Hereโs the simple truth about working as a freelance WordPress professional: If youโre producing quality work and keeping your clients happy youโre going to get busier over time โ itโs almost unavoidable.
There are exactly 168 hours in the week โ no more, no less. Realistically, you should be spending 56 of those hours sleeping, another 7 or so exercising and then of course, you have all the other little daily tasks that eat away at your day as well. The hours left available for productive work are limited.
At some point, youโll have to decide whether or not you want or need to build a team in order to help your business continue to grow. Sure, you could remain a solo freelancer and keep plodding along. But as an entrepreneur, I bet youโre rarely happy with maintaining the status quo. Growth is in the cards.
Building a team is different than working alone as a freelancer. It comes with a whole new set of challenges that will require you to develop new skill sets as an entrepreneur.
In this post, weโre going to touch on some of the techniques and tools required to help you build an effective team around your burgeoning WordPress business.
Shall we get started?
Good Team Management Begins With The Selection Process
The most important technique you can master is that of adding the right people to your team โ the selection process is where itโs at. Bring the right people onboard and your business can flourish โ probably beyond anything you ever imagined possible. But hire the wrong people and youโll find yourself wishing for a swift return to the days of solopreneurship.
In order to work well together you need to work well as a team. I know, it seems obvious but if youโve ever watched a team of 7-year-old boys play football (soccer for my North American friends), youโll realize that calling yourselves a team is very different than functioning like one.
Beyond the obviously required personal connection there are a few qualities to look out for when hiring great team members:
Motivation
Highly motivated team members will make your life easier by leaps and bounds. Whether youโre running a small WordPress development agency or youโre in the business of building plugins, chances are, your business is very hands on. The last thing you need to worry about is being the team cheerleader. Finding people who are self-motivated, especially in the early stages of growing your team is important.
Consider their past work history. Were they responsible for spearheading new projects? Did they run their own business or were they working in a sales capacity that was dependent upon producing leads and sales? Hiring self-motivated people makes your life easier.
Communication
Communication in any workplace is important. If youโre the lead developer for your small business, do you really have time to be chasing people down for answers to important questions? Do you want to be worrying about whether or not someone is communicating properly with your new client? Probably not.
Alex Turnbull does an awesome job of describing how important good communication is to their remote team at Groove. He flat out states that if a new applicant fails to reply to an email within 24 hours, they wonโt even be considered. This is a great standard but pay attention to the fact that the best future team members often reply much sooner.
As youโre working through the hiring process, notice how people communicate and how responsive they are before you hire them.
Results Driven
Hiring a results driven team member is important but you also want someone whoย knows which results are most likely to drive growth. There will be times when you donโt have a specific list of tasks available that need to be worked on. When this happens, you want someone on your team who can pick up the ball and run with it. Someone who has a sense of whatโs important and who knows how to prioritize.
You might be wondering whether these qualities are relevant for both distributed and non-distributed teams. The answer is yes, with one caveat:
Any shortcoming demonstrated by a team member in an office setting will probably be increased ten-fold when working as a distributed team.
Six Techniques For Managing Your Team More Effectively
Running your business as a freelance WordPress professional has probably taught you a thing or two about how to work well with clients. Through a process of trial and error, youโve learned how to interview potential new clients, how to spot the bad apples early in the process and how to communicate in the most effective manner possible.
Growing and managing your team will require you to learn an entirely new skill set. Here are 6 ideas that will help you work through the process:
1. Create an Effective Interview Process
The interview process is your front-line filter. Itโs what should help you to identify which applicants are most likely to make great team members and which you should avoid. First impressions are important and you should pay close attention to your gut feeling at this stage of the game.
We mentioned previously how important communication is to a healthy and effective team. Use the interview process to filter out poor communicators. You can also consider setting up a trial project. For example, if youโre looking to bring a new developer on board, you could arrange a time for a screen-share. Present the applicant with a problem and then watch how they go about solving it. Zapier uses a similar process and might even take the additional step of having them work on a small collaborative project with an existing employee.
2. Great Onboarding Makes Life Easier
Adding a new team member can be a stressful process for both you and your new employee. Itโs not unlike when you first start working with a new client. There is an initial period of uncertainty for both you and your new hire. Developing a standard onboarding procedure can help to reduce everyoneโs anxiety.
Any new team member is going to have a lot of questions. The more prepared you are to answer them, the smoother the onboarding process will be. The first week or two of working with a new employee or contractor is a good time to outline your expectations, explain you your workflow and generally bring them up to speed with how you like to run your business.
