You are listening to My Freedom Grove podcast with Gretchen Hernandez, episode 85.

Welcome to My Freedom Grove podcast. The all inclusive podcast that teaches mindset and business tools. We'll help you rise as your authentic self. Be unshakable with your emotional freedom and unstoppable in achieving any goal and living your purpose. I'm your host, Gretchen Hernandez. If you want to put your mental health first in life, relationships and business, you've come to the right place.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Hi, my strong friends. Hey, I've been thinking a lot about how long it takes to get really good at doing your job. So in my life, we've had a couple changes to employment. Obviously, you know, I started my business over two years ago. It takes quite a while to learn all of the stuff on how to run a business, how to get it up and profitable, all of the tech stuff, the business stuff, and then my own service skills.

What services am I going to provide? How am I going to be effective at it? All of that good stuff.

My husband also has had some job changes. When we first moved out here, he started a new job in a whole new industry. So it took him a little while to learn his job. He recently switched to another job. Same industry, but this one they're throwing so many tasks at him. That it's a bit overwhelming.

New Hire Training The Corporate Way

It made me think about when I was working in corporate. I worked in a group called operational excellence. My group was full of coaches., our job was to help develop other coaches. It was also to develop employees and then to help make everything about the running of each organization's business perfect. Their business models, their business processes, their metrics, their quality, their costs, their speed, everything.

Right next to my department was our learning development department. One of the things that they were responsible for was developing learning plans for every single role at this corporation.

The site that I worked at had 1000 employees, some of those employees had the same job, others didn't, obviously. In order to run a huge biotech manufacturing plant, it takes a lot of different roles. Just like in any business, whether it's a small business that only has a few employees or even a solopreneur business, there are a lot of different roles that need to happen.

Within each of those roles, there's a lot of stuff to learn. There's the service, the technical aspect of it. There might be some business skills that someone has to know, and also the tech skills that go along with it.

Our learning department not only had to come up with what that learning plan would be. They also had to try to get the person that came into that program developed and competent at their job as fast as possible. Because when you're a company and you're hiring someone, you need them to like really hit the ground running. That would be ideal.

If you're going to pay someone to come in and do something for your business, that they can just jump in, hit the ground running, and they're doing all of the tasks, doing it perfectly, everything's working great. That would be a huge relief to any business owner or business manager. But we know that everybody comes with a different level of skill, different level of experience, things that they've done before.

The learning plans that this group would create, it would have a proficiency matrix. What are all of the different skills that are required? There's a way of grading people based on how well they could do those particular skills. Then they would have specific trainings that they would have to go to. Some of it could be online training, you sit there, watch an online training.

And then you go out on the job, you start doing the thing. Someone is usually there as a trainer with you, so that they can help give you those little corrections along the way so that you know how you're doing at the job. And eventually, you've had enough course corrections that you're doing the job really, really well.

Each of those skills is staggered out. They don't throw everything at you at one time because you're just one human. You only have so many hours in the day and it takes a while for the brain to absorb that knowledge. It takes a while for you to get out and experiment and do the things so that you can build up that skill level.

In the learning plan, they would stagger that out and they would also measure what's the most effective way that we can train somebody. And what's the shortest amount of training that we can give, what are the appropriate amount of exercises to do so that the person is up and running and they can just go and do this thing.

Then they could put the whole thing together to see how long would it take to train one employee for that role so that they're up and competent. I remember there were some roles where it would take six months. And the manager of the group would say, I don't have six months to spend training and employee. I only want to hire people that already have all of these skills so that I can get them up and running in, you know, a couple of weeks.

It's like, yeah, that would be great. And sometimes they can find that pool of talent out in the world that really does already have that skill level. They have to pay them a lot more. And so sometimes there are budget constraints that you can't pay someone the amount that they need to be paid in order to have them up and at that competency level immediately.

You have to build in time into your schedule and your budget to give a person time to learn all of the stuff.

