What we get to see when we're using our Colby strengths is that the people who aren't like us, their strength is actually called stabilize. So think about a business with a creative entrepreneur like us, and then there's somebody in the business whose whole role is about stability, about keeping the beat, making sure things go out on time, the little detail things that just keep the rhythm of the business, right? We need those people. Find one thing in your business that sucks a lot of your time, even if it's just like one hour a week, like there's one task that you do every single week that you don't like doing, it's like this is a waste of your skills and time and energy efforts, all that stuff. Find that one hour a week, and there is somebody out there that will do that task, even if it's just one hour, you don't have to find a full-time person that has all these different characteristics that is essentially your unicorn. Don't start there. That's the stuff that we first look at, and then we say, okay, is there something below the line that's a low dollar per hour thing, or it's a very simple contractor hire like a bookkeeper, it's not going to take a ton of money off your board, but it's going to free up some space, even if it's mental space, even if it's just brain space that maybe time doesn't even free up that much, but it's really freeing up energy, that counts too. On episode 419 of the podcast, we talk about why understanding your natural work style can transform your hiring decisions. We also talk about how to identify and delegate your $20 an hour tasks to the right people. What are $20 an hour tasks? Well, keep listening, you'll find out, and then we also talk about why you don't need to find a unicorn employee who does everything, been there, done that, some really hot takes and good insights in this episode, and so much more. What's up, friend? Hey, if it feels like you're drowning in tasks that you hate, today's episode could be your lifeline, Colby certified business consultant, Aaron Morgan, reveals how understanding your natural work style can help you build the perfect team, even if you think you can't afford help. I love this conversation. I love this topic. If you know me in my 20 years of running my own video production business, I've hired dozens and dozens of people. I should probably count, but yeah, probably a couple dozen, if not more, over the past 20 years. And my team right now, I've got four full-time employees, and I'm always on the lookout for that next position, that next hire, and I've made some poor choices in the past. And there's a lot of work that can be done on the front end to save you a lot of stress and frustration. So if you've never hired somebody, you're thinking about it, you've hired a bunch of people, and you just haven't dialed this in, I think that there's a ton of value in this conversation that you're going to walk away with. Cross my heart. I don't hope to die. But seriously, thank you for being here. I'm Ryan Coral. If you don't know me, this is the girl your video business show, and I'm super excited that you are joining me. Happy New Year. I have no idea what the date is. Oh, wow, it is like, I think this is the first episode of the new year. Okay, here we go. I have a brand new workshop for 10x Filmmaker. It's called the 10x Filmmaker. Workshop or something like that. But in this, I'm sharing the most helpful, thoughtful things that I've done to build a business that has lasted over 20 years, and I want you to get access to this workshop. You can do that if you go to the website studiostrippers.com/10xfilmmaker. We have an entire community of people who are like-minded that want to grow, that want to help each other. Man, if you're new to my ecosystem, I have been educating, formally educating filmmakers for the last nine years, 2016. Yeah, holy cow. And I love this. I also have my video production business. That's what takes up the majority of my time. But this started as a side hustle is actually a real business today. But I find so much joy and life in this space of educating, sharing what I'm learning, sharing what's working, but also bringing on amazing people that can help you grow in your journey. And the 10x Filmmakers, kind of like the next level for people that are more serious. While this episode is being released, I'm currently in Naples, Florida, with probably about a dozen other people that are in one of the two masterminds that I lead, and our mastermind is really cool. I can tell you more about that later. But we just kicked off our 2025 mastermind, and we're doing an in-person retreat to get this thing kicked off the right way. So anyway, I don't want you to feel like you have to be alone in this work. You don't. I invite you to come alongside, to learn from me, to learn from others in this community, and to grow together. So thank you for being here. And again, if you want access to the workshop and the other resources that I offer, go check out the free workshop at studioeshurpas.com/10xfilmmakers. The number 10, the letter X, and the word filmmaker dot com. Okay, let's jump into today's episode. Here we go. What's up, friends? Hey, welcome to another episode of the show. Today, my guest is Aaron Morgan, who is a Colby-certified business consultant for creatives and beyond. Aaron, what's up, my friend? Glad you're here with me on the show today. Thanks for having me. What a treat. I'm so excited to hang out with you for a little while. This is great. So this is not the first time Aaron and I hung out. Before this episode, this morning, I started making a list. I'm going to do my end-of-year reflections episode. I got to record that today. And I'm just thinking about different things I want to do next year. And I would love to do the majority of my podcast interviews. I would love to be with people that I've had dinner with or hung out with prior to podcasting. We had wine and real yummy food, and we hung out in real life. Yeah. With your pictures. We had a great time. It's so good. And shout out to Stacey for introducing us as our C.C. Brown Randall. She's been on the show before. So anyway, Aaron, I loved our conversation together in person. I love the work that you do. I think there's a lot of crossover and a lot of shared passion in the things that we do. But one thing I want to address on the front end because I don't know how many people that listen to the show are familiar with Colby. I was introduced to, I love, I don't want to say I have a minor addiction to personality tests and those things. But I just always find them so interesting. It's like, I don't read my horoscope, but I feel like any time I'm doing a personality