I spent 25 years running successful small businesses and moving them from 1 man shows to becoming team based businesses. Here is the process I used successfully time after time in my business and helping other businesses.
1. Be super clear on your why:
You must start by clarifying why are you doing what you are doing; why are you in an eLearning business. You are making good money and from what I read in some of your replies you are doing well fro yourself, so what drives you to wake up every day and go to work, what brings you joy.
Why is this so important, because it's the key to everything else, for example, if you want to hire people for the long term, the must believe what you believe, if you want your business to grow beyond you, ie must be driven by a clear purpose (your why)
Your why is a great for rapid decision-making, which speeds up things in your business, in hiring, in growing your customer base...etc
2. Be super clear on your goals:
You have a successful business as it is, and expanding it is not going to be easy, it is more work for you, so why are doing that, what will things look like when your effort to expand your business are successful and you get everything you want, just the way you want it. This will help you clarify where you are heading and so you will be able to choose your the steps and measure your progress towards achieving your goals.
3. Start with 20%:
In every business there is 20% of tasks and things to be done that are repetitive, mundane, laborious, maybe even boring for you. Even if you love what you do, there will still be things you like more than others. Start finding people to do those tasks. People who believe what you believe and love doing these tasks. This is a very safe starting point since these are not the major tasks that have major impact on your business.
4. Hire for personality more than skill:
This may sound strange, but the top team members that I've every worked with and that outperformed everyone else were the ones that had the least skill but the biggest appetite for learning and growth. They were like a sponge, were willing to learn, and most importantly, they were not affected by the way things are done out in the world. As a one man show you may be doing things differently than how things are done in other big companies or the regular practices in other businesses, so you may want people that are willing to learn your way of doing things.
People who are used to doing things in a certain way will drive you crazy trying to unlearn how they do things, while people who have less experience and more appetite for learning, are more open to learning your way.
This is not to say that people with a lot of experience are bad, in fact if you can find great people with great experience, that would be ideal, as long as they are open to learning, willing to work with you and love to grow.
5. Continue your journey to 80%:
Now that you have handed over 20% of the work to new team members. The ideal goal I suggest is to continue hand over tasks to existing and new team members until you reach 80% of your tasks delegated and handed over, that way you are only doing 20% of the work.
You do thins gradually 30%, 40%, 50%...etc
Keep identifying the tasks that are repetitive, the tasks that give you the least pleasure and joy, and keep finding people to do it. until you are left with only 20% of the work you originally used to handle, this 20% is the most important work that only you can do, it's the heart and soul of your business and your brand, the reason why people come to you and work with you. So you are still in full control of what matters most in your business.
6. Ensure Continuity with Processes:
One of the things that will increase the value of your business and make it thrive no matter what happens to you, is to make it a process driven business.
Make sure the people you hire spend 80% of their time doing the work, and 20% on enhancing and documenting how it's done. This is very different than reporting to you and increasing paperwork, that is not necessary.
This is about them learning to do it better, not just from you, but on their own, and instead of just doing it, they create processes that describe how they do it now, and they keep updating the process as it evolves.
The documentation needs to be clear to the point that they can easily hand it over to anyone on the team. This is crucial as this means that if they leave or anything happens, you can easily hire for the same position without having to lose the intelligence that has gone into teaching that person and the learning they developed by doing and enhancing their work.
Documenting the process of how they do their work, will ensure that they learn more and advance in their work.
7. Never delegate leadership, develop leaders:
you are the only person that is responsible for the totality of your business, so you must do the above yourself, do not delegate your responsibility, this is your business, you lead it, don't leave leadership to anyone else.
You must develop your people to become leaders, by giving them the space to lead and working with them, helping them, supporting them, but neve hand them leadership, that is not how it works.
By following the steps above, and by creating an environment where people are given the space to shine, you will see your team rising up to the tasks they are given and show up as leaders.
One of the other ways people can show you what kind of leaders they are is to have them help you choose the new people, train them, and support them, even if they have different tasks and different roles, they are still a team and that dynamic will help you discover what kind of people they are.
8. Security and protection:
While you can never fully protect anything, you can take conscious steps to make sure your business and the assets of your business (domains, sites...etc) are secure. Make sure you structure your contracts with your team to include nondisclosures and protection of business secrets. Include no competition clauses so they can't leave and take your clients or work for a competitor for at least 6-12 months.
Finally, never give passwords away to give people access, use password protection services like LastPass to give people access to things without sharing your passwords.
Also you can request form your service providers certain accesses to team members, that way you still have admin rights and you have the ability to add or remove people without giving access to the main account.
9. Be the role model, Keep on learning and growing:
There are many mentors, coaches, business experts out there that you can work with to continue to grow and learn how to run your business better, explore that. And there are always brilliant business books that can expand your thinking and ability to lead.
Here are a few I recommend:
Anything for Jim Collins, especially Great By Choice
Anything Seth Godin, especially Tribes
Anything Simon Sinek, especially Start With Why and Leaders Eat Last
Anything Charles Duhigg, especially The Power of Habit
I trust this is clear and helpful
Wish you all the best, and please reach out if you think there more I can help you with
An incredible learning and activating experience, you will feel super engaged and motivated to get shit done. I've also connected with some of the most influential people in Tech that are making ripples and doing amazing things.