When your business is growing but still small, you, the owner, want to maximize your time (and that of any employees you have working for you) so that you can use your workhours to your best benefit.
From bookkeeping to research, from posting your ads on CraigsList and its competitors to seeking out the best-priced suppliers (or the ones who can deliver fastest), there is a plethora of tasks that need to be done but that don’t require your particular talents.
Your time should be spent writing ads (if you haven’t also outsourced that function), meeting with prospective clients/customers, hiring new employees, thinking about new products and services to offer, working up business plans, making sales calls, and other tasks that require your creativity, your leadership, your direction, your special talents and skills. And your employees, if you have them, should spend their time utilizing the skills for which you hired them.
When you first started the business, maybe you did absolutely everything yourself and perhaps still had time to spare. But now your business is starting to take off, and you need to conserve your time for work that really requires you to do it. Save the other work for others — particularly virtual assistants. Here are some tips.
1 – Rather than hiring employees to do everything you don’t do yourself, consider hiring a virtual assistant to undertake some of the tasks you want to lay off on others. You pay for just the tasks performed. When you have no tasks you need accomplished, you pay nothing.
2 – A virtual assistant’s help can surpass that of a temp or part-timer who works onsite, not only in quality of work but also in cost-effectiveness. And the same person or company can perform multiple tasks for you.
3 – Choose a multifaceted service, preferably one with a staff of more than one person (for diversity of capability).
4 – Think outside the box in terms of what tasks you can delegate to your virtual assistant. You may hire the service to do your bookkeeping and then realize you can also hire the same service to surf the web and see what your competitors are up to and present this info to you in a report.
5 – Whenever you delegate a task to the virtual assistant, be as specific as possible about what it is you need. Ask, “Can you handle this comfortably?” if it’s something the person or service has not done for you before. Ask what the cost will be, so there are no misunderstandings or shocks afterward. Make sure the assistant comprehends fully exactly what it is you are expecting him or her to do.