test, it's a form of my horoscope. I'm like, oh, yeah, that is me. So I was introduced to Colby through EOS, Entrepreneur Operating System. I mean, I used to, I mean, for the first few years of this show, I probably talked about that book and that system for years because it has had such a huge impact on me and my business, my life and all that stuff. I haven't talked about it as much as of late, but that's the first place that I've heard about Colby. I took the assessments and it is very interesting. And I do think it's probably one of the best, if not the best, for like work-related stuff. Like figuring out like who to hire, who to who to who do you match with, what kind of hire people, hires people that you might need to avoid, depending on the position. So I love that this was a topic that you wanted to kind of discuss today because I think it can be really, really, really helpful for us. I mean, pretty much anyone, I think almost everyone who listens to this show needs help in some capacity in their work, whether it's having an assistant who can check their email and book appointments on their calendar or just follow up with people or it's hiring an operations manager, somebody to do the day-to-day or anything in between. So give us some context over Colby and maybe even just like how you got into this work and realized this is something that you wanted to do and that you were kind of good at. Yeah. Well, thanks for giving me a chance to chat about Colby. It's sort of one of those best kept secrets. Unless you have a had direct connection with a company or you've been in that EOS world, a lot of people really just have never heard of it. So one of the things that makes it really cool is that while your personality is ever-changing, ever-evolving, your Colby score doesn't change. And what it talks about when I see those numbers and each score is four unique numbers in a specific quarter. When I see those numbers, I understand how a person uniquely makes decisions, how they're going to take action. And this is amazing in work. Just like you've said, it's great for hiring. It's great for just understanding more about how to build and grow your creative business around your strengths and also knowing what your weaknesses are. So there's that little flip side of it and they don't like to talk about weaknesses, but I do. That's one of the things that I will bring up when I talk with people about Colby, because the things that maybe we're not good at, sure, we can turn them into strengths. But if we're in a business capacity, we may actually need to hire against our weaknesses. So all of this is fine, in my opinion, to talk about and to look at. But I actually got introduced to Colby because of my sales coach way back in the day. I had hired a sales coach to support me and just better understanding that process. I'm not somebody who was a natural born salesperson through the scripts and all the techniques. And I'm just more relational, more conversational. And so she was helping me. But the first thing she asked me to do was to take the Colby. And when I did that, she was able to instantly understand how to coach me and help me understand that process. And now one of the cool things that we've actually collaborated together to develop is Colby for sales. So I can teach somebody how to sell based on Colby in a way that feels really good for both them and for the person they're talking with. So that's pretty cool. There's a lot of cool things they can do. So it's a pretty fun tool. I love that. There is that feeling that, "Oh, I have the video business academy. It's like one of our flagship courses." And it would seem like to people like, "Oh, if I just do this thing, I'll get this result." But so much of it is also personality based. So if I have a series of templated emails that, for me, I'm way more relationally driven. And that's how I sell. But for somebody who's not wired like that, in my mind, I'm like, "What do you mean that this will totally work?" But if it's not in your style or your tone, then it's not going to work. So it's not one size fits all. Of course. The way that you sell, the way that you do things, you can't just follow a script and it's going to work. It needs to also match who you are and how you're wired. So tell us more about what some of those differences might be. Yeah. So for somebody who you and I are a lot alike, we have very similar scores. So we're innovators. That's our actual pure type in Colby World. And it means that we're really cool with risk. We're really cool with uncertainty. We're willing to try stuff out, see how it works. We're very experimental in that way. But not everybody is like us. It turns out there are people who prefer stability and for things to be consistent and we'd like them. Boring. Right. So we have that to keep in mind when we're hiring team, right? As we, as creatives, we're sort of like tip of the spear. We're moving quickly. We want to just go out and like build the next thing, right? How many businesses did you start this week? How many ideas did you have this week, right? But what we get to see when we're using our Colby strengths is that the people who aren't like us, their strength is actually called stabilize. So think about a business with a creative entrepreneur like us, an innovator moving quickly. And then there's somebody in the business whose whole role is about stability, about keeping the beat, making sure things go out on time, making sure the links get sent, all those like little detail things that just keep the rhythm of the business, right? We need those people. We also need the people who ask a ton of questions. They're the fact finders of the world, whereas you and I are like, yeah, details, whatever, it's cool. There are like people out there that love to get deep into those details and really delve in and we need those people too. So when you're thinking about how to build a team, you know, how to construct that team, there's a room for all of those different strengths and we can really mesh a team together in a way that helps everybody communicate well and get a lot done when we take that into account. So that's one of the fun ways. That's cool. I'm curious, like with us having very similar strengths and approaches or whatever, what would be what would be some of the things that like if we were working together, what would be some of the benefits and then what would be some of the short-coming things to be aware of because out of all of the video people I've coached the last forever, I've met so many co-owners of a business that had the exact same skill, that not just skill, but personality traits where they're both