280: Three Contractors, Five Hours a Week, One Business I'm Selling
I spend about five hours a week on HobbyScool. Three contractors run the rest of it, and the last event went out the door without me touching a single funnel.
In this episode Kate Kordsmeier asks how that actually works. Who is on the team, what they do, how I manage people in a different time zone, and the two things I still refuse to hand off. It took years to get here, and I say so plainly, because nobody starts at five hours a week.
In This Episode
- The three roles that run a business doing an event every month
- The twice daily report that replaced most of my management time
- Why I build the thing myself first, then turn it into a skill and hand it over
- The two things I will not outsource, and the control freak reason why
- What I would tell myself on day one, including how long it really takes
Resources mentioned
- The B2C brand we spend the episode on: HobbyScool
- Kate Kordsmeier's business: Success with Soul
- Where I teach this AI and delegation setup: The Creator's MBA AI Mastermind
If the part you want is the AI skills piece, where you do a task once and hand the repeatable version to your team, that is what we build together in the mastermind.
See the AI Mastermind →Episode Transcript
00:00Thank you so much for joining me today. As we continue through this series, I have my dear friend Kate here with me. She is going to be walking us through and interviewing me about HobbyScool. Kate, before we get started, can you tell the audience a little more about you and how you help people?
Yes. I love it when you said my special friend. I am Destini's special friend, Kate Kordsmeier. I am the founder of Success with Soul. We help coaches, course creators, and digital product sellers build high-profit, low-maintenance businesses without social media. I am excited for this conversation today, because me and team have a tumultuous relationship.
I have been on the solopreneur side. I have been on the side where I had five W-2 employees in my business and a $35,000 a month payroll that absolutely crushed me with the pressure. So I am excited to talk to Destini, because I think she is such a pro at running a team and doing it in a way that feels a lot lighter and easier.
01:00So let's start with what actually makes HobbyScool go. We talked about this in a previous episode, and I am so blown away that it is not really you. You are the strategic orchestrator, but you have a team that runs the business.
Thanks, Kate, and I loved your introduction. I will go into a little more detail about HobbyScool. I think I mentioned in the last episode that I am personally spending about five hours a week there. I really try to focus on the strategic side, here is where we are going, here is what we need to be doing. For instance, I built our 2027 schedule. I have our business model set up. I am working on breaking HobbyScool out into a separate LLC and getting it ready to sell. So I like to focus on those types of things.
But it has taken me years, literally years, to get to this point, setting up the processes and the procedures and everything that has allowed me to spend about five hours a week on HobbyScool.
02:00I am glad you said that, because so many times people listen to a podcast episode like this and they think you started at working five hours a week and outsourcing it. And it is like, oh no, there was a lot of blood, sweat, and tears, and your own manual labor that went in before you got to the point where you could step away and work just five hours a week in the business.
It definitely has taken me years to get here. And I am happy to get here, because now I can focus more on my personal brand, which I need to. There have been a lot of things I have set up over the years. I have hired people, so I definitely have a team helping me with HobbyScool.
03:00We have a lot of processes and procedures. We have a full help desk set up. I have a lot of AI skills set up that have really helped me step away, and my team is using those AI skills. So let me walk you through who I have on the team, what they are doing, and the behind the scenes processes I have set up.
I have somebody who works six hours a day. He helps us with recruiting speakers and contributors. Right now he is working on HobbyScool, but he is also helping me with my Creator's MBA events. I have a customer support person who works full time, and she handles both customer support desks.
I have all of this set up in Help Scout. She runs the HobbyScool support desk and she also runs the Creator's MBA help desk. I love having it set up in Help Scout, because I can go in and review the responses she has sent to customers or clients or attendees of our events.
04:00I can go in there, and if I see something that needs a little coaching, which happened just this morning, I can say, okay, here is how we should have handled that. She works full time on that. She also helps me with other things that come up, like creating images, working on the Shopify store, uploading blog posts. She can do things like that too.
And then I have my virtual assistant, and she helps me with onboarding speakers. She also sets up all the pages for these events in HobbyScool. She has been primarily focused on HobbyScool and she does a lot there.
05:00Any emails or landing pages for any of the events, onboarding. I am probably repeating myself, but she is handling the bulk of it for HobbyScool.
Okay, so that sounds like you have three team members, is that right?
That is correct.
And what was the first role you hired for?
That was my assistant, and she has been with me from really the beginning with HobbyScool. I knew that if I was going to build HobbyScool up to where it needed to be, I needed somebody to help me. She was the first hire. The person who helps us with recruiting speakers, I hired him in January of this year.
