by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 30, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Small Business
From the time I was little, I can always remember my parents preparing meals from scratch. I don’t think I had ever seen a “box” of anything used as an ingredient or a starter. From the cooking to the presentation and even the table setting, everything was not only visually beautiful, but divinely delicious. Whether it was a holiday, family celebration or a simple dinner, they expended great effort, love and care in every morsel! This love and passion for food represented more than merely the building blocks for a gastric feast, but generated a powerful role model for each of their children’s drive for success, character development and yearning for business acumen.
To this day, everything I make is from fresh, whole ingredients. Last week I was boiling a chicken carcass to make homemade soup and as I watched it simmer, it was one of those Ah Ha moments realizing that being an entrepreneur is similar to cooking. If you want the best flavor from your soup, you must simmer the bones in chicken broth for about two days to extract the flavor of the marrow, chill the soup, remove the fat, pull the meat off the bones, add your vegetables and fresh herbs and simmer again. It is a much longer process than simply popping open a can, but if you want the best outcome, then begin with the making the time and incorporating top ingredients. There are no shortcuts or quick fixes to build the company of your dreams. It requires an extensive amount of dedication, commitment and full-time effort. My soup exploded with flavors, great pride and passion for doing my best.
“Build it and they will come” will not propagate a thriving business. When you choose to become an entrepreneur, you not only commit to yourself, but to your stakeholders as well. You have a responsibility to them to grow and generate the best company you can and this requires a 365 day a year dedication and perseverance. It is not just a whim or a hobby. It is a perpetual cultivation process of business development, goals, service, leadership, insight, customer experience, troubleshooting and so on to ensure prosperity and success on all levels.
Your eyes are not fooling you. The image above is not my chicken soup, but my father’s famous cheesecake which takes 2.5 days to create and you will NEVER find any other cheesecake as richly and sinfully phenomenal.
Serve your business with the passion and all of the time it deserves.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 27, 2012 | Virtual Assistant
Tight schedules, daunting To Do lists, endless commitments, overload of emails, phone calls, appointments and an ever expanding digital world makes it extremely difficult to effectively and efficiently manage our busy lives. We all know how important delegation is in relation to the success of our businesses. It is virtually impossible to execute all aspects of our daily grind, expecting gargantuan growth, innovation and revenue. There just aren’t enough hours in the day to focus on the back end admin tasks in addition to business development, forward expansion, generation of revenue, or creating the sought after customer experience.
“So unless it’s possible for you to get 10x more productive or work 10x harder, it’s physically impossible to grow your business without more people. Your business requires the hours that only more human beings can give you! Delegation is essential for hyper growth in a business.” Laura Roeder
Have you ever considered keeping track of every task or project that you work on during the week? How many of these represent your core genius or your passion? Do they generate income or are they simply some of the necessary tasks, marketing, social media or administrative duties that are part of your daily business operations?
Seriously, are these the best use of your time? Do you need to be uploading your blog posts, scheduling your e-newsletters, proofing/editing documents, responding to all emails, searching for article content, creating PowerPoints, calling vendors, confirming appointments, or managing all aspects of your social media posts? You know that this is just the tip of the iceberg of the activities that must be managed on a daily basis – all part of marketing, online reputation, visibility, customer engagement, loyalty building and so on. BUT, as vital as they all are, YOU don’t need to be doing them all. These activities are time consuming, sometimes tedious and certainly take you away from your core objectives.
Everybody needs a team to thrive and prosper. “The fact is this: Delegating tasks to others can save you a great deal of time and allow you to focus that time on the highest value-added tasks,” states Dave Lavinsky in Do Less, Achieve More: The Beauty Of Effective Delegation This excellent article posted on Fast Company clearly reiterates the fact that as an entrepreneur, you should be focusing your time on the tasks that ONLY you can do and outsource the rest. All of the low payoff day to day things are not a valuable use of your time. With only one person wearing multiple hats, there is only so far you are able to evolve.
“If you are the one consulting, you need someone else to handle client expectations, emails and scheduling. It’s always sticky if you are the one who is answering questions, invoicing and dealing with the smaller details. It can not only be disruptive to your work, but it can give the impression that you’re wearing too many hats.” Angela Jia Kim in How a One-Person Show Can Look Bigger to Clients. “You can hire a virtual assistant for just an hour or two a day to check customer-service emails, follow your process of welcoming new clients and issue invoices. If you go this route, set yourself up as if you are already a bigger firm.”
“Delegation doesn’t come naturally to many small-business owners. However, if we want healthy, sustainable business and personal lives, delegation is a critical art to master.” Nellie Akalp, “6 Tips to Master the Art of Delegation.
As mentioned above, spend one week recording every task or project you worked on and the time required to complete it. Along with that, note if it was a direct income generator (IG) or simply a day to day activity (D2D). Tally up the hours for the 2 categories IG or D2D and think about what should have been the best use of your time. What could you have delegated? If you had spent 8 hours on low value projects, imagine what you could have accomplished in that time.