visionaries. There are some drawbacks, apparently, to that. Yeah, there can be. I mean, it can be amazing. So thinking about if the two of us were going to collaborate, we both have that innovator. So we're going to come up with a ton of great ideas. We're going to land on the one that feels good and we're going to start to go and run with it. We're not going to ask a lot of questions and we probably aren't going to dig into like the steps or the details. We're just going to go out and like do the thing and it's going to be great. So where we get into trouble is two places. One, we don't do our homework, right? We don't do enough of the due diligence about the idea to see if it's actually going to land and the second places that we don't figure out how we're actually going to execute on the project. So what we would need to do, if it was just the two of us, no outside influence, we would need to say, okay, what tool are we going to use to map this project out and we're going to have to really sit down and we're going to have to map the steps. We're going to have to figure out how we're going to get work done or we're just going to have this great idea and it's never really going to become a thing. And if we decide we're just going to wing it, we have to know that there are some things that might be a little challenging on the back and like, I don't know, details of, you know, have you ever bought a ticket to an event and realized you actually had your best friend's wedding on the calendar? Like, I've done that. So I had one of those situations where I was like, oh, well, that's really cool that I just bought that $1,000 ticket. So like those are the kinds of things we have to watch out for us. We're collaborating. And sometimes co-founders, when they're in that type of situation, they might need that third party. And that third party has a very specific role that we're going to design that's going to move the ball, get things done, and make sure things are done in a way that we dot all the eyes and cross all the T's, right? So that team design in those situations and it doesn't have to be a full-time person. It can be technology, it can be AI, it can be tools, it can be VAs, it can be all kind of different ways that we fill that gap. But the systems and the detail gaps have to be filled in somehow. So that's what we're always looking at. That's great. Do you have somebody that processes your emails and assists you in that way? Yeah, I have in the past. And so I sort of oscillate one of the things that I have in my business is this fierce desire to not manage or not have people managing me. Sometimes I get into these zones where I'm just like, I just want to do what I want when I want to do it. And I have this amazing VA that I work with who knows how to sort of ebb and flow with me. So I get into moments where I'm like, just take everything over. And she just picks up the systems we've designed and runs with it. And there are times where I'm like, no, I actually want to get into the details. And she lets me. I mean, she looks at me side-eyed like, really, you're going to do it. But but she lets me do it. But most of the time, yeah, I let somebody sort of handle handle those details. But one of the things I've had to do, and this is something that I've consciously chosen, I have to become the bridge. I have to bridge for my clients, for my team. My leadership style is yes, I want to be that innovative quick start. And I have to be the bridge, because that's what's the missing link in so many relationships is nobody is sort of bridging all these gaps. So I sort of self-appointed myself and and worked on my on building up that muscle of being able to be the bridge in those situations. So I can manage myself. Although maybe I shouldn't. And when you say when you're talking about that bridge, like, what are what are you talking about specifically? Yeah. So a bridge is like this unicorn in Colby land. And they are somebody who they're right down the middle in terms of the amount of detail they need. They can go with less or they can go with more. They can take a system that's very complex and it can sort of figure out how to make it work or they can roll with very few systems, very little structure. And somebody who can take our big ideas and also bridge the gap for the people who really need that consistency and they run right down the middle. And a lot of times they're a little challenging to find. So when you're building a team and you're really missing that person to sort of bring it all together, Colby will sometimes call it a facilitator. I like that this is the person who can bring everybody together and get us in harmony, get us to consensus, get us moving forward and working together as a team. And there's lots of ways to sort of hack that if you don't have that bridge personality, but a lot of people come to me and say, Hey, can you help me find somebody to like bring this team together? And that's usually what I'm looking for. Somebody with those four fives and sixes, those are numbers. Yeah, it makes me think of the book Rocket Fuel, which is a EOS cousin. You know, essentially in EOS, you've got the visionary and you've got the integrator. It's the person who dreams that has the ideas, you know, endless. And then the person who's like, okay, we can't do all thousand of your ideas, Ryan. We have to do the most important one, which is probably this one. And here's how we're going to do it. Sound good. And then the visionary is like, uh, that sounds amazing. Cool. You can actually, you know, figure that out and make it happen. And it's like, yes, that's what it is. For at least Adjina Wickman talks about those two things, like in an ideal business, you would have somebody who's fully gifted and visionariness. And then somebody who's fully, you know, wired and built for in, in, into grading. Yes. Yeah. I think integrating. But for most of us, you know, I would say 99% of the people that listen to this show, they're probably by themselves or have a very small team. Yep. And they kind of have to do both of those together, which isn't always comfortable, which isn't always natural. And in that, I would say that a lot of people get worn out running their business because they're doing both when they're not really wired or they shouldn't be. And my own story, my own example, in 2016, when this woman, Lindsey, who was working for me approached me, we had kind of a rough morning. We had some, another woman that was working for us. She, she put in her two weeks notice in Lindsey came to me with a stack of papers. On the top of the paper, it said it was a blog post. It was how to know when you need a business