Signs you need to find right virtual assistants: You’re drowning in an endless to-do list … you feel overwhelmed all the time … you always feel behind in hitting your goals … you’re stuck spinning your wheels … you’re exhausted and feeling burned out … you wear every hat in your business.
If any of those sound like you, then it’s definitely time to hire help!
Oh, and by the way, in case you’re not familiar with the term “virtual assistant” it’s just someone you hire who works virtually. So, they can work from their home and you don’t need to dedicate a full office space to bring on more help.
So, this week’s Q&A episode I answer Morgan Robinson’s question about how to find right virtual assistants. You’ll discover key tips on how to figure out what type of VA you need, best places to find right virtual assistants, my simple process for determining the right and wrong hires and how to set yourself up for success working with a new virtual assistant.
NOTE: If you prefer to hire someone to work at your physical location, these same tips actually apply to both scenarios. I also shared different answers on this similar topic in this previous episode. Listen to Hiring Tips here
This week’s Q&A episode is for you if:
you’re ready to hire your first virtual assistant, but you don’t know how to start
you’ve tried hiring people before with frustrating results
you know you just can’t do it all by yourselfOk, now let’s dive into this week’s Q&A episode.Grab a pen and paper and get ready to take some notes. Then be sure to share your comments and questions below. I’d love to know your greatest take-aways or specific points you’d like to get more clarity on.
Click the play button below to listen to the
AUDIO BLOG on How to Find Right Virtual Assistants:
Watch the VLOG on How to Find Right Virtual Assistants Here:
If you’re looking for great hiring tips, sales and marketing strategies then you’re in the right place! Growing a business is always full of new challenges at every stage of growth. The good news is you don’t need to struggle with these challenges alone.
My Q&A episodes is a free resource I offer to help you get quick wins you need to boost your sales, productivity and profits.
If you’d like to submit your question simply leave me a voice messagehere.
Here’s what you want to say in your voice or comment message:
1. Your name 2. City and state you’re from. 3. Your question. (what is the result you want to achieve, your challenge?) 4. Your website url (OPTIONAL, but this will help me give you better feedback based on learning what business you’re in)
I’ll share my tips and advice in response. Be sure to share this great free resource with your friends!
This week’s question comes from Jeremy Robinson who asks great questions like:
▶ who to hire? ▶ how to define his company’s organizational structure? ▶ who to hire first? ▶ how to define roles clearly and more.
You may be ready to hire additional full time employees to grow your team, but keep in mind if you are a solopreneur these same hiring tips also apply to you too! If you’re a self employed business owner, taking your business to the next level needs to include hiring part time or full time freelancers / virtual assistants.
Watch the video episode here:
Listen to the audio here:
Grab the free resource mentioned in this episode:
QUESTION: What is one strategy you will commit to implementing that I shared in this Q&A episode? I want to hear from you! Share your comments and questions below.
The backbone of a great business is the people working hard to make it a success.
If you’re a ‘one man band’ looking to expand your services, you may have the capital and experience to know what you need from a ‘dream team,’…but you may not be 100% sure on how to go about finding them.
This post will run through a seven-point checklist for hiring your dream team to help you ace your search and hiring Dream Team.
#1. Define The Role
Whether it’s your first hire as an entrepreneur or your 20th, taking on new staff always presents challenges. As CEO, it is your job to ensure that you make the right choice with your new candidate, as you could potentially lose out on profits once you factor in the cost of advertising, recruitment, administration, and so on.
First, make a list of all the core competencies you need from the new hire. If you are relatively new to the business, this may mean that you would be looking for someone with a range of talents. Or, at least someone who is willing and quick to learn, provided they excel within certain areas, e.g. sales.
If you’re more established, you may be looking for a highly skilled team member to carry out niche processes. A ‘jack of all trades,’ in these cases, may not be such a good fit. Conduct lots of research by looking at advertisements for similar job roles in other companies, taking note of the going rates of pay, qualifications, years of experience, etc.