Entrepreneurs Balance Learning, Building and Doing

I bring this up because I know a lot of you are entrepreneurs or you're considering becoming an entrepreneur. And I want you to think about the time to competency for you. Because especially if you're thinking about being a solopreneur, every single role within your company is for you to do. So you can figure out or plan for your learning and development.

Now, one of the great things about being an employee is that you get paid while you're learning. As an entrepreneur, you don't. All of the risk is totally on you. You have to learn all of this stuff while you're not making money. If you've staggered it out in such a way, you might be able to make money and learn at the same time.

That's a balancing act with your schedule.

I had to do that for myself, too. I still do it; two years into all of this I'm making money, but I still have to set aside time for my own learning and development. In fact, I set aside all of Mondays. Monday is spent just learning and developing myself and my own business because there's seriously a lot to learn when you're an entrepreneur, especially if you've never done it before.

It would be really great. If there was a list of everything that you need to learn as an entrepreneur. What are all of the service things for whatever service it is that you're going to provide? So I like to help coaches, healers and educators. Now, they usually come to me already having that skill. They've already gone to some school. They've learned that skill. They've already been doing that out in the world somewhere. Now they're developing some type of a product or service that they can sell on their own. And they already have that skill.

Now, sometimes I have people that come to me that don't have that skill set yet. They need to learn how to even do all of that skill so that they can help people. And then they also have to learn the business skills and they have to learn all of the tech skills because there's tech, no matter where we turn, there are always computers involved in something. Even when you go out and you pick a job where you're an employee somewhere, you're kind of assessing what tech skills are required, and if you have those or not.

And there are a lot of people still that are not comfortable with tech. I've had people come to me that not only need to learn how to do the service part of it, they also need to learn the tech part and they need to learn the business stuff.

So when we're looking at all of it, the learning plan is going to take a while. And unfortunately, again, as an entrepreneur, when you're learning this stuff, you're not making money. And that can become very stressful.

As a business owner, you can decide, do you want to learn all of this yourself? Are there pieces that you can actually just hire someone to do for you? You don't have to learn all of it yourself. I know when I jumped in, I thought, okay, I'm going to learn all of this. Well, I've also learned that it takes me a while to learn all of them because I have little bit different learning style that I like to learn everything thoroughly. I think about it very deeply, all of the different things. And I found myself getting really frustrated with how long it took me to get things done.

I'd beat myself up over how long it was taking. And I never needed to do that. I was adding all of this extra shame on myself that was not necessary. And when you do that, you can cause yourself to actually slow down.

Inspiration from Brick and Morter

I started to look around and go, okay, there's all of these other businesses out in the world that seemed to get up and running really fast. Why is that?

I took something that was really easy to see. And that's a restaurant restaurants, brick, and mortar. It's right there. You can see it. I was really amazed that someone could get a restaurant up and running in like three to six months, sometimes like really closer to that three-month mark. And I thought, wow, that is a really complex thing. They've got a lot of different moving pieces to that, including inventory, the services that they're doing, employees, they still have branding. They still have marketing all of that.

So why could they do it so fast? And it was taking me so much longer. And I realized it's because I was trying to do all of my own stuff all by myself. I didn't want to spend a lot of money to have other people do things for me. So like a restaurant they're paying for a building, they're paying for someone else to create their website. They might be paying for someone to do graphic design for them. They're paying for uniforms. They're paying for a lot of stuff. They're hiring employees to learn a bunch of this stuff. They might even be going out and hiring someone else to just drop in some business processes for them so that they don't even have to come up with it on their own.

They also have systems that are put in place. So all of that tech stuff, the computer stuff for ordering all of their inventory, their financials, how to take sales, all of that. They go and they get loans or else they've already saved up a lot of money, but usually, they go in, they get loans so that they can just purchase everything that they need. And then they get up and they're doing it.

What I've observed in the coaching healing and education industry, where we're trying to be entrepreneurs selling our own stuff. We're very hesitant to spend money, to have anybody do those things for us. We're spending a lot of our sweat equity, so to speak in developing our mind. We're spending a lot of our time instead in learning how to do all of the different pieces for ourselves, including marketing and graphic design.