manager. And I just, I kind of smiled because I'm like, that sounds dreamy. I don't know what that is or what that means. But it probably means like less annoying work for me. And then I started reading through this and I'm like, Oh, that's exactly what this is. And she said, read this. I, this is the job I want to do. I think this is what would be perfect for you for this business. And then she became our full time integrator and did all of the things she managed to business operations. The day to day, I stopped doing payroll, I stopped doing the hiring, the firing. I was a part of the parts that needed me. But the annoying, you know, payroll and insurance and all that stuff that I got good at, I figured out how to do the, you know, research and make it happen or whatever. But at the end of the day, that's not my skill set. My skill set is relationship and it's creating moving videos and it's helping people come up with strategic content for their own, you know, campaigns. And like, those are the things that I am really, really good at. And then 80% of my time was spent on the details of the day to day, making sure that, Oh, this employee wants to take next week off. And you know, how many more days are left for vacation? And what are we doing? And I was like, yeah, you know, just get so hung up in all of the day to day. Yeah, yeah, that sounds about right. That sounds like a lot of the entrepreneurial founders that I know and that I work with. And you know, your assessment of that is right. And so the question that people come to me with is, well, if I'm not in a position to go and hire the Lindsay, like, if I can't go hire that business manager, what do I do? And this is where we get to really optimize the business based on your strengths and say, okay, project management systems, all that stuff is not your strengths. So where can we find tools and templates in the form of technology? So thinking about, you know, if if project management isn't your thing, what about using AI to help project manage, you know, the next thing that you want to do, or going in and a lot of people feel like they need to build out these very complicated project plans. And it's just so overwhelming. It's like, what if you just found a project plan template? And started there and started to, you know, and it depends where you are in your business, right? How experienced you are, how long you've been running it, who else is on your team? Maybe there's somebody who can kind of pinch it for you in some of those situations. But it could be that you're actually holding yourself back by choosing not to bring that person in to manage that day to day and really do that integration as you as you say. So I think this is a really big question for so many of the creatives that we both work with is when is it time to bring in that person, even if it's the five hour a week VA, like when is the time to say, all right, I'm going to give up a little bit of my revenue in favor of my time, my peace of mind, a little bit more space for me to do the work that I love. And these are really these are really tough decisions. But I think that any time you want to scale your business beyond what you have the capacity to do all by yourself, you've got to ask these hard questions. Yeah, it's like that saying, if you want something you've never had, you've got to do something you've never done. And we can go around being frustrated like, Oh, I'm just so overwhelmed. I mean, I've got a guy I've been working with for the past year. And his workload has just, I mean, it has increased exponentially. And he hasn't delegated. He hasn't, you know, he hasn't done these things that when we talked early in the year, like these were things that were very clear that he needed. And we're at the end of this year, we're working on a project together, we're collaborating on something. And I messaged in this morning, he's like, Oh, I'll get this stuff to you. I was supposed to have it last night, whatever, not a big deal. He's like, I'll get I'll get it to you. And he messaged back later days, like, actually, something else came up. And his schedule is just jammed. He is stressed from my perspective to the max, because he just has no capacity. That's like, I mean, he's, he's like, well past the point of getting to hire somebody to help with, you know, some of the day to day. Yeah. And you know, those are the people who come to me. And they oftentimes feel like they know who they need. I need, you know, this role or this position. And where I get to go a little deeper into that and nuance space is that I get to find out what is really not working, where they're really stuck. And we design these really custom jobs that are for the perfect person. We're looking for the unicorn. And we got the opportunity by really scoping that role and really getting clear on that job description about finding that person. We get a shot at it, right? So where a lot of people will come and say, well, I need, I need a writer, but I need them to also be really create like, and I'm like, okay, we can find the unicorn, but we got to get really clear. We're going to really talk to this person who is going to have both of those skill sets. So we use Colby. We use another thing that I, this is an old school, but I use this thing called Microsoft Competencies, right? There was this competency wheel they had years and years ago, and it was really for education. But it's one of my sort of secret sauce tools that I use. And when I blend them together, I'm able to write a job description that really takes like your, your collaborator friend and takes the things off his plate that really shouldn't be on and knows exactly where to put them and what kind of role that that that person needs in their business. So a lot of times people come to me very certain about what they need. And if they're open to the exploration around, what do I actually need? That's where we can use Colby, especially as a really cool tool to get them going in the rejection. But you know, the other thing to mention here is that sometimes people are really afraid of the idea or concept of managing other people. Like it's just not something they want to do. So that's where we actually can write a job description for somebody who doesn't need a lot of hands holding that self management. And we're going to ask a lot of questions. And you're like, how do you get them to not ask questions? Well, we design the job description to find the people who don't ask a lot of questions and who have the right skill set, right? So this is, this is the nuance of all of it. I love that. That's really good. Because I mean, I got to a point in my business, I had