(Newswire.net — April 1, 2022) — Robert Nickell, Founder and CEO of Rocket Station, tells us his advice about how to create impact in your business using outsourcing, and what steps to take to get yourself ready to hire a virtual team. Nickell and his company Rocket Station, are experts in hiring and managing virtual teams effectively, but it didn’t start out that way.
“I was an entrepreneur straight out of college, and I thought I was going to take over the world,” Nickell quipped. “But I quickly figured out that it’s not that easy! I was really good at the front end parts of the business; networking, big picture stuff, sales, but not the detailed, less glamorous admin side. But you need both parts to make a business go the distance.”
Get Clear on Your Skillset and Where there are Holes
Most business owners are good at one or two things, their ‘core competencies’. They’re great at thinking ahead and at the big picture, whatever their company’s main bread and butter is. They can crush those core competencies, but there are always a few ancillary tasks that they sort of struggle with that outsourcing can solve.
On the flip side, come up with a list of things you could stand to delegate. Perhaps you need help in customer support, community management, answering phones, checking email, bookkeeping, financial department support? Get clear on what you need before you start thinking about hiring.
Realize the Duality of Change and Consistency
For Nickell and Rocket Station, the pandemic didn’t halt their workflow, nor their clients. Which also means their clients’ employees still had jobs during the pandemic.
“Businesses have been forced to adapt to the new normal of working from home, but our clients had little to no disruption in their work because their day-to-day looked the same, pandemic or no,” said Nickell. “It was a really cool thing to be able to see for our clients and their teams that they all still had work!”
Not many people can say that, and being open to the WFH Shift rather than fearing it is a great first step towards securing your business longevity.
Accept the Struggle, and Allow Helping Hands
“Hiring employees is hard!” Nickell admitted. “When I started, I struggled with the management side. I think I am a decent leader, but I was not the best manager. I had to learn the difference before I could succeed. Whether you run a publicly-traded company or a single-owner LLC out there trying to crush it, there’s only so many hours in the day. Trying to pigeon-hole yourself into multiple boxes, like sales, customer support, administration tasks is just going to take away from what you do best.”
Nickell struggled and failed trying to fill all those ancillary tasks by himself. All companies need to do those tasks, they just serve different industries and different people. Tasks such as IT support, business development, bookkeeping, filling executive assistant roles, lead generation aren’t necessarily cookie-cutter across the board, but they all play in the same ballpark. By allowing others to take those tasks off your hands, you free up space for growth and freedom in your workplace.
Even with sales, if you update your setter-closer model by separating and outsourcing the setter role, you can dramatically increase your sales.
“Sales is the lifeblood of every business,” said Nickell. “You have to be efficient in that area or you’re doomed.”
Frequently Asked Questions
Now that you have the basic information, we added in some more Rocket Station-specific FAQs:
What is the post popular role that prospective clients of Rocket Station are looking to fill?
Nickell says lead generation, creating more opportunities to meet clients of their own, has the biggest draw for Rocket Station clients.
“For the better part of a year, organic outreach on LinkedIn has been our bread and butter — not just giving away free goodies — really adding value. Our workers can engage in different online communities, different groups, and having the team and the manpower to do that, to make those connections and set appointments, makes all the difference,” Nickell told us.
What does Rocket Station do, logistically, for its clients?
They follow a three-step process to hire each team member, with hiring and training being the last step.
“Most people tend to hire first and try to mold people to their structure,” said Nickell. “But for success, that has to be done in reverse. Without a clear roadmap and foundation for what success looks like, just hiring people is not the way to go. Understand the ins and outs of what happens in your business’ day to day before going out and trying to fill an ambiguous role. That is what we do for our clients.
“We go behind the scenes and observe what is already in place, create training content based on that information, then find perfect employees for the roles needed to be filled and train them on that content we produce.”
About Robert Nickell
Robert Nickell is the Founder and CEO of Rocket Station, the leading provider of outsourced staffing and process management in the real estate industry. Rocket Station knows that finding the right people for your business is hard. They give their clients a clear process for finding virtual teammates that can fuel their success. For more information, visit https://rocketstation.com/