And the person who does all the help desk support, I think she has been with me for maybe a year and a half.
And they are all remote contractors, right?
They are all remote contractors in the Philippines, all three of them.
06:00So do you want to talk a little about why you chose to go that route, and how you manage a remote team in a different country and time zone?
I basically allow them to work whenever they want, so they select their own hours. The only thing I ask is that the customer support person works Eastern hours when we are doing an event, just because that is when the majority of our help tickets come in.
Other than that, I do not really care when they work. For my virtual assistant, we meet for an hour once a week. Other than that, I do not meet weekly with the others. They do a start of day report, here is what I am working on, and then an end of day report.
07:00In that report they list what they worked on during the day. If they have outstanding questions, or things that did not work, or roadblocks they ran into, they put that in the report. So they do that twice a day, start of day and end of day, and all three of them do it.
One of the struggles I have had managing my own team over the years is the management piece you just described. Having this report takes time out of your schedule, because you have to review them. How do you manage that? What does that time commitment look like for you?
I glance at them. I am really looking for whether any issues came up, anything that needs my attention, so it does not take a lot of time. Where I run into issues, and this does stress me out a little, is when I see an escalation from a client or a customer
08:00or an attendee that needs my attention. They might not have handled it the way they should have, so I need to go back and look at my SOPs and my instructions, because we have SOPs for everything. We have an SOP course where I have loaded a lot of videos too. So I need to figure out what I did not make clear to them. I am constantly thinking about that.
The other thing I ask them about, and I try to emphasize this all the time, is to think about the 1% improvement you can make every single day to make this better.
So if you get a question from an attendee or a client, look at it and ask, do we need to update our landing page? I did this just this morning. I got a question from an attendee for our Closed Door event coming up in August, and I looked at her question and thought, we should have already answered this on the sales page.
09:00Why was this not answered? So I went back and looked, and it was missing. That is why she was asking. So always think about why people are asking the questions that come into the help desk or your email, and whether there is something we should do in our documentation or our procedures so we do not get that question again.
Super smart. Going back to remote workers versus in-house, what did you have to learn the hard way about what to keep in-house versus what to hand off?
In terms of remote workers, I am always thinking about whether this is something I should be doing. Is it the best use of my time, or should I hand it to somebody in customer support or my virtual assistant?
10:00And for most things I try to ask, can I create a skill for this and hand it to them? That is honestly what I did for a lot of what I do.
Meaning a Claude skill, an AI skill?
Yes. An AI skill, whether it is ChatGPT or Claude or whatever. So I try to do it the first time and get it right, and then I hand it over to them. One example is that we are moving all of our summit pages from Leadpages to our HobbyScool website.
What I did was spend the time on the August event and do them myself. Then I took all the work I had done and created Claude skills for it. I handed those over to my VA so she can do them for the next event. But I wanted to do them first myself, because I wanted to make sure they were set up the way I wanted them set up.
11:00That is generally how I think and how I work. I do things myself first, and once I get it right, if it is something I can hand over, I do.
That makes a lot of sense, and it is smart to turn them into skills that can be repeated, so it is an AI doing the work with human oversight and you get the best of both worlds. Is there anything you tried to outsource and then pulled back because it really did have to be you?
There is one thing I have not outsourced and do not plan to, and that is the live workshop content and the get it done weeks I run in my own paid programs in my personal brand.
12:00That is the one thing where I do not think I can outsource any of it. I do not know how I would. Other than that, I am trying to outsource everything else, Kate, to be honest with you. The other thing I have not outsourced is writing the newsletters in my personal brand.
I did outsource all the email content for my HobbyScool brand. But for my personal brand I am still writing those, with the help of AI. I am still doing those because things pop up in my head that she would not know about.
And I am a self-proclaimed control freak, so I recognize some of this is my own issue. But it is really hard when it is your face and name and signature at the end of those emails to truly delegate it to somebody else, knowing it is not going to be exactly how you would do it. That is hard.
13:00And to your point, in HobbyScool it does have my name on it, but I just do not care.
Well, and HobbyScool is not your personal brand. They are not really there for Destini, they are there for the event.
Exactly. But in my personal brand it is different.
Yeah, they are there for you. I am feeling that too. So you are building HobbyScool to run without you, and it is basically doing that. Would you say HobbyScool is there now?
HobbyScool is definitely there now. There is no doubt about it. Now, when things come up, I do have to get involved. For instance, we are migrating our summit pages off Leadpages and putting them on our HobbyScool website. Obviously I had to get involved in that. Nobody could have done that but me.
