Written By: Robert Livingston (CEO, Impact)
Jan 17, 2020 | 3:15pm
If you run a business that is not oriented toward growth, and you are the main driver of the business, you will eventually, 100% of the time, become burned out.
The fact is, entrepreneurs thrive on creativity, on growing something new. So, to get stuck in a cycle that has you doing the same work, day in and day out, year in and year out -- emailing, invoicing, posting on social media, and so on --- will kill your spirit.
So how do we get out of that? How do we find a way to create a sustaining businesses that doesn’t require a life sentence of repetitive labor?
We need to have someone who can do tasks for us continually, how we want them done, and when we want them done, without a dramatic increase in costs and complications that comes with hiring full time employees.
The solution is a Virtual Assistant. Someone who can take as many hours of menial tasks off your plate every day as you need, without you having to commit to paying them full time with benefits, work space, etc.
There are a lot of faulty mentalities and misconceptions about outsourcing that hold small business owners back from using VA’s, but at the end of the day you need to ask yourself two questions:
1. Why did you start this business?
2. What did you want out of your business at the end of the day?
Chances are, your answers will gravitate toward one of the following answers:
- You want to be financially prosperous and think that your business can grow
- You want to have more free time, more energy, and to do less meaningless busy work
- You don’t want to have a boss, you want to BE the boss
- You absolutely love what you do
Let’s look at how these goals are helped by having a VA:
1. GETTING RICH: You simply cannot get rich by doing every task yourself. There are only so many hours in the day, and way too many a jobs that need to be done in a company. So you need help, especially on the non-money making tasks. But while help for highly-skilled work is expensive, for lower end menial tasks, VA’s are the absolute cheapest!
This is how you get out of doing each and every small task yourself, and actually grow your business.
2. FREE TIME: VA’s full purpose is to free time for you -- if you are stuck doing multiple little tasks, your time and energy are not only sucked into those, but are sucked into the “transition time” of those, or the time it takes you to go from one task to the next without getting caught on email or facebook. When you have a VA, your main task is simply to go through your todo list and make sure they know what they have to take care of -- which takes a fraction of the time of doing the actual tasks!
3. BE THE BOSS: With a VA, you are now the boss! You have the power to say “do this by this day” and to say “organize this exactly how I need it”. THAT’S POWER! No longer do you have to procrastinate doing tasks you don’t want to. No longer will you need to constantly be adding to your backlog of to do’s. Now, you can delegate the menial work to someone else and devote your time to actually BUILDING the business like a boss should!
4. LOVE WHAT YOU DO: Having a VA allows you to do LESS of what you don’t want to do and MORE of what you actually want to do! One of my businesses was working with kids in sports-- the more time on the field I got with the kids, the happier I was! The more time I had to organize spreadsheets, get t-shirt sizes, track weekly lesson payments and packages, email parents, etc, the more I hated my “entrepreneurial” life. Yes, administrative tasks will always be there when running a business, but the first step is realizing YOU don’t have to do them!
The point is, when you are lost in the forest, you can only see the trees. When you step out of the forest, suddenly the whole landscape becomes much more clear.
Having a VA gives you that bird’s eye view, getting you out of the weeds of organizing emails and typing up invoices, and instead allowing you to focus only on the big picture of your business’ future.
Leveraging a VA to take care all of your small tasks is the most cost-effective (and therefore least risky) way to save time, as well as get valuable peace of mind knowing that all menial work is off your plate!
