How many of your clients have stuck with you for seven years?
Real talk: most of y’all can’t name one. And if you’ve ever hired help for your own business, you know how this usually goes. You hire someone, spend three months training them, and then they leave to go build their own thing. Womp womp.
So if you’re figuring out how to make your first hire (and how to make it one that actually sticks around), this one’s for you. I sat down with Janessa, the person who has run Brandi Mowles LLC behind the scenes for seven years, and we answered the questions our Strategist Society members submitted at our live event.
How I Made My First Hire (And the 2 Questions That Found Her)
I started my business when my daughter Rylee was five months old. She’s eight now, so I’ve been doing the dang thing for eight years.
Not even a year in (about nine months), I made my first hire. And it wasn’t for anything fancy. I hired someone to transcribe my YouTube videos because I was convinced I was going to be a YouTube star. This was also before AI, at least AI as we know it today.
I posted the job in The Virtual Savvy and interviewed four or five people by phone at my parents’ house, because Rylee was always crying and I needed someone to hand her to. I was literally standing in front of my parents’ bed doing interviews.
And I was getting so discouraged, y’all. Because I ask two very specific questions, and I still ask them today.
The 2 Interview Questions I Ask Every Hire
- “Why do you want to work with me?”
- “Where do you see your business a year from now?”
This is some of the best hiring advice you will ever get, so listen up.
If they say “I want to learn from you,” you do not hire them. You are not paying people to learn from you. And a bunch of the people I interviewed wanted exactly that.
The second red flag? They told me they wanted $10K, $20K, $30K months. Which is great for them. But I knew I’d be hiring someone so that they could leave me. I wanted someone who was going to stick around.
What Janessa Said That Got Her Hired
When I asked Janessa why she wanted the role, she said she just wanted to be home with her newborn baby and make a little grocery money to help offset what her husband brought home. And she said, “I want to be behind the scenes.”
I remember thinking, oh my gosh, this is my person.
It didn’t hurt that she’s an Army veteran (disciplined, y’all). Today Janessa is a wife, a mom of three, and the backbone of this company. She’s in the inbox, she runs payments and retention, she sends our emails without broken links, and she knows where the commas go (because that is not my strong suit).
So ask yourself: are your interview questions designed to find someone who stays, or someone who’s using you as a stepping stone?
From Transcribing YouTube to Running the Launch: How Your First Hire Becomes Your Right Hand
Janessa came in that March. In May we launched the beta of the Serve Scale Soar membership, and in July we did the big launch. I stopped doing YouTube, and suddenly we had a whole new admin monster: failed payments, members who wanted to cancel, people who needed to update their card.
The pivotal moment was when I handed her my Stripe account. That’s when everything changed, because up until then I was holding on to so much control. From there, her role just kept growing.
When she started, I was probably making around $20,000 a month. Since then, she has seen it all: million-dollar years, $300,000 months, and $10,000 months, plus everything in between.
And y’all always ask what her title is. We’ve never had one. She’s my right-hand woman. That is the role, which means stepping into a whole lot of different roles in one seat.
The Business Lesson She Learned From the Inside
I asked Janessa what she’s learned watching our business evolve through one-on-one services, memberships, courses, group programs, and low-ticket offers. Her answer? Consistency. Even in the hard months, we keep doing what we do. We keep serving, and eventually we find our way back.
And she’s right. The years we didn’t get the results we wanted were the years I wasn’t consistent. Our best building years were the years I was consistent with my marketing and my promotions, and I wasn’t floundering.
We see this with our students too. The most consistent people don’t always have the fastest growth, but they have the most growth, and the most sustained growth. If you’re in the early stages and you need a consistent client-getting system to follow, that’s exactly what we build inside Conversions for Clients.
What Janessa Owns Now (That I Don’t Touch)
This did not happen overnight. Here’s what I fully hand off to her today:
- Payments and retention, including renewals
- The inbox (unless she has a question for me)
- Email marketing, including deciding which emails go out during a launch
- Launch setup. July was the first launch she fully set up herself, and this October I was pretty hands-off. We had a great launch.
