Building your business to have a diverse set of income streams is a wise move. If you hire a team of contractors to handle the production, your passive income truly becomes much more passive once you get your team started.
Think of it this way: If you invest in the stock market, every financial advisor suggests splitting up your investments into a diverse array of stocks and bonds, simply for the fact that not every company will perform well all the time. When one company has a bad quarter, a diverse portfolio allows you to minimize your losses, especially if the other companies in your portfolio are doing well.
Independent contractors are also advised to work for an array of clients instead of devoting all their time to just one client, simply because you never know when that one client will close up shop or decide to hire a different contractor. The same is true for your own business. What if you lost multiple clients in one month? Do you have a calm way to make up that income or would you be scrambling in a panic? Creating passive income over time lessens the panic.
How a Dream Team Benefits Your Business
Outsourcing allows you to focus on your daily money-making tasks while your products, classes, books, summits or webinars are being produced in the background. While these products will certainly be money-makers, delegating the creation to a team makes them even more passive so you can focus on your coaching clients and marketing.
A basic dream team may include of a graphic designer, a copy writer and a virtual assistant, although your team will look different from other coaches based upon what type of products you’re creating. If you need to grow your team, hire a project manager to oversee deadlines and to answer questions from your contractors. Again, this allows you to focus on your daily tasks.
To make the most of your team investment, decide if you need all these players on a monthly, quarterly, or annual basis. This frequency will depend highly on the types of products on your brainstorm list and how quickly you want to produce them. Just keep in mind that contractors take work all throughout the year so there’s no guarantee that your favorite virtual assistant will be available in 11 months to work on your next project.
One of the most frequent questions or complaints about hiring a team is that it costs more money. Very true, but consider this an upfront investment in your business. You’re paying your team one sum per project but you can then sell that same product for years to come, with no changes. If you price your product carefully and do the research to know this is what your audience wants, you will likely make your initial investment back very quickly; then the rest of your earnings are pure profit.
One last tip: Advise your dream team to document their processes during the creation period or assign this task to your project manager. This way there’s less of a learning curve if you have to hire a new team member in the future because they can refer back to these process notes.