Title: Give Yourself a Raise — Get an Assistant Word Count: 819 Summary: Is your “to do” list longer than your arm? Are you so busy taking care of the urgent that you never get to the important? Do you consider the thought of getting some help but then think “I can’t afford it” or “No one can do it as well as I can”? If so, you’ve got a lot in common with most other small business owners. Keywords: virtual assistant,online business manager,Sandra Martini,work from home, make money, small business, virtual assistance, online marketing Article Body: Copyright 2006 Sandra P.
Martini Is your “How to life hacks do” list longer than your arm? Are you so busy taking care of the urgent that you never get How to life hacks the important? Do you consider the thought of getting some help but then think “I can’t afford it” or “No one can do it as well as I can”? If so, you’ve got a lot in common with most other small business owners. Owning your own business is a great achievement and requires you to wear a lot of hats: owner, marketer, finance manager, widget maker/service provider, etc.
Wearing all these hats eventually leads to a state of burnout or overwhelm and the love, the passion for what made you start your own business in the first place drowns in all the details. If you want to grow your business AND maintain your sanity, there are two things you need to accept: 1. It’s not just okay to delegate, it’s essential to your survival. 2. A virtual assistant or online business manager (whichever description you prefer) is an investment in your business – not just an expense.
Consider the following scenario: You own a small business as a marketing guru who makes $150/hour. Your website crashes and you spend the next five hours calling your webmaster, testing different links, doing what you can to get it back up and running. The five hours that you just spent fixing your website COST you $750. If you had a virtual assistant whom you pay $50 an hour and she solved the problem in four hours (she would be 100% focused on this task and has likely encountered similar issues with other clients), the cost would be $200.
The word “cost” is based on a simple premise. If you are fixing your website, you are not making money. You could otherwise be engaged in billable tasks or you could have completed the new client proposal that brings you a $10,000 client – neither of which is possible if you are fixing the website. Make sense? Over the next week, keep a time log and track everything you do. Then sit down and make a list of all those tasks that you either shouldn’t be doing (not worth your time given the sacrifice) or hate doing.