Chelsea Baldwin may call herself the Business Bitch, but she just wants everyone to get along. According to her self-description, she is a “total softie who cries at songs on the radio,” and is “sensitive to other people’s emotions & hard times.”
However, Chelsea Baldwin does mean business. She wants to help you succeed in the marketplace, and she will help you clear every obstacle your journey throws your way. Her vast experience stretches way back to 2008 as a freelance newspaper writer in college.
In September 2015, Chelsea Baldwin started her first LLC, Copy Power. Through the next year, she received several bookings that she had to stop taking on new clients to keep her energy. When 2018 came, she expanded Copy Power into a sub-contracting agency that writes contractors to take on projects she couldn’t or didn’t want to handle.
Eventually, Chelsea Baldwin started Business Bitch to help her cover the growing demand of business coaching. She couldn’t accommodate these projects under Copy Power, which meant further expansion. Under the Business Bitch brand, Chelsea Baldwin started booking even more clients, and she also started launching digital trainings.
Chelsea Baldwin’s services promise to help take you to where you want to be in the fraction of the time. If your goal is to earn $300,000 a year or $25,000 a month, she’ll take you there faster than you could if you went at it yourself.
For her work, Chelsea Baldwin begins with troubleshooting calls that cost $250. After these calls, you already get concrete steps to solve your problems and grow your sales. You get down to the point right away. Chelsea will get at the root of your problem and give you a to-do list you can complete ASAP.
Read more interviews with business leaders here. You can also listen to the Business Bitch podcast here. This podcast is also available on Apple Podcasts and Spotify.
Jerome Knyszewski: What do you think makes your company stand out and can you share a story?
Chelsea Baldwin: I think the name of my website is enough to help it stand out on it’s own, lol. You usually don’t see a URL like BusinessBitch.com and forget about.
But also, once people get to the website, they either really resonate the message of “cast the bullshit aside, get shit done, and impatience is a virtue,” or they don’t resonate with me at all.
I’ve got a bit of a polarizing message that has really triggered some people, but just as much as it triggers some, it resonates highly with my target audience and keeps them coming back for more.
For example, I’ve been a lot more active on LinkedIn lately. When I updated my profile on LinkedIn, I wrote “BusinessBitch.com” as the first thing that shows up under my name… where most people put their job title. But, by making that change and having my URL show up anywhere and everywhere my name shows up, I’ve gotten SO MANY positive responses and messages from strangers saying things like, “Oh my God, I saw your website under your name, I had to check it out, I loved it!” or “Clearly you are the kind of person I want in my orbit. Love your business name.”
Of course, some other people can’t believe I have the audacity to call myself that in a professional setting, but it really does stand out and attract the right people in, which is the whole point.
Jerome Knyszewski: Can you, please, share your five things you need to know to delegate effectively and be completely satisfied with the results? Please share a story or example for each one.
Chelsea Baldwin: Yes! I’ve done a lot of delegating and have certainly made some mistakes to learn from, so I’m happy to share.
Number 1: It’s important to know the boundaries of the task. You need to know what’s included and what’s not included in what you expect the person to do.
This can be hard sometimes, especially if you’re delegating something you’ve never delegated before.
When I started outsourcing things like accounting and payroll, for example, I didn’t know what was included in what, or what was typically done by accountants and payroll people.
The first person I hired for this was my accountant to do my business taxes, but when we needed to add on payroll, I went with the person he suggested for the role. The way they worked together was pretty seamless, to their credit, but I didn’t know what was and wasn’t included in a person’s payroll responsibilities or even what *I* expected the person to do.
It turned out that folding this responsibility in actually added additional tasks to my to-do list to communicate with both of them about my numbers, instead of them just taking care of it all for me. As it turned out, I expected I’d have some bookkeeping services as well, whereas neither of them do bookkeeping.
Number 2: If you’re outsourcing a specific task, know the exact steps the person needs to take and tell the person what those steps are. (Especially if they’re outsourced help, like a hire-by-the-hour virtual assistant.)
For example, a few years ago, I switched email marketing softwares so I needed to get my email automations and campaigns transferred from one platform to another.
To “save time,” I hired someone who was an expert on the new platform I was upgrading to. I told her to copy over all the emails, campaigns, tags, triggers and automations from the first account to the second one, gave her a couple of examples, and I thought that would be enough, especially since she “got it” and was a total expert on the new platform.
While she did know what she was doing when it came for the software help I hired her for, she apparently didn’t understand the importance of visuals in marketing or keeping brand visuals consistent.
When I went into the campaigns she’d set up, the fonts were not right, the colors were off, the images weren’t added into the email body, and the formatting was off.
I realized then that she would have greatly benefited from me recording my screen & copying one of my emails over, so she’d automatically know to change the colors, choose the same fonts, and make sure the images were added in properly. She’d have known the exact step-by-step process to take, instead of guessing on what I wanted done.
If I’d made that video, we wouldn’t have then had the back-and-forth that ensued after, the task would have been done quicker, and I’d have saved money on her having to go back and fix her mistakes.
Number 3: Don’t just train talent for creativity, train them for deliverables as well.
To delegate effectively and grow an in-house team, you need to know how to train talent and communicate expectations on the end result. This can be hard, especially when you’re delegating creative tasks instead of something like data entry or running numbers.
In my copywriting agency, one of the big steps I took in growing my business was to outsource to writers so we could take on more clients than just one person could handle.
