Three Tips for Increasing Productivity

March 5th, 2010

If you’re serious about getting more things done, it’s time for a major mindshift. It’s time to stop being a “doer” and start being a “producer.”  Here are 3 tips to get you started on changing your mindset to accomplish more in your life.

1.  Change Your Mindset and View Yourself Differently
Before you can make a change in how you run your business, you must first see yourself differently. Rather than clinging to the idea that you have to do everything yourself, consider how Oprah Winfrey runs her show. Can you imagine Oprah sitting down and calling prospective guests to book them for future shows?

Of course not! She has producers to line up each show’s content. Those producers, in turn, break down what needs to be completed and assign it to other people. They understand that Oprah brings unique skills to the show and it would be a waste to have her booking talent. Surrounding herself with great teams of producers to get things done is one reason Oprah has become so successful.

2.  Visualize and Plan Your Team
Even before you hire some help, you need to visualize and plan your team.   Think about those big projects you don’t have time to start. Outline how you’d like them to be. Break down those projects into smaller bites and imagine what kind of person could take them over. Imagine how much more smoothly your business would run if you weren’t taking care of every detail.

That’s an important point to reach, you need to visualize and plan what you can delegate.   Let go of the idea you’re the only one who can do every little task. That change shifts you from being the doer to being the producer.

3. Start Delegating
Once you’ve visualized and planned your team, start making it your reality. Get serious about breaking down the work you’re doing now into individual tasks. Let go of the idea that you have to do it all. Choose a task that’s wasting your time, that you don’t enjoy doing and that someone else could do easily. Find a way you can afford to have someone else to do it.

Take another look at projects you’ve been putting off. Determine what’s keeping you from getting started. Decide which pieces someone else should be doing. Visualize the project from start to finish, the way a producer would do. And then find the help you need to get it done. That’s the only way your business, and your income, can expand to the next level.

Being in business for yourself can be overwhelming, especially when you’re stuck in “lone ranger” mode. Allow yourself to visualize what life would be like with a competent team helping to achieve your goals. Learn to look at your business the way a producer would, and you’ll finally experience the satisfaction of getting it all done.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Three Tips for Increasing Productivity

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Home Business, How To Make Money, Internet Business, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, Systems, outsourcing | 1 Comment »

Leverage Yourself to Keep Clients Satisfied

February 14th, 2010

Take a look at your calendar of appointments right now. If you’ve been applying the Client Magnets approach, you shouldn’t have much available space in that diary. Hopefully, you have a pipeline of prospective business that keeps your book filled.

So, getting clients isn’t a problem for you. That’s a nice situation to be in, isn’t it?

From the outside, it looks fine to be that busy. You may even be getting a decent daily rate for your time. The problem is, though, that while your client list continues to grow, the amount of time that you have to serve those clients does not.

Once you’ve gotten new clients to sign on, you’ve got to deliver results for them. And as your calendar fills up, it’s not uncommon to feel as if there isn’t enough of you to go around. You may find yourself thinking that there aren’t enough hours in the day to meet all of your clients’ needs. You may think the only solution is to do more work, to spend more time at it.

When you get to this point, you’re so busy trying to keep the wheels turning that the idea of having one more thing to do is unbearable. To prevent your business from reaching this unmanageable stage, act now to start building your information empire.

As more people approach you about your services and want to know more about what you can offer, the more important it becomes to figure out how to duplicate and leverage yourself in order to meet their needs.

I’ve heard too many people say, “I just want to focus on getting the clients in. When I’ve got enough clients, then I’ll start focusing on the products, or on automating the sales, or on setting up the ecommerce site.” But you don’t want to let your business get to that point. You want to act now.

You need to design a workable, customized roadmap, one that will get you from that situation to an information empire that will have you earning money in your sleep. A business in which you produce revenue without having to physically get up and see clients every day.

Think very carefully about your business offerings. Look closely at your products or services, and determine which ones can be repackaged to reach more clients simultaneously. Perhaps you’re planning a live event that can be recorded and sold as a CD on your website. Hire a virtual assistant to handle admin tasks so you can concentrate on the creative aspects of your work. Find the thing that you do best, and focus on that.

You have complete control over this. Your awareness, your decisions, and your creativity are the resources that will help you to deliver results that are not dependent on your time and how much you work.

