on January 22, 2021
When it’s time to scale your business, that usually means it’s also time to grow your team. You need to get the right people in the right seats on the bus to maximize productivity, optimize your operations and, ultimately, increase your bottom line.
While this sounds good on paper, realistically, there are some pain points that need to be poked before a business owner finally invests in adding people.
The good news is you don’t need to jump right into hiring employees. Sometimes you may not need or want permanent, on-site employees (I’m looking at you, work-from-home-er’s), and sometimes it makes more financial sense to outsource specific tasks instead of committing to an employee.
Luckily, there’s an entire industry dedicated to filling this gap. Here are five signs that it’s time to hire a virtual assistant.
1. You’re spending more than 50% of your time in the business instead of on it.
We all know the sermon. “You should be spending the bulk of your time on your business instead of in it! Finding clients, marketing, strategic planning, client services, and super-high-value work is where your time is best spent! Get out of the daily grind!”
While that’s great in theory, let’s be honest … it’s sometimes not realistic, especially for small business owners. We all need to dive into the weeds sometimes to solve problems or extinguish fires. Sometimes, we want to get our hands dirty and work in the trenches of our business; for some of us, it’s being able to practice our craft or learn something new, and it reminds us why we went into business in the first place!
But, track your time for a few weeks and, if you find you’re consistently spending more than 50% of your time in the weeds, then it’s time to find someone to delegate something – anything – to. It’s time to hire a virtual assistant.
2. You’re bumping your head against the ceiling of capacity.
This is especially true for billable-hour business models. There are so many hours in a day, which means you can only work with so many clients. It doesn’t matter if you max out at 10 clients or 100 … there’s still a maximum you can work with.
So, it’s time to figure out what you can offload to a support staff so you can increase capacity. Client onboarding steps? Regular reporting? Calendar support? Operational processes? Marketing lifecycle tasks? Hiring a virtual assistant can help you manage these support tasks.
3. You have (or know you need!) processes, procedures, and checklists for routine operations.
Everyone knows the backbone of any business includes repeatable processes, standard procedures, and operational checklists. But, developing them may not be your strength. Or, if you have them, you find you’re running all these processes and checklists yourself … and you don’t have to.
The point of processes, procedures and checklists is to make life more efficient. But, they’re also designed to be repeatable and – listen carefully – delegateable.
4. You need a specific skill set to “next level” your services.
At the beginning, most of us did all the things ourselves – from providing services to updating our Websites to bookkeeping to creating our marketing materials. It’s bootstrapping at its best, and is practically a right of passage for most small business owners.
But, you’ll get to a point where you need to “next level” things in order to continue growing and honing your brand, your operations, and your services. While the work you did at the beginning was sufficient, it’s time to bring in an expert. If you hire a virtual assistant (or an entire virtual assistant firm), they typically bring a wide skillset to the table — from expert graphics to financial reporting to copyediting to project management to business process development.
5. You want to make more money or, worse, you’re losing money.
This is a culmination of all the previous signs. At some point, you’re going to start losing money by not delegating or doing it all yourself. The math doesn’t lie; you get to a point where you can’t afford not to grow your team. If your time is worth $100/hour, it doesn’t make sense to spend too much time on $50/hour work; in general, that $50/work is stuff that needs to get done, but is also stuff you’ll never get paid for.
Growing your team is a big deal. It requires reaching some pain points that you can’t tolerate anymore, a little bit courage, and finding the right fit for your needs. But, thanks to an industry that’s dedicated to helping clients fill this gap and allowing them to scale, virtual support services and virtual assistants can be the perfect next step in growing your business.
