by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Jun 28, 2016 | Delegation, Leadership, Productivity, Virtual Assistant
Stop Controlling and Allow Your Business to Grow
How to master the art of letting go
Many entrepreneurs face an ongoing internal battle when it comes to letting go and delegating certain tasks and projects to others. If you find yourself keeping a five finger death grip on every decision and project, you’re probably your own worst enemy.
When you first launched your startup, you needed to have your hands in everything that went on. But if your ultimate goal involves scaling your business beyond startup and into a full-fledged company, you need to master the art of letting go.
Mindfulness Over Multitasking – The Key to Success
By now, you’ve probably heard or read about the harmful effects of multitasking on just about, well, everything – including the health of your business. Multitasking doesn’t help you get more done. In reality, it causes you to scatter your focus and constantly shift mental gears. In effect, you’re working harder, certainly not smarter.
In contrast to the disaster of multitasking, mindfulness involves taking on one task, one thought, one action at a time. Not only will you perform at a higher level and make better decisions, but mindfulness can also improve your capacity to cope with change and manage stress.
But, in order to practice mindfulness in your work life, you’ve got to let go and delegate.
Why Is Letting Go so Hard?
Let go. Delegate. Why is it so hard for small business owners like you? A couple of reasons come to mind.
- Control seems to somehow give you peace of mind.
- When you’re in control, you feel free. When you relinquish control feelings of frustration and even anger may emerge.
- Control gives you a feeling of security.
Chances are, if you’re a control freak at work, you probably exhibit the same behaviors in your personal life. It all comes down to fear – fear of what might happen if you give some of the control over to another person. After all, your business is like your baby, and no one can love and nurture your baby the way you can. Wrong. It’s hard to face it, but it’s the truth.
Now that you’ve faced the cold, hard truth, it’s time to get to work at not working so much.
Kill Your Inner Control Freak to Awaken the Slumbering Leader
As your business grows, daily tasks to support operations increase as well. You take on what seems like an ever-increasing number of projects and tasks. The scope of your responsibilities widens so much; keeping up with it all becomes impossible. This can lead to overwhelm, longer hours, tightening that grip on control even more.
At this point, something has to change or you, and your baby (business), will crash and burn.
Five ways to empower yourself and others by letting go:
- Face your fear. Know that when you begin delegating, not everything will get done exactly the way you would have done it. That’s ok. In fact, by allowing others to find new ways to do things, you empower them to perform better for you and your business.
- Take an honest inventory of things only you can do. Ask yourself if someone else could complete this project with acceptable results. Ask yourself if all of your new responsibilities keep you from performing the critical, high-value activities of a business owner.
- Defer to others as often as possible. Think of deferring, as delegating is a close cousin. When you delegate, you hand off responsibilities already on your radar. Deferring involves passing tasks and work off to appropriate parties before they ever get on your to-do list. Outsourcing social media, executive administrative duties, travel planning, and similar responsibilities to a virtual assistant represent one example of smart deferral.
- Develop a reliable follow-up system. When you delegate duties that directly impact how others perceive you or your brand — such as a presentation or social media marketing campaign — it’s critical that you receive status reports on progress. You might use project management software so that you can view progress and get notified at certain milestones. Or, you could simply use a shared Google Drive task list.
- Just say no to taking back control. Paradoxically, letting go of control actually gives you better, more consistent control. You may start wavering if a final project result simply doesn’t meet your standards. You may experience frustration, anger, and the fear that makes you want to get your death-grip working again. Resist the urge. Instead, investigate what went wrong and help those who worked on the project understand what went wrong.
There’s an easy way and a hard way to everything in life. If you make yourself busier than necessary, you run the risk of trading a meaningful life for a barren existence of busy-ness. Smash the control freak and lead by delegating, instead.
“No person will make a great business who wants to do it all himself or get all the credit.” ~Andrew Carnegie
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | May 17, 2016 | Delegation, Virtual Assistant
Entrepreneurs are accustomed to doing it all from changing printer ink, uploading tweets, proofing blog posts, and ordering supplies to curating content, creating images, travel planning, retweeting, and sharing content, and testing the latest social media apps. Owning and operating a scalable business takes a team to fortify the back end, the daily routines, the foundational systems, and processes. It’s not a solo act to grow your business.
