The day will come (heck, maybe it’s already here), when you suddenly find yourself at a crossroads in your business – one path leads to exciting opportunities and massive growth, while the other keeps you nice and safe right where you are.
You know that if you choose the exciting path, changes will have to be made to make your business scalable – and that means hiring help, which scares the crap out of you because it’s completely new territory.
But before you say no to the exciting new path your business could take, I want to help you better understand the positive impact that outsourcing can have on your business and your life.
So here they are…5 reasons to fall head-over-heels in love with outsourcing:
1. You get to break-up with your business tasks
When you’re running a one-woman show, you’re responsible for everything – including all the stuff that drains you, like making sure that your clients get their paperwork, or scheduling consultation calls, or answering tons of emails everyday replying to the same questions over and over again, or dealing with negative-nellies who think you’re crap and want a refund, and the list goes on and on.
How many times have you wished that all that stuff would just go away so you could create, or teach, or coach?
Thing is, you don’t have to wish for it to happen “someday”– you can make it happen right now by hiring an assistant. An assistant can manage all of those soul-draining tasks for you so that you can do the work you love.
When you spend all your time working IN your business instead of ON your business, you lose the very thing that built your business in the first place – your creativity. Whether you create amazing online programs, or you coach others to success, or you design beautiful works of art, if you stop doing it, you stop being of service to your people.
But when you leverage the skills of other experts, you’re able to spend a whole lot more time doing the work you love. Plus, there’s the added benefit of having more time to hang with your family, travel and explore the world, and just relax without the stress of a hard, long work week.
2. Your business grows when you do less work
As weird as that may sound, it’s totally true!
When you hire an assistant to help you in your business, and you assign her all your soul-draining tasks, you’re freed up to spend your time doing whatever you want to do. And when you spend your time working on the things that you rock at, your business will grow.
Think about that for a minute. Your people spend money with you because of what you provide, but if you spend all your time working on tasks that don’t directly fulfil their needs, they’ll go elsewhere.
Imagine if you went to your favorite coffee shop – and when you ordered a coffee, the owner told that she stopped making coffee because she’s too busy wiping tables, cleaning the bathroom, answering the phone, and checking email – what would you do? You’d go somewhere else to get your coffee fix, right?
I’m not saying you always have to be creating your next big thing, because it goes way beyond that. Maybe you only have one program that you sell (like Marie Forleo’s b-school, or Denise Duffield-Thomas’s money bootcamp), but you have to be marketing it consistently – writing content, doing interviews, hosting webinars, running Facebook ads, emailing your list, etc., to continue to sell it and on-board new clients. But if all you’re doing is back-end busy work, and you’re not driving the business forward, your sales will take a nosedive.
Yes, the “back-end busy work” is super important because it supports your business, but that doesn’t mean that you have to be the one to do it all. Hire an assistant to help you keep things running behind-the-scenes while you do the things that grow your business.
3. You make more money when you hire an assistant
Yes, it does cost money to hire an assistant, but your investment will pay for itself over and over again.
You see, when you invest in outsourcing, you’re basically buying more time from other people. So that means that you get to “spend” other people’s time on your business tasks, instead of your own. As a result, you get way, way more done in your business than you could ever do alone.
When you hand over a lot of the day-to-day admin tasks to your assistant, you’ll be able to do more marketing and have more sales conversations, without all that other stuff pulling at you, and that means, you’ll be able to make more money.
Let me share a little story with you:
Back in 2008, I was still managing a lot of my customer support emails, and my assistant kept telling me to let her take care of it. But because email felt like such a personal thing, I was resistant – at least until I did an actual assessment,
I discovered that I was spending about 10 hours a month answering emails, and a lot of the emails that I was replying to were repetitive, general issues like – I can’t access my downloads, what are my account logins, etc. But there were also some emails that made me feel like complete crap for days afterwards because they were from frustrated, upset customers who said mean things in the heat of the moment, and it was very hard for me to respond professionally when it personally stung me so deeply.
