The Super Simple Way I Created My Dream Team

I knew I needed a team to reach my goals, but I wasn’t sure how to get that dream team locked down. As I struggled to decide what to do next, I happened to attend the perfect talk about building a dream team by Joy Cho from Oh Joy! at Alt Summit.

My goal is to create a passive income. Currently, I make most of my money when I am sitting in front of my computer doing client work. There’s nothing wrong with this, I love it and I want to continue working with clients. ...but I would also like to continue earning money when I’m sleeping or on vacation. Obviously, right?

To gain multiple sources of income, I would need to expand my operations and I needed the help of a dream team.

Dream Team: Freelancers vs Employees

If you’re a freelancer or small business owner, you probably already know the options: you can hire employees or contract out the work. 

For some reason, it feels more official to hire an employee, but the responsibility is huge and I was wrestling if I really wanted to take that on.

To be totally honest, I love working with freelancers (maybe because I am one too) so they already had a leg up. But I was seriously questioning if it would be worth it to hire a generalist full-time.

Basically, I was totally primed to hear from someone else’s experience when Joy Cho stepped in with this: if you can keep a freelancer employed full-time with that one task, then it is only maybe time to hire someone full-time for that one task.

That gave me all the confidence I needed to grow my business with freelancers. There’s no pressure to hire employees and frankly, I like that I’m not 100% responsible for keeping someone employed.

The next step was bringing in the dream team of freelancers.

How I Created My Dream Team of Freelancers

There’s a difference between hiring freelancers and hiring a dream team of freelancers.

Hiring a freelancer is a way to outsource work I can’t or don’t want to do.

The dream team is made up of specialists who add their skill sets to get me closer to my goal.

Here’s how I built my dream team. 

1. I made a list of all the work that needs to be done

After I got home from Alt Summit, I wrote out a list of all the work I was doing, big and small. The small tasks will seriously add up, so don’t forget them. Then I wrote a list of all the work I was already outsourcing and another list of all the work I would need to add if I wanted to reach my goals.

2. Then I grouped tasks into categories and double checked that I really needed them

Looking at all three lists, I grouped everything by category. The assumption here is that a freelancer will be able to do similar tasks.

For example, email marketing was something I knew I was lacking. From creating a strategy, writing out the content, formatting it in MailChimp, building the email list, and hitting send… I needed help with all of it.

Based on this, I knew I could hire an email marketer.

But before I hired anyone for any specific category, I doubled checked that these tasks were truly needed. Was this category a nice-to-have or did it have an ROI? Would paying someone to do this work actually help me create a passive income?

When it came to email marketing, it was a clear-cut ROI.

3.  Finally, I hired freelancers who love doing what I needed them to do

Last, but certainly not least, I found the freelancers who love their categories.

For example, my copywriter (coincidentally the one drafting this blog) absolutely loves to write and has tons of experience writing for the web. I can throw just about any writing job her way and she can turn it around in my voice and brand like none other.

Right now, I work with four freelancers who are on top of it. They’re not just doing the work, but they’re also pushing it to the next level which pushes me to the next level.

I wish I could tell you there is one place to find freelancers – but I found each of mine a different way. One was a professional acquaintance that called me up, I found another through a friend, another through an online forum, and the last one through Instagram.

There’s no secret place to find the best freelancers, so just start looking wherever you can. The real secret is knowing what you are looking for.

I know this sounds so simple, but really, writing everything down on a list made such a huge difference. When I started evaluating people, knowing what boxes they needed to check made it obvious to if they were a good fit for my dream team. 

Rebekah Epstein