My client’s advice to other business owners and start-ups: “Cultivate the business mindset for growth and profit. You don’t have to go it alone, nor should you”.
When you keep yourself buried in the day to day minutia, this is time you are not working ON your business. If you aren’t, then who is? With only one person at the helm, there is only so far that you can scale. While it isn’t easy to relinquish some of your daily demands, it is a tremendous benefit to free up your valuable time and avoid burnout.
Entrepreneurs have great talents but many times they think they can do it all. That can really stall the growth of the business. By outsourcing the day to day back-office tasks, the business owner has more time to focus on generating income. Laura Lee Sparks
Identify the essential and eliminate the unnecessary
Delegating will help you to:
- Focus on your core genius: Do what you must do: the tasks and projects that ONLY you can and should be doing. The mainstay of your company.
- Increase your productivity: You can work on more high-level business operations instead of the routine and mundane day to day necessities.
- Eliminate distractions: There are many daily tasks that don’t require your immediate attention. Moving those off of your plate diminishes notifications and multi-tasking.
- Be client/company-centric: You have more time to dedicate to building your business structures and relationships.
- Reduce your stress: You’ve got a vested partner working behind the scenes to ensure that everything is efficient, successful, and administered in a timely fashion.
- Bolster your work-life balance: The more you are able to move off of your desk, the more time you gain for your personal life. Nix the nights and weekends.
Effective Steps to Delegating
DETERMINE WHAT YOU CAN OUTSOURCE
Typically, at Ace Concierge, LLC we assess the type of tasks associated with your business functions and daily management. They might fall under two categories: highly repetitive tasks, such as data entry, social media management, and blogging; or more specialized knowledge, such as accounts payable or web design. To help determine your delegation list ask yourself the three questions below.
- What are THE most important core business activities that I should be doing?
- What generates revenue?
- What leverage points produce the greatest results?
CREATE A PLAN AND EXPECTATIONS
Clearly plan, understand, and outline for accountability and outcomes, keeping all lines of communication open. We try to stress the importance of a strategy to ensure that all needs and requirements are met or exceeded. It is often difficult enough to give up what you have always done so it’s vital to create a solid foundation with dialog, expectations, and feedback.
RELINQUISH CONTROL
The hardest step business owners tend to have is relinquishing control and letting the person or business you’ve hired do their job. Remember, you’re outsourcing for a reason. You need to focus your time and energy on other more important, high payoff activities relative to your business. It doesn’t make sense to outsource a project or task and then micromanage it. Trust and release.
For some entrepreneurs partnering with a virtual assistant is unfamiliar territory and you may not fully comprehend the wide scope of work that can be efficiently outsourced to help free up your time. You may create mental roadblocks or perceived hurdles to prevent yourself from seeking assistance with your business. These alleged barriers can be easily overcome with a little in-depth thought and evaluation to conquer your objections.
A greater fear to consider is how much are you actually holding on to that is stopping you from focusing on the core of your business? What isn’t getting done? What is being shuffled under the rug?
Embrace delegation, don’t run from it. It is a low-cost high payoff tool to help you scale your company and focus on the core of your business – what ONLY YOU can do.
Delegating is a key management strategy that will benefit you and your company.
In order to grow a successful business, it’s important to let go of some perfectionism and delegate certain tasks so you can focus on your strengths. Diana Adams
Are you ready to grow? Contact your Ace today to start the dialog.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Sep 30, 2015 | Blogging, Content Marketing, Delegation
What is the simplest tool to help you grow your business?
Besides a Virtual Assistant of course?
It’s your blog.
As a direct communication outlet, your blog helps you to reach your target audience and engage on their level, on their terms. It is THE most valuable piece of company real estate you own so you need to make the most of every post beyond a simple one click, social share.
