Amanda McVicker (00:00)
Hello and welcome to this week's episode of the OBM educator.
I am going to dive right into today's topic because I think this is one of the most common questions that I get as an OBM educator mentor when someone is first starting as an OBM. What am I not responsible for?
When we're first starting out, we want to be helpful. We want to, we are eager, right? We want to help our clients. And that usually gets us trapped into doing things that one, we don't want to do, but two things that should never have been our responsibility to begin with. And so today we're going to cover what some of those things are. This is definitely not an exhaustive list.
This is a generalization. You might something and be like, well, I actually like doing that. And that is totally The main thing to think about with these things that I am sharing is it is going to come back to what is your comfort level, right? You're gonna hear a lot of these things and this is going to be permission for you to not do these things.
But if there is something that you have expertise in, you have background knowledge in, and you enjoy doing it, go for it. Like this is your business, you do what you wanna do. But take this list as kind of the examples of things that a general OBM should not have responsibility over. So let's dive into it.
So the first thing on my list is not necessarily a task, it's something that I want you to remember as an OBM. And that thing is results. You are not responsible for your client's results. You are not responsible for your client's results in a launch. You are not responsible for your client's results to their clients. You are not responsible for your client's results in general.
Right? You are putting together the back end pieces. You are making sure that things are where they need to be, when they need to be. But you are not responsible for the results that they garner. Right? You are not responsible for what happens. That is your client's responsibility. is something that your client should take on. Feel the burden.
I'm afraid not you.
It is something that I always hear from those that I'm mentoring, new OBMs, people who've gone through my course, that they worried when their client doesn't get the results that they wanted because they think it comes back onto them for some reason.
and that is simply not the case.
If you have done your job as the OBM, and by this I truly mean, you know, the If set everything if a place for people to go to whatever it is that they're launching, there's a system in place, and not that there's like some above and beyond thing. If you have done setup was agreed to,
you have done your job. The results after that is out of your hands. And so do not take the responsibility of results onto your shoulders because that is just a slippery slope to...
undo stress and
nervousness when it really shouldn't be yours. So that is the first thing you are not responsible for. Results.
The rest of the things on this list are actual items.
Next being CEO level tasks. So this is your planning, your budgeting, your setting vision, All of these things an OBM can support on, know, if you want. So like with planning, the CEO is probably going to come to you as the OBM for support in that, right? You're not coming up with the
launch ideas, you might help with the schedule of what makes sense based on their audience and the time and what's going on in the business, right? Like that's where you come in, but you are not the one being like in January, we are going to launch this course. In February, we're going to come up with this new course. In March, we are going to promote our membership, right? All of that really is on the CEO to be
figuring out that planning. And then you as the OBM execute that And you can be, again, you can be involved in it, in the planning, the strategy, all of that, but the ultimate planning really does belong with the CEO. It is their business. They are the ones who are planning everything they're doing.
with budgeting. are the ones, the CEOs are the ones who their money. It is their money, right? So they're the ones who budget where it goes. They're the ones who are doing their accounting that off to an accountant or a bookkeeper. You really should not be in your client's books and making sure things are categorized correctly,
benefits, write-offs are accurate. Unless you have an accounting background, this is something that you should not be in.
them to hire a bookkeeper because that should not be your responsibility or on your plate.
And then the last thing in this CEO tasks is the vision. You are not responsible for figuring out where that business is going. Again, that is the CEO's job.
Sometimes I hear it from new OBMs
or even experienced OBMs that their client kind of takes, they take themselves out of it, right? They're like, no, you can just, you know, go ahead and do all of this stuff. It is not the OBMs business. It is the CEO's business. It's their client's that client needs to be responsible for where that business is going.
So the next thing that an OBM is not responsible for selling, Unless you have signed on with your client as a seller, you are not responsible for selling. That includes taking sales calls, having sales conversations in the DMs,
And I would even say providing engagement. Anything that is a selling activity should not be your responsibility. You are board as the person who is running things behind the scenes so that your client can show up and sell. They should not be pushing that off to you.
If your client wants to off-board selling, they can hire a seller. They can hire an engagement specialist. They can hire...
someone who does that professionally, right? As OVMs, obviously we do sell, but we don't sell for our clients. That is not zone of genius. That is not what we started our business to do. And you should not take on that responsibility.
for a client.
you that gets back into you're not responsible for results. A seller somewhat of a responsibility for results, for closing sales. An engagement specialist has somewhat of a responsibility for getting warm leads, getting hot leads.
It is not part of the OBM job description to sell.
And I would encourage you to not even let that door open a little bit. I have talked OBMs before. have been asked by my own OBM clients if I would consider selling to, you know, get a percentage of the sales, get compensated additionally for that. And it is just not something that I think an OBM should get involved in.
Obviously every situation is different. So if this does not apply to you, don't let it apply to you. But I think for the majority of people, for the majority of OBMs, you should not get involved in the selling piece. You can create systems that make selling easier. You can help in creating funnels that, automate sales, all of that stuff. Like sure, go for it if that's what you enjoy doing.
but you should not person in the sales process. Keep everything that you do on the backend.
And then this leads into the last thing that I think that OBM should stay away from because it's not your responsibility. that is providing specialized support. I'm going to preface this at the beginning unless you have experience in it, it is your background and you definitely need this and, and it is something that you want to do. I would not.
say yes to providing these services. And so this is going to include things like copywriting, graphic design, podcast editing, website building from scratch, right? All of these things like the graphic design is not saying you can't create something in you're not putting together.
brand assets or a whole.
design portfolio, something like that. Copywriting, not saying you can't put together like a paragraph that goes onto social media, but writing sales pages.
creating emails and social media from scratch, right? That's not your job. That's not the OBM's responsibility. If your client is wanting to off-board that, they should hire a specialist in those
you should not be writing all of your clients' social media posts. You should not be writing all of your clients' emails. If you are repurposing and that is something that you want to be doing under content management, sure. If you want to guide the strategy behind it,
If you wanna help with what topics your clients should be putting out there on social media, sure, go for it. But as an OBM, you really should not be getting involved in those specialized tasks. That should be left someone who has more of that specialization.
And this is not to say that you would not be good at those things that taking time to do them like would be harder for you, right? I am saying this from the purpose of is an OBM's
It is higher level tasks and strategies and systems and management that these things, specialized projects, tasks take away If you only have a 20 hour retainer and you're editing a podcast each week, that's gonna take a significant amount of time from your retainer.
and you're not really gonna be able to devote the time you need to to those other things.
And so when you're looking at your task breakdown, you're really not serving in an OBM capacity. And again, you want to end up being a podcast editor and start a podcast editing agency, podcast management agency, then sure, do more podcast editing. But if you are wanting to be an OBM to be a...
Full-fledged OBM who is only handling OBM things don't take on things that are not OBM things at the end of the day.
So again, this is not an exhaustive list. There are definitely other things out there that OBMs really shouldn't be doing So if you have a question on something of, I don't know if this is an OBM task or not, feel free to send me a DM on Instagram at AmandaMcVicker underscore OBM, or send me an email at hello at AmandaMcVicker.com.
I would be happy to chat through with you what is and is not an OBM responsibility. But this is a good, this list is a good starting point for really.
determining your tasks what is and is not an OBM task.
And if you're interested, I could have another episode on what to do.
if you find out that a lot of tasks you're doing are not OBM tasks and you want to change that, like that could definitely be a podcast episode in the future. So just let me know. hope this was helpful for you and I will talk with you guys next week. Bye.
