March 14, 2026
Ep 180: Your First Hires as a Solo Consultant: How to Hire, Onboard, and Build Systems Without Burning Out | Expert Guest Sara Nay
Send a text On the Tiny Marketing Podcast, host Sarah Noel Block interviews Sara Nay, CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, about making the first few hires as a solo consultant. Nay explains that effective hiring starts before the job post by clarifying mission, vision, and values, then running a culture/fit interview before assessing skills. She recommends choosing a first hire by doing a one-week time audit to identify repetitive, draining tasks to delegate—often starting with an executive assistant...
On the Tiny Marketing Podcast, host Sarah Noel Block interviews Sara Nay, CEO of Duct Tape Marketing, about making the first few hires as a solo consultant. Nay explains that effective hiring starts before the job post by clarifying mission, vision, and values, then running a culture/fit interview before assessing skills. She recommends choosing a first hire by doing a one-week time audit to identify repetitive, draining tasks to delegate—often starting with an executive assistant or account manager to keep the consultant in a strategic role. Nay advocates hiring earlier than feels comfortable by starting part-time (around 10 hours/week) and scaling up. For onboarding, she emphasizes slow ramp-up, training and shadowing on one client at a time, daily check-ins with small task lists, using Loom videos plus checklists, time tracking from day one (e.g., Harvest), and documenting only critical recurring processes by mapping end-to-end client “flows.”
00:00 Welcome to Tiny Marketing
00:49 Meet Sarah Nay
02:11 Hiring That Actually Works
02:59 Values First Job Posts
05:24 Choosing Your First Hire
07:43 Start Part Time and Scale
11:37 Onboarding Without Overwhelm
15:09 Looms Checklists and Docs
17:33 Time Tracking and Profitability
22:19 Pricing and Raising Rates
25:15 Documenting Core Processes
28:13 Where to Find Sarah
28:36 Booked Out Blueprint Outro
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00:00 - Welcome And The Real Problem
01:48 - Meet Sarah Nay Of Duct Tape
03:16 - Values First Hiring That Sticks
06:27 - Choose The First Hire Wisely
08:48 - Hire Earlier With Part-Time Hours
12:42 - Onboarding With Training And Shadowing
16:14 - Loom Videos Plus Simple Checklists
20:44 - Time Tracking Profitability And Pricing
28:28 - Document The Flows That Matter
31:25 - Find Sarah And Booked Out Blueprint
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Welcome to the Tiny Marketing Podcast.
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I'm Sarah Noal Block, and this show is made for solo consultants who wanna get booked out without burning out.
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If you've ever thought, I just want this to feel easier, you're not alone.
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Around here, we focus on simple, sustainable growth that actually fits into your life to growth, feels doable instead of overwhelming.
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and So today we are talking about those first couple of hires that you have when you're a solo consultant and you're feeling that pain, the growing pains, it's really, really hard.
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So we're gonna dig into how to hire great people, how to onboard them, and the systems and processes you need in order to make it all work.
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Sarah, thank you for joining me.
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Can you introduce yourself to the audience?
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Of course.
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So my name is Sarah Nay.
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I am the CEO at a company called Duct Tape Marketing, and I've been with the company for 16 years now.
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I started as an intern, had various roles throughout the company, and about a year ago stepped into the CEO seat, over those years.
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I've helped a lot of people with hiring, so we've obviously hired on our team and I've led that initiative.
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But also we train and certify marketing consultants, fractional CMOs and small agencies, and as part of that certification, we're teaching our system and frameworks, but I'm also helping people go from solopreneurs to their first hire to growing their team.
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So I have a lot of experience talking about hiring and onboarding.
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I didn't tell you this on our onboarding call, but I remember when I was a one person marketing department, like 20 years ago, maybe like 15, 20 years ago, duct Tape Marketing blog.
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I read it constantly.
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Amazing.
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I love to hear it.
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Yeah, we've been around for 30 years as a company, and so I hear those stories all the time.
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We've had our podcast for 20 years now, so
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Yeah.
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a while.
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Yeah, it's crazy.
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You were like the only source for information when you were marketing with a small team and limited resources.
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So thank you for that.
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Of course.
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Yeah.
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I'm glad to hear that we helped you 20 years ago.