When I went into being a business owner, I didn't think I was going to have to spend so much time learning how to do graphic design. Now it just blew my mind that somebody else, a dear friend of mine, decided to spend $20 to purchase one graphic design. And it was a good brake check for me because I was thinking, well, why would you spend $20 on something that you could just create?

Because I create all of my own graphics. I bought a membership through Canva so that I could do as much as I could on my own. And I've had to develop a lot of my own skills and go out and search and look at other people's to try to figure out how to do this on my own. And then he went and he just spent 20 bucks and had somebody else do it. And I thought, oh my gosh, what a waste of money to spend $20 to have somebody else do something that you could do on your own.

But the thing was, it was just a different decision than mine. I had chose to spend all of my time instead developing that skillset. That's an investment too because our time is valuable. Learning all of the marketing part is a huge investment of time.

When I think back to the restaurant example, did they spend all of their time just learning how to do all of the marketing, or did they pay someone to do the marketing on their behalf? And I don't know, each restaurant owner is going to be different. And of course, everyone's going to have to learn some of the marketing, but in order to get up and going and launch, there are definitely restaurants that have paid marketing firms.

Marketing firms actually exist. I know that when I was a kid, my mom, you know, I think I had mentioned she was a carpenter, but she also worked for a marketing firm at one point. And she loved it. But again, it's an investment of money. These people that work at a marketing firm, they have spent a lot of their time developing their skillset.

When we look back at our service skills as coaches, healers, and educators, we have developed our skillset at being able to do those three things. If we're now trying to develop our skillset to be a marketer, we have added on a huge amount to our learning plan.

And our quality of our marketing may not be that great yet. It takes a while to get really good at doing something. Marketing firms have spent a lot of their time and effort developing their skills at marketing. It might just be worth the money to hire them to do the marketing for you. You don't have to do everything on your own. Marketing is just one piece of the puzzle, of course.

Creating Your Own Learning & Development Plan

I actually started to put together a learning and development plan for myself and some tracking. And I started listing out what are all of the service skills that I needed to develop for myself to be able to do what I do. And my list isn't even complete yet, I have 45 different things on there to be really good at what I do as a coach.

Then I went and I made another list of all of the business skills that I would need to have. And again, this isn't even a complete list, but I came up with 77 things on my business list. I know that just seems overwhelming.

I am very grateful that I've spent more than a decade of my life already as a business coach, already helping to optimize businesses. So this long list, a lot of it, I already know, in fact, I've mastered it and I now teach it to other people. But there are things on that list that I'm still developing, that I am still learning how to do.

And then tech skills and this, again, I created a list of what are all of the tech skills, because a lot of this, I didn't know when I started. Now, I'm a tech person. I was doing software design and all of the computer systems in biotech for a long time. So my tech skills are pretty high compared to a lot of people.

Being an entrepreneur and especially doing things online. There's a lot of those tech skills that I needed to learn and develop. There's still a few more that I want to learn and develop, especially as we're thinking about the different computer systems that we want to use, the different software systems that we want to use as we're optimizing our business over the years, there's stuff to learn.

My list has 37 different things on it. So far. A lot of these are the things that I have already learned. There's some of it where I've just learned it a little bit and it's enough for now, but there's ones where I need to get a lot better.

I have different columns for my list. So one is just not applicable. Like here's a skill, a tech skill I've heard about, but right now, not applicable. There's others where I've decided that it is applicable, but I just haven't started it yet. Others where I'm learning it, where I'm applying it, and then things where I've mastered it or things that I'm willing to teach to other people.

I wish I had the time to teach people everything that I know, because these lists are pretty long, but now that I'm looking at it and I see the sheer volume of it all, I know that it's not possible to teach everybody everything I know. And honestly, people don't need to learn all of it. They can make that choice on if they want to hire out, have somebody else do it, or if it's just not applicable for their business.

