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The Affiliate's Guide To Hiring - Structuring A Team (4)

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I’ve written about this topic before, but this will have addons to the initial post that you can find here:

https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...onal-Structure

After reading the post linked above, you will have an idea about how a typical AM business can be structured and work on adjustments for your own team, and also break out skills needed for each unit.

Each unit can be one or more people, and people from one unit can (and usually will) participate in activities from another unit (wearing more than one hat). This is normal. This can also get chaotic. The way to reduce the chaos is to have Standard Operating Procedures, aka SOPs.

These are detailed step by step instructions on how to do certain tasks or procedures. They don’t have to be written, they can also be in video form (think screen-casts for setting up a campaign).

They are meant to coordinate between units as well. The steps someone takes for creating a new campaign takes into account that someone knows about creating landing pages (pops team coordinating with tech).

The SOPs become a guide for any new person in your business. It greatly reduces the time you need to spend training employees on tasks and skills, and it increases the time you can spend taking care of their needs, and your business’ needs.

Hint: Your employees’ needs ARE ALSO your business’ needs. You can’t have a well working business with great company culture thinking otherwise. More on that in a future post.

Example SOP I previously posted on STM for optimization: https://stmforum.com/forum/showthrea...ation-Strategy

Where can you write these SOPs? There are a good number of tools out there, that like boasting about how good they are and how much more productive they make a team. In my experience, the content of the SOPs matters much more than the tool, therefore I recommend keeping it simple and familiar with Google Docs (or similar) and videos saved in a shared folder that is nicely structured based on the topics. You can use Google Drive (I love the integration with all devices and free Docs), Dropbox or whatever you deem best.

To coordinate between tasks and projects that apply these SOPs and more, you should have a shared tool as well. It can be as simple as a shared spreadsheet, Google Keep notes, or more advanced tools like Asana, Trello, Podio. My number one is Asana; it offers enough flexibility while still showing you how it’s meant to be used. In contrast, Podio is extremely flexible but also hard to set up because you need to know your requirements very well. It’s basically an empty canvas.

Of course, you cannot communicate only through delegating tasks, and some real time communication is needed. The king there is Slack. Some alternatives are Skype, HipChat, Facebook Messenger (yes, some people use it for talking to their team!).

Action steps you should take:

• Draft a structure for your team (like here)
• Add names of who is part of each unit (if you are a lone wolf, it’s easy )
• Create an SOP for a common task from part 1.
• Figure out which unit it is assigned to.

You can post it here get feedback from me and other forum members. You can hide any private information like names.

In part 3, we will dig into the local vs remote debate.

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Thank you.

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I have a small team, ive always tried to hire for my weaknesses, basically anything that all i have to do is ads and only ads all day.

Ive realized that the more time i get to spend in marketing/ads, the more money my biz makes. As things grow, there are so many things that can try and pull you away from that

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If the business grows, there will certainly be things pulling you away from either what you like or what you are best at, and sometimes from both.

Your weaknesses are certainly also an important consideration when hiring.

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