- Cards and gifts you get in the mail
- Software, subscriptions, and address updates (five states in seven years, some repeated, so that’s a lot of address updates)
- Getting the weekly email and the blog post up so you actually receive them
When y’all message me saying “Brandi, I’m so sorry my payment was late,” I genuinely had no idea. I want to show up and serve, not chase money. I still know our numbers, so my head’s not in the sand. But that’s hers. Not mine.
Should You Pay Your First Hire Hourly? (Here’s What We Do)
One of the most-asked questions was whether Janessa is hourly and how much she works.
She is not hourly. She has never worked hourly for me. I teach y’all not to work hourly, so there’s no way I could turn around and pay someone hourly. We had that conversation the day she started.
Her hours range from about 18 a week up to 29 or 30 during a launch. Q4 and Q1 are our busiest seasons. We do keep a pulse on her hours over the years, because we never want the pay and the workload to get mismatched.
Why Predictability Makes Hiring Easier
Here’s something that makes our relationship work: we do the same thing, rinse and repeat, every single year. No surprises.
- September: live event
- October: a launch (seven years running)
- November: prepping for promotions, not promoting
- December: a promo (this year it’s our virtual conference and our Champagne Year workshop), wrapping up the year, then a good break
- January: prepping for the next launch
- End of January and February: launch
- The rest of the year: pretty low-key until August
We also run on theme days, which we teach inside Conversions for Clients. Every Monday I get Janessa the Wednesday email. The podcast goes out every Tuesday. I have two coaching calls every Thursday, so she knows Friday is for getting the replays up. When your business is predictable, the theme days build themselves.
And no, I don’t tell anyone to only do three things a day. People like to twist my words on that one. On your strategic day, you get your top three priorities done first, so if a kid gets sick (and Janessa has three of them), the important stuff is already handled.
Contractor vs. W-2 (Yes, She Used to Be an Employee)
Janessa was actually a W-2 employee for a year. That was the year after I hit my first million, when people told me I had to run the business differently now. I broke a lot of the business that year doing stuff a coach told me to do, then undoing it. We would’ve been better off keeping everything the same.
She’s been a contractor again for a long time, and my attorney and accountant have both reviewed our setup. I don’t tell her who she can work with or how to do her job. Having employees is expensive. As a contractor, I can just pay Janessa more.
How to Build a Working Relationship That Lasts 7 Years
So how have we made this work for seven years? (Fun fact: we didn’t meet in person until last year at our live event, after six years of working together.)
1. Set Clear Expectations From Day One
Janessa said it best: I knew exactly what I wanted when she came in. I had SOPs. I had systems. I never asked her to go figure something out. It was always “this is the way I want it done.”
2. Do It Yourself First, Then Hand It Off
I’m always going to do something first and then outsource it. You’re not coming in to do your own thing. You’re coming in to do it the way I want it, because I’ve already done the lift. I didn’t just hand her a launch and say “okay, you do it.” She was handed one individual thing at a time, for seven years, until she was ready to run the launch. Now I show up, and I’m just the face.
3. Give Grace on Both Sides
We’ve both had babies during this time. When Janessa was pregnant, she thought she should leave because she wouldn’t be available. I said, “No, don’t leave me. Take a maternity leave. I’ll figure it out.” After I had Bodhi, we went from a million to around $350K, and I wasn’t sure I could keep the business going. We always found a way to make it work.
4. Make the Invisible Work Visible
For a while I thought Janessa wasn’t doing much. She was doing a ton. I just couldn’t see it. So we started end-of-day Slack check-ins, and holy bananas, she does a lot.
5. Check In on the Role (Once or Twice a Year)
I ask her straight up: “How are you feeling about the role? Are you happy? Is there anything you don’t want to do?” Not liking something doesn’t automatically mean it goes away, but we can talk about whether there’s a way to automate it.
6. Be Direct, and Don’t Take Direct Personally
I don’t sugarcoat: “Hey, this needs to be done differently next time.” It’s never “you’re in trouble.” Janessa spent almost ten years on construction sites and then in the military, so direct doesn’t rattle her. She learns and moves on.
We don’t run businesses on emotions, y’all. I see so many students let someone’s directness turn into “she hates me” in their head. That’s not it. It’s business.
