope you're able to take a few nuggets away from it to implement into your business. Remember, knowledge without implementation is useless if you're curious about what we do and how we help painting contractors all over North America. Schedule a free business analysis meeting with us at www.elitebusinessadvisors.com. our entire team of advisors have ran and managed painting companies just like myself and are here to help support you on your journey. We have packages available for contractors at every stage of business, from flying solo and just starting out all the way to multimillion dollar businesses. And lastly, if you love this episode, please leave us a rating and a review. It helps others on the platform find our podcast and it could be the best blessing that's ever happened to them. Thanks to you. Thanks for plugging in and we'll see you back for next week's episode.