Donโt forget that the onboarding process is also about giving your new hire a chance to ask questions and become comfortable in their new position. Donโt drop a new client project on their lap and expect them to knock it out of the park โ theyโre going to need some additional oversight in the early stages.
3. Flexibility Breeds Happiness
Happy employees and contractors are more productive. Whatโs important in your WordPress business is shipping results โ completing a new website build, delivering a new logo to a client or resolving a series of customer support tickets. These are the end-results that matter.
Obviously youโre going to have some established operating procedures โ a certain way that you like to run your business โ but the more flexibility you can provide your team the happier they are going to be. Some people work better early in the morning and others are night owls. As well, the ability to juggle work and family life is becoming increasingly important. Respecting an employeeโs personal life and desire for balance and control can help them feel more loyal towards your business.
4. Communication is King
Chances are you already understand the importance of great communication when it comes to your clients. You probably wonโt beย surprised to find out that managing an effective team requires the same level of communication. Weโre going to talk about some of the tools you can use to communicate shortly but, whatโs more important are the frequency, openness, and subject matter.
In an office setting, itโs tough to avoid daily communication of some kind โ usually next to the water-cooler, right? But structured time where you can review client projects or address customer service issues is also important. And although working with a remote team presents unique challenges, donโt use that as an excuse. You should still be scheduling regular meetings via Skype, Hangouts or the platform of your choice.
Openness and subject matter are two other things important to communicating effectively with your team. No employee or contractor likes to feel like they donโt have a voice. Encouraging open communication between all team members leaves everyone feeling like their ideas and opinions are important and that they provide value to the team as a whole.
5. Establish Standard Operating Procedures
While flexibility helps to create a happy team, standard operating procedures help to ensure that your business runs the way it should โ even when youโre not there.
Having a process for managing new client inquiries, a defined workflow for developing a new website and a procedure for managing customer support tickets are what keep your business functioning like a well-oiled machine.
In a perfect world, youโd have SOPs for virtually every aspect of your business because they benefit you, your customers and your team members. For the business owner, they provide the peace of mind that even in your absence, projects and tasks are being completed in a specific way and to a predefined standard โ this also directly benefits your clients. For your team, SOPs remove any hesitation or anxiety over whether or not a task is being completed as expected.
As a side note, If youโre bringing on your first employee or contractor, having them create SOPs for their position is a great initial task to have them work on.
6. Lead by Example
Learning to manage your team effectively is going to require time and effort. Opinions are divided on whether good managers are made or born but since youโve already committed to building your team, it really doesnโt matter. You may as well buckle down and become a great manager.
How well your team works together and how productive each individual member is will be greatly influenced by how much respect they have for you. If youโve ever had a boss that you didnโt respect, you know exactly what Iโm talking about.
One of the best ways to earn the respect of your team is to lead by example. Be a great communicator and be open to hearing and exploring new ideas. Quite possibly the most effective way to earn the respect and loyalty of your team is by being willing to admit when you are wrong. Even the boss makes mistakes, right?
Tools To Help Your Manage Your Team
What would this article be if we didnโt cover at least a few of the tools you can use to manage your team โ distributed or not. Of course, these are just a few examples and there are alternatives to each one but if youโre transitioning from solo freelancer to building a small team, these will provide a great starting-off point.
Slack for Communication
If youโre going to be working with a team of people, be it 2 or 25, you owe it to yourself to check out Slack. The basic plan is free and paid plans start at $6.67/month per user. Never mind that, though, because the free version is awesome.
Using Slack as your primary communication tool allows you to keep pretty much everything in one place. You can set up multiple channels so, for example, you could have channels for new leads, development issues, customer service tickets and daily updates. The ideas for channels are limitless. Even GitHub can be integrated with Slack.
Where Slackโs communication abilities really shine is in its ability to pull in information from different apps, and share them collaboratively. And we havenโt even mentioned file sharing, direct messaging, groups and group messaging, searchable conversation archives or the mobile app.
Talking about Slack could quite literally be a post in itself, itโs that good.
Trello for Project Management
Trello, if youโre not using it already, is a great tool to assist you with project management. A lot of people dismiss Trello because it seems simple on the surface, and it is. Thatโs part of what makes Trello so great for project management. Itโs got everything you need without a ton of extra, unwanted features. Projects, to-do lists, files, conversations, labels, due dates and more make it a great option for collaborative project management.