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That's That's great.
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Okay, so let's get into.
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The hiring piece first.
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So let's picture, actually one of my clients who's going through this right now, she works in finance, she's been hiring people, but it's just never working out.
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They are If they don't have the right skillset, or just the onboarding feels messy, like it's taking way too long to get them ready to take over responsibilities.
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So
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Yeah, and I'll say, I think.
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That person's not alone.
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I think everyone, when they start thinking about hiring for the first time, there's just a lot to learn.
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There's a lot to figure out.
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A lot of mistakes are often made, but hopefully this conversation, yes, we all have.
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I have too.
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but hopefully this conversation will help people make.
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Less mistakes moving forward.
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That's the goal ultimately.
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but that person's not alone.
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So I think the thing that's tricky with hiring is there's a lot of stuff that needs to go in before you're ready to hire that people often skip or don't think about.
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And so, for example, whenever we've hired over the years, like we've, on our job descriptions, we always start with.
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Here's our mission, here's our vision, here's our values.
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And so that's the first part of our job posts before we'll then say, okay, and here's the role that we're hiring for and here's the requirements.
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And so it's really important to understand those things deeply so you can hire people that are aligned with your values and what you're actually trying to accomplish as a business.
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And so for us, we're trying to make.
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A massive impact in the small business space like that has always been what we focus on.
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And so when I'm hiring, I wanna hire people that first and foremost are excited about that.
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Like they want to work with small businesses, they want to make a difference.
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They want to try as hard as possible to get them results.
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And so I think when you're thinking about hiring, you need to.
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Step back before you say, what are the roles that, that I maybe need?
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And take a step back and say, you know, what's really important to me and where do I need people to be aligned on?
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so getting into like the values piece, for example, like marketing is changing and evolving So fast, right now.
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And so whenever I'm hiring anyone on our team, regardless of their position, one of their values needs to be that they're growth minded.
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They're eager to learn.
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They they read books outside of work that are business focused.
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You know, I need those types of people 'cause it's changing so fast.
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but.
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I've taken the time to identify those things that then it makes it easier to hire people that are gonna be aligned and that are gonna stay with us longer because they're excited about what we're trying to do.
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so that's really important.
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But then also.
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And that's all related, like the job description and posting and getting clarity.
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But then our first interview is always a fit interview from a cultural standpoint.
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And so the whole first interview is focused on does the mission resonate with them actually?
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Like what?
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How are they doing on these?
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Values, are they aligned?
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Like are they gonna fit culturally as our team?
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And so that's always like the first interview.
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And then the second interview will actually get into their skill sets and experience.
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And so I think focusing on those things is really important before you can even get to the interview process with a candidate.
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And that's what often people kind of skip and overlook.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, that makes sense.
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So actually, can we take one step back from the job posting and look at who should a first hire be?
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Yeah, so there's.
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There's a number of exercises on delegation, that I think are relevant.
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But for one, like if you're a solopreneur, oftentimes, and if you're a consultant, for example, like I work with a lot of marketing consultants and so oftentimes I say, okay, what are you doing consistently?
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That takes up a lot of time that you don't enjoy doing 'cause you bring someone in to help you with that stuff.
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And so doing a time audit.
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You know, this sounds really painful, but spending about a week just jotting down like every 15 minutes what you actually are doing, because I guarantee it'll be different than if you just like sat down and wrote 'em out.
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And so doing a time audit for a week, writing down everything you're doing every 15 minute increments, and then at the end of the week doing an audit of those things are, you know, what are your highest payoff activities?
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What are things that drain you?
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What are things that you love doing?
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what are things that actually drive value to your business?
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And then holding onto those.
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Value things that you love doing, that you know, that, add value to your business.
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And then looking at, okay, what's on this list?
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That's like time consuming, that's repetitive, that does not bring me joy.
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And then making a list of those things will then help you more clearly to find, okay, what roles do you need to bring in to be able to take some of that stuff off of your plate?
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But oftentimes, I will say in the solopreneur role, if you're serving clients as a consultant, usually thinking about like an account manager or executive assistant type of role makes the most sense in the beginning.
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because a lot of times, you know, as a consultant you need to stay.
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Strategic.
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You need to stay high level, you need to stay advisor, and not necessarily implementer on all of the things.
