How to Create a Stellar Team Without Hiring a Single Employee

You know how to roll up your sleeves and don’t shirk hard work, but at some point you realize you can’t do it all alone. As you grow it’s inevitable you’ll need outside help. 

That applies whether you head up communication and marketing for a company or if you run your own business, agency or consultancy. 

If you’re not quite ready to hire full- or even part-time staff, there’s a great option available that will still get you excellent results: hiring contractors and agencies. 👭🏾 

Below are Zoetica Media founder Kami Huyse’s 5 top recommendations for creating your own stellar team and getting the best results possible.  Some of the links below are referral links, meaning if you decide to use any of them we will get credit. We only recommend tools we use, rely on and pay for ourselves.

• ⏺️  Know your own working style.
  You need to make sure the people or agency you hire mesh with your work style and culture. Perhaps you’re someone who likes personal meetings and verbal instructions rather than written checklists and manuals. Or maybe you expect that work is completed ahead of official deadlines rather than tasks not being finished until the last second. Whatever your preference, make sure you and your consultants’ or agency’s work styles overlap so you don’t end up frustrated. 

• ⏺️  Create a narrow scope of work and do a test project.
  When hiring outside contractors, it’s tempting to give them the entire list of tasks you’ve been eager to unload. But it’s wiser to test the waters first and see if the person is a good match. Assign them a well-defined and concrete project, then determine if the results reflect the quality and outcome you expect. If so, you can start increasing the amount of work and responsibility you assign, eventually making them an integral part of your team. 

• ⏺️  Hire specialists instead of generalists.
  One of the biggest mistakes Kami sees people make is trying to find contractors who can do everything to perfection. They’ll try to identify the magical individual who can manage the agency’s entire operational workflow, create beautiful social media graphics, write enticing newsletters, and even complete monthly billing! 🦄That person rarely exists, so Kami recommends hiring for very specific or related tasks. She suggests collecting recommendations through word-of-mouth or using a platform like Upwork to find quality contractors. If and when you do hire your first employee, that’s often the time to bring on board a generalist. 

• ⏺️  Set up clear lines of communication.  
  Help your contractor or agency succeed by  streamlining the communications process. Kami uses ClickUp for all of Zoetica Media’s work, making it the main way her team communicates. Everything from brainstorming ideas, creating task assignments, and actual content creation, to sharing status updates and tracking progress, can take place on ClickUp. For someone just starting out with their first contractor, a standard Google doc or spreadsheet can also work well.     

• ⏺️  Treat them as part of the family.
  At one point in Kami’s career she worked as a contractor, and to this day remembers how important it was to feel like an integral and respected part of the team. In fact, knowing she was valued made her want to work even harder. Treating everyone like they’re an important part of the group, regardless of their employment status, is something she adopted when, as head of her own agency, it came time to hire outside help. At the end of the day, how you treat people is strongly connected to the caliber of work you’ll receive from them. 

For all the details on getting the best results from contractors and agencies, watch Kami's full livestream here. 🥇