How I Am Hiring Talent (Almost) on Autopilot and Why Solopreneurship Is Not for Me

I’m saving myself hours of headache and inbox hell with a few simple automations. Also, I used to think solopreneurship was the ticket to a stress free business, but have found the opposite to be true

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(5 minute read)

This week’s calendar full of interviews and classes

Current monthly revenue: $0

My remote house cleaning business is starting to come together piece by piece.

Still no booked jobs, but this is mainly because I haven’t had any cleaners that have fully onboarded, until now.

It’s hard to complete jobs without any cleaners and I don’t want to do fulfillment myself, that would be the easy way out for what is essentially a staffing business.

I also found myself drowning in my inbox trying to follow up with applicants. I realized I needed to create a system for onboarding cleaners with limited human interaction.

I spent a few hours building a simple hiring system in a crm called Go High Level. I would recommend it to anyone for just about any business since there’s so much that can be done with it (I genuinely think that and have no affiliate link to give you).

This resulted in me getting 17 interviews next week and I didn't have to send a single email manually.

Let me break it down:

Attracting Talent

To attract users, I post to over a dozen Facebook groups. 

I even have a spreadsheet to keep track of all of them because it was getting out of hand. I will automate this in the near future with a Virtual Assistant (VA).

Rudimentary Facebook Groups CRM

I also use Craigslist. I bought a gig post and a job post for a total of $52/month. I have been getting a lot of applicants from here.

I posted on Indeed. I only posted once for free, but I might pay for a boost in the future since it generated a decent amount of applicants too.

Finally, I paid $25 to list a job post on Offer Up thinking my target demographic would be on there but have gotten 0 applicants.

Overall, I think I’m going to double down on Facebook groups, Craigslist, and Indeed.

I am also going to add posts in Spanish speaking Facebook groups since right now I’m only in English speaking groups. I have a hunch my demographic may not speak English as a first language.

Thank you mom and dad for teaching me Spanish.

The Meat of the Automation

On every job post, I add a link to this form:

Once submitted, applicants are automatically filtered based on certain responses. For example, if they respond they are unavailable to commute to Seattle, they are rejected.

The qualified applicants are sent an email with a booking link for an interview automatically:

Once they book a time slot, they are sent an email confirmation and will receive reminders of our meeting 24 and 1 hour before. My hope is that this will prevent no-shows but we will see this week.

Sometime in the future I will also create an automation for onboarding cleaners after the interview. Right now I am doing this manually and have fully onboarded 1 cleaner so far, but it has been a very manual process.

There’s still a lot to be done such as:

• Get EIN (IRS is taking forever to process my submission)

• Get verified on Google (Google also taking forever to process verification)

• Heavy overhaul website copy + SEO

• Add citations (will do this when Google Business Profile is verified)

I also cold called a few apartments this past week and managed to convince a leasing agent to insert my door hangers into their move in packets. Thank you Kyle.

However, I realistically see myself getting my first few jobs via Google Local Service Ads or Yelp ads, since those seem the quickest way of generating business (albeit expensive).

Finally, I have 6 inboxes warming up to use for cold email. I plan on targeting property managers in the Seattle area for cleaning. I figure this is another way to be able and potentially secure commercial clients.

I’m excited to see what this next week’s full interview schedule brings!

Why Solopreneurship Is Not for Me

Solopreneurship is usually thought of as running a business without any partners or employees.

This means no people to manage and complete flexibility in your schedule. 

As someone who prefers to be async and is trying to create a semi passive business, this sounds great.

However, there are several downsides with solopreneurship that I don’t see talked about often:

When You go on Vacation, the Business Halts

I want to build business(es) that works for me, not the other way around.

I also want to take vacations whenever I want, and still make money while not actively working.

This is possible with solopreneurship, but if something goes wrong, or if the business needs attention, you bear all the responsibility, regardless if you’re on vacation.

The obvious answer is to then hire people to help you run your business, but then that wouldn’t be solopreneurship, would it?

You Work on Low Value Tasks

Doing everything yourself as a solopreneur sounds great at first. You have complete control over everything and can shape your business and its outcomes.

However, what I’ve found is that I end up doing repetitive, low value tasks. 

For example, last week I created a well performing Facebook post to promote expiredlistingscout.com that generated ~70 emails of my ICP. These emails were commented on the post itself.

If I wanted to stick to strictly doing everything myself, I would have spent hours monitoring the post and copying each email one by one. 

Instead, I sent this 4 minute loom video to my virtual assistant and he was able to spend a few hours scraping each and every email for a grand total of $8 (he charges me $3/hr).

I know my time is worth more than $3/hr and for that reason, I choose to delegate low value, repetitive tasks to my assistant.

Hiring great people and having trust in them to be able to run aspects of my business is how I’m going to be able to scale and remove myself from the day to day operations.

Solopreneurship seems to be against these beliefs.

I believe I should be focusing on higher value tasks like marketing, strategy, and creating time saving automations.

I’m excited to be able to hire the right people that will allow me to work on the businesses rather than in the business.

Delegating the right tasks to the right people is how I’ll eventually reach 100k/month.