Are you fond of creating business systems? What about a system for virtual assistants?
For most hardworking solo entrepreneurs, once your business starts growing exponentially, you’ll find yourself getting overwhelmed and overworked with the additional work demands. It’s either you start to fall apart or your business starts to suffer—in the quality of your work, in the quantity of your client, or in the length of time for your deliverables.
You know you need help, you are not accomplishing the things you want—but how can you trust other people to help you in running your business? How can you be assured that the virtual assistant you’ll be hiring will do things the way you do?
Leslie Ingves, a business optimization specialist from ClearPathway, and Riah Gonzalez share how creating a system could help entrepreneurs optimize how their business operates so that they could step back from being involved in the minute details of the daily tasks and instead, delegate.
Identify Your Personality Type
To create a good working system, it is absolutely important to first identify your personality type as an entrepreneur. It would help you understand the reasons why and how you get things done. It would also be helpful in finding the VA that matches and compliments you. There are 5 basic Personality Types of Entrepreneurs:
Pragmatics – people who are very detailed and concise. They don’t like ambiguous information and they like the bottom line of everything to add properly.
Planner organizer – people who look at everything as a system and like to figure out what are the steps to get there. They like to break down everything into a detailed system.
Socialites – people who work best in conjunction with others. They love the energy and synergy of working with people.
Creatives – these are innovative out of the box thinkers. They are visual, so they like everything out where they can see them.
Thinkers and Big Picture Visionary – people who come up with great ideas and have fabulous goals, but they might need help in breaking down these ideas into details and processes needed in order to reach these goals.
These personalities can overlap, and knowing your personality type can help you identify how you naturally function, what works for you and what doesn’t. It also helps how you can create your Training and Information resource system.
Differentiate Your Business as a Brand
Solo entrepreneurs oftentimes think of their business as their baby, and although it’s difficult to relinquish control, they have to start separating themselves from the business and establish the business as a brand separate and distinct from their own persona.
With this mindset shift, entrepreneurs can then start thinking of the processes they’ve been doing to run their business so that they can train their VAs to be like them, to do every single thing that they do. Thus, the quality remains the same.
Brain Dump to identify your process
Riah, a Creative-Socialite personality type, does her brain dump and records her processes. By recording every step of the process, she ensures that whoever watches the video can follow and can perform the task the exact way she does. By doing a brain dump, you will also be able to identify tasks that you hate and also tasks that you like but procrastinate doing. There will be things that would be hard to give up or relinquish control of—you can create multi-step tasks and give up one or two steps to clear your plate, yet keep the most important step.
Sometimes, entrepreneurs don’t think of what system to use, they just do it and get results. By doing a brain dump, it helps you backtrack and realize that you do have a system in your head that you can record down, tweak it and make it into a cohesive system. You have to know your strategy, your overall plan and then get into the details of how to execute the plan. You can get somebody to take care of those details.
Oversee, not Control
Once you have successfully handed down the task, all you’ll need to do is oversee to ensure that their work is up to your standard.
It’s important to start delegating before you get too overwhelmed. And it’s important that you create your system on how you would like to get things done, not only will it ensure you optimize your work process, it also sets up your virtual assistant for success and will make them want to stay.
Want more Riah & Linq?
Linq Website: www.linqcs.com
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/riahgonzalez/
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/linqconsultingsolutions