Your willingness and ability to look at the situation differently will allow you to meet the needs and expectations of all of the clients who are anxiously awaiting your help.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Leverage Yourself to Keep Clients Satisfied

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Posted in Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Cash Flow, Customer Retention, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Sales Motivation, Success Secrets, outsourcing | No Comments »

True Success Starts With Your Vision

February 4th, 2010

Vision is a powerful thing.

It’s one of the most important tools you have to move you from where your business currently is, to where you want it to be. If you have a picture in your mind of what you want your business to look like, you’ll find that it’s much easier to bring this vision into being.

If you don’t know where you want to go, how will you know what to do? You don’t jump into your car and start driving, with no destination in mind. Before you start the engine, you have in your mind where you want to go so you know whether to turn left or right at the bottom of the driveway. The same principle applies to your business.

So what I would like to ask you to do today is to imagine for yourself another version of you.

Imagine yourself running a more successful business. You’re happier with how your business is progressing. Maybe you have more clients. Maybe you’re working fewer hours. Maybe you’ve expanded into new markets. Your vision will be unique to you and to your business.

Imagine what this business would be like, what your experience of a typical working day would be like. Start imagining it now, because it’s available to you.

It’s so important to recognise that this starts with YOU.  Your business has to be built around your vision. You are driving your business, so it’s based on what you want. You need to ask yourself: if I could have my business set up any way I want it to be, how would it be?

Bear in mind that the perfect solution for you may not be the perfect solution for the next person. And that’s fine – every business is unique, because your talents are unique. But regardless of what your perfect solution is, it starts in your mind.

There’s one common step that every business owner can take to achieve their vision, and that’s outsourcing.

If you’re really serious about expanding your business, you need to identify the routine or basic administrative tasks that can be given to someone whose hourly rate is a lot less than yours. Next, you need to develop the ability to find the right people at the right price who can help you. These people will be able to get things done quickly for you to allow you to spend more time envisioning the future and bringing it into being.

The purpose of having a vision is to imagine what you’re trying to achieve and to act as though it’s already in place so that you’re moving toward it. This is what Dan Kennedy calls “behavioural congruency”, which is essentially acting as if you already have the outcome you desire.

If you want to make, for example, £250,000 over the next 12 months, the more you act in alignment with that outcome the faster you’ll get there. So if you’re already running a £250,000 business, chances are you wouldn’t be doing your own expenses, but would instead have someone handling routine bookkeeping tasks. So you need to start acting as though that has happened already.

Something happens when you make a conscious decision that you’re ready to change and you want to do it differently.

If you don’t make this a priority, you’re still going to be in exactly the same situation three months from now, six months from now, a year from now.

So start creating your vision today – I know whatever vision you have for yourself can come true!

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

True Success Starts With Your Vision

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Posted in Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Motivation, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, outsourcing | 2 Comments »

Outsourcing – Know When to Say Goodbye

January 30th, 2010

What if you’re not completely happy with someone you’ve hired to help with your business?

Should you keep them on to see if things improve? And, how long do you wait for that to happen? Is the problem really this person? Is it your system? Is it you?

Here’s what to consider:

• A good rule of thumb is to trust your gut.

Really trust your gut. Chances are that if you’ve been thinking for awhile about letting someone go, you probably had an inkling within the first week that something wasn’t going to work out.

If an employee, assistant, vendor or supplier takes up more time and energy than they are worth, you need to let them go. Dan Kennedy, a marketer who has influenced me quite a bit, has very strong beliefs about running your business autonomously and doing business on your own terms. He says, “If I wake up three mornings in a row thinking about you and I’m not sleeping with you, you’ve got to go.”

As much as you’d like to see the good in everybody and give people a chance, don’t drag things on longer than necessary. Be decisive about pulling the plug when things clearly aren’t working. There’s really no point in continuing down the wrong path.

• Check their attitude.

There will always be an element of human error. If you’ve hired a person who has the right attitude – where they’re proactive, they’re willing, they’re trying – and they’ve just made a mistake, be willing and able to overlook that. The fact is that whenever you’re dealing with people, there’s going to be an element of human error. That’s just a fact of life.

• Evaluate your communication and training systems.

85% of problems can be solved by communication. Evaluate the training you’ve provided. Be clear about your needs, and have a good system for communication in place.

• Examine your own attitudes and beliefs.

