How a VA Can Help You Grow Your Business
Out tasking (one-time or short-term projects with a revolving door of contractors) can be a great way to gain experience outsourcing, and get a feel for developing your systems and team building skills.
Ultimately, the idea is to find your superstar talent and hire them full-time or part-time as part of your team. A virtual assistant is an umbrella term that covers a person with a wide variety of skill sets, generally specializing in a handful of related tasks.
These skill sets can be anything from administrative, operations, technical, customer service and creative skills such as writing or graphics. In a perfect world, we would find somebody who had a skill set that matched our needs to a tee.
There will always be a place for those occasional tasks where you don’t really need a full-time team member to do a steady stream of those particular types of jobs. What I would like to explore in this post, is how much more beneficial having your own virtual assistant (VA)can be.
Frequently, virtual assistants tend to be female, though there are certainly many excellent male assistants as well. For this post, I’ll refer to the VA as a female.
A true VA – while she is an independent businesswoman, with more than one client – will help you feed and nurture your business. She’ll have a strong interest in seeing it thrive, and she’ll take almost as much pride in it as you will. Hiring a VA with this approach will create other benefits:
1. You’ll be able to truly delegate, handing over the reins with confidence! Not the reins to your whole business, of course – but to those areas that suck your energy dry, and don’t make you money! You’ll have the confidence of knowing that she’s thinking on her feet and is far more likely to catch errors in the areas she’s responsible for than you are!
2. You won’t have to worry about and spend endless hours dealing with the “weak spot” she’s filling any more. If you’ve hired her knowing exactly what you need her for and why, she will boost your productivity and help your business flow more smoothly. The two of you will create a dynamic team, building confidence in your clients or customers.
3. She’ll generate more income for you. By taking care of tasks you’d spend hours struggling through – hours you really can’t justify billing your clients for – she’s freeing you up to get on with your money-making tasks. In short, you’ll be making double the money, because you’re putting in more hours on billable stuff – with less work!
4. You’ll have someone to bounce ideas off. True brainstorming can open you up to possibilities you may never have even considered! And if she’s in tune with your business values and goals, you’ll soon start noticing that the tiny percentage of “keeper” ideas you both come up with often hit the “brilliant” range. (If you’re trying to think up ideas all by yourself, you’ll be more likely to miss opportunities by falling back on old patterns of thinking.)
5. VA’s and other outsourcing contractors come in all shapes and sizes. That is, their skills, talents and specialties do! There is a vast pool to fish in out there, and you can find one that fits your business needs perfectly. Especially if you take the time to identify your specific problems that need solving, and choose a specialist in that area.
Of course, it’s absolutely crucial to know how to choose properly, so that you don’t end up repeating past hiring mistakes, or even simply getting the wrong fit (and realizing it later!) I recommend learning how through:
http://www.EasyOutsourceVideos.com
That’s where you’ll find out how to spot the diamonds, and give the lemons a wide berth. This series will guide you through the basics, including advanced training on gettin the most out of your outsourcing endeavors.
Howard Tiano (a.k.a. the “OutSourcerer”) has been marketing online since 2005, and creates products and training around outsourcing for Internet Marketers.