Newsflash...you don’t have to learn every detail and skill yourself

When putting together a learning and development plan, you can list out what are all of the specific skills that you need to learn? What are those deliverables that you need to be able to create in your business? And then there's three different ways that you can approach these skills.

You can decide that you're going to have somebody else do it so you can outsource it. You can pay somebody to do a deliverable for you like your marketing stuff or something else. Like how I do podcasting there's people that just record their podcast. And then they pay somebody else to do all of the processing on it. All of the editing, all of the sound mixing and even the publishing and promoting of it.

I choose to do a bunch of that on my own. I've recently hired someone to help me with part of it. And you can even choose that you can choose to hire someone to do something in its entirety, or you can hire them to do a part of it because your time's valuable. Because I hired someone to do something that frees me up for a few hours out of my week, that now gives me space to do something new in my business, which right now I'm developing some more online courses to include in my memberships.

Once that's done, I can choose to use those hours to either take back that workload that I outsourced or that I could do something else, like take on another one-on-one or a couple more one-on-one.

You might even choose that you want to employ someone to be your own employee. And many businesses do that. Not every business is a solopreneur, some start off as solopreneurs, and then realize that they do want to hire employees. That then adds on another layer into your business skills that you learn, that you need to learn how to be an employer.

What are all of the laws that you have to follow? What are all of the taxes that you have to pay? All of the details? I don't know those details yet, but there are business coaches out there that definitely know all of the details for how to do that. There may even be accountants and tax professionals that could help you with that.

DIY Lovers… Learn it Your Way

If you are deciding that you're going to just learn these things on your own. There's different ways that you could go about it. There's either do it yourself, where you're learning from a book or you're watching some free YouTube videos out there, or you're doing Google searches to learn how to do things.

You might choose a course. There are some online courses that are out there that are self-paced. And what I'm finding is that there's so much to learn that you could easily collect a whole lot of courses, but are you setting aside the time to sit down and actually do them? Finding out ahead of time, how long is that course?

I have some courses that I've purchased that I thought, oh, this is so great, I need to learn this skill. And then once I sit down and I like calculate out how long the online course is, it's 20, 30+ hours to learn one skill. Is there another way that I can learn that skill a whole lot faster?

There might be some workshops that you can take where it's focused. It's not that self-paced where you could take it at any time and just allow it to collect a whole pile of self-paced courses. Instead, you may have to show up this exact day, we're going to learn this exact thing. And someone's telling you, okay, step one, do this. And then you're doing that one step. And then once you're done with it, they say, okay, step two. You're going to go learn this next thing and do it. And by the end of that workshop, you have completed something. You've done a skill at least one time.

So when you think back to when you were an employee somewhere, you had someone helping you with on the job training. They were standing there, they were telling you what to do. They were observing you. They're giving you that feedback. Workshops may be the replacement for that.

That goes into that column of doing it with you. There's workshops where it's, you know, step-by-step but doing it with you could also be a coaching relationship.

Thought Partner Coaches

And there are different ways of having that coaching to develop your skillset.

There's group coaching where there's one person who is coaching multiple people on something at the same time, it might be on one particular skill set, or it might be a variety of things that the person is coming to get that development on. There's also having one-on-one coaching where someone is trying to help develop one skill in you or multiple skills in you. You get to decide what is the right thing for you.

I know that coaching seems like something that was just reserved at one point for sports things. But really if you think about it, when you're an employee, and you're getting that on the job training to do something that was someone coaching you. They may not have an official title of being called a coach, but they're teaching you a technical skill. And then they're trying to develop you to actually be able to do it.

You've had more coaching in your life than what you're aware of.

As you are entering into the unknown of entrepreneurship, you might start to feel a little jaded, like, do I really need all of these coaches? But it really is that on the job training, otherwise, you're trying to learn how to do all of it on your own through books or courses and not having anyone there by your side observing what you're doing, giving you feedback and helping you even think things out, be that thought partner.