Determine your own role before you make your decision to keep someone on or let them go. Ask yourself, “At what level am I creating this?” And be honest with your answer. Have you created an insurmountable barrier in your own mind that they can never break through? If you’ve already written off someone who’s working for you – thinking “they’re no good” – you’re going to get that mirrored back to you. You need to take responsibility for that as well.

• Are they an investment or expense?

The right people will ultimately make and save you more money than they cost you. The wrong people will just cost you. If your time or energy is being drained by an individual, then you may very well need to just cut your losses and move on.  Remember, if it’s not working, it’s not working. The best thing you can do is to set  free. Let them go so they can find where they’re meant to be.

Use these tips to evaluate your team and make the right decision as to when it’s time to say goodbye.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Outsourcing – Know When to Say Goodbye

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The Top Five Reasons To Outsource

January 25th, 2010

I’m a huge fan of outsourcing. I think every business owner should outsource as much as possible.

I’ve been outsourcing for a number of years. I now have a team of virtual assistants located around the world, and I can’t imagine doing business without them. It doesn’t matter if you outsource to one person or to one hundred. Making the decision to outsource will have such a profound impact on your business that you won’t ever look back.

Today, I’ll give you my top five reasons to outsource.

1. It will grow your business.
Outsourcing will help you free up more time, which you can devote to the business. This seems pretty obvious, but sometimes it can happen in surprising ways. I’ve mentioned before a client of mine who came to me, asking for help in attracting new clients. However, she was so bogged down in administrative work that the last thing she actually wanted was new clients because that meant more paperwork. But as soon as she started to outsource her administrative work, her business started to take off. Wouldn’t you like to hand over the mundane parts of your business to someone else to deal with?

2. It helps you decrease costs.
Sometimes you need to play mind games with yourself, and start to quantify every cost that’s going on in your business all the time. You are the greatest asset that your business has. You are the hardest worker, and you come up with new ideas and new products and new plans. Your time is worth so much to your business. But if you find yourself doing routine tasks instead of earning money for your business, you are costing yourself money. You’re completing the accounts or updating the website when you could be meeting with a client. These tasks could be carried out by someone external to your company, and would cost a fraction of the amount that you could otherwise be earning. Outsourcing should not be an expense, but rather a cost saving exercise.

3. It increases your productivity.
By outsourcing routine tasks that aren’t part of your unique ability, it will free up your time and allow you to focus more on what you do best. The whole purpose of your business is to build a business around your unique strengths and your unique talents. You don’t want to be stuck doing jobs that you dislike and which could be done by someone else. Whenever I let go of a part of my business that’s been draining my time and energy, I get an instant boost in productivity.

4. It will help you move faster.
This will have a huge impact on your business. It’s quite interesting the number of people who have told me that it can sometimes be frustrating to attend a seminar or buy a new product to do with building the business. This is because it gives you more ideas, but if you’ve already got a backlog of ideas that haven’t yet been actioned, the last thing you want is more ideas. You need help getting things done, and outsourcing your work can give this to you. When you get someone else to do your routine tasks, you will free up time and energy to move on ideas that you haven’t had the capacity to action. You’ll be able to respond more quickly to clients, both new and old.

5. It builds scalability.
If your business is built purely around one person doing all the work, sooner or later you’re going to run out of time. And normally that’s sooner rather than later. But when you start to outsource, you will start to build scalability because it makes it easier for you to multiply and duplicate your business. You can put systems in place that make it easy for tasks to be duplicated, which make it easier for your business to grow. Building an online business is about helping you reach more people. You’ll be able to deliver more value to more people more often, so you make more money. You’re in a position to do more because you have more time and energy.

Many people think that they can’t afford to outsource. But I guarantee that you’ll be amazed at how much of an impact outsourcing just one task will have on your business. It will free up so much time and mental energy that you can devote to core aspects of your business.

The Top Five Reasons To Outsource

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Posted in Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Freelance Work, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, Systems, outsourcing | 9 Comments »

How Do I Start Outsourcing?

January 23rd, 2010

So you’ve made the decision to start outsourcing. Congratulations!

You’ll soon notice the positive impact this will have on your business, and you’ll wonder how you ever managed without it. Outsourcing is so important, because if you want to grow a profitable online business, you’ll need more than one person!

It’s time to build up a network of people around you that you can outsource routine tasks to.

