Who Should You Hire First? The Real Answer to ‘I’ll Just Do It Myself’

Ever caught yourself saying "It only takes a few minutes, I'll just do it myself"? This seemingly innocent phrase might be the very thing holding your studio back from sustainable growth.

Those "quick" five-minute tasks—responding to DMs, handling sub requests, ordering supplies—aren't so quick when you add them up. They could be stealing hours of your week that could be spent on actual leadership. When you're stuck in this reactive cycle, your business becomes completely dependent on your constant presence and availability. This isn't just unsustainable; it's a recipe for burnout.

In this episode, I'm breaking down:

• How doing everything yourself can stop you from reaching your goals
• The two foundational roles every growing studio needs (and how they are different).
• A quick self-assessment to determine your most pressing hiring need.
• How intentional onboarding sets your team up for real ownership over time
• How strategic hiring lays the foundation for sustainable, long-term growth

You don't have to be the glue holding everything together. True leadership means building a team that runs with you, allowing your business to scale while you reclaim your time, energy, and passion for the vision that started it all.   

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Chapters

• 0:00 The "I'll Just Do It Myself" Trap
• 4:10 The Hidden Costs of DIY Leadership
• 9:10 Two Essential Roles: Operations vs. Marketing
• 16:30 Hiring Quiz: What Role You Need First
• 18:50 Onboarding Timeline for New Hires
• 21:30 Moving from Manager to Leader

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:00

If you ever told yourself it only takes a few minutes, I'll just do it myself. This episode is for you Because those few minutes are actually adding up and they are costing you your growth, your energy and your ability to actually lead. Today, I'm breaking down exactly who to hire for your business and knowing what role you really need and what to delegate now, so you can get out of the weeds and back into the seat of the CEO. Tune in now.

Speaker 2: 0:37

Welcome to the Studio CEO, the only podcast that empowers yoga and Pilates teachers and studio owners to step confidently into their role as CEO. If you are ready to show up with passion, take your business seriously and scale to new heights without burning out, you are in the right place. I'm your host, jackie Murphy, an award-winning certified business coach with over 12 years of experience inside the yoga industry. I have seen firsthand what it takes to build a profitable and scalable business. Join me as we dive into strategies, insights and real-world advice that will help you grow your revenue, build a thriving team and create a business that serves you as much as you serve your students. It's time to embrace your inner CEO and make more money without working more. This is just the beginning.

Speaker 1: 1:50

Hello and welcome back to the Studio CEO Podcast. I am Jackie Murphy and in this podcast we are going to be answering the question who should you hire first in your business? Who should you hire first in your business? This episode was inspired by one of my private client sessions this week and I know that it will be literally very helpful. You can take it and use it in your business if you are in the process of hiring or if you have current hires but you don't feel like you're getting the most from the people that you've hired already. This is going to help you kind of organize and understand what your first two hires could be in your business or how you can restructure your current hires so they are more effective and efficient.

Speaker 1: 2:36

Now, that being said, you may hear it in my voice I am just a little bit congested. We have had just so much pollen down here in Charleston, south Carolina, this spring and I usually am not affected at all, but this year it's hit me kind of hard. So if you hear that in my voice, I feel fine, but I just sound a little bit funny today. But I wanted to make sure I got this information to you, all right. So let's talk about hiring, and before we talk about what to do with hiring, we have to talk about the resistance that I see very often when it comes to hiring. And this is something that actually one of my clients just recently said to me, because we were in a conversation of I think I need to hire my first virtual assistant, my first VA. What would they even do for me? And I was giving her some examples of tasks that a VA could do, such as like scheduling emails in her email software, and she was like Jackie, that doesn't take that long, I can just do it myself. And I said, yes, that is the thought that holds all of us back from hiring, and when we hold ourselves back from hiring, we're actually holding ourselves back from our ability to grow and scale. So if you have big revenue goals and maybe you want to double, triple, 10x your business this year, one of the first things that you're going to have to do is set up your team in order to create your bandwidth to be able to scale that much and the business's ability to scale that much.

Speaker 1: 4:07

But let's talk about why this lie is so believable. Right, it's just faster if I do it myself and in the short term. It's true, right, it's not even a lie. It's true. It is faster sometimes for you to just quickly update the schedule or respond to your DMs, or schedule the email, fix the typo in the email or grab and order supplies from Target for your studio, whatever it may be, it's those tasks that we're like. It's just faster if I do it myself, but this is also why you're stuck in a reactive cycle where your business depends entirely on your availability. So let's think about it in terms of like, what is this actually total up to?

