Richard Branson famously says, “There are no quick wins in business – it takes years to become an overnight success.”
I was reminded of this quote recently as I heard yet another potential client voice hopes that hiring a Virtual Assistant would be the solve all, quick fix that they’d been searching for!
Yes, that’s right I wanted to say… and I’ll wave my magic wand and all of your problems will be solved immediately. I’m that good.
Well, I’m pretty sure you can see where I’m headed with this so let me start by letting you in on a little secret…
I have been running my business, Virtual Elves, for 6 years now and over this time we have provided Virtual Assistants to over 50 small businesses and solo entrepreneurs around the world. And during this time I can boldly say I have made one distinct observation…
…there is no magic pill. No quick fix. No silver bullet.
But let me tell you what I’ve discovered there is.
There is a process.
A process that is essential. And when you master this process, it will ensure that when you do go ahead and hire a Virtual Assistant to grow and scale your business, it will be a real and ongoing long-term success.
Now, this process is not for the faint hearted – it’s not a magic pill, remember? You must be prepared to put in some effort and keep working on this process, refining it and making it work for you and your business.
So here it is… your core process to follow for outsourcing success.
IDENTIFY, PLAN, RECRUIT – your process for hiring a Virtual Assistant
Key to the process of outsourcing to a Virtual Assistant is identifying what your needs are before you hire support for your business. You see, most of the time, we don’t know ourselves what we actually need someone to help us with.
Almost always, if I was to ask you to recall from memory what tasks you complete in your day, what you recall is not the entire story. Delving deeper, well below the surface of the day to day, is what it takes to uncover the real truth behind what support you actually need.
In most businesses there are 4 key areas that the running of your business fall into. These are Administration, Communications, Technical and Sales + Marketing.
Identify
To get started, I suggest that you create a spreadsheet with each of these areas as subheadings and for one week, note down every single task that you work on and the time that you took to complete each step of each task.
You will very quickly start to see a picture of what tasks are creating a bottleneck within your business and how little time you are spending in your zone of genius or as I like to call it, your zone of passion!
Plan
Once you’ve identified the tasks that you’ve been performing but would be better handled by someone else, it’s time to create your Outsourcing Plan.
Using the inventory of tasks from the previous step, sort them by frequency. What tasks are done daily, weekly, monthly and quarterly? Now identify which of these tasks you wish to outsource and voila – you’ve created an Outsourcing Plan.
Recruit
By crafting a job description for a Virtual Assistant you have a document to brief your outsourcing solutions partner with, this will be your gamechanger. I promise.
Approaching the outsourcing of your tasks to a Virtual Assistant in the same way you would recruit any other high value team member creates a smooth experience for all involved and ensures the addition to your team of a professional and focused member.
As you can see, hiring a Virtual Assistant to outsource your bottleneck tasks to, is not a quick fix but when you invest time in following the process I have outlined above you will be guaranteed more time in your passion zone which leads to more money and more growth for your business.
Would you like more information on each of the steps within this process? If you’ve been putting off doing things in your business because you don’t know how to do them or you’re sick of feeling bogged down in the day to day of business and feel like you’re losing your passion for what you do, click here to join us for a free online workshop.
On this online workshop you will learn how to get out of your own way so that you can build a support team, grow an organised, systemised and profitable business and get back to doing what it is you really love! And you will get the opportunity to ask Kristy questions during our live Q+A session! Click here to register today (and if you can’t make the call live you will receive a recording, but only if you’ve registered!)