But where do you start outsourcing? For some people, deciding which aspects of their business they could or should outsource is really simple. To them, it just makes sense which routine activities to outsource.

But for other people, there doesn’t seem to be an obvious answer to the question of where to start outsourcing. No part of the business stands out as being more easily outsourced than any other.

Something that will help you to identify what to outsource is to keep a log of your day. Try to keep a track of all your work activities on a daily basis, ideally for a week. It may seem very labour-intensive to start with, but this will help you to save time in the long run.

Once you’ve done this, sit back and look at this time log. Start to identify any activities that you would like to hand over, things that could be done by someone else. Highlight any tasks that, in an ideal world, you would handover.

Say, for example, you really dislike doing the accounts, or you wish you could get someone else to do your monthly newsletter mail out. Highlight every time during that week you spent on accounts or on organising the month’s newsletter. You’ll probably be amazed at how much time you’ve spent on tasks that aren’t part of your core business.  Tasks that you could hand over to someone else to deal with.

This is where you should be starting to outsource. The routine jobs that immediately jump off the page at you are where you should concentrate, as these are the tasks that you have readily identified as not being part of your core business.

When you start doing this, maybe you’ll only highlight a few tasks on your log. While you might want to hand over other things on your list, at the moment it might seem like too much of an impossible dream.

But I promise, once you start this process you’ll be hooked. And the longer you do it and the more things you’ll start to observe, you’ll begin noticing all that you’re doing that you could be delegating.

The great thing about doing this is that once you’ve got your list of tasks and activities that you would like to handover, you can start to group them together. Ask yourself if there are skill sets that go together, and if you can outsource a group of tasks to one person or team.

For example, your list might contain several activities relating to editing and publishing, or website maintenance, or data entry. These groupings might not occur to you if you just thought about a regular business day. But actually going through each minute of your day clarifies exactly what you do to keep your business going.

I still find myself monitoring my daily routine, because it’s so easy to fall into the trap of doing things that I could be delegating. Whenever I sit down to look at exactly where I’m spending my time, I immediately experience a boost to my efficiency and productivity.

So, your challenge is to keep a log of your activities next week. For those who aren’t outsourcing, you’ll be amazed at how much of your day you will be able to delegate to someone else. And while you may already be outsourcing, think of it as a ‘tune up’ for your business.

Get ready to feel that boost of productivity!

How Do I Start Outsourcing?

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Home Based Business, Marketing, Online Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, outsourcing | 5 Comments »

Three Tips for Dramatically Improving Your Business

January 18th, 2010

Would you like to be able to jump from earning between £50,000 and £100,000 a year to averaging well over £30,000 per month? Is one of your goals to reach the million dollar mark in online sales?

You don’t necessarily have to work longer or harder to accomplish that. In fact, I did that during the same period of my life when I had my two children.

And, as any parent knows, when you have two youngsters around, there isn’t exactly an abundance of time to work with. Quite the opposite.

So, achieving this kind of dramatic increase in your earning is not about putting in longer hours. It’s about creating a structure, both externally and internally, that will make it possible for you to receive money 24/7.

There are three basic things you need to do in order to create that structure.

1. Stop undervaluing what you have to offer. Trying to squeeze your expertise into low-priced solutions doesn’t work and won’t really give your clients what they need.

Part of your journey to financial success has to include your offering higher value products and programs that really deliver great solutions to your clients. This will also enable you to charge more.

2. Productize your service business. Instead of getting paid by the hour, package your expertise into products and programs that can be sold off the shelf and aren’t dependent upon your time to deliver.

If your business model involves going out and working with a client for a day, and then getting paid for that day, can you develop a product that does the work for you? With this type of business model, instead of doing the work and getting paid, you do the work once and get paid over and over and over again.

3. Remove yourself from the manual labor of your sales and marketing – or at least, as much as possible.

You don’t need to be personally involved in every single sale. You don’t need to pick up the phone to prospect and find new customers. You don’t need to write individual proposals or have meetings and phone conversations to make the sale.

All of that time-consuming sales and marketing activity can be replaced with automated sales processes. Use things like direct mail, the Internet and email marketing instead.

Rather than selling one-to-one, develop one-to-many techniques that will help you reach more people in less time.