But everything I am doing in HobbyScool, as much as I possibly can, I am delegating. Some things come up, like we got a sponsorship request yesterday, and obviously my VAs cannot handle that.
14:00So I say, send them my scheduling link, I will talk to them. There are things that come up like that, but I am happy to get involved in those.
Why does that matter so much to you, building this brand into something that can run without you?
I am trying to sell it, and that is what investors want. They want something they can hand over to a team that does not require them to be involved in it. That is my goal. That is what I am getting to. I think I am really there. The only thing I need to do right now is build up the monthly profit to get it where I want it before I sell.
I think this is so smart, and we have talked about this so much behind the scenes. You have the HobbyScool Million Dollar Experiment.
15:00And we have talked about how people can follow along to see how you are preparing this business to sell, what buyers are really looking for, what makes a business sellable, those sorts of things.
But I also think that even if you have no interest in ever selling a business, it would be so valuable to follow along, because everybody wants to work less and everybody wants more passive income. It is the same concept, just with different goals at the end. It does not really change the process. Any thoughts on that?
You are right. It is not changing the business model. If you want to work less in your business, this is how you do it, even if you do not plan on selling it. This is the business model to follow, for sure.
Exactly. If you did sell it, what would you miss?
16:00I think the income is pretty sweet. The income I am getting where I am not really having to work for it directly, that is something I would miss. But honestly, this was always a side hustle project for me. It was never something I intended to have forever and ever.
And we talked about this in the former episode, that people are so concerned about having to love everything they do at work, and about monetizing their passion. There are some great things about that. But there is also something really nice about being more detached from the business.
This is not the most precious baby I have ever had. I really admire that, and it makes me think, oh, I wonder if I could just find a hole in the market and fill it.
17:00And it does not even have to be something that interests me. It is just business.
To your point, Kate, I feel like I could sell it and go buy another domain and do the exact same thing. I know what I need to do to grow a business and get it there, and I feel like I could do that in any niche. And honestly, I have been thinking about this. If anybody is listening, I think there is a huge market out there for teaching AI to the B2C market. I think it has not been touched yet. If I had the energy right now, that is where I would go.
And if I sell HobbyScool, maybe I will put some effort into building that up. But I know you are looking at a few years to build something like that.
18:00So to wrap us up, knowing everything you know now, what would you tell yourself on the day you started HobbyScool?
Just be patient. You have to be patient. It is not going to get there overnight. I would have thought I would have gotten there a lot faster than I did, but you have to be patient, and there have been a lot of ups and downs over time. There still are. Things come up. You get angry people. A lot of that you just have to ignore.
You have to have thick skin as an entrepreneur, and with the volume we are dealing with, just know you are going to get things that pop up that are probably going to make you angry or sad or whatever your reaction is going to be, and you have to let it go.
That is such good advice, whether you are just starting your business or you have been doing this a long time, and I could echo the same thing.
19:00I have been an entrepreneur for 16 years now, and it still amazes me how much longer things take than you think they will. We say it is not going to happen overnight, but it is not even going to happen in the first two years. It takes years to build high profit businesses that can run without you, that bring in good money, that can replace salaries and other serious income.
And I think people see so much of the marketing around courses and passive income and make money while you sleep. Those things are true. Both of us do make money while we sleep now. But I did not do that in the first six months of my business. It is patience and persistence and just continuing to show up.
Truly, I think it takes three to five years. So if I went out and started on that AI B2C niche we were just talking about, I would tell myself I am probably not going to get where I want it to be for about four years. Four plus years is what I would tell myself.
20:00I do truly think it would take that long. And of course I want to say, well, we could probably cut the timeline down because we have learned so much. But I would say minimum two years, and that is just to start really breaking even and getting to the point where the momentum is compounding. The snowball effect is getting started. Things are happening.
I guess I was thinking four to five years to get it where it could run without me with a substantial amount of income coming in from other places right now.
I would agree with that, for sure. Anything else you want to say about team, and building a business like this, and selling a business, before we close?
I would say that if you are out there questioning yourself, can I hire somebody, should I hire somebody, start small. Maybe hire a part-time VA, maybe 20 hours a week. Test it out. Start working with that individual, training them, seeing how the relationship goes.
21:00I think you will be surprised at how much more you will be able to get done in your business, because you will be able to focus on the strategic things, the things that actually make money, and have them do the more daily tasks. I think you will be very surprised at how much you are able to scale with just one part-time team member.
I love that. Totally agree. Thanks, Destini. This was super fun.
Thanks so much, Kate.
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