Frankly, it was draining – mentally and emotionally, and it really ate away at my creativity and motivation to do what I really wanted to be doing. So I finally turned ALL of my customer support over to my assistant, and when I did that, it felt like a huge weight off. Turns out, she provided better care to my customers than I ever did because she was able to handle it professionally, and without attachment.
Plus, I was able to use the 10 hours a month that I was spending in my customer support desk to create new programs, grow my mailing list, and market my business. It may have cost me an extra $250 a month, but that investment paid for itself over and over and over again! And since that day, I’ve never managed my own customer service because I’m just not the right person for the job.
Want to know what the numbers really look like? Click here!
The moral of the story…spend your work time doing money-making tasks. If you find yourself working on a bunch of admin type tasks, stop yourself and go through each task and ask, “Is this the best use of my time right now, or can my assistant do this?”
4. Your business tasks get done on autopilot
In my opinion, this is one the best parts of outsourcing! With the help of an assistant, you can literally use the “set-it-and-forget-it” concept for so many of your on-going business tasks.
Once you have a system set up, your assistant will know exactly what she needs to accomplish every month without you having to tell her. It will free up your mind to focus on other things, while also knowing that the work is still being done – even if you’re on vacation.
There are so many things you can put on autopilot: for instance, if you run a monthly group coaching program, your assistant can post the call schedule, she can edit call recordings and get them transcribed, she can upload the recordings and transcript, and even send out an email to members with updates about call times and when downloads are ready. Then all you have to do, is show up for the call and shine!
Consistency in your business will help you grow your reach and your income, so put your recurring tasks into the hands of your skilled assistant.
5. Support when the unexpected happens
I want to ask you something…
If you were to (God forbid), get into an accident and were not able to fully work for a month – what would happen to your business?
I know. It’s scary to think about it, and I’m sure you avoid doing so at all costs. But don’t you think it’s better to be proactive instead of reactive?
When you have an assistant, you’ll have someone to support you during the expected. You or a family member can send her a quick email or text about the situation, and she can take care of things. She can reach out to your clients and let them know what happened, reschedule appointments for you, recycle your blog content on social media, send out email promotions for your products and programs to keep the money rolling in while you’re recovering, and so much more!
Otherwise, it would be like you just fell off the face of the earth and your clients would have no idea what happened to you. And it’s not just the big things either, it’s also the little things – like if your website crashes, who’s going to fix it if you can’t? How much money will you lose if your website blinks out? Or what if you’re about to launch a brand new program and you end up with sick with the flu, will you have to call off your launch because you have no one to help you pull it off?
Having the support of an assistant means you have someone watching your back. Someone you can call on for help when the unexpected happens (and it will happen at some point). I remember being out of town for the weekend once and my website went down. One of my assistants sent me a quick text about it and asked me to make a decision relating to it, I sent a quick reply and the site was back up in no time. Having support meant that I didn’t have to stress about it the whole time that I was away.
But it’s not just being prepared for bad things, it’s for the good things too! Like having someone who can take care of things for you while you go on vacation for two weeks, or just hang out at the pool all day.
I’ve personally been outsourcing for many, many years now and I can honestly tell you that outsourcing is not going to be sunshine and roses all the time.
You’re going to have to step up and be a leader, and that may feel uncomfortable for you at first. You can’t just reply to your assistant all the time with, “I don’t know, what do you think we should do?” Your team is only going to be as strong as its leader.
You’re also going to have to be able to persevere through the challenges and bumps that will come up during the first month of working with someone new. And you’re also going to have to be strong enough to start all over and hire someone else if it doesn’t work out.
But at the end of the day, I’ve found that the challenges are really insignificant compared to the incredible professional + personal benefits that come about through outsourcing. Which is why, after all these years, I’m still head-over-heels in love with outsourcing.
