Client Magnets Official Blog

When planning how you’re going to outsource, it’s helpful to draw an analogy from personal relationships. If you’ve got a life partner, it’s unlikely that that life partner meets all of your social needs.

Perhaps your partner doesn’t have the same interest in art that you do, or prefers to stay indoors while you go hiking. You probably still have friends that you go to the cinema with, or to art galleries or the museum. It’s almost like you build up a team of friends to fulfil the different needs of your life.

Just as we have different people in our life that resonate with different parts of us, it’s the same with business. It’s unrealistic to expect that just one person will be able to fix everything. You’re going to get frustrated because you’ll end up with a person who is good at some things but weak in other areas.

When I started my business, I had a list of tasks that either I didn’t want to do, or that were not cost-effective for me to do. But one of the things that I did wrong was to try to find one person who could take over all of the tasks. Instead, what I should have focused on was to build a team of people around me who could assist my business.

You need to remember that business is a team sport. You should think about the tasks you want to outsource, and match them to the right people. You need to build up a team of assistants to look after the many aspects of your business. This is what I call my “virtual team”.

Outsourcing to teams allows me to be more flexible. I used to outsource transcription of my teleseminars to an individual, but whenever she got a backlog of work or whenever she was on holiday, I had a delay in getting transcripts back. I like to get transcripts of teleseminars up ideally within a week of the teleseminar, so I decided that would work better if I could hand it over to a team of assistants, rather than one person.

This doesn’t mean that you can’t have one person with whom you work more than any other, or who helps run your team of virtual assistants. You just need to make sure that they don’t become indispensible for your business.

Right now, I have a team of virtual assistants around the world who work for me without me having to do it myself. The beauty of it is that even if my key person were to leave, I wouldn’t be left high and dry. We have a manual that I can hand over to the next person that explains how my business operates.

The other important message is not to think that a “virtual team” only applies to a small business. Eben Pagan runs workshops around building virtual teams, and has built a large business around the idea. The interesting thing is that while he has a virtual team of 80 people and his turnover is $20 million, he doesn’t have a company office. So he has the benefit of 80 people working for him, but his business doesn’t have the huge overhead that comes with providing office space for them all.

Your ultimate goal should be creating a team around you that would allow you to action today’s ideas tomorrow.

So create your team and start scoring some goals!

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