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And so if you can bring someone in that can schedule your meetings and that can keep content moving forward and that could communicate with your clients, and keep track of just like all the people that are in your world, it allows you to stay higher level and provide more value to your clients.
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Yeah, and then you have the actual time to grow your business and do your like, show up in your marketing, show up for sales and biz dev, which you wouldn't have if you're stuck in fulfillment all the time.
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Yeah, and that is one of the challenges that I see with solopreneurs as they're just getting started, is they don't wanna hire because they don't have a ton of clients yet.
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And so they're like, I can just do it.
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But then all of a sudden they have.
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Two, three clients and then all of a sudden their client's businesses are more important than theirs.
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And so their business takes a second seat completely, and then they stall in growth and they come up for air and they wonder why.
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And so I always encourage entrepreneurs, like, even if you're just getting started.
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Hire sooner than you feel like you're, you're maybe thinking about it or ready from a financial standpoint, but you can always hire by starting with someone very part-time, starting slowly, starting them hourly, and then they can grow into a, a larger position over time.
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And so that's the route that we've always taken at Duct Tape Marketing.
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We we do have full-time employees, but we also work with a lot of contractors as well.
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And whenever I'm bringing on someone new, regardless if they're gonna turn into a full-time employee or not, I start them at like 10 ish hours a week in the beginning.
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And I'm paying them hourly because I wanna determine does it make sense for them?
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Are they gonna be a good fit?
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Like do, am I ready to introduce them to more of our clients because.
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You know, you have to start slower.
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But then having the conversation with them from the very first interview is like, we're gonna start at like 10 hours a week.
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We're gonna get to know each other, we're gonna build trust.
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we could, there's opportunity to scale this up to even full-time, if that's of interest.
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So, you know, asking the person, are you good with starting slower?
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Do you have ability?
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If it, if it goes well, to really ramp up further.
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And I think if you think about hiring that way, it seems a lot less intimidating because you're not committing to a full-time person from the very beginning.
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You're starting small.
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You're building relationship and then you can scale them up from there.
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Yeah, I think that that's the only mistake I did not make at the beginning of my business was when I first got my very first client.
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I was still working corporate, but I hired a VA immediately.
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And I just took a percentage of what I was making from that one client and set that as the budget for the because I knew I could afford that.
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It was, it was that.
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And, because I was able to onboard her, slowly, like she didn't have like a ton of stuff right away.
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Our relationship and she was able to take on so much.
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She was able to take on so much more responsibility because she could ease into it.
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Whereas I'll talk about the shitty thing that I did.
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now she got a full-time job.
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I had to figure some stuff out, but at this point I had 13 clients and it was a full-time job.
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I was no longer corporate, and I was in a mad rush to hire people.
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And at that point I did not do it slowly.
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took onboarding was so rough and I work with any of those same freelancers today because it was just like I was in such a, a difficult place that I wasn't able to onboard them appropriately or even like vet them appropriately.
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Yeah, and it's such a better experience, the one with the VA that you shared, where you started slowly and you built over time for you and your clients and that freelancer as well.
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'cause I've also made the same mistake years ago.
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You know, I brought someone on as an account manager.
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I introduced 'em to like six clients right off the bat.
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They were completely overwhelmed.
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There was so much to learn so fast that they ended up not working out, and so we had to let them go, and so.
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We had to let them go was a, was a negative in that story, but also like I had to go back to all the clients and be like, okay, now you have a new account manager.
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Hopefully this person lasts longer than two months.
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so it's, it's really important to just start slower, in the beginning.
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And so, you know, I know we were gonna talk about onboarding as well.
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So now when I bring on new team members.
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we always start with like, first you're going to go through training, and then when you're ready, you're gonna start shadowing on one client, and then you're gonna start getting involved with that one client.
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And you're gonna learn all of our systems and processes and ways of doing things and all of our tools and all of that with that one client.
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And then once you prove that, you know, things are working out and, and we can trust you, we'll give you a second client.
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You'll get comfortable with that second client, we'll give you a third client.
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You'll get comfortable there until you get to the point where you're at capacity.
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And so I'm a big believer in, you know, spending as much time as possible in your onboarding and training to then set them up for long-term success.