If you are looking for a particular task, like a website build or social media management, you can avoid taking on a full-time marketer and instead break up these duties into discrete tasks, projects, and contracts. Find a suitable remote worker from Upwork or VirtualPA Help to do the jobs instead, saving you a lot of money.
#3. Define Your Values
To ensure that the new hire fits in with your company culture, you will first need to explain in clear terms what your company cultureis.
Go back to your original business plan and forecasts for the next few years. and identify the traits you need to help you achieve the vision you have for your business.
#4. Define The Behavioral Attributes
Recruiters use psychometric tests to help them match the best personality types to varying job roles. Every company’s requirements will be different, even if the positions perform the same function.
Many of us have heard of the Myers-Briggs personality test, but for recruiters, this personality test reveals little about a candidate’s employability. A test called The Big Five is preferred over Myers-Briggs because it provides more insight on a person’s negative traits.
‘The Big Five’ can be tested in different ways. However, they work by giving people a score on the high-low scales of:
Extraversion
Agreeableness
Conscientiousness
Neuroticism
Openness
The language of these terms can seem alarming. However, it is important to remember that for certain roles, things like high agreeableness may not prove so useful (in negotiation roles, for example). Building a good sales team takes time and dedication — don’t be rushed into hiring ‘green’ salespeople as your profitability will plummet.
#5. Shortlisting Candidates
Once you have crafted your job role and defined your company values and key personality traits, it’s time to advertise and start the process of selecting candidates.
Prioritize your list of skills and behavioral attributes and give each of your potential candidates a score.
Once you have made your list for interview, decide how you’re going to assess their capabilities effectively. You may want to consider:
Interviews in front of a panel, or in groups
In-tray exercises where you give interviewees a task to complete representing one of their core competencies
Presentations (if you’re recruiting for a sales or marketing role)
It’s recommended that you find out as much as you can about the candidate’s previous roles, and it’s also worth snooping around on social media to get a feel for them.
#6. Successfully Onboard The New Hire
Hiring your dream team doesn’t end when you draw-up their contract. It is commonly believed that it takes around 90 days to get your new hire up-to-speed and working productively. Providing a thorough training and onboarding process takes time and careful planning.
Make training manuals, record video tutorials of ‘on-screen’ processes and provide all you can regarding automated tools to help them reduce time and error in mundane tasks.
You can find a range of automated solutions for every industry, things like: Plugins that can schedule social media posts, blog content, and inventory, all through your online storefront — train staff once, and you won’t have to keep asking them to do the same, mundane tasks
Financial automation tools can manage bookkeeping and accounts, generate invoices automatically, calculate sales tax, etc.
Chatbots and automated customer order tracking systems can streamline customer service tasks
…the list is ever-growing and investing in new technologies, as well as staff, will help your business grow.
#7. Motivate Your Team Members
Once you have introduced your new staff and systems into the mix, it is down to you as a boss to do your best to provide a positive and productive place of work.
Do bear in mind and plan financially for your staff to leave, or for their jobs to ‘expire’ as time goes on. As a business owner with a company on the rise, the skills you need in the beginning may not be as useful to you as time goes on.
Also, plan for your company culture to change and diversify in terms of personality fit, as the number of roles and operational complexity increase.
QUESTION: What’s your best tip (or question) on hiring great candidates? Share in the comments box below.
You need a quality business dream team behind you if you want to find success in this day and age. There’s no such thing as a one-man show. If your team of small business employees isn’t doing what you want to them to do, it’s easy to get frustrated. Small business is big business. Small businesses with less than 100 workers account for over 98% of all small businesses, and that means your team matters more than ever.
When your team doesn’t do what you want, you don’t have a team problem. As much as it hurts to admit, you likely have a leadership problem. Before you blame yourself, take some time to reassess the situation. Learning how to be a great leader is all part of mastering how to start a business. All hope is not lost. There are many things you can do to get your small business team back on track for success.
1. Hire the Right Employees
If you’re noticing a trend in dissatisfaction amongst your current employees, you might not be hiring the right people to begin with. It’s worth being choosy with your team members in this era. When you hire the wrong people for the job, they don’t enjoy the work they do, and you won’t be impressed with their results.
