An excerpt from my podcast with social media expert Melanie Brandt. Listen to the full episode here.
Alex: Do you grow your team with growth of the business in mind or with your own time freedom in mind?
Melanie: I grew my business within the thoughts that I'm actually growing my family. So everybody on my team are incredibly important to me like out of business which is really, really cool because we are all invested in the end result of the company's growth. Which I think, you know, and we've heard it before that if you don't have a, a mission that your team's working towards, then everybody kinda just goes on, here's your documents, here's your ....'here's whatever you need.'
...And there's no love put into it. Whereas the people that I've brought into my company I've actually that have been in my space for many, many years and, you know, they, they felt honoured to be on my team. So I think that that's really, really cool and, you know, I wanted to create, I didn't want to create jobs. I never wanted a job.
You know, this is why I started what I started. I wanted to be able to have that flexibility. And I wanted to be able to create positions for people that allowed them to work from home. So, you know, I I have a heap of moms on my team that raising little babies or cooking little babies at the moment and you know, this allows them to keep doing what they're doing and still have an income. And, you know, they're in complete control of how many hours that they take on board which is really, really cool, cause they've just designed their life.
Alex : That's super awesome. And you know, the way that you've said that you're building your business, that's what great business owners do is they think about how many people can I employ? How many people can I help with this business? Not how much money can I make. But my question is how do you get a remote worker working from home, believing in your mission as a company?
Melanie :
So I think, like I said, you know, it was really important for me to find people that were Australia based. That was very, very big for me. Because I needed the understanding of the company. I needed people to know my story. And this is why when I recruit, I quite often put it out on my socials because I want to recruit somebody that I know I want to recruit somebody that you know, has watched my journey over the last few years.
So I think that's how I've done it, you know, I've just got people who are, you know, honored to be a part of what we're creating because they S they see themselves as, you know, a friend to me, you know, there's somebody that holds value in my life. And, you know, by holding that value, they don't want to let down, so they play at a higher level.
You know, they know what this means to me because they've watched me create it and not give up on it for, for almost seven years now. So, yeah, I think I had to, for me, I personally had to find people that wanted to be on this journey. And I had to find people that understood that, you know, if you stick with me in this growth mode, while things are messy, it's a beautiful mess at the moment it's organised chaos. You know, if you can stick by me through these times where, you know, things are messy and crazy, but so beautiful you're going to be very well rewarded, and you're going to be able to pick your wage and pick your business and pick when you work. And I'm quite happy to support him on that. Quite often I say to them, you know, I'll pay you eight hours online, which is nothing like eight hours in in the real world. And you know, if you only worked four of those and you get the job done, then perfect, this whole four hours paid off and I don't care.
You know, so I think for me, I'm very, very, very understanding in the rewards that you get when you're in this team as well.