Was this your day?

You wake up and you are excited to begin a new day thinking of all the productive things you are going to accomplish and then you get to the office…

Your desk is a mess, you have 14 unanswered voice mails, 250 emails, the phone starts ringing, and you now have that sinking feeling that – today is NOT that productive day you had planned.

We have all been there at one time or another. The good news is that can change… easily.

We are going to share with you 7 scenarios where our clients have experienced this change. Their virtual employee changed each of their days from being a day of hell to being their most productive day ever. If you want to learn more about how to select a virtual employee – click here.

1. Feeling Overwhelmed?

Do you have more work than you can reasonable accomplish in a day? That feeling like you are getting further and further behind? You are not alone. A friend of ours started his business and tells the story perfectly. He was doing well financially, but he just couldn’t keep up. Bills were piling up, phone calls not returned & you could forget about emails. One day he made the decision that he needed help. He hired an employee to do all the things he didn’t want to do and a year later, he had increased his business 10 times in earnings.

You see when we feel overwhelmed – we get stuck. We avoid doing necessary business tasks and then feel guilty. That guilt weighs heavy. Most times you don’t even know that is what it is, you just feel “heavy” and “blah”. Yet, the guilt is there, keeping you from being your best. Having the help you need to do those things you probably aren’t doing anyway because you don’t enjoy them, can have a huge impact on your business.

2. Are You Angry at Work?

We aren’t talking about the “you have had a bad one-time event” kind of angry. We are talking about the ever nagging something isn’t right and “I really don’t want to be here” angry. The angry that you have had enough and want to stop your business if this continues the type of angry.

We were talking with a colleague of ours recently in the property management business about her situation. She was thinking of quitting her business because it just wasn’t worth the aggravation anymore.  Once we talked through all the things that she wanted to change, it was super easy for us to come up with a plan to get her back on track. We originally recommended 1 employee, but she ended up hiring 2 as she realized that there were a lot of additional items she could hand over. Now she is back to enjoying her property management business.

So if you have ever felt a flush of heat over your forehead from anger as you are sitting down to do work you really didn’t want to do, it is time to reconsider what you are doing.  This is a true wake-up call that you need to delegate more tasks and focus on work that you actually enjoy.

3. Bogged in Repetition?

We have all watched the movie “Ground Hog Day” with Bill Murray. He is stuck in the same day loop – over and over again. He had to repeat the day until he got it “right”. If you have tasks that are repeatable, this is a great use of a Virtual Employee. All you need to do is document the process one time and then have them do it for you over and over again. Click here for the questions to ask before hiring a virtual employee. 

4. Are Your Personal Responsibilities Killing your Productivity or Worse – You are Missing Out on Important Events?

We all have personal and professional responsibilities. For business owners, one of the main reasons we started a business was to have more control over our income and how we use our time. However, once you start to have success, your personal and business schedules can become blurred.

We have one client who’s personal and business commitments were clashing and she felt that she was letting everyone down. When she hired us to help – she was amazed that her virtual employee was able to streamline her calendar, intercept personal and business interruptions and keep her more balanced. She even had her virtual employee review the daily notices from school, summarize the important notices in a brief email, and put important notices of events on her calendar. Just this one task allowed our client to gain control over her time and still make sure she wasn’t missing anything important.

Having someone as a gatekeeper of your emails and calendar can be a huge game-changer for productivity. Nothing says you only have to use your virtual employee for business only. We have compiled a list of 160 tasks that you could have your virtual employee handle – click here to get it.

5. Are You Ignoring the Core Tasks of Your Business?

The moment you realize that you haven’t really worked on the “core tasks” that grow your business because of all the minutiae is the final moment you need to stop and reassess your workload.

For a successful business to continue, you have to work on your business. To do this – Stephen Covey talked in his book – 7 Habits of Highly Successful People about working on those tasks that are important, but not urgent. This is impossible if you are bouncing from one crisis to another and neglecting the things that made you successful in starting with.

For our clients, we help them transition from owning a job to creating a true business that operates without your direct involvement in every little thing. By hiring and training a virtual employee, this is a key step that allows you to focus on the work you do best and hire other people to do the rest. Being the jack of all trades can seem like a necessity for many entrepreneurs, but it really doesn’t have to be that way. Focus.

6. Is Your Business Growing?

Congratulations! Your business is growing and this is great. But it can also pose some challenges. It can put you in some of the categories we have discussed earlier.

Hiring a Virtual Employee when your business starts to pick up can help you with the tasks you need. With a cost of 20% to 35% of a traditional employee, a full-time Virtual Employee will improve your quality of life and allow you to grow exponentially. Even if you don’t have a full day’s work for them to do initially, you will find they can do far more than you initially planned for such little cost.

We were talking with an entrepreneur just last week. She knows she needs help, but she was stuck because she was worried about the fact she wasn’t 100% “ready” for a virtual employee. (When are we ever 100% ready anyway – right?)

We were able to break it down for her to show her that even if she was only going to have her virtual employee working 50% of the time she was paying for her – it was still a huge impact to her growing business and because she elected to use our recommend global workforce, she was still way ahead financially even if her virtual employee wasn’t 100% productive day 1. We then provided her with the head start she needed on the training to ramp up that productivity very quickly.

7. Do You Realize Others Could Do It Better?

This is probably the bitterest pill to swallow as an entrepreneur. We can’t be great at everything, but we feel like we do it better than anyone else could. The fear of losing control will put most business owners in an early grave. Once we realize that by letting others be better at tasks than we are – we are able to grow and flourish.

When we are working with our clients – we always recommend making a list of business tasks and then ranking those tasks 0 to 5. Zero being you would rather poke your eyes out than do it and 5 being you will cry if it is taken away from you. We do this because we typically find that the zeros & ones are the things that our clients aren’t good at anyway. When we aren’t good at something – we tend to avoid it and therefore it isn’t getting done. Having someone else who does enjoy these tasks and are good at them provides an immediate boost to the bottom line.

In each of these 7 scenarios above, our clients have significantly improved their businesses and their quality of life through the training and hiring of a virtual employee. The best part is, you can have the same results!