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And another thing that we do too, that I've learned over the years is, you know, initially when we were onboarding, we would say, okay, we'll have like your onboarding meeting, give you a bunch of stuff, and then we'll meet with you, you know, several days later.
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And it just left people feeling really overwhelmed.
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And so now every single time we onboard someone, regardless of their position, we have daily meetings in the beginning, where it's like, okay, here's your project management board that we set up.
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'cause we always use monday.com is what we use with your tasks for day one.
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Here's exactly what you need to do for day one.
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Go do it.
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Ping me on slack if you need me.
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We'll meet again tomorrow morning and then the next day we say, okay, here's your tasks for day two.
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Go do these exact things.
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Because if you give people too much information in the beginning, they'll just get stuck.
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So if you can meet with them daily and break it down to like, here's your five things to do versus 25 for the week, it's gonna make 'em a lot less overwhelmed.
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And it's also gonna make your life easier because I felt like.
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In the beginning when I was giving people too much, then they were just constantly slacking me and asking me questions, and so it was actually taking more time than getting on the call with them for, you know, 15, 20 minutes a day to make sure they had what they needed, to see how they did on their previous tasks and to set them up for success.
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That is really smart and I, I just wanna point out that.
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It works a lot better that way when you're onboarding clients too, like I, I have found that when I give them too much information upfront, it's overwhelming.
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But if I give them micro tasks that they're working through and just showing them just what they need to see at that moment in time, it's so much easier for them and they're like, okay.
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Task complete task.
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Complete task complete, and then I can move on to the next thing.
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So it works
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I think just in communication in general, like if you can make things as simple and straightforward as possible and not feel like this massive thing to start, then people will actually start.
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And so another example on that is like we've rolled out documenting our systems and processes within our business.
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Uh, we've done it over the years, but we rolled out a new system for doing it essentially.
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And so the.
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Girl on my team that mapped it out for everyone and communicated put all of this work into how everyone needed to get started.
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And it just felt like when she communicated with everyone that it was this big hurdle for people to get started.
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And so no one actually got started.
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But then when we were able to take a look at and be like, where can we simplify this to make it like, Hey, I just need to do this one thing and it's only gonna take me a few minutes, and then it will feel a lot easier after I do that.
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And so we simplified how we communicated and now people are making a lot more progress.
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And so you just need to, you know, make things as straightforward as possible and not make it feel like I have to figure out this whole thing, or people just won't take the time to get started.
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Yeah, and I wanna point out an episode I had a couple weeks ago with Pamela King depending on when people are listening to this, but she talked about how you should start creating your looms or your walkthrough videos as you're doing your tasks, whether you hired someone or not.
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So you have those available for your upcoming hires whenever you happen to hire them.
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And then you said you used Monday, so you could just attach the link to the Loom right in that Monday task.
00:16:13.191 --> 00:16:14.451
Like, this is how you do it.
00:16:15.216 --> 00:16:15.966
Yeah, absolutely.
00:16:15.966 --> 00:16:28.885
And videos are incredible for training team and clients and communication, but we actually would take it one step further 'cause I, I think when people are being trained on processes, watching a video once is absolutely wonderful.
00:16:28.885 --> 00:16:34.165
But then after they watch the video and they understand the process, then they just need a checklist to follow.
00:16:34.165 --> 00:16:55.545
And so, transcribe the video, put it into Create a checklist and then create a document that has the process, name the video embedded, and then the action items below, because then the second, third, fourth time they go back to do that process, they can just check the boxes to make sure that they hit all the steps versus having to like re-watch the video and make sure they didn't forget something.
00:16:55.846 --> 00:16:57.745
Yeah, that makes complete sense.
00:16:57.745 --> 00:16:58.706
So.
00:16:58.706 --> 00:17:10.586
Like going back to the not overwhelming people, would you create a single doc with like different tabs depending on the task, or would you have a separate doc for each task?
00:17:11.036 --> 00:17:12.596
Separate doc for each task?
00:17:12.596 --> 00:17:13.346
Ultimately.
00:17:13.346 --> 00:17:13.766
Yeah.
00:17:13.766 --> 00:17:18.326
Unless it's like, you know, it just kind of depends on what, so like, let's give an example.
