Archives March 2013

Don’t-Devalue-Your-Time-Outsource-to-a-Virtual-Assistant

Don’t Devalue Your Time – Outsource to a Virtual Assistant

Outsourcing your tasks to a virtual assistant (such as a web designer, SEO/SMM specialist or a general admin assistant) is a MUST if you’re a serious entrepreneur.  To become a serious entrepreneur, you have to assess the value of your time. How much are you worth per hour currently? Take your yearly salary and divide it by 2000 to get your per hour rate eg. if you’re earning a salary of $50 000 a year from your business, you’re earning $25/hour. How much would you like to be worth per hour, $50, $150, $300 or more? Decide what you want to earn per hour and then from there work on a plan to achieve it.

 

As an entrepreneur, there’s no limit to how much you can make, however, there is a limit to how much time you have in a day. There’s only 24hrs in a day for all of us. The value of your time really comes down to opportunity cost – the benefits you could have received by taking an alternative action. These benefits forgone could be in dollars or otherwise such as time forgone to work on your income generating actions or time forgone with your family and friends. For example, if you have a web store, instead of uploading products to your web store yourself, you could outsource the job to a virtual assistant or a team of virtual staff from an offshore outsourcing company for $8-$10 per hour. You can then use the time you would have spent on the task to work on marketing strategies which will drive more traffic and leads to your web store.

 

To get your business to grow, you will need to let go and delegate. You need time to step back from your business every now and again to have a look at your business growth and make the relevant changes to navigate it on the right path if it’s off-track. However, often times, entrepreneurs get too emotionally connected to their business that they refuse to let go and delegate so they not only end up wasting their time doing the things that do not generate a worthy return on investment but they’re unable to see their business from a non-biased third person’s perspective.

 

Don’t overlook the most important aspects of your business which GENERATE INCOME by devaluing your time. Many entrepreneurs are guilty of trying to do it all on their own and this is one of the reasons why the average business makes less than $100k a year, has no plans for growth and fails within the first 5 years. If you’re doing work that someone else can do for $10 per hour, than that’s exactly what you’re worth as an entrepreneur, $10 per hour. And if you think you’re worth just $10 per hour as an entrepreneur, then you shouldn’t have quit your day job.

 

In order to succeed, you’ve got to have time to create and implement a growth plan for your business. Virtual staffing is a great tool that you can use as one part of your growth plan. As with all plans, always assess your risks and rewards. The risks and rewards are not the same for every person. The risks and rewards from outsourcing staff are very unique to your own circumstances and will depend on your goals, your objectives and your opportunities. If the rewards outweigh the risks and you have your finances in order, partner with a reliable outsourcing company to hire virtual assistants and you’ll see your business not only survive but thrive.

make-virtual-staffing-a-reality-go-paperless

Make Virtual Staffing a Reality: Go Paper-less | Virtual Staffing Services

To make virtual staffing a reality in your business, we recommend that your business goes paperless or at least paper-less (less use of paper). In today’s fast-paced business landscape, you need to be able to quickly put documents at the fingertips of the right people, at the right time from anywhere. You won’t be able to do this if you’re drowned under stacks of paper and rummaging through your filing cabinets every time you need to search for a document.

 

Get over your paper addiction. Start consolidating all your documents into a cloud based centralized document management system to enable you to act quickly with the right people when it comes to accessing information. In order to streamline your business operations and take excellent care of your clients, it is extremely important that you process documents electronically (using the system to automatically manage, track and report on these processes). When you expand paperless across your business, you will be better ready and able to take on offshore outsourcing staff and apply complete end- to- end business workflows that automate and apply existing processes more efficiently.

 

For instance, instead of having client records on paper, all communication with clients and client records should be electronically recorded, stored and accessible online on a CRM (customer relationship management system). So if you have a virtual sales staff, you can readily provide your virtual sales agent the relevant access levels to the CRM so that your staff can access relevant client records. If the need arises, your sales agent can share related client information and tasks via the CRM with another authorized staff like a virtual administrative staff to take care of the client’s administrative needs.

 

Another example is if you have an offshore bookkeeper, ensure you electronically store all accounting documents such as expenses, receipts and sales invoices so that your virtual bookkeeper can readily access this information and do your books via an online accounting system. This will allow you to log into the online accounting system at any time to look over the progress of your virtual bookkeeper and communicate any errors quickly.

 

Where possible automate the initial scanning of the documents by implementing a more sophisticated document capture approach. Human errors will decrease and efficiency will increase the more you automate with the system. It is best if your systems are interlinked, for example, link your accounting system to your CRM so you’re able to view invoices and quotes directly on your CRM and link your CRM to your emails so that you’re able to view this information in your CRM directly from within your emails. A virtual staffing company can assist you in establishing these online systems and centralizing your data.

 

Going paperless or paper-less, by applying document management technology is a pre-requisite these days if you want to give your business a competitive advantage. Paper based processes are ancient history. While the reality of being 100% paperless may not be attainable, businesses that are taking the paperless path are reaping the rewards for each step they take in going paperless. Being able to use offshore outsourcing services is one of the benefits of going paper-less. The key in this whole process is ensuring you get reliable and secure systems and your data is backed up regularly.