Leveraging the power of social media platforms is the shortest route to your prospects. It’s not enough just to write rich and relevant content that solves pain points and answers the most sought after questions. You must take the extra steps to reach your target audience by promoting and sharing your blog on a variety of social platforms.
Social media continues to play a very active role in most brand’s marketing strategy due to the expansive reach and opportunities for engagement. This being the case, your content marketing is paramount to driving your online success and revenue. In fact, it generates 3 times as many leads as traditional marketing at cost of 62% less. Blogging retains its space as a key component in your marketing blueprint as the centralized community to keep your audience informed, educated and wanting more. Your content and blogs help to showcase how your products and services solve challenges, answer questions and make life a little less complicated.
- Blogs give websites on average 434% more indexed pages and 97% more indexed links. (Inbound Write)
- Brands that create 15 blog posts per month average 1,200 new leads per month. (HubSpot).
- B2B companies that blog only 1-2x/month generate 70% more leads than those who don’t blog. (HubSpot)
Smart Insights found that 33% of marketers gave social media a medium to high rating as being a cost effective marketing channel, versus 19% for display advertising.
Social media is still by far the most universal approach to connect and distribute information. [Tweet “93% of bloggers share their content on social networks. Orbit Media”]
We’re living in a saturated marketplace of digital overload with millions of data bytes flowing down stream so if you want a little playtime on the raft, let me toss you a lifeline, direct from Mike Allton at The Social Media Hat.
Strategic content distribution is the spider web to disseminate information and capture attention and further drive higher conversion rates. There’s no roll of the dice, passing Go or collecting $200.00 without some time, effort and creative work.
Mike’s post “Blog Promotionology, The Art & Science of Blog Promotion” is a comprehensive checklist of the best (IMHO) blog promotion tools and tactics. Yes, as Mike states, it is a science but the return on investment pays off with:
- Increased traffic
- Readers
- Wider exposure
- List building
- Online authority
- Relationship building
- Credibility
- Connections
- Lead generation
- Revenue
Make it easy for your target audience to search and find you online. Remember, at this very instant, people are searching Google for answers and you may be the solution BUT if you aren’t effectively promoting your content, you won’t be able to connect and serve.
Mike’s secret sauce of Blog Promotionology ensures greater success in reaching your target audience not simply because you are adding your post to networks but with each link, you are impacting your SEO to bring your site higher in search rankings and algorithms. Something we all strive for.
Don’t be your own best audience any longer. Grab the wheel and take the necessary steps to drive your posts into the hands OR tech devices of your intended market. They want to hear from you.
Download Mike’s Blog Promotion Checklist and once you’ve digested the essentials and scratched your head about where to start or how much time it make take away from your business, get in touch with your Ace and let us help take your blog promotion to the next level.
Don’t leave it to Chance.
What you do after you create your content is what truly counts. Gary Vaynerchuk
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Sep 10, 2015 | Delegation, Virtual Assistant
Whether you are a budding entrepreneur or an established business, you can’t do it all yourself. Who can possibly wear all of the hats required to operate a successful viable business? Not many that I know of. It takes a cohesive team to manage each division of your business. You may already work with an attorney, a CPA, or even a graphic designer, but what about the balance of your everyday business operations? The daily administrative and backend details that keep you flowing, productive, and focused on your core genius?
A virtual assistant can change your life, giving you back your day so you can work on the tasks that will take your business to incredible new places. Brandon Turner
Partnering with a Virtual Assistant is a low cost, high payoff solution to enable you to work ON your business rather than IN it. This is such a cliche, but it holds true. If you are buried in the everyday, mundane activities then you don’t have the time or energy to focus real efforts on business development, client retention, troubleshooting or building relationships. And, as you know, your online presence depends on developing a human, touchable brand.
What can a Virtual Assistant do for you?
This is the simple shortlist of what you should delegate to a virtual assistant. There are literally hundreds of tasks and projects that you do within your business that aren’t the key drivers to generate income and don’t represent the best value of your time. If you’d like to see where your time is spent (not invested), keep a daily log of what you do, how much time you spend on tasks, and what is accomplished. You may be surprised at the end of the week to realize that you are more “busy” than productive.