Remember that the most experienced employee might not be the best fit. You’ll need to weigh things like company culture, expectations, and experience level when making a decision about who to hire. In addition, make sure you’re presenting your company and the role accurately. The internet job platforms are full of poorly described positions which will only lead to more confusion.
2. Improve Employee Happiness
How are your employees responding to their daily work environment? Is it full of stress, confusion, and dissatisfaction? If so, you need to reevaluate employee happiness. While nobody should expect to have a fun, exciting day at work (at least, not all of the time), that doesn’t mean it can’t be a satisfying, stress-free place to be.
There are new ways to improve employee happiness that don’t cost you a thing. The first is simply delegating work effectively. When employees feel they’re reasonably able to handle their daily tasks, they perform better. We’ve all dealt with the stress of not being able to meet deadlines and requirements.
Finally, one reason your business dream team might not be doing what you want them to do is because they’re spending too much time on inefficient tasks. So many of our workplace practices today can be automated thanks to new technology. Yet, so many small businesses, in particular, are still holding onto the older ways of doing things. The older way tends to take longer, be inefficient, and wastes valuable time.
Chances are your employees likely know more about these inefficient tasks than you, and they should be your first line of defense for solving these problems. The employees time is valuable. How much of it is going to waste doing things that could be automated or skipped altogether?
Conduct regular team meetings to discover if there are any areas you could invest in automation, artificial intelligence, or modern solutions. The cost of implementing these programs likely will be more than worth it in the long run.
Your business needs strong leadership that pays attention to your employee’s mindset and feelings. These tips above help you put your small business dream team first so you can get more done together. It’s easy to get caught up in the day-to-do stress of being a small business leader, so taking the time to notice where your employees need support is key.
Even just taking the initial steps to bridge these gaps in communication will go a long way to repairing employee morale. Your employees want to do their best. Make sure they’re in a position for finding the most success.
QUESTION: What is 1 key aha you’ve had from thinking through these 4 tips? Share your comments and questions below.
Everything I learned in life, I have learned from pain. I have learned nothing from (success) and pleasure.” @RickWarren Don’t waste your pain …
A painful time in my life as an #entrepreneur was having to put out fires from the hospital bed. My office manager/production manager really showed her true colors when I was in labor with my 3rd child in 2004. She couldn’t handle the stress of an upcoming 1,000 person event we were producing and threatened to quit on the spot if I didn’t put out the fires that were happening.
I made the crazy mistake of actually taking her calls in between contractions 😳 which led to me giving bad directions, causing more problems, as I was not clear headed at all. 😦
To make things worse, she actually walked into my hospital room and dumped a pile of urgent paperwork for me to fix, giving me an ultimatum of quitting on the spot.
I was taken by total shock 😱 at how she was handling this, especially since my previous managers never acted this way when I had my first two children.
I was angry. 😡 😡 I felt completely robbed 😩 of enjoying even one day with my newborn. But, there was a lot riding on this event and no one in the wings who could replace her immediately.
So, there I was lying in my hospital bed, working to put out the fires because I wasn’t willing to risk the negative impact of potentially taking a $400,000 loss if I didn’t step in.
The key lessons I learned that day was:
➡ Never assume someone will make a good manager just because they were a good worker bee.
➡ Always have a 2nd string who is trained as a backup.
➡ Never make yourself the backup.
➡ Always get a personality assessment done prior to choosing your managers to validate you have the right people in the right seats.
➡ Always update your team’s job description with clearly written expectations. (yeah, my mistake that year … the production manager part never got updated in her written job description)
I hope you’ll apply these lessons in your business and avoid the painful consequences I had to endure.
QUESTION: WHAT WAS A DIFFICULT CHALLENGE or PAINFUL TIME IN YOUR BUSINESS THAT YOU LEARNED THE MOST FROM❓ –– please share your comments below.
Don’t waste your pain … share a key lesson you learned to help others.
