How Do You Know When It’s Time To Hire?

One of the things that all entrepreneurs have in common is trying to do everything themselves. Maybe it’s what makes us want to set out on our own, but there comes a point when it becomes detrimental. This “superhero syndrome” as virtual staffing expert Chris Ducker calls it can bring your business to a screeching halt when you inevitably burn out.

I have read a lot of Chris’ stuff and understand that I need to ask for help when I need it so when I was feeling overwhelmed a few weeks ago, I knew I had to do something. The launch of Mind The Gap has a lot of moving parts and I knew that I couldn’t do it all alone unless I wanted to pull a long series of all-nighters that culminated in exasperated burnout. Have you ever felt this way? Like you just have so much on your plate and you need to hand some of it off? But what do you do about it?

The first thing I did was look at how I’m spending my time. I found that I was spending a lot of time learning how to to do a few things that would just be easier to hand off to someone who knew how to do them. I recently picked up the new version of OptimizePress and while it’s a great tool, I just don’t have to time to learn it right now but I knew that I still wanted to make use of it.

After going over how I was spending my time, I realised that I was spending a lot of time on tech setup and marketing and not enough time in areas that no one else could handle but me. I started looking for a virtual assistant to work with and it turned out that there was a VA with great tech skills (Martha) in a Facebook group I’m a part of. After talking to her I was so relived to find out that she could take care of all of the tech tasks in half the time it would take me. I got a recommendation for a marketing/social media VA  (Gina) who is helping me out with my marketing and saving me TONS of time. I also booked a consultation with a Facebook ad expert (Jon). Booking time with him means I can figure out my ad strategy within an hour instead of pouring though blog posts all day and trying to figure it out myself.

In my opinion, working with virtual assistants is the way to go. It means you don’t have to have an “employee” but you can still get support at a reasonable price when you need it. You’re also working with a fellow entrepreneur so there is a level of built in support/understanding. A lot of entrepreneurs suggest hiring Filipino virtual assistants for many good reasons and if you’re looking for someone on an ongoing basis, that is something you should look into. I didn’t give myself enough time to go through an entire hiring process so I went with people who were personally recommended to me. If you want to learn more about working with virtual assistants, check out all of this great content on the topic by Chris Ducker.

When thinking about taking on assistants it’s important to ask yourself how much is your time worth as the business owner? Sure you might be able to do a task but if someone else could do it and free up your time to do something else that will generate profit, isn’t that much better?

So I know what you’re wondering, how much did I spend? Well ask and you shall receive, here is the breakdown:

Tech help from Martha: £500 (or $777)
Social Media/Marketing help from Gina: £107 (or $161)
Facebook Ads consult with Jon: £95 (or $147)

Grand total: £702 (or $1090) well spent

Martha is doing what would have probably taken me 20+ hours to do on my own and without her help I’d be WAY behind. Gina is helping me formulate and create my marketing which of course I could do on my own but again, no time. I’ll probably work more with her but this is the total spend at the moment. Jon is helping me knock out my strategy within an hour and has a ton of experience with this sort of thing. I know I’ll recoup my investment and then some on this.

I can recoup these expenses in sales AND it saves me from going totally insane which is totally priceless. You can get virtual assistants for a lot less but because I needed people right now and didn’t have time to go though a screening and hiring process.

What could you hand off to someone else so that you can focus on activities that drive profit?