Plan, Budget, and Schedule

When I created my learning and development plan, I have a list of all of my different skills. I have been trying to learn a bunch of it on my own, but some of it I'm starting to decide, yup, I do want to outsource that, but I'm also wanting to keep a list.

Now, what are all of those different courses that I've bought so that I make sure that I'm actually doing them? How much did it cost me? Because again, as a solopreneur, I was trying not to spend too much money.

All entrepreneurs have that fear of what if I fail, what if I invest all of this money and my business doesn't work out? That's a real risk. Every entrepreneur takes. And when you look at the statistics for how many businesses make it versus how many were attempted, the statistics are not great.

I really wish that there was a higher success rate for entrepreneurs. And that's why I stepped up into this space because I was helping a large corporation to be operationally excellent in everything that they do. Now that's something that I do for solopreneurs and small businesses.

Everybody deserves to have that extra support.

Creating Your Own Learning and Development Plan

What kind of learning and development plan do you want to have? What are the things that are going to be important for you when you're thinking about your own quality of the services that you're delivering? Is that something that you want to develop? And how much are you willing to invest in that? You're thinking about your time. You're thinking about your effort. You're thinking about the money that you're going to spend. Sometimes spending the money to get your quality up faster might be a better investment than just spending all of your time. And then it takes you forever to get there.

What kind of business skills do you need to learn? And again, is that something that you want to learn on your own? Is some of this stuff that you can outsource so that maybe you're up and running a lot faster? If you've been in business for quite a while, but you find yourself struggling in one particular area? Is that something that you really want to spend more time trying to develop your own skillset in, or is that time where you can have some grace yourself and decide that yeah, you'll actually spend money to pay someone else to do that part for you?

Because the faster that you can get that thing resolved, the faster you'll be able to do all of the other parts of your business and have it all working for you.

And then finally, all of the tech stuff, what's all the tech stuff that you need to learn. Is there stuff that you don't, maybe you're taking on more tech stuff than what you really need? But if there is tech stuff that you need to learn, is that stuff that you want to learn yourself? Is that something that you can outsource? Especially if it's just a one-time thing, have somebody else come in, set up everything for you and then just train you on how to use it. Or is it something that you're really just going to learn from the ground up or try to develop yourself?

How much of your time do you want to invest? When is it a better investment to use money to speed up that process?

So all of these things go into your time to competency as a business owner, you want to actually just have your business working so that you're creating that repeatable income source for yourself. It sucks to go into business and then have every month be a question of whether you're able to keep a roof over your head or not.

Make those good decisions for yourself. What's going to be the fastest way that you can get yourself up and running. Sometimes it might be like the restaurants taking a loan so that you can afford to pay people to do these different things. Or if you think back to my previous episode on how to make the money work, you might want to take on a little side hustle to earn the extra money, to pay someone, to do something in your business.

It's kind of a weird trade-off, but if you really want to be an entrepreneur, these are all of those different things that you need to think about. What is going to be the fastest, easiest way for you to make your business work for you.

If you could use a little bit of help in flushing out what your learning and development plan should be and helping you think about how you would stagger this out, how you would plan for it, then I invite you to reach out to me for a free consultation. I'd be more than happy to share with you, the visuals that I've created for myself and help you to think about what it is that you need for your business, and then be able to move you forward. If you would like to set up some time with me, just head on over to my myfreedomgrove.com, go to the contact me page. And there is a calendar there where you can schedule a free consultation and we could talk about that.

Have a wonderful week. I will talk with you soon. Bye-bye.

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Thank you for listening to My Freedom Grove Podcast. I can't wait to work with you directly. I'll help you to be your authentic self, to have amazing relationships, and to live your purpose. I invite you to check out Unshakable Men and Unshakable Women. The unshakable programs will give you all of the tools, coaching, and the community to help you rise in life, relationships, and business. To learn more, go to my MyFreedomGrove.com/workwithme. I can't wait to see you there.