Learning to delegate doesn’t come easy. We want to control our businesses – and there’s nothing wrong with that – but one day you will realize that it’s impossible for you to do everything. Impossible to do everything while trying to grow your business; impossible for you to do everything and have a life outside of your business. When that day arrives – hopefully sooner than later for your sake – you will be looking to delegate certain tasks in your business. A Virtual Assistant (VA) may be the right solution for you.
Hiring a VA
Hiring a Virtual Assistant (VA) is one of the best ways to delegate effectively. Remember, the right VA will be a business person just like yourself and will understand that delegation is key to running an efficient business. A VA can assist you in your business virtually – there are VA’s who do admin tasks, bookkeeping, website design, travel, social media, marketing, copywriting – and everything in between! And there are multi-VA companies that have a team of VA’s that can be your one-stop office support system as well – for the same price as a single VA. The benefit is that you have one source for everything you need.
Virtual Assistants enable a solopreneur, small, medium or large business to get all the work done necessary to run a business – the back-end stuff – so the business owner can work on growing the business.
What Are the Savings?
A legitimate VA is a 1099, which means you don’t pay payroll taxes or benefits; no need to provide an office space for an in-house assistant, no purchase and maintenance of equipment and best of all – only paying for the work that is actually done!
If you already have an in-house assistant, you can utilize the services of a VA when you have extra work without having to hire another part-time or full-time assistant. We work with quite a lot of businesses that have down-sized and thinned their staff. Unfortunately, many times the workload is just too much for the remaining staff, but it doesn’t quite justify hiring more in-house staff. The businesses that are asking more of the remaining staff are setting themselves up for problems. If you overload staff, something is going to go wrong eventually.
Take this story, for example: A business started downsizing their staff. Eventually there was one faithful employee left, but now she had to do the work of the other employees that were laid off in addition to her own. She spent her days putting out fires and was never able to get to the day-to-day work of the business. Although she put in long hours every day, it was just impossible for her to ever get caught up. She got burned out and they lost her; and because they couldn’t bring in someone to do everything she did, they had to bring in three people to do what she was doing – but they were all new and didn’t know the business like she did. The business suffered greatly, and may not recover for a long time.
What could they have done? They could have hired a VA to assist her, so she would have been able to delegate tasks to the VA(s) so she could take care of the tasks that had to be done by her. It would have cost the business more up front, of course – but less than the price it ultimately cost the business.
Finding a VA
It is not always easy to find the right VA for you and your business. Word of mouth is great, but that is not a guarantee that the VA your friend recommends will work well with you. And, unfortunately, there are a lot of people out there that feel the prerequisite of being is VA is having a computer to work with from home because they’ve lost their job.
An option would be to visit TheRightVA.com which is a matching site for VA’s and clients – no more going through the arduous process of submitting an RFP and then getting all kinds of responses from VA’s that you really don’t know anything about. The VA’s on the site must possess some stringent qualifications, ensuring that they are experienced professionals and cream of the crop.
Where to Start
If you’re not sure where to start to delegate, I recommend that you keep a list for a week of everything you do. Keep a pad and paper with you for an entire week, jot down notes on your smart phone, keep your notepad open on your computer – whatever method you would like – but keep a list somewhere. After that week, assemble your list in one place and look at it. Put a check by every single item on your list that someone else could do for you. Then narrow down that list to the top three most important items that you do that need to get done – but not by you. Then ask yourself: 1) How much of your time is wasted by doing tasks that someone else could be doing for you? 2) How much is your time worth? 3) What will you be able to do with the time that you’ve found by delegating?
The Recap
Learn to delegate.
Realize the savings.
Find a professional VA that you can work with.
Delegate.
You can do it!
Virtual Caffeine 