Quick quiz:
- What’s your business?
- How do you spend your time?
If you answered differently to each of those questions, you might be wasting your time rather than investing it in your business. There are a hundred little – and big – tasks that need to get done every month for your business. Collecting payments, making payments, processing registrations for an event, handling e-mail and voice mail messages while you’re traveling…the list goes on and on. But your time and energy don’t. So what’s your first thought when someone suggests you hire someone to help you? Pick all that apply below (and see the responses in parentheses).
- I’d rather do it myself. (Shouldn’t you be focusing on your actual business, the thing that you’re so good at you decided to launch a business for it?)
- I want to learn how to do it. (Why? If it doesn’t help you grow your business, this may be a control issue that is working against you and holding you back from big success.)
- I enjoy doing it. (If you enjoy doing it so much, why isn’t that your business?)
- I don’t have enough work to hire someone even part time. (You don’t need to! That’s what a virtual assistant is for. What a great segue.)
- I can’t afford to hire someone. (You can’t afford not to. The time you spend trying to learn something new is time you aren’t spending on the idea that prompted you to start your business to begin with.)
We say these things because we’re women so we’re used to picking up the slack, multitasking to the nth degree, and getting by with six hours of sleep and a part-skim mozzarella cheese stick for lunch. Imagine what you could be spending your time on if you let a professional handle the support functions of your business. How much more successful would your business be? A virtual assistant provides a variety of services that support your business.
You can:
- hire a virtual assistant for as little as a few hours a month and as much as 40 hours a week. Start off with a small task or project to test the waters and make sure you’ve found the right assistant before getting into a huge project.
- pay said virtual assistant by the hour, the project, or on a retainer.
- find a virtual assistant who can help with just about any business activity: bookkeeping, travel arrangements, event planning details, database management, marketing, Web site management…and a whole lot more.
So our business tip today is: do what you set out to accomplish by starting your own business. Leave the rest to someone else.
On our Blog Talk Radio show, Wendy interviewed Linda Siniscal,owner of Third Hand Secretarial Service LLC. Linda offers excellent tips on what kinds of tasks and projects are best suited to a virtual assistant and how to find one best suited to your needs. Listen to the interview.
Want to get more great information about how to start and grow your business? We wrote the book on that very topic. Check out The Sassy Ladies’ Toolkit for Start-Up Businesses; click on the book graphic on our Home page or go to amazon.com. From Amazon.com customer review, Lilli Spencer: “If you are considering starting your own business, this should be the first book you read. As I go through the process of building my new business, I continue to refer back to this book. By far, this is one of the best resources out there for new entrepreneurs!”
Opening my first business at 19, I thought I could do it all! Many moons later I realized it was best to hire thoese individuals who were great, and loved to do those things I was not good at. Each person got hired into the company based on their assests, interviews were based around what the company needed, and direct scenarios referencing what those needs were. What I learned is that each employee was able to flourish and work to the best of thier ability. They were doing what they were good at, proud of their work and carried a large sense of completion and satisfaction which was reflected in the business.
Thanks for sharing that, Maureen! You hit the nail on the head when you said you hired people who “loved to do those things I was not good at”. We all can’t be good at everything, and we do best the work we love to do. It’s a great way to keep your passion for your business alive, and someone else appreciates having the work!
Hi Maureen!
You bring up a great point: if you aren’t loving what you’re doing…why are you doing it? Of course, we all have obligations that we must “woman-up” to do, but very often it’s really a matter of letting go. Small business can take a lesson from big business – there are really good reasons an accountant in finance isn’t asked to create a marketing campaign. In fact, that would make an excellent blog post all on its own. Stay tuned!