eight people working for me. This is before I had a business manager. And I hated it. I literally like, we did really cool projects, had some really amazing opportunities. But I literally hated it because I it's like, oh, so-and-so is not coming in tomorrow. Oh, what are we doing next week? Oh, in like, everybody's coming in. I'm like, just, can I just do their job that I hired them to do, which wasn't to ask me a bunch of questions, but inevitably, that's what happens. People have questions, duh, Ryan, like, why don't you know this? People aren't all like you and just, you know, are going to do the thing. And then I'll ask questions later and whatever. But yes, yes to all of that. One area or like one struggle that at least I had early on was knowing that I needed help. Like, I'm like, I can't do this. Like, you know, I'm mad enough to say, I don't, I don't have everything that I need in order to, you know, have all the peace and all the freedom and whatever in my business. There's, there's lots of things here that need outside help. We think, or we tend to think that finding the unicorn, that is just hilarious, because I think when we start going to hire somebody, it's like, okay, they need to, like you said, they need to be able to create a copyright. Also, it'd be nice if they could design, like, do some graphic design. And I wonder if they could do sales too, because that would be sweet to like, delegate that, you know, and it's like this list of like, that's literally a unicorn and granite. Here's what's so weird. And I don't want to sound ego-centric or anything like this, but as the business owner, you figure out how to do the things. And there are some things that you do really well and other things that you do just fine and other things that you do poorly, but you do them all because they have to get done. Yeah. And so we, I think we get into this trap of just assuming that there's probably somebody else out there that's like us that can figure out to do things. And then we hope that they can just do that. Well, it's like, well, I was doing the website and I was doing the copyright and I was doing some editing. So I could find somebody else that could do that. But that person probably has their own business because they're just, you know, they're skilled in many different ways. And they probably found a passion. And so they probably started a business out of that thing. Yeah. So my encouragement really, and this is not the first time I said this. So if you're listening to the show, remember, when I say, find one thing in your business that sucks a lot of your time, even if it's just like one hour a week, like, there's one task that you do every single week that you don't like doing. It's like, this is a waste of your skills and time and energy efforts, all that stuff. Find that one hour a week. And there is somebody out there that will do that task. Even if it's just one hour, you don't have to find a full time person. Right. That has all these different characteristics that is essentially your unicorn. Don't start there. That's so hard to find. You're going to be not satisfied. Yeah. In most cases, unless you hire Erin, like she will be able to help you. But just know, take my advice to say, like, find something that's like one hour a week, that if you could free up that one hour. Yeah. And then you use that brand new hour that you just won back over the next four weeks or eight weeks to work on your business, to work with somebody like Erin that can help find, okay, maybe there's a person out there that could work 10 hours a week or 20 hours a week or maybe there is somebody, you can't see how you can afford a 40 hour week and play right now. But if you had somebody doing X, Y and Z, that would free you up to do more of the thing that you love doing, which is being with people. And that's when people tend to hire you is when you're at networking events or conferences or whatever it is, Ryan, this is me, I'm talking about how I'm wired. But if I'm not doing those things, then it's going to be really hard for me to find the time to make the time to do the things that gets this business and then we're going to be stuck in this spot, plateaued business frustration. Then I'm calling somebody like Erin out of total frustration and I almost want to quit the business because nothing seems to be working and I'm not getting any younger help, Erin help. Yeah, that's usually the first conversation is I want to burn my business to the ground. I want to quit my business. I want to sell my business because I hate everything about what I'm doing. So for people who are on the earlier side of this problem, one of the first places that will sometimes go for hire, hire a bookkeeper, just hire the freedom bookkeeper, right? But for all the folks out there who have, I always say, I sort of joke about this, but I'm also being completely serious. I have two jobs. I run my business and I run our household and that's two jobs. So for some of the folks out there who have that household piece, there are times in my life where I have had a household manager who does everything down to folding my socks and that has kept me sane because you can't have a really, really big client load like I did at the time. I was working with 26 clients and all of them had businesses that were unique and complex. So my brain like finishing a sentence was buying at Stephanie. We wouldn't have eaten. There wouldn't have been clean clothes in our house. Like forget even having toilet paper like this girl, she literally ran my life on the household side of things. So sometimes that's what you're actually needing. You need that kind of support. So there's a really cool exercise and lots of people teach it lots of different ways, but it's called, I call it a brilliance list. And this is where you take your piece of paper and you put it into four quadrants and you layer out top left. What do you absolutely love to do? Your genius work, right? Gay Hendricks called it, your genius work. What are the things that only you can do? Then you got your top right, which is stuff that you're really good at. But technically somebody else could do it. It's not like the thing you're going to go higher for first. It's probably a high dollar higher as well. But it's just having that recognition that you don't actually have to do everything, even when you feel that way. Then below the line, we have the stuff that you're good at, but you kind of hate, right? And the bottom right, we got the stuff that you hate and you suck at it, right? So that's the stuff that we first look at. And then you say, okay, is there something below the line that's a low dollar per