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Get Help.
Hire Expertise.

When I was working full time at the United Nations, one of my fledgling side hustles was growing. This was good because my business was indeed growing, but it was bad because I still had a full-time job, which was getting in the way of my entrepreneurial aspirations. I had to hire help. A few weeks before, I had met an administrative assistant, who, after I hired her, helped me grow my company for many years.

Help is essential.

I’ve always relied on a great team to help me grow my business—be it organizing events, managing content, or other things. You’ll want to hire for two main reasons: Hire for expertise. Your expertise, what you do best, is limited. You can probably do one or two things very well. For the things you don’t do so well, you can learn to do them a bit better, but in the long term your business will benefit from hiring someone who can help you.

For example, I often hear this advice to business owners: you can use this or that tool to do graphics work on your own. Some image and video editing you can probably do on your own. But consistently I’ve found that the work of a professional designer is nearly impossible to match. A professional designer has the expertise from pouring in the five or ten or more years of experience that you’ll never be able to match—unless you want to become a designer. You have years of experience in what you do, right?

The second reason you’ll want to hire is to save you time. Over the years, I’ve spent what seems like hundreds of hours poring over WordPress code or HTML in attempts to tweak or update various areas of my website. Sometimes I end up getting things updated or fixed, and sometimes I don’t. However, every time I work with my website developer, Andigo Media, they get it solved quickly and perfectly, much better than I can. I waste time, a precious commodity, when I fiddle with things that I should leave to experts who can solve it much faster than I can.

Sure, you have to pay for their expertise. But your time is so, so, so valuable. Here are a few things I’ve learned over the years in hiring the right person. It works most of the time.

Know what you want. Be sure you really know what your needs are, what your challenges are. It’s hard to hire someone if you’re not clear how he or she can help you.
Have a clear job description. Even though someone might just be “working on your website,” it helps to have a short job description. This way, what you expect of them is clearly documented. If you need to hire someone else, you can do so.
Measure for success. Be sure to benchmark, to measure, the success of the person you’ve hired. Have regular meetings, in person or on a phone call or via email. Ask yourself (and them), are they fulfilling their responsibilities to you and the job? Are you fulfilling your responsibilities to them?
When using an online talent site, such as UpWork, use a clear job description. Having “Web designer needed” is too broad. How about “Lover of HTML and WordPress Needed for Nonprofit”? This kind of job description is not only eye catching, but I find it attracts a better type of person—sometimes.

Should you hire an employee or a contractor? An employee is great when you have steady work and really want someone who is fully dedicated to you. For most of the work I do, I’m quite fine using contractors. They work when and where they want, and through clear communication (email) and a task management tool, we get a lot done and my business grows.

You want an experienced contractor who has only you and a handful of other clients. Not too many, or they’re too busy to work with you, and not so few that they have to skimp around for jobs just to make ends meet.