If you’re hiring a team, you’re doing so because you want (need) additional support in your business. Whether that’s emotional support and collaboration or to take some tasks off your plate, you and your business need to be getting some sort of return on this new investment.
The ROI you receive could be financial, but it can also be time–depending on what role you’re actually hiring for. Both are incredibly valuable.
But measuring ROI of a team member can be a slippery slope, especially when some roles don’t directly impact sales and revenue. On the other hand, you hire team members to relieve some of the burden on you–likely in hopes of increasing your bottom line.
When measuring performance and ROI of your current team, I recommend comparing the dollars you’re paying them vs. the income coming to you.
In the first weeks of bringing new team members on, there will be a learning curve. It will take time to onboard a team member, which will cost you some time. But within the first 60 to 90 days, you should be making more back than you’re spending on that team member. Otherwise, the ongoing ROI probably isn’t there.
There’s only so much work and responsibility one person can take on. So after about 90 days, if all goes well, you probably won’t see a huge shift in the ROI (all other factors being the same).
Here’s an example to illustrate what I mean, when the team member isn’t a sales person or directly working with clients:
You hire a VA at $1,000 per month to help you implement a new idea.
In the first month, you’re training that person. You spend time making sure she knows your standard operating procedures, has a handle on your systems and knows how to take some primary tasks from a to-do to checked off her list. You invest a lot of time in her, more than you would have had you done the tasks yourself.
In the second month, the VA has a better grip on what she’s doing and is able to manage more on her own. As the second month progresses, you’re able to loosen and eventually lose the training wheels. This frees up your time to get back to the money-making aspects of your business.
By the end of the second month or beginning of the third month, you should see a clear change in how the VA is working inside your business. She should be fully functional, leaving you enough time so that you’re now able to make that $1,000 monthly investment back.
Once you have this new VA up and running, it’s important to sustain that ROI for some time before bringing on another team member–unless you’re in such a growth period that you need to hire multiple people at once. But the ROI principles still remain the same.
Ultimately, each team member brings in the revenue or allows you the freedom to bring in that revenue to cover their costs and then some. That’s where you really hit the sweet spot of growth.
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