Speaker 1: 4:51

Let's say you have three sub requests that you have to talk to people, communicate who can take over and then change the teacher in MBO, and each takes five minutes. Each right, that's 15 minutes of your time. Or you log into social media today and you see six DMs from people who want to sign up for your next workshop or event and you're responding to them and going back and forth, and that takes 10 minutes of your time. Maybe you decide to order supplies for your studio. Things are already on automatic order and that takes 20 minutes of you shopping around on Amazon or Costco. However, you order your supplies and then you have one team text thread. This is something I really really don't recommend. You have a giant text thread with all your teachers and it blows up for some reason and they're having a conversation, and so you're going back and you're reading the messages and you're engaging and you're commenting and being in that team text thread. That's 15 minutes. And then you're that's 15 minutes and then you're doing posting on social, following other people for intro offers and you're easily spending 10 plus hours a week on things that someone else could be doing and probably honestly do better with the right training and structure.

Speaker 1: 5:59

So you have to really ask yourself the, the one-off thing that I do quickly, how fast does that actually add up and how many of those things am I doing right? So you know, it doesn't take long for you to schedule an email, but it will take a long time for you to schedule 30 emails. And no, it doesn't take long for you to respond to your DMs, but if you're doing it every day, that will take a big chunk of your time. Respond to your DMs, but if you're doing it every day, that will take a big chunk of your time. So then you have to really ask yourself is my resistance to hiring? Is it really that I'm faster or is it really that I'm afraid of releasing control? Because if it's the fear that if you don't do it, it won't be done the way that you want right, or it'll just take too long, or you'll just end up cleaning up a mess and I get it. I've been there. There are hires that that's a situation you can end up in, but there's also a way to avoid that.

Speaker 1: 6:51

What I want you to hear is this it's not sustainable for you to have big goals to scale your business and also expect yourself to be the one doing all of the things in your business. It's not how you build a business that grows sustainably. This is the way that you'll build a business that you'll burn out. You'll feel tired, you'll feel exhausted. At the end of the day, you'll be like, oh my gosh, let me just do this one thing real quick, and that adds up for 365 days. You realize you haven't taken a day off, you realize you're starting to get resentful over your studio and then a lot of times I've seen it happen where then you Right, that's a dramatic kind of downfall of just saying, like it doesn't take that long, I'll just do it myself. But what we really want to understand is like the problem is not time, it's just a lack of ownership.

Speaker 1: 7:43

When clients come to me overwhelmed, I rarely start with let's take things off your plate, because this isn't about task management. It's usually about role clarity and ownership. Your business doesn't need random help. It needs specific support in the areas that are slowing you down and keeping you stuck in survival mode. In either case, the answer is not you doing more, it's hiring someone who can fully own a lane of your business not help with everything, not float in and out of tasks, but own a function of the business that gives you your time, energy and clarity back. So rather than saying, okay, let's take some things off your plate, can we hire a social media intern, thinking like let's take that off our plate? What instead we would do is look at a in-depth time audit of everything that you are doing and separate what you are spending your time doing into different roles so that you can easily see okay, the role that I'm holding ownership of the most is the CMO marketing role, and that entire role is something that I want to give up, not just a task within that role, which would be a social media, intern or manager.

Speaker 1: 9:03

Typically, when you hire in these tiny little areas and you're thinking that's going to give you the support that you want, what actually happens is those people are unclear about what their end result should be. They are just doing a little bit. They're not fully invested, they're not fully owning it from start to finish. They're almost waiting for you to hold their hand through completing tasks that were on your plate. But now the task on your plate is managing all of these different people. So I want to give you two examples of foundational roles that I think you can consider hiring in every single business in order to grow sustainably.

Speaker 1: 9:42

And the first role is what we're going to call an operations manager, and this, for the longest time, has always been referred to as the studio manager, which isn't wrong or bad, but I like the term operations manager a little bit better, because it's more clear about what their role is, what their lane is. The operations manager is going to be your stability builder. They are going to keep the machine of your business running, so that you are not the one holding it all together. You would hire this role when you feel constantly interrupted by sub requests. Supply issue teacher wants to pop in and check in with you. The studio is not consistently clean. Or maybe you're the only one who knows systems and you're exhausted from being the glue and saying, okay, that's done, now do this, and you're moving the business forward all of the time. Or maybe you're the one saying yes and answering student questions and you're the one handling mentally, like so many different to-do lists and you're also showing up to teach class.

