Professional or Virtual Assistant. We use the terms Outsourced Professional (OP) and Virtual

Transcription

1 Our Quick Start Guide provided an overview of the numerous ways to utilize an Outsourced Professional or Virtual Assistant. We use the terms Outsourced Professional (OP) and Virtual Assistant (VA) interchangeably throughout this manual and can refer to a very short term project or to an ongoing permanent working relationship. The possibilities and resources available to us today to retain and manage a specialized job force outside of our own offices are endless. The world has changed dramatically in the past several years and the opportunity to grow and enhance your business easily and inexpensively is tremendously abundant. Before, you grew your business very slowly one employee at a time, now you can have an army of specialized professionals supporting your business almost immediately. Outsourcing is the perfect solution to creating a better work/life balance and allows you to focus on the highest value tasks in your business. Effective outsourcing has no down side. It will increase your productivity, passion and most definitely your bottom line profits. This manual is the details and specific how to s to achieve the penultimate actor in Outsourcing. This manual will serve as a companion and supplement to the online resources available to you. In many cases, we will refer you to a video or resource in one of the Modules as we believe sometimes it is easier to understand a visual demonstration as compared to a written demonstration.

2 Chapter 1 You Already are an Experienced Outsourcer Outsourcing is simply assigning specific tasks or projects to a person who is not an employee, does not work in your location. Although you may not realize it, you already outsource every day, all day long. For example, you outsource your utilities. You retain a company that provides electrical power, natural gas, phone service, cable service, etc. To set it up, you contacted the company, provided information to them about your needs, they set up your service and every day, at the flick of the switch, your lights come on and once a month you pay them for the service. You didn t have to figure out how to create the electrical power, how to get it flowing through your house and how to make sure it keeps flowing. Grocery shopping is outsourcing. Someone else grows the vegetables and fruits, raises the cows and chickens, creates meals out of them, packages it and brings it to the store. You are not maintaining a farm or hunting for your food in your back yard. Pumping gas? Outsourcing. Dry cleaning? Outsourcing. There are endless examples of outsources. All of these activities and services that we encounter are examples of how we already outsource in our daily lives. Easy, effortless, dependable, out of sight and out of mind. Outsourcing in your business is in essence the same process. Outsourcing day to day business functions has become revolutionary in recent years with the advancements in web-based

3 communications. What was once unthinkable to have an assistant work outside of your office, it is now commonplace to have an assistant or complicated projects performed for you business from anywhere in the world. Outsourcing for business is a simple concept. You retain an individual to do any task or project that you are not qualified to do, are not an expert at doing or do not have the time or interest in doing. The person you hire is called a virtual assistant or an outsourced professional. We will use these terms interchangeably throughout this book. They are not employees and they do not work from your office location. You do not have the hassle and responsibility of payroll taxes, government reporting, insurance, overhead, equipment, overtime or fringe benefits, no office politics or water cooler drama. You pay them an agreed amount of money per hour or per project. It is a contractual business arrangement. The VA is an independent contractor responsible for their own office environment and equipment. They will often work from home or from an office. It is likely you will never meet them but they provide an enormous positive impact in your business growth and initiatives. Any size business and especially the small business thrives with outsourcing to virtual assistants. In recent years, it has become absolutely critical for businesses to develop multiple talents or competencies to compete in the marketplace with businesses of any size. How can your small business or even a single person home based business working from home perform all the tasks related to a business with expertise without depending on other to assist? You can outsource ongoing day to day duties or specific projects.

4 Here are several reasons for outsourcing your business: You can increase the number of clients you can serve because you have an army of people working with you. You can get the benefit of having professionals who are experts in other areas of your business. They possess different qualifications and skill sets than you, allowing you to expand or enhance your business in areas you were avoiding because you lacked the expertise to create, perform and manage them. There are no limitations to your business. You cannot handle all of the tasks related to a business by yourself or with your current staff. There will be several things you are not good at doing and things that you don t like doing. If that is the case, outsourcing is a great option to accomplish these tasks. You can meet your deadlines and create more business opportunities. In many cases you will reduce your costs. If hiring a person to perform a specific task or project is expensive in your area, you could find a professional from another part of the world where that particular service is cheaper. Many companies outsource work from to the developing countries where the economics helps them hire experienced professionals at a much lower cost.

5 Chapter 2 What Can I Outsource? The better question is, what can t you outsource? Any size business has several things it must do. These include product or service development, marketing, sales, product or service delivery, accounting, reporting, managing, customer service and these are only a few broad areas that make up a business. Whether it is a home business or a large corporate conglomerate it entails a lot of people and processes. If you are planning to be a home business entrepreneur, you can see that there are various things for you to do and to master. Think of a large company and it s various departments or divisions. The diagram below is a basic organizational chart that shows the various departments in a basic business. I don t care if you are a one man shop operating out of a corner in your basement. If you are running a business, you are not only the Big Cheese, you are the Vice President, mid level manager, line manager, employee, apprentice, worker bee and rah rah volunteer of each of these departments. Even if you have an employee or a dozen employees, you are likely responsible for or at the very least participating the creation, training, implementation and management of all of these divisions. While I go take an aspirin to calm my headache from

