The first question you should ask yourself is “How can I spend my time and energies on what is most important to me?”  When you set goals and focus on achieving them, then the next step is to prioritize and minimize the less important things. 

 Or DELEGATE, DELEGATE, DELEGATE!  If you want to focus on your strengths (or your top priorities), then you need to delegate your weakness (or less important tasks).

Here are 10 reasons why you need an Assistant:

1. You’ve missed out on opportunities because you forgot or haven’t followed up.
2. You spend huge amounts of time trying to locate information & documents that your CPA needs to file your taxes (no bookkeeping system).
3. You can never seem to remember where you put your clients contact information (no database).
4. You often work extra hours just to try to stay on top of routine administrative tasks.
5. You often miss deadlines or important events because you don’t have a centralized calender or reminder system.
6. You have lots of great ideas for you business, but no time to carry them out.
7. You’ve been procrastinating about tasks on your to-do list for several weeks-or longer
8. You haven’t focused your time & energy on securing that “big client” because you’re too overwhelmed just handling the day to day activities of running your business.
9. You’ve thought about taking your business to the next level- if you only had the time.
10. You haven’t updated your website in over a year, or worse, you still don’t have one.

Okay, so now you are convinced that you do need help.  What now?  The next question you should ask yourself is “Should I hire an employee or outsource my administrative work, and hire an independent contractor?”

Consider these benefits of hiring a Virtual Assistant verses a traditional on-site employee:

• An Executive Support Professional (a.k.a Virtual Assistant) is also a business owner, and they have a unique perspective of what your needs as a business owner are.
• You don’t have to make a full-time commitment to start out.  You could start out part-time, and outsource a few hours a week, until you are more comfortable delegating tasks.  When you have become more productive, and start to generate more business you could then increase the amount of time and the amount of work that you outsource.
• You don’t’ have to buy and extra office equipment, software, computers, or make room for another person in your office.
• You don’t have to pay any payroll taxes, or provide worker’s compensation insurance
• You don’t pay any benefits, such as medical insurance, sick leave, or vacation time.
• You don’t have to worry about your employee coming in late or calling in sick, or worse, using company time for their personal business!  We work from our own home office and can assist you right now, and after hours.

You have decided that you do need administrative help, and you have decided that outsourcing and hiring an independent contractor is your best option.  The next question to ask yourself is “Who should I hire for the job?”  The answer:  Reno Helper of course!

This post is authored by Melissa Wadsworth, Productivity Specialist and CEO of Reno Helper.  Reno Helper is the provider of executive support services, real estate agent (realtor) support, and virtual assistant services.  You may use all or part of this post as long as you give credit to the author,  and link back to both the website and the individual post.