Speaker 1: 10:43

So the operations manager would own scheduling and sub coverage if you have that, any sort of teacher communication supplies, cleanliness vendors, any checklist or studio systems that need to be created, basic tech If you've got an iPad, if you're recording videos, music, sound, et cetera. They would handle and schedule team meetings and make sure the morale of the team is high. They also can handle customer service and incident reports so that you aren't the one who's canceling the membership or freezing the membership or even seeing that email or knowing what's happened in your customer service realm until they bring it to you. So I just want you to think about bringing on even just a part-time operations manager to just handle all scheduling Meaning, like if you have a teacher change and that needs to be put into MBO. This person would do that? They would handle all subs and all communications, and what would be taken off your plate if that's something you hired out? You could remove yourself of the sub text threads and you could reclaim this mental and emotional space just from that one person taking that task alone.

Speaker 1: 11:58

So the second role that I want you to consider hiring is what I call a business manager, but you could also call a marketing and sales manager. This is your growth generator and this is the person that is going to make sure the studio is being seen, leads are being nurtured and your offer is talked about consistently. You would hire this role. One, when you already know how to convert people and you could train someone else to do it. Two, when you have enough leads but you don't have time enough to do conversions or follow-ups. Your social media is solid. You have a brand identity, you know what to say on social media, but you just don't have the bandwidth to show up there consistently. Or you have a really, really strong offer, like a membership, but most of the people coming into your studio don't know that it exists and they aren't reminded of it enough to actually buy. So this marketing and sales manager, or business manager is really someone who would own your brand, voice, your content creation, email marketing, follow-ups, intro offer, nurture conversations, conversions, promotions, campaigns, tracking metrics like growth, retention, conversion, churn and testimonials and social proof.

Speaker 1: 13:14

Now, if you are looking to hire this person who is going to be more of a business manager role, it is actually someone who has different skills than the operations manager and a lot of the times we want to combine those two roles and you might, at first, in your business, combine those two roles because of budget. But eventually you want to combine those two roles and you might, at first, in your business, combine those two roles because of budget. But eventually you want to find the person who's really good at operations and really good at systems and organization and communication and people, and then find the person who's really really strong in marketing and sales and content creation and copywriting, and sometimes those people are going to be two different roles, two different skill sets. Essentially, now, when you are hiring this kind of person, a business manager, you might see a much clearer, quicker return on your investment in terms of, let's say, you hire someone just to focus on follow-ups and talk to all the new students that have come into your business, your conversion rate can jump pretty quickly having someone own that task, and so you'll see a return on your investment in your revenue fast. The operations manager will also bring you a return on your investment, meaning they're going to help keep your team happy, help keep retention high, they're going to cut costs, make sure that your spending is in budget, and that also is going to help you have a business that people want to return to and be at again and again and again. You're going to save costs because if you're not having to constantly hire teachers, that's going to serve you in the long run.

Speaker 1: 14:50

But also, I once had this was back in. This was like in college, I don't know I once had a manager tell me like your business is only as organized as your back room and the front of your business, meaning what clients see is a reflection of what's happening on the back end of your business. So if your business starts to be a mess operationally, it is really only a matter of time until your clients start to speak up and comment on it, and so that operations role can help you clean up the back end and really have a really solid client experience. Now you can't be in every single role right. So if you were hiring a coach or joining the studio, would you trust one where the owner was running the front desk teaching every class? Updating the owner was running the front desk teaching every class, updating the email list and fixing the broken mic. That is what some of us are requiring ourselves to do and that isn't the person that we want to necessarily turn to, because that level of just overwhelm and what could be chaos isn't inspiring. But a true leader is always inspiring and when you scale your business, it feels like everyone in there is being led and they're not just being. You know, things are being held together with duct tape. We're flying by the seat of our pants.