hour thing or it's a very simple contractor hire like a bookkeeper, it's not going to take a ton of money off your board, but it's going to free up some space. And even if it's mental space, even if it's just brain space that maybe time doesn't even free up that much, but it's really freeing up energy that counts too. So we look at that from when somebody doesn't really even know where to begin. That's one of the first things I asked them to do is, hey, let's do a brilliance list. We'll twerk on it over the course of a week. Any time you notice something, you're like, oh, man, that's a bottom right. Like, boy, do I suck at this, right? So it's a really cool tool to use if you're not quite sure what you want to get rid of first and get off your plate first. Yeah, I I love that. I do a version of that. I couldn't and I just don't want to over I can't over stress. You don't have to find somebody that does all the things like Aaron, even as you're saying, like, if you found somebody to do that one thing that just sucks the life out of you. Oh my gosh. Yeah, because like, as soon as you don't have that, you know, those, you know, if you're like a video game character and you've got you only have like four bars out of your five bars left, it's like, well, shoot, like you're missing an entire bar. If you had five, you'd be 100%. But like, you have to do this one task that just sucks that one life out. It's like, now you're not operating it, you know, best at full potential. Yeah, you can can be that you should be. What's the when you're talking to somebody who, you know, I get this all the time, it's like, well, I can't, I can't afford that. Like, so I'll just do it myself. And there are these things that, you know, Wickman calls $20 an hour tasks season, don't ever do $20 an hour tasks. And, and that probably, you know, out of the tasks that get listed out, it's like, well, how much like could I pay somebody to do that? And then when you look at your own rate of like, what, what should I be chart? What do I want to charge my clients? If I was only charging hourly, what does that even look like? So then you can start to get an idea of the value of some of these tasks. But how do you walk people through that objection of like, I just, I can't, I can't afford it. Yeah. Yeah. You can't afford not to actually. Right. Exactly. Well, and sometimes it, that is like a really tricky place to be. So the first thing that I do is I ask the question of, if you had the time back, what would you do with the time? And so often the answer is what I should be doing is business development. And it's the thing they don't want to do. So they're actually making an excuse of, I don't have the money because they don't want to do the thing they would do. If their time was freed up. So we got to be real about that. And we just got to say, maybe the thing we actually need to hire is business development. Let's just be real. But the other side of it is that there's this mindset around and it's, it's, it comes up in each person differently. But that they should, it's almost like a shouldn't like, I, I, I shouldn't know. Nobody's going to want to do this thing. It's a $20 task. I don't want to do it. So nobody else is going to want to do it. There's this element of the work that needs to be passed off is not worthy of somebody. But the thing that I've found is that there is somebody out there, there's a Stephanie who wants to buy my toilet paper and sold and fold my socks. Like there really is. There's a person out there who wants to do graphic design or content creation or they want to edit your podcast or they want to be the person who manages your email because they know how important it is for you to not miss this relationships, that there's connection points that come through that inbox, right? So everybody gets to do their genius work and we have to recognize that the world is full of amazing people who love them, things that we don't love. And when we start to look big picture, the, you know, we can, we can start with passing off the $20 task and feel a little better about it. When that person's eyes light up when we hand it over, right? I'll never forget. I had the VA come on to a team that I was consulting on. And I said, listen, we've got three Google drives and they're all a disaster. And what I need you to do is I don't care how we actually get to the, to the end result of an organized Google drive among and between these three. But I need you to figure it out. I need you to not ask me a hundred questions about what these files are. I need you to figure it out. And it can take as long as it takes. But at the end of the day, if I go into offers and I go into, you know, 2025, I need to see everything is related to offers in 2025. Like that's just what I need to see. And it took her 84 hours, but she did it. 84 hours at $8 an hour. So when you do that math, we could not have possibly come up with a scenario where that was better off done by me or by the CEO or by the content gal who was writing blog posts. Like that was the perfect job for this gal. And we made her month. She was like, Oh my God, this is a dream project for me. And I'm getting paid an amazing rate for her in her in her currency. She felt great about it. So like, there's always a solve no matter what the challenge is. Yeah, yeah, I agree. I remember, I remember this years ago, this before chat GPT, and you could plug spreadsheets into it. But we were trying to, I was trying to figure out a formula on this. I think it was my budget sheet. And it had multiple layers. I mean, I did like, I think the most complicated math I took, it was either calculus or pre-calc in college, whatever the minimum requirement was, I took it, I passed it dot dot dot question mark. I did. Yeah. I hated it. Well, yeah, you're talking to a girl who's dad taught AB and BC Cal. Yeah. So I get it. I was, I like barely, barely made it through trig. So I could kind of figure out, you know, how to do summary, you know, some, whatever, like in spreadsheets that some, some equal, equal, some. And I could not. I mean, I probably spent two hours trying to figure out this formula, and I couldn't get it to work. And I was like, you know what, I wonder if there's somebody out there that could help me solve this problem. And I'm like, this is so dumb because I can't figure it out. So I think my ego is like, somebody else probably can't figure it out. At least that's what I was thinking. But then I'm like, how long is this going to take somebody? I went to Upwork. I typed in like, spreadsheet guru or something like that. And a bunch of people popped up and this one person, I think she was, I think she was $35 