I knew from the start of the hiring process that I would only accept people who were already talented writers, but I also developed specific writer trainings. These trainings taught writers my specific methodologies for writing that worked like crazy and got 2x to 3x more conversions and sales for my clients every time. Any writer I hired couldn’t take on work until they finished these trainings.
I thought I’d done a great job with the trainings (and I had), but I was really underwhelmed with the quality of the first project that came back from another writer. She was highly talented and she’d done my trainings, but she wasn’t delivering the high quality I expected, so I had to go through and make some edits to improve it before we handed it off to the client.
My talent-training part was fine, but I quickly realized I’d only trained them on the process of writing different things, and not on the client delivery aspect.
Part of their training needs to include what’s acceptable as a creative deliverable, and what’s not. This isn’t always easy with creative work, but try to have a checklist people can go through to make sure their creative work is up to scratch before they try to deliver something to you that clearly needs some more polishing done.
Number 4: Train on the delivery & teamwork process.
As you start delegating to more than one person, you’ll quickly realize you need to be as efficient as possible in communicating with your team.
Aside from training the people you delegate to on their individual responsibilities, train them on how to communicate with you and how to communicate to the rest of your team.
Do they need to only reach you via email? Or only communicate with you via the project management software you use? Show them how to do this, in what instances to communicate where, and how to “deliver” their work when it’s finished… or how to mark something off a to-do list or notify the team that Project A is done, so it’s time to move on to Project B.
This process is different for each business and each leader, but it’s crucial to your sanity.
For example, I once had a writer who ~only~ wanted to communicate with me about a writing project via Instagram DMs, just because that’s where our initial conversation started. Needless to say, it was a hugely inefficient conversation, and I finally told her that if she wanted to keep working with me, she needed to communicate within the project documents themselves so things would be easier and faster to understand.
Number 5: Have growth in mind for each individual you hire.
You don’t always have to keep growth in mind if you’re just outsourcing tasks like interview transcriptions, but if you know that delegating is going to become a way of business for you, keep an idea in your mind of how you’d like this person’s responsibilities to grow on your team, before you ever post a job description.
For example, one of the things I’ll be starting soon with Business Bitch is hiring a writer to help me take the content of my podcast interviews and repurpose them into multiple new blog posts per episode.
Ideally, after a little while of working with me, they’d also be able to take on some social media or image-creating responsibilities.
I won’t start with delegating everything at once, but since I have this in mind, I’ll hire someone who also has a passion for social media and an eye for design… instead of just a blogger who hates social media and only wants to spend time behind a screen writing all day. The blogger who hates social media might be a good fit for the first task I want to delegate, but not the ones that come after. By keeping this in mind, I only have to hire one person, and not multiple people. This saves a lot of time with training and team onboarding, and means we’ll be able to move faster in offloading some other responsibilities because they’ll already “get” what it’s like to work with me.
Jerome Knyszewski: One of the obstacles to proper delegating is an often-quoted cliché ‘if you want something done right, do it yourself’. Is this saying true? Is it false? And is there a way to reconcile it with the importance of delegating?
Chelsea Baldwin: Yes! I mentioned this earlier in the interview, but I don’t think it’s necessarily true or false. To an extent, it can be either true or false, but there’s definitely a way to reconcile it without compromising one way or another.
With the five things I mentioned in the last question; like knowing the exact steps someone needs to take to do a task, training people on deliverables, and keeping role growth in mind, you reconcile the true/false dichotomy of this statement by basically multiplying yourself.
When you choose to delegate something, it’s almost always something you yourself have done before. If you’re happy with the way you did it; document how you did it. Record a video of your screen while you do something or write out a document of standard operating procedures.
By documenting before you delegate and capturing your exact step-by-step process, you’re essentially multiplying yourself. Since the person you delegate to follows your process, in a way, it is like you are doing it, without it having to take your time.
Documenting individual steps can feel really mundane while you’re doing it, but I think it’s the perfect way to reconcile the idea of delegating to save time with the idea of needing to do things yourself to do them correctly.
Jerome Knyszewski: Thank you for all of that, we are nearly done. You are a person of great influence, if you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people what would that be?
Chelsea Baldwin: I feel like I am already working on that movement with Business Bitch. The whole inspiration behind starting the company was to make the world a better place by changing the flow of money into the hands of good people.
With the coaching and trainings I provide on my website, I want to put money and influence into the hands of good people and well-meaning people so they can use it to create positive ripple effects throughout the world: for social issues, the environment, politics, whatever they’re passionate about.
I really want these people to have the money, power, and influence they need to make things happen, and I feel like I can help people make that happen by becoming more successful in their own businesses. We can’t make changes happen if we don’t have the resources to do so, so I’m all about putting more resources into the hands of good people.
Self-employment definitely isn’t the path for everyone, but it is the path for a lot of people, so I’m here to help the ones how have chosen it succeed as much as they can.
Jerome Knyszewski: How can our readers further follow you online?
Chelsea Baldwin: I am at BusinessBitch.com, where you can find all my freebies, my blog, and The Business Bitch Podcast. On social media, I’m most active on LinkedIn, where you can find me under the name Chelsea Baldwin. While I’m not super active on Instagram, I do check my inbox there at least a few times a day, so my handle there is @businessbitchchelsea.
Jerome Knyszewski: This was very inspiring. Thank you so much for the time you spent with this!
Chelsea Baldwin: Thank you for having me!