6 thinking of this, you take a minute to digest the gravity of your situation. It is overwhelming to even think of how or where to begin let alone how to keep the moving parts running smoothly and according to your strategic plan. So, which of these processes can you outsource? The truth is virtually all of them. With the Internet, world is literally a mouse click within your reach. You can find professionals to handle all kinds of tasks. These professionals focusing on their specific task or project can create rapid results that would take you days or months to accomplish on your own while you are trying to juggle all of the rest of moving parts of your business. Once where it was thought that outsourcing your business led to unprofessional or inferior product or services, it is now a widely used and accepted method to deliver superior services that are even beyond your current skill level and expertise. Start by examining all of the tasks and process that pertains to the execution and delivery of your business product or service. For example if you are a real estate investor, your business is about marketing for potential deals, researching for potential deals, performing due diligence on the deals you find, negotiating the deal and servicing the result and paying the individuals or companies associated with the deal. You could easily outsource much or all of the marketing, research, due diligence and servicing and payment aspects of this process. This leaves you to do the personal networking in the marketing phase, negotiations and overall management of the process. With a strong outsourcing plan, you can outsource every aspect of your business except those tasks that you and only you can do. The business expert and author, Michael

7 Gerber has a theory that for your entrepreneurial business to be successful, thrive and grow, you must focus only on tasks that allow you to work on the business (building it) and not in the business (the day to day functions). If your time was freed up to focus on just these tasks, how fast and large would your business grow? Would you be able to add other areas of growth or investing to your business? Would you be able to sit back and enjoy the view from the vacation property you were able purchase with the income? Would you be able to achieve a better work/life balance when work becomes play once again? Let s revisit our quick start manual example of a business that delivers a tangible product, such as custom fly fishing lures. Your business is about developing a line of lures suited to a variety of fishing situations, marketing and selling your product in a number of venues, such as via the internet, auction sites, outfitters, trade shows, retail establishments and so on and delivering the product to service market demand for it. The product also has to be manufactured to fit a specific design using specific raw materials. The materials used to create the fishing lures must be found and purchased at the best quality and the best price. The lures must be created and e sold, inventory levels must be maintained, vendors must be paid, sales must be documents and the list goes on. Let s also say, the only thing you want to do in the business is to sit in your basement and create the most beautiful and effective fishing lures. Not a problem at all, because you can outsource the rest of the functions to others and most if not all of these functions can be coordinated from other locations and over the internet.

8 If you get tired of making lures, you can outsource that too and spend your time on some other aspect of the business that you like to do such as traveling to trade shows or better still, start another related or unrelated business or just go fishing! The best areas of your business to outsource from the beginning is the execution process of your business. Think of the execution process as being all of the things your business does to earn income. It is the services or the How s that support the Why of your business. Outsourcing the execution processes is important for the following reasons: The execution is usually the most time labor intensive time consuming tasks. It usually involves a repetitive process that is followed over and over again. The skills it requires are easy to teach others to do. Once documented the training can be delivered over and over again. The execution may also entail skills that are not your expertise. You have the availability of having highly skilled professionals on your team that already know exactly what to do and can even provide you with suggestions and guidance. The execution process is easiest to control and manage. When you are not doing all of the work yourself, you have time for review, proofing and planning. You simply manage the process and your time is free to step back and evaluate your processes, proof and tweak the delivery. Outsourcing the execution process allows you to view your business more clearly and objectively. This will allow you to focus on improving your product or service, creating new products or services, forming new referral relationships and growing you business.

9 When you are constantly working on servicing the business (working in the business), it is hard to work on developing new business (working on the business). No matter how small or large your existing business is and how accomplished you are at performing the tasks that execute your business, you are juggling too many responsibilities. There is a saying that goes, When you are the Jack of all Trades, You are the Master of None. This sounds a bit harsh but as you are juggling, balls are dropping, mistakes are made and the results are mediocre at best. The highest and best use of your time or your highest value tasks are those that create new products, build new strategic relationships and nurture your business growth. Let s examine how you should value your time by assigning an hourly rate to it. How much money would you like to make each year? $50,000? $100,000? $200,000? I want you to make millions but let s start out slowly because the results are shocking. Allow me to make the assumption that there are 220 working days per year and you work approximately 8 hours per day. You are probably working far more days and hours than that, but this assumes that you are working 5 days a week for 50 weeks from 9-5. Okay, I want that job too but This works out to 1,760 working hours per year. To achieve the 3 sample income levels per year, your hour rates would be: $28.41/hr at $50,000 $56.82/hr at $100,000 $113.64/hr at $200,000 At a million dollars, your hourly rate is $ The point is that you must begin to look at your time as being extremely valuable. Wasting even an hour on tasks that you can teach

10 others to do is dramatically impacting your bottom line. This is occurring every hour every day. Can you afford to roll down the window of your car and throw out hundred dollar bills every day? I think not. Okay, I can hear the screaming across these printed pages. I get it, you are struggling in your business and can t afford a full time assistant, even a part time assistant. For a mere Five Dollars, you can outsource a small simple task. No kidding. I m sure you have at least $5, cause a minute ago you were willing to toss $100. In the next chapters, I am going to show you a variety of tasks you can outsource and the resources you can use to find outsourcing professionals and yes, some of this only costs $5.