Our experiences since March of this year have all been different. Some business owners embraced lockdown, using it as an opportunity to take a look at marketing strategies and revamp existing processes and practices. Others have reacted to the new situation by realigning their offering – moving from face-to-face services to online. Some have been even busier than usual. A lot of us will have been concentrating purely on what absolutely needed to be done, keeping our business afloat and letting a lot of the little day-to-day things slide.
Whatever you’ve been doing work-wise during lockdown, if you’re a small business owner, especially a sole trader, the chances are you’ve got a s**t-ton of admin that has been piling up. If you’re one of the organised ones who has used this time to get on top of your paperwork, then good for you, crack on and enjoy the spreadsheets. But if you’ve been doing everything possible to market a new style of service or you’ve found yourself swamped with work and you’re looking at your overfilled inbox with dread then you might need some help.
I recently attended a very useful training session based around goals. The coach reminded us that there’s still a whole quarter of the year left and we need to know where we want to be by the year end and how we’re going to get there.
So where do you want to be by the end of this year? What’s had to take a back seat during lockdown? Do you have enough hours left to clear the backlog and achieve your goals?
If the answer to the last question is no, what do you want to do about it?
It might be that you’ve moved to an online service, which you want to market to a wider audience but setting up the training courses and Zoom meetings is taking up all of your time.
You may have been concentrating on developing your marketing materials and now need someone to proofread them and update your website.
Or you’ve been so busy that you haven’t been keeping on top of your CRM.
The point is if you have more tasks to do than hours available then you should consider hiring someone to help you achieve your goals.
Whether it’s for a one-off job or ongoing support virtual assistants can take on a wide range of tasks – more than you might think. Some of the things my team and I do for current clients include inbox management, maintaining databases, updating websites, creating templates, organising conferences, and setting up Zoom webinars and editing the recordings – and this is just a snapshot of what we offer as a team and as a wider industry.
By delegating the tasks that are taking too long, the ones that have built up over time, the techy stuff you can’t get your head round or just the horrible jobs that you hate doing, you will create time in your life to concentrate on the things you need to do to achieve your goals and get your business where you want it to be.
Where to start? Well, if you’ve been procrastinating over a particular job for a while that could be a great starting point – pick up the phone and get someone else to do it now!