Have you ever wondered why some business owners always seem to be busy answering calls, sending emails and generally running around like a chicken with its head cut off and other business owners stay later in meeting, socialise more and generally seem to have more time on their hands?
Time and Money Are Both Commodities
When most people (myself included) first start an internet business you have plenty of time and not much money. You invest your time into your business plentifully in the hope of making a bunch of money. When your efforts start paying off and you start to see results and you say to yourself “This is great, but where did all my free time go!”
Eventually in the process of growing your ebusiness you get to a stage where you have to move from the role of a star performer (sales, customer service, etc) to that of a conductor (CEO, manager, outsourcer) where you are no longer facing the audience (customers) and although you are the one conducting the show you must also ensure that your other star performers get the lion share of the praise.
Doing it and outsourcing it are not the same skill
And here is the kicker, the skills you will learn getting the job outsourced like communication, clarification and following up are completely different a skillset from that in which the job requires to get done.
Think of it this way, if you have a leaking tap and you need it fixed you can:
a) Spend hours learning how to fix it yourself and still probably mess some part of it up, or
b) call a plumber to fix it for you
Now ask yourself this question, if you have 134 taps, 53 light switches and 46 holes in the wall to fix which option will get the jobs done faster?
Now you may be asking “what does this have to do with business?” here are just a few examples of the jobs that you don’t have to do and can get outsourced cheaply with a virtual personal assistant:
- Setting up an aweber email campaign
- Uploading your files via ftp
- Contacting potential affiliate partners and managing the relationship
- Answering the phone
- Making appointments
Infact as Tim Ferris proved you can even outsource your dating life…
So I have a question for you, name something in the comments and I will see if I can think of a way to get it outsourced.
Mike McMahon
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Nice article Mike. I actually saw a video of Tim Ferriss talking about outsourcing his online dating. Then I heard about this company from a friend. Really crazy the stuff you can outsource for the sake of time efficiency these days!