When you stop undervaluing your services, and begin to productize them and automate your sales process, your earnings will skyrocket. Doing any one of these three things alone will make a noticeable improvement in your business. But, implementing all three of them -  together -  will have a dramatic and profound effect. That’s when the magic happens.

Three Tips for Dramatically Improving Your Business

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Posted in Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Cash Flow, Marketing, Motivation, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, Systems, outsourcing | 1 Comment »

Improve Your Team To Improve Your Business

January 10th, 2010

If your goal is to have a business that operates without being totally dependent upon you, you need to develop a team that is self-sufficient.

As your business grows and becomes more complex, things are going to come up that you haven’t anticipated. Your team will be part of the solutions, but it may also, at times, be part of your problem. There will be misunderstandings. There will be mistakes.

When you’re dealing with people, there will be things that go wrong. This is just part of human nature. That’s part of a growing business. Learning from mistakes and implementing new procedures will help to improve the performance of your team, and in turn, improve the performance of your business.

One way you can do this is through weekly team meetings…

• Weekly meetings make you focus more on keeping your team updated. You think about your business more than anyone else does. If you come up with ideas and things almost overnight, you could end up moving forward on something that you haven’t even mentioned to anyone yet.

• Weekly meetings are the one time a week when your team is guaranteed your full attention.

• This means you’re available to tie up loose ends or address any minor issues that need to be handled.

• Instead of your team constantly checking with you on different matters throughout the week, or trading e-mails, you can handle things right then and there in an allotted time slot. This can save you alot of time.

Improving communication systems is another way to improve your team’s performance…

• Setting parameters is a good way to let your team know what’s expected of them.

For example, do you spend an inordinate amount of time answering a constant stream of e-mails with one question in them?  Consider telling your team to send only one e-mail each with all of their questions in it. That’s easier to manage than turning on your inbox and seeing 10 different emails from the same person.  Psychologically it’s easier to handle this way.

• Remember, you are also setting aside time at weekly meetings to address issues.

All of this goes back to your vision; doing business on your own terms. You’ve got to set the parameters. You set this up. You decide how you want it to be.

Progress reports are another great way to ensure your team’s performance…

Arrange for your team to submit a weekly progress report.  That way, you don’t need to be chasing your team and asking, “Have you done this? What’s the progress on that?” At the end of each week, the responsibility is on them to take everything that you have put their way, and give you an update.

And finally, in order for your team to be truly self-sufficient, you need to take some time off.

This may sound odd to you, but it’s important.

Give yourself a few free days.  It’s important for you as a business owner to recharge, to get in touch with your own creativity.

Take a well-deserved holiday at the seaside, or wherever you’d like to go. Leave the laptop home. This will really force your team to step up and take charge. If you make yourself available, you know for a fact there will be a couple of hours worth of emails or questions coming your way.

If you simply aren’t available to them, they will just handle it. This is actually great training for your team. If you want to make them an ongoing part of your business, you have to build free days into how you do this.

At the end of the day, you are paying these people. They are on your team. So you choose how you want them to communicate with you. The leadership and the guidance need to come from you.

Try implementing at least one of these tips this week and see the different to your business and lifestyle.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Improve Your Team To Improve Your Business

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Posted in Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, Systems, outsourcing | 4 Comments »

Are you cheating your own business?

January 6th, 2010

Are you thinking about outsourcing, but worried that it’s too expensive to pay someone else to work for you?

If you outsource in the right way, the outsourcing you do should save you money. It’s about more than just getting a job done, it’s about freeing up your time.

I want you to do a simple exercise that will help identify which aspects of your job you should be outsourcing, and how outsourcing can save you money. I want you to work out what your time is worth. Now, this is not necessarily the rate you are charging your clients. But this is the amount that you need to keep in mind when you are doing every task you do during a work day.

1. Write down what you want to earn in the next year.
2. Write down how many weeks per year and the hours per week that you want to work.
3. Using these figures, calculate your hourly value.
4. Keep that number in the front of your mind throughout each work day, for a week.

Say, for example, your goal is to make £250,000 in the next year. You want to earn this amount by working 30 hours a week for 46 weeks. This would make your hourly value £181.16.

Whatever this number is, stick it above your desk, put it on your screensaver, write it on your day planner. Then, as you go about your working day, you should be asking yourself constantly, “Is what I’m doing right now worth £181.16?”

Or, more importantly, ask yourself, “Would I pay someone else £181.16 per hour to do this?”