an hour. And I was like, man, that's, that's kind of a lot for the spreadsheet thing. I reached out. She's like, oh, yeah, I could totally do that. I hired her. I was like, how long do you think that in my tank? She's like, you know, I think she's at most a couple hours. She did it in like 20 minutes. And so my bill was like $17. And I was like, oh my gosh, I cannot believe I spent all of this time trying to figure out because I'm stubborn, because I'm cheap, because I'm like, I can, I can do it. But all of that wasted time and energy. And then this lady was like, yeah, this is what I do. So thanks for the work and see you later. That was a great hourly rate for her and blah, blah, blah. But yeah, I think they're just getting over that belief that there's somebody that there's nobody out there that wants to do our, what we would look at as like, menial tasks, like just annoying, obnoxious. Yeah. And when you look at like a Colby score as well, if we sort of type back, somebody who has that really high number in that detailed data department, you hand them something like that, they're like, oh my God, kid on Christmas, right? So we can even see our differences when we look at Colby scores and understand, obviously, with all the different combinations of scores, there's somebody out there who's gonna love the thing you paid. So it's about figuring out who that person is and how we talk to that person and market to that person to find them and bring them onto your team. I want to talk just a little bit about sales, because you brought it up and it made me, made me think of this. You said, people will inevitably say, and I've heard this a million times, I've said the same thing like, oh yeah, if I had an extra hour or two hours a week, I mean, I would do more of the thing that generates revenue for our business, I would do business development. But there's a part of like, okay, well, when I sit down and it's time to do business development, what does that look like? Because if it looks like cold calling or cold reaching out, like I don't want to, like with every fiber in my being, I don't want to do that. So subconsciously, I think for a long time, I was like, well, you know, I'll just keep doing the thing because I just have to do the thing and I could be able to delegate that and I can't find these magic hours that I'd love to spend in business development when really, no, I probably was, there was some gap there. I will say, for those of us who have been stuck, custom quoting everything, we are married to the, we're the one that has to come up with the estimate, the proposal, the quote, and all that. We're the one that has to guide the conversation with the client. But when you can create a package or a set of packages that you can sell, that's the whole thing that you could actually delegate. And you can teach somebody that pretty easily. So anyway, just speak to speak a little bit to the how all this plays into pricing and selling and everything else. I think that with Colby, the things that I know are that there are lots of different kinds of buyers. So when you're out in the world and you're selling your projects, some people are going to look at that proposal you create for them and they're going to read every single word of it. And those people are your fact finders and they're going to want to know the details. They're going to ask a lot of questions. There are going to be other people who really just want to understand your process. What are your steps? How are we going to do this? How are we going to work through this process? And there are other people who just want to know, can you get me to my outcome, my goal? I'm already six steps ahead. I've said yes to you and I'm already working on end result here. Visionary is sort of like us. And this is just our natural instincts. It doesn't mean that you won't read a proposal, Ryan, like you'll read the proposal, but you'll sort of skim through and you know kind of absolutely right. But so when we as business owners are selling to our ideal prospects, we want to understand what level of detail they're looking for. And so if you're doing a sales call and you're getting on that call and the person is like me and you want to walk me through 27 steps of how you're going to do all the things, I am going to be like, okay, can we like just, do you think you can get the job down there and be like, yeah, but don't you want to know all the steps? No, I really don't. Right. So it's figuring out how the person who you're speaking to wants to buy the services you're selling. So it's not that your proposal is an important. It's just the presentation of it. How do we shape that conversation? So it feels really good. And I use a very simple sales process. There's no scripts involved. It's very natural. It's based on who you are and how to have a great conversation with somebody. But it does involve listening a little bit. And so when you hear somebody who's really deep in, you know, so what's going on right now? And they start giving you the diary of everything they've ever tried and everything that's never worked and all the you're like, oh, you're a fact finder because they went straight to the past and they started talking about the past. And that's our little signal that they actually need to gather more details. They're going to need more information versus somebody like me. You talked to me and you're, how are things going on? Oh my god, you know what I'm working on? I'm working on this crazy new plan. I'm going to learn how to build custom GPTs. And I'm way in the future, right? I went way to the future. So when you sell to me, you want to give me future vision, outcome based, and don't get don't get too heavy on the details. Because I might ask some questions. I may have some curiosity there. But ultimately, I want to know, can you get me to my vision? Right? So you can listen a little bit for that when you're talking with folks, makes it a little bit more natural, a little easier, just to have that little, little clue and that little signal as to what they, their buying style is. So that sometimes is a helpful little tip. Love that. Okay. So we just taught you how to sell better, make more money, build a better business, find freedom, free up your time, do less of the jobs that you don't want to do. I mean, I feel like when should I start charging for this podcast? It's maybe yesterday and also you should probably get some sponsors and a bunch of other stuff. No. It's sometimes things can just be fun and for value and for free. Full herd plus episodes going strong. Yeah, I know. You've got track right in here. Well, Erin, what would you say? I want everybody