“As all entrepreneurs know, you live and die by your ability to prioritize. You must focus on the most important, mission-critical tasks each day and night, and then share, delegate, delay or skip the rest.” Jessica Jackley
Take back your time to scale your business with a Virtual Assistant partnership.
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Aug 25, 2015 | Delegation, Entrepreneur, Virtual Assistant
With the various new forms of technology, there have never been more ways to enrich your life as an entrepreneur, reach your target audience and grow your business. The only problem is, how can you manage everything? Software, apps and other tools might help, but the overwhelming list of tasks can be excessively time consuming if you are a solopreneur.
A solution that is exceptionally effective is to outsource your administrative and back end tasks. Some business owners balk at the idea, wondering if they will have enough resources and comfort level to make it feasible. However, statistics compiled over the last decade have revealed a growing trend, with over 43% of companies now using outsourcing to help successfully manage their business operations. It makes perfect sense, since the more power we have behind us; the more work we are capable of doing. You can achieve more by doing less.
If you are new to the outsourcing concept, these 5 high level steps can help you streamline this process and get the ball rolling to free up your time and your mind.
- DETERMINE WHAT YOU CAN OUTSOURCE
Typically, at Ace Concierge, LLC we assess the type of tasks associated with your business functions and daily management. They might fall under two categories: highly repetitive tasks, such as data entry, social media management and blogging; or more specialized knowledge, such as accounts payable or web design. You may also have your own list according to your industry and niche in addition to the day to day necessities of processes and procedures. Once we have determined a list of tasks you’d like to outsource, we can determine the skill level needed and begin to narrow down your options.
- WEIGH THE COST VS BENEFITS OF OUTSOURCING
Begin with determining your own time value and where you should prioritize your efforts. If you tend to bury yourself in the daily minutia, for example, social media, editing, proofing, or curating content, it is here you need to ask yourself if this is the best value of your time? Is this your expertise, why you started your business? More often than not, it doesn’t represent your core genius, won’t provide an immediate return and isn’t a fundamental function of your company. While these tasks and activities represent daily necessities of an online presence, they don’t embody the crux of your knowledge and capabilities.
As an entrepreneur, your time needs to be protected, leveraged and highly valued. Outsourcing maintains these properties keeping you highly effective and focused on your business, growth, development and other primary structures of operations. Delegating allows you to forgo other things you would pay an actual employee, such as insurance, training, extra office space, supplies, and benefits. Instead, you are only paying for the project time which is a tremendous cost savings.
- DECIDING WHO TO OUTSOURCE TO
One of the most popular questions we get asked is, “Who should we use? How do we know they’ll do a good job?” As the old saying goes, “You get what you pay for.” There are many opportunities to find cheap labor from developing countries, but the difference in hours, language barriers and skills can sometimes pose a problem. These are options you must consider, especially if you are presenting their work to your own clients.
Consider partnering with another entrepreneurial like-minded individual as they will understand what it takes to own and operate a successful, viable company. If you only choose someone based upon price, a “one-off task master” then that is all you will receive. Point A to Point B with nothing in between. Think in terms of a virtual business partner who has your best interests at heart. Someone who invests in you, your time and your company to help you achieve your goals.
- CREATE A PLAN AND EXPECTATIONS
One mistake we frequently hear from business owners is frustration when a project is delivered and it’s not what was expected, it wasn’t on time, or it was not successfully executed. Clearly plan and outline for accountability and outcomes, keeping all lines of communication open. We try to stress the importance of a strategy that all agree upon to ensure that all needs and requirements are met or exceeded. It is difficult enough to give up what you have always done so it’s vital to create a solid foundation with dialog, expectations and feedback.
- RELINQUISH CONTROL
The hardest step business owners tend to have is relinquishing control and letting the person or business you’ve hired do their job. Remember, you’re outsourcing for a reason. You need to focus your time and energy on other more important, high payoff activities relative to your business. It doesn’t make sense to outsource a project or task and manage it from afar. If that’s the case, you should save your money and do it yourself!