I guarantee that if you do this for just a couple of days, you will immediately find many areas where you are wasting time. For example, you might spend an hour on a phone call with someone who is just chatting with you instead of helping to grow your business. When you see the figure “£181.16” written by your phone, you’ll quickly realise that this phone call is not a good use of your business hour.

Or you’ll think, “Actually, I could be paying someone else to do this for a lot less.”

If you spend an hour formatting and uploading a webpage, you could easily find someone to do that for £35 per hour. Or why spend three hours doing bookkeeping which could be done by someone else for £20 per hour?

Now I know some people might say, “Right now, money doesn’t permit me to outsource.” But even if you were to outsource just a couple of hours each week, those hours will be worth so much to you.

Time is the scarcest resource that a business owner has. If we’re short of money, we can make more money, but we can’t manufacture more time. That’s why it’s important for you to hand over routine tasks or basic administration work to someone whose hourly rate is a lot less than your hourly value. These tasks are having a direct impact on your business, because they are pulling you away from your unique ability – the things you love to do, the things you do best, and the places where you add the most value.

When you start outsourcing, sometimes it seems like you’re spending more, but that is because you personally have been absorbing these costs in the past. If you wrote a cheque for £181.16 every time you sat down to do something that could be outsourced, you would stop doing it very quickly.

If you’re doing jobs in your working day that could be done by someone else for a lower hourly rate, you’re basically cheating your business, and you’re cheating yourself. You’re taking money out of your own pocket.

Because why not pay someone else less to do the same work? If you value your time in the hundreds of pounds per hour, why are you wasting your time on penny jobs?

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Are you cheating your own business?

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Posted in Business Plans, Business Success, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, outsourcing | 6 Comments »

Building Your Dream Business

January 5th, 2010

Just imagine that you are building your dream house. It’s on just the right block of land in just the right location. You’ve designed it just the way you want it, and you’re ready to start building. You can’t wait to move in.

The next step is to hire one person who is going to build the entire house, from the foundations to the roof, all by himself. He will be the bricklayer, the carpenter, the plumber, the electrician, the painter, the roofer and the landscape gardener. This one person will be responsible for every part of your dream home. Your plans will be reliant upon that one person and can only progress as fast as he can work.

Sounds pretty unrealistic, doesn’t it? If you decided to build your dream home like this, you’d still be waiting for it to be finished ten years later.

So when you’re building your dream business, would you use one person to do every job?

It’s amazing how many people decide to build their business this way. They approach outsourcing with the belief that they can hire one person to do it all. They want one person to be responsible for their administrative work, their data entry, their website design, and their newsletters.

Looking for one person is a mistake for a few reasons:

1. It’s unlikely that there will be one person who will meet all of your requirements. If you’re looking for one person to try and fix everything, that’s an unrealistic expectation. You’re going to get frustrated because you’ll end up with someone who is good at some things, but weak in other areas.

When you start to think about outsourcing, you can’t look for just one person to do it all. You want to start thinking about your different business needs, and match them up to the right individual or organisation to do them for you. For example, I wouldn’t ask the person who does my data entry to start formatting my newsletter. Instead, I use different people for different tasks, depending upon their areas of expertise.

2. Using just one person will only transfer the problem. What we are trying to do with your business it to turn it into an entity that can operate by itself, and isn’t solely dependent on you.

One of the major frustrations of owning a small business is that so much is dependent on us: if we stop working, the income stops too. I want you to get out of that trap. I want you to set things up so that your business is creating an income regardless of whether you’re working, or at the beach, or asleep.

If you look for one person to meet all of your outsourcing needs, that person becomes the indispensible person for your business. They will become the bottleneck through which all your business must travel, instead of you.

You need to find the right people with the right skills to do the right tasks. You can’t just click your fingers and have the perfect person present themselves in front of you, like a genie from a bottle. You will need to build a team that works for you, and this takes perseverance.

But it makes a tremendous difference, and you will be able to free up energy and time immediately.

This will allow your business to focus on its unique talent: you.

Bernadette Doyle is a small business marketing expert. Get more tips and advice at http://www.clientmagnets.com

Building Your Dream Business

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Posted in Business & Money, Business Plans, Business Success, Marketing, Personal Productivity, Success Secrets, Systems, outsourcing | 1 Comment »

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