Are you a “Jack (or Jill) of all trades”? You know what they say about about Jacks of all trades — “master of none.” And truly, no matter how good you are at what you do, you can’t be good at everything. Nobody is great at working with both words and numbers.
Nobody can excel at the precise work of bookkeeping, the persuasive skills of collections, the person-to-person skills of sales, the creative work of writing sales letters or ads or other collateral materials, the repetitive work of data entry, the creative work of business planning, the hands-on work of management, the… whew! You get the idea.
Yet many owners of small and mid-size businesses try to be exactly that: Jack or Jill of all trades… and they wind up being masters of none. No matter how intelligent, how skilled, how talented, how creative, how clever, and how diversely capacitated you are, you cannot do everything and excel at it.
And you really don’t want to turn in a half-baked job. Especially if you yourself are the boss. (You know you’re your own most severe critic!)
What’s the answer?-:
Large companies have hundreds or thousands of people working for them. The boss — or bosses, since there are corporate V.P.s in charge of this, that, and the other — has people with particular skills working under him or her in many different departments, at many specific and pinpointed jobs.
But that’s a luxury that you, as head of a small business, don’t have… at least, not yet. (Maybe someday your company will grow that large, but to accomplish that, you’d better focus on what you’re best at: sales, management, and other key areas. And leave the rest of the work to others.)
But how, if you’re a small business with a commensurately small budget (or maybe even a one-person shop)?
As Holmes said to Watson, it’s elementary. Hire a virtual assistant. A virtual assistant can help you in diverse fields, depending on what your needs are. Some of these include data entry, bookkeeping, and even the creative job of writing. (Think sales letters. Think corporate blogs. Think press releases. And that’s just for starters.)
Stop trying to be a Jack or Jill of all trades, and let a virtual assistant handle some of the work. Start being the master of your true skills…and your ever-more-successful business.