What Janessa Wants You to Know Before Your First Hire
Her #1 Hiring Tip
Know exactly what you want to take off your plate before you hire. We’ve done it ourselves: we thought we knew what we wanted to hire for, and it turned out we didn’t. Don’t expect someone to take over a role you haven’t figured out yourself.
People hire because they want more time back, but they haven’t put in the time up front. That’s when hiring fails. The one exception in our business is McKenzie, our designer, who just gets me without me describing anything. But that’s a unicorn. Don’t plan your hiring around a unicorn.
Pay Your Invoices on Time
When I asked what would make her life easier, she didn’t hesitate: update your cards. Failed payments are still handled manually on our end. And here’s my real talk: if you’re constantly having failed payments, you’re probably attracting clients with failed payments too. Pay yours on time and watch your clients do the same.
Her Favorite Tools
Janessa can’t live without Notion (also her least favorite for a while), but her favorite is Scribe, the SOP tool I completely forgot we pay for. When she takes her week off every spring, I follow her Scribes step by step and don’t feel lost. And HighLevel (FG Funnels) is like electricity: you never think about it, but it runs everything.
Here’s how we actually work: Notion manages me, and Janessa manages Notion. If it’s in my Notion, I’ll do it. If my Notion is empty, I think I’m done for the day.
The Truth About Dependence
I’m way more dependent on Janessa than she is on me. She could find another Brandi anywhere. We have SOPs, but if she left, balls would definitely get dropped.
So here’s the lesson for you as a business owner: never get to a point where you don’t understand how your own business runs. I can’t navigate Stripe like she can, but I know how our payment system works in Airtable because I helped set it up. I could take it over if I had to. It would just suck.
(Also, that realization is exactly why she just got a pay raise.)
If you’re building a team so you can scale past $10K months without working more hours, that’s the kind of strategist-level thinking we work through every day inside Strategist Society.
The Real Secret to a First Hire Who Stays
It’s literally like a marriage. You have to get through the rough spots, because it’s not always going to be great, and you have to communicate. We’ve both resented each other at different stages, and usually neither of us was wrong. The communication was just failing. And we always came back around to “how can we communicate this better?”
I’ve never hidden numbers from Janessa. She’s seen the good, the bad, and everything in between. I truly believe you start people from the mail room and work them up. And most people aren’t willing to put in the work we’ve put in to make this last seven years.
Janessa said she’s most grateful I saw something in her she didn’t see in herself. She didn’t finish college and came from construction with zero online business background.
And me? I’m most grateful she’s still here. I have big ideas and high standards. I don’t mind mistakes; I mind the same mistake made twice. Janessa is someone of the highest integrity, and our students tell me all the time, “Janessa is the best.” She is.
Oh, and our final piece of hiring advice from the rapid-fire? Go find someone who is your complete opposite. She doesn’t even like Mexican food, y’all. And it works.
So here’s your homework. Before you post that job, sit down and write out exactly what “done” looks like for the first task you want off your plate. Do it yourself first. Then hire for the person who wants to stay, not the person who wants to learn from you and leave.
The right hire won’t just give you time back. She’ll give you a business that runs.
Want to come tell me what landed? Find me on Instagram @brandimowles. And if you’re inside our community or one of our programs, go tell Janessa thank you (and update your card while you’re at it).
This post is based on an episode of the Serve Scale Soar podcast, where I help service providers build profitable, scalable businesses without the hustle. Listen to the full episode with Janessa here https://brandimowles.com/303 and catch a new episode every Tuesday. Until next week, y’all: go out, serve your clients, scale your business, and soar into the success you deserve.
** This post may contain affiliate links, which means I may receive a small commission at no additional cost to you if you use one of the links to purchase. This helps keep the podcast going and I only share products I have used, tested, and love.”
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Meet Brandi
Brandi Mowles is the host of the Serve Scale Soar® podcast which is a podcast dedicated to helping service-based entrepreneurs scale their online business to five-figure months so they can soar into six-figure years. Brandi is a wife, mom and in less than one year, created a six-figure business. Now she is spilling all her secrets so you can too.
