The Lone Ranger Syndrome
July 30, 2009 by Andrea J. Lee
Filed under Beyond..., For Coaches, Meaning..., Online Business, Tools & How To
It’s time to stop doing it all…
(An excerpt from Chapter 15 in Money, Meaning and Beyond)
It’s not unusual for either of us to get variations of this question:
“Tina, I want to build my website, set up some Pink Spoons and manage my different streams of income, including online. So how do I become tech-savvy?”
Our response: “Why should you become tech-savvy?”
It’s easy when adding online elements to our business to think that we need to do it all ourselves, which simply isn’t true…
As a small business owner, isn’t your time better spent elsewhere, such as delivering value to your clients or building your business? When your time is limited, doesn’t it make sense to work on the stuff that only you can do in your business?
It’s a pet peeve of ours to see people waste their time and effort learning skills that are a poor match to their talents, they don’t enjoy, and in many cases don’t benefit their business!
So why is this so common? Most people think they can’t afford to hire help for themselves and their business, especially in the early days when cash flow may be tight. And so they resign themselves to either:
- Doing everything themselves and letting their business suffer, OR
- Under-utilizing the help that they do have, thus hampering their growth.
On behalf of your sanity and the growth of your business, hire some help sooner rather than later.
One of the best resources for support available these days is to hire a Virtual Assistant. Also known as a VA, these skilled professionals are able to help with anything from general administrative tasks, customer service, technical projects, marketing initiatives and more. The word Virtual simply refers to the fact that they work from their location, not yours, and that may mean they’re up to half way around the globe.
Because VAs usually work as contractors, you can hire them for as much or as little work as you need, be it just a few hours each week or up to full time hours as your business grows. Since VAs work from home and have their own equipment, you save the cost of hiring and housing a fulltime local assistant.
But won’t a VA – or any other kind of help for that matter – cost money? Money that you may not feel you can spare just now? The answer is yes, however there is one key point about turning a VA from a business liability, into a true asset.
Think of them as a Profit Center.
Instead of an expense, like stationary, office furniture, or your internet connection, a Virtual Assistant can be a profit center.
Most people don’t think about ‘getting help’ this way, so it’s to your benefit if you do. By focusing your VA on profit generating tasks, you leverage yourself, add capacity to your business and in fact, alleviate the pressure on you to be the only ‘bread winner’ in the business – a very common situation if you’re working solo.
Although it seems simple on the outside, this one mind-set shift will differentiate you from other business owners if you go ahead and implement it.
Ask, “How Can My Virtual Assistant Be a Profit Center In My Company?’
This mindset-shift is one of the main reasons why we have been able to help build our client companies so quickly from six figures to seven. Think about it. Being able to add capacity in a way that makes it possible for you to do much more work, more quickly, is a pretty neat thing. Not to mention bringing in more money!
Let’s talk a bit more about what these profit-generating tasks might be. First, the best VAs are NOT just glorified secretaries.