Assigning the control to someone else can be nerve racking, especially if you’ve been involved in every aspect of the business from the start. As Ace Concierge, LLC has continued to practice outsourcing ourselves, as well as accomplishing administrative tasks and business management operations on behalf of our own clients, we’ve seen an increase both in productivity and the efficiency with which we can grow our businesses.
Leveraging time, expertise and a team is a growth mentality. It’s worked for us, and we’d love to show you how it can work for you!
by Ace Concierge | Virtual Assistant | Dec 17, 2014 | Delegation, Small Business, Virtual Assistant
Owning and operating a scalable business takes a team to fortify the back end, the daily routines, the foundational systems, and processes, let alone the everyday task of social media. After you’ve done it all yourself day after day and you’re ready for a business lifeline, take heed of my client’s advice to other business owners and start-ups. Cultivate the business mindset for growth and profit. You don’t have to go it alone, nor should you.
Humbled and honored by a client’s written word, I’d like to share his opinion about our long-time valued partnership.
Besides transcribing shows Suzie helped organize timelines and tasks for my books, edited and proofed them, served as a sounding board giving much-needed feedback, she found online collaboration tools to help facilitate an easier process, she’s schooled me on social media tools, made introductions to other resources and been an avid cheerleader and friend.
Her role has been a key factor in reaching my goals.
You’re hiring a partner, a coach, an employee, even a boss when you hire the right virtual assistant. If you hire the right virtual assistant, your life is made easier and more productive.
Have you truly got the time to build your business, generate revenue, and manage ALL of the necessary components of your company? Single-handedly?
Take some time to investigate your options for growth. If you haven’t already, write out your goals, both short term, and long term, including action steps and a timeline. List every hat in the company with about how much time you SHOULD invest and DO invest in each. Are there places that are falling between the cracks? Projects or responsibilities that never seem to get finished or even started?
Upon review, are you a superhero with a magic red cape who can do it all and be it all to everyone? Make an honest and sincere assessment of your organization? Can it withstand just one person at the helm or would you benefit from a co-pilot? A little scrutiny goes a long way toward your successful longevity.
If you’re still not sure about delegating, here is another client exchange:
I actually found Suzie from internet/social media, her posts and activity was something we were trying to do so I figured if she could do it for herself she could do it for us. Suzie wasn’t my first attempt at a VA, the 1st one didn’t work out mostly because our styles didn’t fit together.
My personality is that I know what I don’t want more than what I do want ….so people who work with us have to be able to think things thru and come up with solutions. I’m not good at giving detailed specific instructions. I tried Suzie on a couple of ugly projects and she worked thru them, she pushed me when I needed pushing and she made the decisions when she knew she was right.
Suzie could do the specific projects faster than we could do them, get them done on time better than us and all though my cost per hour for Suzie vs some of my employees is much higher, I found that it takes Suzie less time and it takes no supervision from me.
Don’t get hung up on a comparison of hourly costs and don’t think a VA is for the grunt work. Hiring a VA is a way to get another smart person on your staff at a low overall cost.
Delegating allows you to:
- Focus on your core genius: Do what you must do: the tasks and projects that ONLY you can and should be doing. The mainstay of your company.
- Increase your productivity: You can work on more high-level business operations instead of the routine and mundane day to day necessities.
- Eliminate distractions: There are many daily tasks that don’t require your immediate attention. Moving those off of your plate diminishes notifications and multi-tasking.
- Be client/company centric: You have more time to dedicate to building your business structures and relationships.
- Reduce your stress: You’ve got a vested partner working behind the scenes to ensure that everything is efficient, successful, and administered in a timely fashion.
- Bolster your work-life balance: The more you are able to move off of your desk, the more time you gain for your personal life. Nix the nights and weekends.
These are some time-saving and life-saving benefits for the entrepreneur. The gift of time is something we all need more of. If you want to seriously focus on what is important, rather than on what needs to be done, delegating might just be the tool for you.
When you do less, you achieve more.
If you’re ready for a few upgrades in 2015, contact us for a free consultation.
