BUILD A LOYAL AND FLEXIBLE TEAM
If you want to grow your Impact Project, you will need to grow your team. Working with freelancers or outsourcing is a flexible way to start. But if you want people to stick around, you will need to create an inspiring work environment. People crave meaningful work where they have the space to contribute, can be creative and take pride in their work. Here are some things you can keep in mind when building a flexible and loyal team of experts that will grow with you every step of the way.
Align values and expectations
If you have the intention to build a sustainable working relationship, you better start by connecting. This means you are truly interested in getting to know the other person. Not only skills and talents but also mindset and attitude, drive and needs. Whether you want to work with freelancers, outsourced team or employees, you’ll always have to align values and expectations. When it comes to freelancers they might have specific needs. Maybe they value variety and enjoy supporting different projects at the same time. Maybe they enjoy working with different people because they can learn a lot that way. Maybe they find it important to manage their own agendas. Maybe they dream of spending a year living abroad with their family and working remotely. Maybe this is a way for them to earn more net. Whatever the reason, this way of working probably suits their values and lifestyle. However, I often see people on LinkedIn who announce their start as freelance consultants in high spirits, soon realize that it is not what they expected and then start looking for a job again. If you have concrete plans to hire these profiles permanently in the near future, it can be a good way to start a collaboration. If you do not have the intention to hire, you might be better of with outsourcing or freelancers who wouldn’t want it any other way. So always have an open in-depth conversation to understand their values, needs and expectations both in the short and in the long run. Make sure these expectations align with the needs of your organization as well as your vision on how you want to work together, now and in the future.
Have clear pricing agreements
There are several ways you can determine prices. The most common pricing arrangements are or based on hours or results or a mix of both. The nature of the work is the determining factor here. If you want somebody to be available and work for specific timeslots, you can make an agreement based on price per hour. For instance, when you are looking for a person who needs to be in your office at the reception desk, welcome visitors and answer the phone from 8 am to 12 am, on Tuesdays and Thursdays. This is a pretty straightforward assignment and a price per week can be negotiated. Another way of calculating fees is based on delivery of a specific well-defined outcome. This is absolutely my favorite when working with professionals. Especially when people work partly home based or remotely, it is better to link the fee to the outcome. There are a lot of services for which you can agree a fixed price such as designing your website, writing a weekly blog article, produce videos for your socials or creating a flipbook. However, I notice that many freelancers are not used to working this way and tend to underestimate the workload it might take to do the job. Also, they might give you their best price as they want to get the assignment. This can lead to two ultimate scenarios. The first scenario, respecting the price that was agreed upon but resulting in the freelancer feeling frustrated and underpaid. The second scenario, making an invoice with higher fee then was agreed upon, resulting in an unhappy client. Either way this leads to friction and frustration and has a negative impact on the working relationship. When I negotiate outcome-based pricing with freelancers, I always ask to give me the price for worst case scenario. Together we go through the process and the steps that need to be made, estimating a duration for all steps in the workflow, clarifying who is doing what exactly. So, we agree on price and process. If things go smoother then outlined, I welcome freelancers to give a discount. The more we work together the smoother it should go, and the more discount can be given. I find this a pleasant way to create a healthy basis for a long-term collaboration. Making agreements this way also allows you to set clear pricing for your services to your buyers. Many organizations like to give discounts to onboard new clients. This makes no sense to me. The first collaboration is the one that takes a lot of start-up effort. You need to get to know each other, streamline the communication, create a system, test the workload, and then optimize the workflow. Therefor I prefer to make correct prices to new clients, that is a price that allows us to overdeliver and create quality work. While at the same time making the profit we need to keep growing and keep helping more Impact Projects. Once we are working together for a longer time and workflows have been optimized, then we can give discounts to our loyal clients. Thus, we build a sustainable relationship on trust and quality both with the customer and with the team.
Make space for the team
As your Impact Project grows you will have to delegate more and more. That is often a learning process for the Impact Entrepreneur. You must let go, stop micro-managing, and make space for the professional to bring in his creativity. If you want to control it all, you will slow things down as you will become the bottleneck in your organization. As an illustration, this week in a mentoring session an Impact Entrepreneur realized that 6 months ago she only wanted a freelancer to execute her ideas. There was no space for the input of the freelancer. While today she can see and appreciate the creativity and the added value of working with professionals. Thus, growing her project to the next level, in a way she herself would never have thought of. So create space. You might want to start with an all-round assistant. But as you grow you will soon notice you need different specialized professionals. There is administration, bookkeeping, product development, sales, IT, press management, marketing, workflow optimization, media production, automation … Even if you think you can do it better, and for some things you will probably be right, it is still impossible to do it all yourself. At a certain moment you won’t even have the time to follow-up on every freelancer in person. You will need team managers and project managers to do that for you. Building a team is a skill. Mind you a team is not the same as a group of individual professionals. A team is in tune and connected. It is a collective of professionals who lift each other up and work together smoothly, efficiently, and pleasantly. This takes mentoring, training, and time. But once a team is ready to become self-directed, that’s the greatest thing. I feel really blessed with the teams that surround me. I can confidently leave everything to the team managers. This not only creates opportunities for the entire team to grow. This also gives me the space to start new Impact Projects and build new teams again. Thus the circle of the QP Quest is made complete again and another cycle can begin.
Build a loyal team with the QP Quest
The QP Quest is not only an approach that grows your Impact Project in a sustainable way. It is also an approach that supports each team member to learn and grow, both professionally and personally. Therefore, everyone we work closely with is also invited to participate in the QP Quest mentoring program. This includes all assistants, managers and professionals involved in our Impact Projects. In this way, we create a thriving work environment where people can create, connect and care. So we create a loyal and flexible team of entrepreneurs and professionals that love working with us.
Would you like to experience what it’s like to work with dedicated assistants, managers and teams? Check out the flipbook to discover flexible outsourcing solutions that can also help you professionalize and grow your Impact Project.
