Outsource
// February 29th, 2012 // No Comments » // Blog, Business Tips, General Ideas, making money
My business has always been a one-woman show. I’ve never considered my future to include managing employees. But recently I made a decision for my business that I truly believe is one of the best I can possibly make. I hired an assistant.
I outsourced my daily functions and repetitive tasks to a virtual assistant about a month ago and in that time my business has doubled. Before I started to outsource, I really thought I was doing a lot of work every day but what I was doing was standard work that kept my business at its current level. I was advertising and monitoring more than anything. I wasn’t bringing in new projects or moving forward on my long term plans.
Now my assistant handles all the daily work tasks. She places my ads. She monitors my current websites. She keeps my current business running while I concentrate on creating new projects and new content. In the last month alone, I’ve finished a new training website and am starting two entirely new sites.
It did take me a week to interview and hire someone. I do all my work online and my assistant actually lives in another country. We communicate through Skype in the middle of the night. And training has been an ongoing project for the person I hired. I give my assistant a list of tasks and training requests for the week, she is expected to do the work and report back to me. I test her learning and knowledge by having her complete practice tasks on a blog or writing an article for me.
I love being able to give someone a list of daily tasks that need competing and then focusing on new projects. It takes trust and the ability to delegate work but those are skills that anyone can learn.
From now on, when a business building client tells me that they work all day and don’t seem to have time for new work – I’m going to tell them to hire an assistant. Outsource your daily tasks, it really is worth the time to get someone hired and trained.
