Business

What time did your alarm clock go off this morning? Do you even like getting up well before dawn? The chances are if you’re an entrepreneur or in charge of a small business, you have an alarm clock set for 5 AM. Unfortunately, you only had a few hours of much-needed rest before that darn clock awakens you from your slumber. This is a picture repeated worldwide as people who are “living the dream” devote all their waking hours to their work. To them, there are not enough hours in the day, and they seem to devote less and less time to their family or friends.

There is no such thing as a 9-to-5, Monday-to-Friday work week for anyone with a small business or who is in charge of one. For these people, working at a minimum between 60 and 70 hours per week, life goes by in a whirl. They don’t have enough time to devote to all their daily tasks, especially as they have to backpedal from time to time to put out fires and deal with unexpected complications. The business may be turning over nicely regarding the amount of money coming in, but is it really growing? There is a good chance you can’t see the wood for the trees due to everything you have taken on.

If you manage to get one day per week away from the office, per se, there’s a good chance that you have taken work on and find that you have to do specific administrative tasks on your Sunday morning. You may have a loving spouse, but they must be secretly upset and frustrated with how things have turned out.

Is this kind of lifestyle sustainable? Understand that it’s putting a tremendous strain on many areas. None of us are supposed to work under pressure for extended periods, no matter how well the business may be doing. Your relationships will undoubtedly suffer if you don’t have time to devote to leisure time and the more essential things in life.

Not being able to afford a virtual assistant is the most common issue that business owners on this topic raise. However, hiring a virtual assistant may be more affordable and viable than you realize.

Two things can help you determine whether or not you can truly afford a virtual assistant. First, look at your expenses for the last two or three months. Have you spent money on items you now consider fruitless, ones for products you have never used? Your total for this type of purchase may surprise you. Yet, you could have spent that money or hired a virtual assistant, even temporarily.

The next area to look at is your daily or monthly to-do list. For example, do you spend lots of hours trying to design your book covers? Or trying to get your membership site to look and run the way you want it to? Would your time be better off spent elsewhere? What could you have accomplished if you had hired someone to do these projects for you?

Your main accomplishment would be completing these tasks and having them permanently crossed off your list. Secondly, you could have spent the time proactively marketing or working in other business areas. Ideally, in those areas that you excel at.

Can you now see that you might have the money to hire a VA? Even if you are not convinced, you should set aside some funds for this purpose. Start with a small monthly budget and hire someone to do a few small jobs for you. This could be scheduling your social media posts for a month.

You will notice that even this one small job frees up your time. As a result, your sites will most likely start to see more interaction from regular posting, and this reflects on your primary business.

Once you see what a virtual assistant can do for your business, you will be eager to give them more tasks. However, you may also find that you don’t miss your spending money either. Instead, you are spending money on something positive for your business rather than some fruitless product that didn’t help grow your business as promised.