What is your strategy for growth? How will you institute change for 2013?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 26, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Time Management
What impedes your productivity? For many, it can be outside distractions or lack of dedicated focus. Here is a quick exercise to help you learn where you may need to improve.
When you find your mind straying or you wander off task, make a hash mark # on a piece of paper, noting what you were supposed to be doing and how much time you allowed yourself OFF task. At the end of the day, review how many times you were distracted and how many hours you squandered on non-core activities.
What did you fully accomplish or complete? Any work that is not advancing you toward your professional or life goals should not be counted as “work.” These activities account for many wasted hours during your day. Much of the busyness that usurps your time may give you a sense of productivity, but being busy does not mean you are being productive or effectively contributing to your life’s work.
Part of being effective during your work hours is the discipline to spend time on what is truly important even if other things try to steer you off course. During your review of the hash marks, where did you spend most of your time? If you end the day with several half finished projects or other important activities that merely were pushed to the back burner because Facebook, text messages, Twitter or other more “fun” interactions, you may want to re-evaluate your focus and productivity levels.
Efficiency is learning about your awareness to, acceptance of and ability to determine your real work, the actual tasks and projects that propel you forward versus time suckers, bad habits, procrastination or other low payoff activities that take you away from your personal and professional aspirations. It is a continual building process and without a strong sturdy foundation, you may find yourself with a few cracks, leading to disaster, lost time or missed opportunities.
How will you commit to improving your productivity and limiting your distractions?
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 18, 2012 | Entrepreneur, Life Thoughts
Feeling like you live in a shadow but dream of success requires that you don’t merely step out of your comfort zone, but you LEAP, JUMP, SCREAM or otherwise take some real concrete actions to ensure your aspirations become realities. Sitting on the sidelines with an “oh poor me” will NOT take you to the mountain top.
You must decide what is it that you truly want! Something definitive and tangible.
If you have been floating within mediocrity, feeling just reasonably comfortable but suddenly realize there is more. YOU WANT MORE! Well, what are you willing to do for it? What will you commit to?
There can be some harsh revelations during the eye opening beginning. Learning what you did wrong, to teach yourself what you can do right.
What you can do better!
Some of us may not want to admit mistakes or past errors, but until you see the failures, it is more difficult to plan your successes.
You may see other industry colleagues thriving, flourishing, while you are only treading water. You know your legs are tiring from the constancy of monotony.
Your recognition needs to act as a positive upsurge, your motivator. Create your strategy; your plan to achieve your goals.
Envision your end result and work backwards with a detailed outline of how you will make it all happen. Record timelines, players, procedures, activities and any other structures or elements that will drive you toward your end result.
- Make a vision board
- Partner with your task force
- Seek a mentor
- Create a daily schedule/To Dos
- Write out your processes
- Enlist “industry experts
- Enhance your skill-set
- Measure or track your successes/failures
- Have a deadline
It is your playing field and if you want that touchdown you must write the playbook to score.
Now get in the game.
Learn the action steps, the stakeholders and commit to creating the life you want and deserve.
”Unless commitment is made, there are only promises and hopes… but no plans.” –Peter F. Drucker
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 2, 2012 | Life Thoughts, Small Business
Smart entrepreneurs plan because they recognize that it will increase their probabilities for achievement. Important issues are less likely to fall through the cracks with formal outlines, processes and action steps. It’s a valuable tool that can make a substantial difference in the success or failure of a business or personal dreams.
Business development is about creating your dream of self-employment and spinning it into reality. A business plan is the document you produce when you take have an idea for a marketable endeavor and work through all the dynamics that will have an influence on the startup, operation, and management of the business.
Formulating your plan will help reduce time-wasting indecision and increase the likelihood of success. Without knowing where you’re going, it’s not really possible to plan, or make inroads toward goal achievement. Take a moment and look around, thinking about all of the things in your present environment, from the chair you sit on, the pen you use, the computer, your car or even the food you eat; they all began with a plan, a blueprint.
Dumb Little Man: ”A mansion will not come out as grand and as breathtaking as it is unless there’s a good plan behind its construction. Same goes with the great and amazing things you want to obtain in your life. Plan, and plan well. Make sure your plan is feasible, doable, and effective. Also, it pays to think and plot an alternative plan or a plan B, in case your initial plan does not work.”
Managing our own lives and businesses is hard enough but without written goals and action steps, we are just going through the motions, yearning for success and growth. It is important to visualize what we want and expect. It is from this starting point that enables us to map out our plan to facilitate action and forward movement.
There are many options to formulating your plan of action, from spreadsheets, mindmaps, flowcharts or just a word document, but whichever tool you choose should be one you will faithfully utilize and implement otherwise, it will be an exercise in futility and there aren’t enough hours in the day to justify wasted time, energy or effort. Your plan can outline all of your goals, action steps, timelines and a To Do list to help drive your dreams to the finish line. c into a reality but instituting a thought out functional strategy will.
How will you launch your inspirations from a concept to a tangible outcome?
