TCC Podcast #264: Stepping into Your CEO Role, Hiring a Team, and Giving a Better Client Experience with Ahfeeyah Thomas

Ahfeeyah C. Thomas is our guest for the 264th episode of The Copywriter Club podcast. Ahfeeyah is a serial entrepreneur who teaches business owners how to grow their teams, so they can scale to 6 and 7 figure businesses. If you’ve been wondering how you can scale your business or become a better leader, tune into the episode. How a resume writer became a successful CEO. How to navigate entrepreneurship with a love for the corporate sector. The better way to write your resume to land the job. Why you need to improve your job descriptions to attract the right candidates. Lessons from Harvard you can use in your own business. How to build team productivity and why you need an organizational chart. The core system Ahfeeyah uses to help her clients scale their businesses. Is it ever too soon to hire? How a virtual assistant or social media manager will help your business. Mistakes business owners are making and how to fix them. The scalable CEO model: How does it work? How we can become better leaders through learning about ourselves and the people we hire. How to know when you’re becoming a bottleneck in your own business. The different types of leadership and why it’s always a good idea to lead with empathy. How to shift your mindset and step into your CEO role. Steps to take to knock the fear of growing a team. Combining a quality client experience with quality deliverables. How to ask for feedback and why you need to take the emotions out of it. Navigating perfectionism and procrastination… How do we get out of the cycle? Do creatives experience the fastest burnout? Debating about hiring your first contractor or want to implement better systems? Grab your headphones or check out the transcription below. The people and stuff we mentioned on the show: Kira’s website Rob’s website The Copywriter Club Facebook Group The Copywriter Underground Ahfeeyah’s website Hiring and Working with a VA with Hillary Weiss The Ins and Outs of Creating a Microagency with Jamie Jensen 21 laws of leadership by John C. Maxwell   Full Transcript: Kira:  Running your own business is hard enough. There are countless tasks you need to carry out. And sometimes it can just feel like way too much. What needs my attention first? Should I hire someone to help? And if so, who should I hire? Well, if you're growing your business, you're not alone. Ahfeeyah C. Thomas joins us to talk about how to hire a team and become a scalable CEO on the 264th episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast. Rob:  Before we dive into our interview with Ahfeeyah, this episode of The Copywriter Club Podcast is sponsored by The Copywriter Accelerator. And if you're listening, you might be thinking, "Well, wait a second, The Accelerator's not even open, why are you even talking about this?" And it's because we're making a few changes to The Accelerator the next time we do open. And if you've been thinking about joining this program, there's never been a better time to join the waitlist. So, you make sure that you get notified when it opens up for new members early next year. And when it comes to those changes, a couple of things that we're doing is going through all of the content. We're not necessarily saying that the old content was bad. We're just saying we're updating it with newer information. We're adding in better frameworks to make it more understandable and improving the blueprints that help you put all of the advice and ideas and strategies into action so that you come out of the other end of The Accelerator with a business that is just ready for rocket ship growth or whatever it is that your goal is for your copywriting business. So, if you want to be on the waitlist that you can hear about those changes and be notified of the new Copywriter Accelerator program or what it becomes, go to thecopywriteraccelerator.com and join the waitlist. Kira:  Let's begin with Ahfeeyah's journey. Ahfeeyah:  The honest question is I feel like it was a combination of just allowing myself to operate within my passion, operate within my purpose and allow the journey to be what it needed to be. So for me, it didn't start with business coaching. I started out actually as a resume writer at the age of 18 years old was my very first business and I was writing resumes for $40. Now, obviously the prices went up since then, but at the time that's what it was. And so naturally the passion behind that was that I wanted to help women and minorities be able to get paid for what they love to do. And so, at the time my vision was, if I can rewrite their resumes, then I would be able to help them to get into positions that paid them more and that they were passionate about. And so that started that way. I gained my coaching certification through the International Coaching Federation, became a career coach and then always found a love between corporate and the business arena. And so I'm found myself working back and forth, being a career coach and then also working in the corporate sector, helping employees improve their professional development and so forth. And so that led to being a career coach, helping people with their professional development, and then there were women that was in the corporate arena that I came across that wanted to become business owners. And so I was helping them to ultimately level up and move from their corporate space to the business space. And that was the birth of becoming a business coach and helping people strategically grow their brands. So yeah, that's the backstory of all of that, and I'm sure we'll dive in a little bit more on the design piece and what came after that. Kira:  Okay. Let's go back to your resume writing experience at the age of 18. So much of that is around positioning and how to position yourself best for the job. What did you learn if you learned anything from that experience that's helped you understand how to brand clients and how to position clients, and how to position yourself and your business? Ahfeeyah:  That's another great question and there's always a lesson. From that, what I was learning even then was that how you position yourself, how you brand yourself matters. Because especially in the dance society that we are in, you only have a short period of time to be able to capture someone's attention, to be able to also tell your story. And so when it was resume writing, it was me helping my clients, my students at the time be able to market themselves, we are our personal brands. So, I was able to help them to market themselves, and now as a brand growth strategist and creative director, I'm able to help companies go from being a business, designers, copywriters, go from being creative and really take their brand to the next level. So the message has carried through that you only have a short period of time to capture your audience and how you brand yourself will determine a lot of times the opportunities that will be lined up for you. Kira:  And I know this is going back a little bit, but do you have any examples of how you did that for your clients with their resumes so they would grab attention instantly and you were just like, "You know what, if I make this change to your resume, you will instantly grab attention"? Ahfeeyah:  Yes, yes. An example would be clients would come to me their resumes, and there was kind of a cookie cutter way that they were told they needed to do their resumes, or they needed to write their resumes. And so what I would do is I would teach them that they needed to take a look at the job description. They needed to figure out what the employer was asking for, and then ultimately customize that resume towards that job description. And it's so funny, because again, we'll talk about this a little bit later. But in my program now, I'm taking all of my experience, even when we talk about professional development and teaching now on the business owner's side of it how they need to write job description so that they can attract the right candidates. So it's full circle. But in that example, once my clients were able to look at the resume, look at the job description and match it up, the employers were a lot more likely to call them because they were finding exactly what they needed within the resume. And that let them know that the person that was applying was a qualified candidate. So simple tweaks, simple changes that we would make would allow them to be more, I guess, visible, be more attracted to employers by making those small changes. Kira:  Can you share the lessons you learned from working in HR at Harvard that would help us or could help us as small business owners today? What we could pull from your work there that we may not think of or just be familiar with in our businesses, but we could benefit from? Ahfeeyah:  A lot that I learned, and I speak about this often is that when we're in corporate, there are so many systems and structures, strategy that is around us that we oftentimes don't notice. So being an HR and overseeing and managing the hiring process, what I found is that we don't carry that again over into our business. So are we writing the job description? In HR, there are a number of steps that that job description goes through before it is approved. And that includes assessing what the needs of the company, what the needs of the department are. And so, we want to be doing the same things within our business in assessing what are my current needs? What are my current pain points in my business to really direct the hiring process? That's one of the things that is a lesson. And as we look at now, moving over into building that team or elevating the team that we do have once we hire them is how our team meetings being conducted. Are they productive? Does your team understand the vision and the mission? When we're in corporate,