You’ll always find the best people to work with based on recommendations from your business colleagues and mentors. However, I’ve come across some awesome service providers in some interesting places.
Of course, I highly recommend that you grab a copy of my Fabulous Service Contractors List that includes the contact info for 100+ awesome service providers, as well as the peeps that I personally work with.
But it also doesn’t hurt for you to keep your own eyeballs peeled for your first or next team member, so here are 3 surprising places to find your first or next assistant (or designer, or tech person, or ghostwriter, or book editor, etc.):
1. Testimonials
If you’re scrolling through a sales page for a program that you’re interested in buying, take a close look at their testimonials. Most of them will have a website address listed below their name. They likely won’t be live links, but you can still copy and paste them into your browser and check them out. I’ve found some awesome peeps that I’d never heard of before this way.
Hot Tip: Check out the footer of their website to see if they have a link to their website/graphic designer – a lot of designers require that their designs have their name in the footer giving them credit (kind of like how a painter signs their painting).
You can even take this one a step further by looking at the websites for all the testimonials – even if they’re for health coaches or whatever. Then take a look at their programs and scope out their testimonials and check out their website footer, etc.
2. Portfolios
If you’re looking at a website designer’s portfolio, a lot of times you can click through and look at the website they designed, or they’ll at least list out the website address of the person they designed it for.
If they don’t list it, google the name listed on the website image shown in the portfolio 😉 You can find all kinds of cool people this way – including assistants, writers, book editors, marketing experts, and more.
Now this mainly works for designer portfolios, however, you can sometimes find leads from the portfolios of writers, virtual assistants, copywriters etc., because they will hire other people to do work for them.
For instance, a copywriter may have a sales page example in their portfolio for a writer who has a program, but when you look at the writer’s website, you may discover that the writer also offers book writing services – and they obviously hired a copywriter to write their sales page for them (something they may not be good at, didn’t want to do, or didn’t have time to do).
3. Emails
You know all those emails you get from other entrepreneurs? Well, start reading them and click through and look at the products they’re promoting (either their own or other people’s), and do a testimonial + footer check.
You can also learn about people you’ve never heard of before just by reading their email, then Google them and check out their website.
Sometimes, during a promotion, a biz owner will share testimonials right in their email and they may say something like, “Sarah Johnson, a copywriter, was able to…” – but they won’t include the website address of the person, so just Google that person’s name with the term copywriter.
You’d be surprised what you can find just by reading all those emails and doing a little digging 😉
So there you have it. Three interesting places you can find your first or next team member.
