Small business owners, business coaches and life coaches are busy and, at some point, they often come to the conclusion that they can’t do it all and be successful at the same time. Their own business coaches will often tell them they need a virtual assistant.
Does any of the following sound familiar to you?
You get overwhelmed with trying to keep up with your online presence and trying to figure out technology. You may be struggling to keep up with your social media accounts and blog. You are trying to figure out how to make changes to your website and add sales/squeeze pages. You are collecting emails on your website, and trying to send out regular newsletters and email marketing campaigns.
You are trying to sort through the hundreds of emails in your inbox (often sending out the same answers to questions over and over again). You are trying to manage selling products and services in a shopping cart and on your website, as well as develop new products and services. You are trying to launch new products and promote them through joint ventures.
You are trying to schedule appointments and send the contacts the appropriate information. You are trying to provide customer service and refunds. You are trying to do copywriting for sales pages and maybe writing for an e-book or physical book. You are trying to place ads and listings online. You are trying to research new technology that you need. You are trying to manage online membership sites.
You are trying to set up virtual events (teleseminars or webinars), and send out the appropriate information and reminders at the right times, hoping there will be no glitches, and then you have to make sure the replay is available afterward and reminders sent out. Don’t forget to make sure all of the links and corresponding download pages or sales pages are set up and all working properly! You may have promised to have the call transcribed and made available to participants, so don’t forget about that or they’ll be hounding your for it!
Are you tired yet? I’m exhausted just writing about it! How much time does this leave you to work with clients and actually make money? What about a personal life? No wonder so many entrepreneurs are overwhelmed and stressed out!
Because you are handling your website yourself, you may not have the best security measures in place and… crap, your website just got hacked. Maybe your website and blog posts haven’t been optimized for SEO (search engine optimization), so no one can easily find you in a Google search anyway.
Projects aren’t getting completed because you’re overwhelmed. You either don’t have the time or you don’t know how to use the technology to put all the pieces together.
Emails are getting overlooked or response time is slow. Same goes for responding to voice mail and customer service inquiries.
Email marketing newsletters and broadcasts get sent out occasionally, and sometimes with typos or display errors (images in the wrong place because of email/browser incompatibility and lack of testing before sending).
Instead of having a consistent social media presence with a social media strategy and marketing plan, you disappear for days or weeks at a time, you market too much (buy from me, buy from me, buy from me), and/or your profiles may not be completely filled out and optimized. Or you may be wasting too much time on social media and not getting results. We all know how easy that is to do!
Then what happens if you get sick, go on vacation, go to a networking event, or host or attend a live coaching event? Will everything continue to run smoothly, or will everything pile up or fall apart because there is no plan and there are no systems in place?
Does all of this leave you any time to work with more clients and come up with creative new ideas for products and programs?
You need to focus your time on activities that:
- Bring in the most money
- You love to do
- You are strongest in (your talents)
Everything else may need to be done, but does it need to be done specifically by you? Delegating does mean giving up some degree of control, but you always have input and the final say. If you already know exactly how everything works and the exact steps you need to have things done, you can always develop a procedures manual for a virtual assistant to follow. Otherwise, a virtual assistant with experience in specific areas can step in and get everything working for you. Depending on the help you need, this may require one virtual assistant or a few. Not all VAs are alike due to specialization and services offered.
If you would like to set up a Complimentary 30-minute Discovery Session to determine if we would work well together, you can schedule your preferred time in my calendar below:
Great breakdown of tasks! No wonder bus owners get overwhelmed with social media and the like! thanks for sharing! great job! Patricia
I’m glad you liked it!
Love the value you have shared about VA’s. I think they are valuable and they help and assist in taking out alot of the mundane stuff that allows entrepreneurs to focus on bigger tasks at hand. Great post Lisa!
Thank you!
Loved this Lisa, I had a site that got hacked and left me with a tonne of broken links to get fixed. I never seemed to have the time to fix things and then I emailed my list and said “who can fix this for me?”, I gave the 2nd applicant the job and she was brilliant. I wish I’d found her sooner.
That is awesome! Not that you got hacked, but that you so easily found the right person to help you. 🙂
VA's are special people – I LOVE it!
I like to think so! 😀
Bobbie, how did you get in my head :). I have been looking for someone who “gets” what I do without having to do most of the tasks myself anyway. I guess it’s a matter of finding the right fit. Thanks for the great post!
Lisa – great article!
This is great information. I keep saying I want to hire a VA. Now to figure out how to fit it in my budget!
Thanks for breaking it down! Focusing on what's important and leaving the rest to a VA can make a lot of sense!
I’ve been toying with the idea of hiring a VA again for a while, and I probably will at some point. One of the things that stopped me was being uncertain what to delegate – you’ve just alleviated part of that!
Thank you for a wonderful post.
I agree – outsourcing certain tasks can be a great benefit for small biz owners!
Megan
Founder
Photorelli – Mobile Phone Photography Tips
http://photorelli.com/
Yes- it’s hard to do it all, Lisa, isn’t it! As a life coach working with midlife moms and mamas, my clients often find it hard to give themselves breathing room (they feel unjustified in taking five minutes of time for themselves sometimes!). We talk about feeding our own spirits, minds and bodies first, in order to be able to give and nurture to the degree that we’d like to. Same thing here- we can’t do EVERYTHING and do it all with excellence!
Great post, thanks for sharing!
Great summary Lisa!
In my business my two biggest breakthroughs were:
1. hiring my coach and
2. hiring a VA
It took me 2 years to let go of my fear of delegation, but once I finally did it, I realized that I became a time millionaire!
Brilliant! And just love the image which says it all. Together with your VA skills and my nutrition work we could have women entrepreneurs cool calm and collected! PS I do have a VA who I could not thrive without but after hearing a recent call about having backups in place, we should talk. My VA is away visiting family and I’ve really missed her these last 2 weeks!
Wow; no wonder I’m overwhelmed! I definitely fit your description of the typical solopreneur.
I’ve known for some time that I would need a VA: This is a great reminder of the things I should look at outsourcing first.
Peggy Lusk
Financial Coach – The Geek with a CPA
Abundance-by-Design . com
Ahh, someday I’ll be able to afford a VA…
Seriously, though, I could be so much more productive if I had someone to share the load with. Then I could just coach my face off!
As I was reading, I kept saying, " Right, right, right…". All concerns. We spend so much time working in the business, that we cannot work on the business. Great job!
Great post! You're right, there is an awful lot of business tasks that go along with running a business…sometimes it can crowd out the creative side. Thanks for sharing.
Good reminders how I SO need a VA! I have a part-time business manager but with my video summit she is pretty focused on that and all the other stuff you mention is definitely back burner. Like I just realized I forgot to put the link to the video series on my home page! I even had my designer make a graphic for it. sigh
That’s great info! I have had an assistant doing other things. Maybe I need them to do social media stuff as well!
Thanks for the head’s up!
VA's can be very helpful indeed!
My coder is trying to convince me to move to .net from PHP.
I have always disliked the idea because of the expenses.
But he’s tryiong none the less. I’ve been using WordPress
on various websites for about a year and am anxious about switching to
another platform. I have heard great things about blogengine.net.
Is there a way I can import all my wordpress posts into it?
Any help would be greatly appreciated!
Sorry, I really don’t know anything about blogengine.net and what tools might be available. Try googling “wordpress to blogengine.net.” There are pages of links that come up. I don’t know why you would want to move from WordPress though, if you are using your website for your business.