to hire you and work with you. But before they do that, if they don't choose to do that, what's like the best next step for somebody that's in a spot of like, okay, I'm tired of doing all the things. I really need to maybe understand myself better. What's one or two steps that somebody should take? Yeah. The easiest one is to go and get your Colby score. It's 55 bucks. Like it's not a big investment. And what you're going to get from it is this beginning understanding of exactly how you're wired. So if you are somebody who's filling in that frustration zone, it could be because you're sort of Colby out of balance and knowing that is huge. And people are like, well, you know, what if I'm exactly the way that I'm meant to be? Yeah, well, you might be married to somebody in a relationship, have a team member that you're like, there's some conflicts here. It's not working. Have them take the Colby too. Because that's going to start to show you. So for a very, very tiny amount of money, you can start to see where things are to balance and communication wise. I know, I mean, my husband is so different than I am. And after we got his Colby score, I understood so many of his like habits, things that he does that sort of drive me crazy. And then I realized we just like, this is actually the way he's wired. And if I can just be cool with the fact that he's going to do it a little differently than I do, then it'll be, it'll be okay. It'll be fine. So it's saved more than one relationship before. I'll raise my hand for that, right? Thank you, Colby. Because Colby 55 bucks is cheaper than divorce as it turns out. So you can really start there. And if there's ever a time where you don't really understand your results, there's Colby consultants. Like I am one, but there are others like me. So fun when you resonate with, and they can help walk you through it and really give you a good understanding of how that works. And then you can slowly start to see ways to integrate it more into your business. But it's a good, a good low cost starting point. Yeah, yeah, I love that. And you know, there's the, that's the DIY, you can get it, you do it, you have some clarity, it's like, okay, that's done. As soon as you bring somebody alongside of you, that's an expert, a consultant, you're going to learn faster and fail less often. So when you get stuck or frustrated, that's probably your next best choice. So Aaron, where can people connect with you and follow along with your work? Yeah, I hang out on LinkedIn. And I'm super active there and love to chat and have conversations and connections. So you know, even if you're like, I don't know if I want to hire this girl, she might be a little, I don't know, you can still be my friend. Like you can reach out and say hello, tell me more about your business, tell me what you're up to. Because I like, I like to be friends. And my website is Aaron Morgan dot com, you can come and check it out over there. But mostly the place I socialize is on LinkedIn. And then tell me, just give us a quick story. I don't think we touched on it. The 45 day perfect tire is so fun. I love doing this. Nobody knows I do it because it's not on my website. But people who know me sometimes know that I like to find these unicorns. So I had a outcome to me at the very beginning of what month we in December, very beginning of November. And she's like, I really need a chief marketing officer. She wanted to call it a chief growth officer. She's like, but I, you know, I've hired two people, they haven't worked out. I'm really thinking that nobody's really going to be able to do this. And I went, okay, so here's the deal. I'm going to ask you a couple of questions. And then I'm going to go and write you the perfect job description. I'm going to put it out. I'm going to get the best candidates. They're going to be not too many of them, which is a good thing because we're going to be really specific. And I'm going to have a couple of conversations and I'm going to find you the perfect person. And we literally did it in 45 days. And we found the dream candidate. And she was actually the very first applicant. So I saw her application come in and I went, well, we're done here. But I took additional applications and I did some due diligence. But in that 45 days, we were able to go from no job description all the way to found our person. And it was really magical. I love finding unicorns because they're like, I'm sure they don't exist. And I'm like, yeah, I'm certain they do. And I'm going to go find you one. So it's a really fun thing for somebody, especially if they've had a stressful or challenging process where the persons, people, persons they've tried have it worked out. It's it's something that I'm really good at, but it's like a secret Colby skill. Not secret anymore. I know now reach out to Aaron if you need help there because, I mean, Lord knows I've hired multiple people for similar same jobs. So maybe we'll talk. This is super fun, Aaron. Thanks so much for for being with me and sharing all of your wisdom today. Greatful, grateful to have you as a new friend and also fun learning from you as well. Yeah, total blast. Thank you so much. All right, friend. Hey, I hope you enjoyed this episode. I would love to hear a big takeaway. So you can comment, you can message, you can send me an email Ryan at Studio Sherpas.com. We're also on social media at career video business. And if you would do me a favor, let's kick off the new year right. Okay. Leave a review for this show. I would love to hear what you think about it in a public space. And it also helps the algorithm. So if this show has helped you and you think it could help others, then leave a review and that will it will like pop up like in the, you know, the places where you can listen to podcasts. So Spotify, Apple podcast or wherever, but would love a review, even if it's not a five star. But I know it will be because you love me. And I love you too. No, seriously, thank you for taking time to do that. I really do appreciate it. And let me know what what do you want 2026? Wow, I just we just lost a year. What do you want 2025 to look like? What are your dreams, your hopes? What are your goals for your business? Let me know, shoot me an email, give me a message somewhere, leave it in the comment below. But thank you for being along on this journey. Let's climb this mountain of running a successful video production business together. Let's define what is success actually. What does that mean for us? We've got a whole year ahead of us. Okay, it's going to be great. And I am rooting for you and hoping for the best. So here we go. Okay, time to get to work. See ya.