00:17:18.326 --> 00:18:25.506
We're a marketing company, so let's say it's, you know, creating a blog post for a client like that would be all documented on one.
00:18:25.506 --> 00:18:35.990
Document, but then if it's like optimization from an SEO standpoint, like that might be a separate document that are like related, but like it's two separate processes
00:18:36.351 --> 00:18:36.621
Mm-hmm.
00:18:36.621 --> 00:18:37.316
Okay.
00:18:37.316 --> 00:18:42.191
anything else on onboarding before we move on to systems and processes?
00:18:42.761 --> 00:18:51.081
No, I mean the biggest thing is just don't overwhelm people start slower than you want to, communicate with them as much as you can to set 'em up for success.
00:18:51.906 --> 00:19:04.816
Yeah, I really do like, like you could, those morning meetings for that first week could just be like 15 minutes but it sets them up to be able to understand like, these the things that I need to get done by the end of the day.
00:19:05.116 --> 00:19:05.371
Yeah.
00:19:05.371 --> 00:19:05.911
Yeah.
00:19:05.911 --> 00:19:09.001
Oh, and another one too, I guess that relates to all this is time tracking.
00:19:09.001 --> 00:19:12.361
So have them track their time from the very beginning.
00:19:12.361 --> 00:19:13.551
a lot of times people don't.
00:19:13.551 --> 00:19:15.411
Love time tracking.
00:19:15.411 --> 00:19:17.061
If they're a freelancer, they're used to it.
00:19:17.061 --> 00:19:21.871
but getting them to start from the very beginning, especially if you're incorporating it as client work.
00:19:21.871 --> 00:19:26.101
And so you're, you know, figuring out your cost and profitability within client work.
00:19:26.101 --> 00:19:30.061
But we have people track their time a hundred percent from day one.
00:19:30.061 --> 00:19:33.841
So there's not pushback when they're with us for a while, and then we eventually ask 'em to.
00:19:33.841 --> 00:19:41.381
but it gives you really good insights as well because you're able to look at how they're spending their time and where they're getting stuck.
00:19:41.381 --> 00:19:42.521
And so.
00:19:42.521 --> 00:19:52.181
There's another story in this and why this was helpful is we onboarded a team member recently and we use for a lot of work that we do among other AI tools.
00:19:52.181 --> 00:19:59.461
And one of the things I was having him do was pull a deep research report in and when you pull a deep research report, it takes.
00:19:59.461 --> 00:20:04.951
10 ish minutes, depending on the context to generate that report before it gets something back to you.
00:20:04.951 --> 00:20:06.991
And so he did that for a client.
00:20:06.991 --> 00:20:11.791
He got the report back, but then he didn't realize that he needed to turn off deep research mode.
00:20:11.791 --> 00:20:17.431
So every single time he was prompting he was waiting 10 ish minutes for response.
00:20:17.431 --> 00:20:18.631
That was a full report.
00:20:18.631 --> 00:20:19.411
And so.
00:20:19.411 --> 00:20:30.826
I wouldn't have uncovered that if he wasn't time tracking his time clearly, because I was able to meet with him and be like, why did this take you like two hours when it would've taken me?
00:20:30.826 --> 00:20:32.431
10, 15 minutes.
00:20:32.431 --> 00:20:35.431
And so we uncovered that he needed to turn off deep research mode.
00:20:35.431 --> 00:20:44.231
So that was a good learning opportunity for us, that you would, you know, sometimes I forget about those things 'cause it seems obvious 'cause I'm in those platforms for, you know, the time.
00:20:44.231 --> 00:20:46.121
And so for some it's a little bit newer to it.
00:20:46.121 --> 00:20:55.781
you need to explain some stuff in more detail, obviously But that was a good learning that if he wasn't tracking his time and putting details as to what he was doing, I don't know how long that would've gone on for.
00:20:56.276 --> 00:20:58.946
Do you use any specific apps for time tracking?
00:20:59.646 --> 00:21:02.076
Yeah, well, we've used Harvest for a long time.
00:21:02.076 --> 00:21:03.276
it's just the one that we've used.
00:21:03.276 --> 00:21:07.356
I don't necessarily I mean, there's better, cheaper options that are available.
00:21:07.356 --> 00:21:11.266
I'm actually exploring switching over to right now, because it has more features.
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