I know what you’re thinking, “Here’s a company that specializes in outsourcing that’s going to tell me about how outsourcing will increase my productivity,” typical sales pitch, and you’re going to tune out. But before you do that, let me ask you something, is there any task that you do on a daily or weekly basis that is taking a large chunk of your time? Is the task something that is making you money, or costing you money AND time?
There are three main ways to increase productivity:
- Work longer hours
- Automate or implement tools and applications to save you time
- Hire someone to help you
At some point you will run out of hours, and while automation is a wonderful tool that I highly recommend, you will likely need someone to help you set them up and maintain the different tools and applications as you need to scale them, leaving you with outsourcing.
The fact is that if you use outsourcing intelligently, your productivity will increase dramatically. To break it down even further, not only will your productivity increase, but your ROI will as well, which means increased profitability for you and your business.
Entrepreneurs all over the world have started to recognize the value of hiring others to maximize their productivity. Why? They understand that implementing practices to increase your productivity will allow you to 10x your daily output. The best way to maximize your value is to spend your time efficiently. Find ways to be more effective, develop routines for success, and focus your energy on the 20% of tasks that provide 80% of your value.
Having said that, here comes the warning portion that I always include. Hiring a virtual assistant can be incredibly helpful, but only if you have taken the time to really look at your schedule and determine what you need help with and what it will take to help you grow your business, whether that’s booking more speaking opportunities, gaining more coaching clients, or getting the word out about your new, upcoming book release.
And how do you do that? To start with, look at your daily schedule. What are the $20 an hour activities? What are the $500 opportunities? Once you start to organize your blocks of time into monetary chunks, you can easily see what you could hand off to a virtual assistant. And if you clear up 10 hours a week of checking mail or scheduling prospective client consults, that’s 10 more hours you can spend on your real passion and you will see your productivity and growth potential soar.
Regardless of what type of business you run, the majority of clients I speak to admit that the parts they enjoy the most are also the elements that provide the greatest ROI – the creative, strategic, and interactive aspects of their work. Once they do their time assessment, they discover that a disproportionately large amount of their time is spent on the mundane, yet necessary, tasks of responding to customer requests, growing their social media following, or researching potential clients
Of course, you have to be smart with your money, but your focus shouldn’t be on minimizing costs, it should be on maximizing your ROI. The opportunity cost for every hour spent on a $20 an hour tasks is the $980 that you could have earned if that time was spent on the $1000 an hour opportunity.
At Create 2 Sell, we want you to succeed. Whether that means hiring us or someone else, please do yourself a favor and actually take the time to look at your typical week. How many hours could you free up a week to work on the high-level parts of your business by hiring a virtual assistant?
Until next time … to your success!
Paige Jackson
Create 2 Sell