In celebration of today’s spookiness, let’s discuss something most freelancers find horrifying. If you’re anything like me, you’ve probably found at some point that you’re so busy helping your clients take care of their business that you’ve begun slacking on your own company.
My mom always told me practice makes perfect (or practice what you preach, depending on the day). My dad was a big believer in the minute you stop learning is the second you start dying. I agree with both, which is why I was disappointed to find myself in a bit of a pickle a few months ago. You see, hackers had wormed their way into my server host’s main account and it had spiraled from there. By the time I was notified, there was no way for me to know how long and how deep the intrusion had gone.
I lost all my prior blog posts and basically closed my account, went with a different server hosting company and had to begin rebuilding my company website from scratch. Just a note, no client information was ever at risk, it was just devastating to me in terms of content lost and time I would now have to spend starting over.
However, by nature I’m an optimistic person and I thought to myself, well, let’s rebuild bigger and better -make those changes I’ve wanted to make for years but could never quite justify spending the time and resources on. Now you know why my website currently looks so barren, it’s a work in progress and I’m utilizing all of the advice I’ve given (and take from) clients over the last few years. Which leads me to the actual point I’m trying to make here.
As a Virtual Assistant, I spend the majority of my time helping clients grow their business. I’m always reading articles, taking courses, scouring case studies, anything to keep my knowledge base current and growing (in whatever free time I manage to eke out). I do what I do so that my clients can grow their business – spend their time doing what they love without worrying about all of the administrative, marketing, social, automation, conversion tasks … all of those time vampires that can eat away the hours in the day and leave you feeling overwhelming and nonproductive.
Imagine my surprise when I realized that I’d been so busy focusing on my client’s work that my own had lapsed and fallen far behind. My social media accounts were barely teetering along, my LinkedIn (which I created 10 years ago) had … 16 connects and I had never linked my website blog to my account (same with my Twitter). Here I was telling my clients how important their blog and social media were to growing their business – finding and keeping new clients, booking more speaking engagements, relating to the readers of their books, all of those incredibly important steps. And I wasn’t doing ANY of it!
Well that has changed. I’m hard at work on my website. I’m now actively working my Twitter and LinkedIn (if you haven’t already, join me on my social accounts). I’ve outsourced the tasks that I just don’t have the expertise needed in order to do correctly (and if you’re not going to do it right, then really, why bother?). I’ve used my time management skills (yes, I actually do have those) to partition out my week so that I still have time for my continuing education but I also now have time to proactively work in and on my own business. And of course the majority of time is still blocked out for my clients and my family (as it should be).
What’s your biggest business nightmare right now and how do you plan to face and conquer it? What can Create2Sell do to help you?
Until next time … here’s to your success!
Paige Jackson
Create 2 Sell