Speaker 1: 16:08

So I want you to use this quick quiz right now to decide like what do you need to hire first? First question is are you spending more than five hours a week on client issues, teacher communication or sub coverage? Yes or no? Do you feel like you're the only one who knows how to run everything, or knows how everything runs? Yes or no? Are your classes mostly full but you're exhausted? Yes or no? Do you have leads but low conversions? Yes or no? Is your social media inconsistent or reactive? Yes or no. If you said yes to all of them, let me help you. That's okay, we can fix it. If you said yes to the first three, then an operations manager is probably what you're looking for.

Speaker 1: 16:54

If you said yes to the first three, then an operations manager is probably what you're looking for. If you said yes to four and five, then really you want to start to think about hiring a marketing and sales manager. But I don't want you to overthink this. What I actually want you to think about is what am I ready to hire? Right now, most often, I really really strongly recommend that you keep your marketing and your sales as your role longer than you keep the operational side of things your role, because, as the CEO of your business, the leader of your business, it is your job to really create your brand voice to create your brand, show up on social media, be the face of your business, learn how to talk to your people, and no one is going to know it better than you or care about it the way that you do. So. If I were to just make a blanket recommendation which is hard to do, but we're on a podcast and I want to help you I probably would say your operations role is something that you can find support for and hire for more easily, rather than a really solid business manager who understands your brand voice and how to talk to people. That is something that needs to be taught over time, in my opinion. So when you make the right hire, you'll start to find that you can reclaim hours where you can spend time thinking about vision instead of triage. Your team is going to feel more supported and aligned, things are going to feel organized and no one's going to be wondering what do I do and when do I do it. Your revenue will be able to grow without requiring your constant input and you're going to start leading instead of just managing. So I want you to think about now when it comes to hiring. You don't hire and say okay, you're in, you take over everything. One of the things we do inside of the Grow Mastermind is help you create a growth plan and an onboarding plan for all of your hires.

Speaker 1: 18:47

So let's say you hire an operations manager Month one. They may just be learning the systems. They might be learning. You know you might use Walla or Mariana Tech or whatever you use. They're going to be shattering you. They're going to be taking over taking care of the schedule. Month two, then they're going to start to step more into day-to-day operations like cleanliness managing if you have a team of people who cleans, managing your teacher needs checking in with your teachers ordering. Month three, they might then start to lead team meetings, really track more KPIs and look at where can I improve the systems that are already there. So it's going to be a slower process in any role and that's okay. Let's say you hire a business manager month one they're going to just do a marketing audit. They're going to look at your brand voice, understand what you've been putting out there and they're going to start to build a calendar of what they could do. Month two, they're going to really focus on running an intro offer campaign and testing that and improving conversions. Month three, then, they're going to really focus on launching a specific campaign, collect testimonials and own follow-up completely.

Speaker 1: 19:55

So hiring isn't about instant relief Sometimes we think it is. It's about intentional onboarding. So you're not training forever, but you are setting them up to lead their lane of the business that they fully own. Now let me just say this when I work with my clients privately, a lot of the times what we are doing is crafting their job descriptions and then creating their organizational chart, and that happens Sometimes. It takes months for us to get that organized and figured out. Sometimes it's faster, but it never is just like in one session. We know exactly what the job description is, we move forward, we maybe figure out the outline, we go back and forth on it, we tweak it, we edit it, we present it to the person. We bring them on. We then edit and tweak the onboarding.

Speaker 1: 20:41

This is a process just like anything else, and so I want to tell you that you're not weak for wanting support, like you're wise for thinking I need support in order to grow. I just don't want you to think that it's going to be a quick fix. Really, I'm not sure anything in business is a quick fix. But a slower solution is to keep telling yourself it's just faster if I do it myself, it's going to keep you in that cycle of hustle, burnout and leadership avoidance. So you were never meant to be the one holding it all together. You were meant to lead, and building a team that can run with you is really what makes leadership sustainable.

Speaker 1: 21:21

So if this conversation has been really inspiring for you and you're ready to step into your new season as the studio CEO, then I really want to invite you and tell you about the Grow Mastermind. This is the type of conversation and content that is within the Grow Mastermind, you'll get structure and clarity to know how to lead a team of people and lead your business without micromanaging or over-functioning. Right now we are not open for enrollment, but we will be opening later this year. If you are interested in the Grow Mastermind, you can always send me a message and ask me about it. In the meantime, I want to just empower you to surround yourself with the support that you need in order to grow your business. I'll talk to you all in the next episode.