If youโve already taken a few minutes to check out Slack, you might have noticed that Trello can be easily integrated into any channel your desire.
Perhaps one of the best things about Trello is its short learning curve. Other apps like TeamWork or Asana offer more features and functionality, but the learning curve is quite a bit steeper.
Google Docs for Collaboration
If youโre looking for a place to store files large files and collaborate on documents, Google Drive is where you should look. Chances are youโre probably already familiar with Drive โ you probably already know where I am heading with this, but it just so happens that Slack also plays nicely with Googleโs industry-leading collaborative app.
Files from Drive are easily integrated into Slack and once they are, the full text of the document becomes searchable from within Slack.
Wrap Up
If youโve recently decided to start building a team to help support the growth of your WordPress business, hopefully, you found a few points of interest in this article.
If youโre going to build and manage an effective team, it all begins with bringing the right kind of people on board. Team members who demonstrate the qualities of being motivated, communicative and results-driven greatly increase your chances of making the right hiring decision right from the start.
From there we covered six techniques or areas that are worth paying close attention too โ beginning with the interview process. If I had to pick one thing that would be more important than anything else, itโs the idea of leading by example. Team members who respect one another will be more loyal, more productive and will function more efficiently as a unit.
Last but not least we touched on a few tools that when used properly, can help you manage your team with less effort and better results.
Making the decision to grow your WordPress business by bringing on a team can be an exciting proposition. Will it require more work initially? Yes. Will it force you to develop better management skills? You bet. But in the end, if you are serious about growing your business, itโs a necessary step.
If you have recently taken steps towards growing your WordPress business by hiring employees or contractors, please share your experiences in the comments below.
If you have a favorite tool that makes team collaboration easier, let us know what youโre using.
Article thumbnail image by totallyPic.comย / shutterstock.com
Great Post! I have been using Slack and Trello for a few months now and they are both fantastic.
Good stuff. That “email reply in 24 hours” bit I have to admit I think is a bit bogus. It’s just much too simplistic.
Sure, if someone is applying for a job but takes two days to reply to your email, they’re probably a bit of a slacker. So it weeds out people who are just unfit for professional work, period. But that’s really all it tells you.
I hope we’re not at the point where just replying to an email without a huge delay makes someone seem on-fire. ๐
Proofhub is missing from your list and I think this is the best tool for managing projects.
Excellent article!
I’ve been building a team for 2+ years, after 8 years working solo. I agree that:
1. Communication is critically important
2. Finding the right people is essential
Building a team is empowering, but be prepared for growing pains.
Easy: Screening for technical skills
Tough: Screening for ability to work well with team members
Tough: Screening for ability to acknowledge mistakes
Our team relies on Slack, Trello and Google Drive.
very informative article. you are totally right because you said communication is the king . without proper communication, it’s impossible to lead a good team . That’s why I give first priority on communication.
Very useful article for managing a team and a small company.
Gmail, Google drive and there add-on, Skype, Hootsuite, WhatsApp Web, some of my best tool
I use Google Talk and Skype for communication. Those are my best choice.
We use Slack, Intervals for project management, Google Drive, and Google Hangouts video for our current tools. Makes communicating and keeping track of things with a distributed team easier.
Whenever I think of hiring a team, which I’d love to do, I run into two problems:
1) Why would anyone want to work for me for less than they can get if they work for themselves?
2) Why would I hire someone when I’m lacking enough work to keep myself afloat?
There is also the problem of feast and famine in the freelance world. there are months that I am desperate andhave hired programmers who make more than I do or hour just to get the job done. there are months when I have steady updates and don’t need assistance. I find this to be the major issue for freelancers.
finding trusted Temporary teams is what a lot of us need
Ciao Rob.
Probabilmente non sei ancora padrone di un vero progetto.
Un imprenditore ragiona in un funzione di obiettivi piรน ampi.
Ti auguro di arrivarci presto, Risponderai da solo alle tue due domande.
Buona giornata e buon lavoro a tutti ๐
Bye Joe. Ottimo lavoro come sempre.
You miss Asana. My favorite tool.
Very interesting article!
We are trying to implement a little team of 3 persons to expand our business, and your suggestions to lead by example is true. Leader creates other leaders, not followers.
About communication we use Skype, Watsapp, Call by phone, gmail and sometimes facebook messenger. For storage Google Drive.
Motivation is the first thing! We read every day the Tought of the Day by The Napoleon Hill Foundation.
What are your thoughts on office 365 for collaboration?