Are you an entrepreneur of a small or medium-scale venture hustling everything by yourself? But while doing so, do you feel confused about which sector to handle first, like product development, client management, sales, marketing, operations, etc? Don’t worry, you are not the only small venturer who wants to do it all by oneself but, wind up in a mesh of complexities!
The first few years are always difficult for small businesses. Nearly 20% of small businesses fail at the end of their 1st year; by 5th year 50% go under and by the end of a decade & nearly 80% fail completely.
What Are The Challenges Small Entrepreneurs Face While Managing Business By Themselves?
Before learning about the challenges, first, we need to identify the responsibilities entrepreneurs have while managing a business by themselves.
- Leadership – Managing and delegating tasks to reach business goals.
- Time Management – Creating periodic tasks, deadlines, and priorities and ensuring timely execution.
- Developing Sales Strategy – Identifying the best scopes and opportunities to increase sales.
- Generating Starting Funds – Focusing on new ways of generating funds from the market.
- Sticking To The Budget – Ensuring the business processes stick to the allocated budget.
- Revenue Sustenance – Sending invoices timely and requesting payments to secure funding for consistent operations.
- Managing Employees – Guiding employees to carry out our organizational goals, developing detailed rules for each role, and ensuring a consistent flow of them.
- Business Expansion – Figuring out ways to approach spiked demands, channeling for new partners, and re-assessing staff roles in the company.
- Customer Support– Providing seamless customer support, ideally 24/7, for building brand reliability.
- E–mail Handling – Shooting timely E-mails to the target customers who lie at different levels of the sales funnels and navigating them to the read-to-purchase point.
The list is pretty long, isn’t it? Now look at the challenges that a small-scale entrepreneur faces while handling these responsibilities single-handedly or working severely understaffed:
- Finding customers – Small businesses are millions in number globally and they are not a household name for it is difficult to gather new customers without a team to build and support a strategy.
- Increasing Brand Awareness– Continuing from the previous point, with so many alternatives around, it is difficult to grab the limelight without the proper execution of brand awareness strategies.
- Building E-mail List – Custom E-mail marketing is impossible for a small entrepreneur frequently when the target customers are large in number. He or she will require help!
- Lead Generation – Lead generation as well as nurturing both need dedication and focus, followed by timely execution of the strategies.
- Intriguing Customers – Through providing unparalleled customer services only an entrepreneur can impress customers and build a loyal customer base that goes a long way.
- Hiring The Right People – In a CNBC study, 52% of respondents stated that small businesses face challenges in labor quality.
- Managing Workflow – Even having the best tools by side, entrepreneurs can never manage workflow by themselves, a dedicated team is needed.
- Financial Planning – One wrong calculation can bring down an entire strategy, so managing accounts and finances single-handedly or in short-staffing is a huge risk!
What’s the best solution to steer through such a vortex of problems?
First of all, it’s an acceptance that a single person, in this case, the entrepreneur, cannot manage everything by self. And secondly, choosing delegation to lessen the load. If you are wondering what delegation is, then simply explained, that it’s distributing the responsibilities to eligible professionals. They are dedicated individuals who are given to manage and handle the workflow of respective business sectors for seamless functionality.
Why Is Delegation Of Business Tasks A Dependable Solution?
Delegation boosts efficiency by saving a lot of time for the entrepreneur by reducing workload. This allows the business owner to accomplish higher-level tasks that contribute to consistent business growth.
Here are 3 basic ways delegation strengthens the business:
- Enhances employee skills
- Improves collaboration & communication
- Enhances client services
Invariably, the next question that arises, is:
Who Should Small Entrepreneurs Delegate Their Tasks To?
At this point, you will come across options like an in-house salaried employee, a freelancer, and hiring a team of remote or virtual employees who will do the job. Here’s how it can go for you:
Hiring A Permanent Professional
Small business owners often lack the budget to hire permanent staff because they take time to gather money for perpetual expenses like salaries plus other benefits. This moves them to the next consideration of..
Hiring A Freelancer
Freelancers are good no doubt, but they seldom guarantee the client timely execution of jobs, and transparent communication, and there’s always a chance of missing the deadline, and worse – leaving the project midway. Working with a freelancer is too risky, to say the least!
Next comes the option of hiring the services of a dedicated team that works virtually for you. These professionals, generally, are associated with b2b virtual assistance-providing organizations, like Curingbusy. The best thing about hiring them is that you will get to work with a team that dedicatedly works for your business, and has dependable expertise like in-office permanent employees, and that too, for half the cost.
They are a cost-effective workforce. Most VAs function as independent employees and based on where they live, their rates vary and are always lower than any full-time employee. A virtual employee from Southeast Asia typically costs less than a VA in North America with the same skill set. In case you have a tight budget, hiring a VA from India would be worth every penny spent!
Are Virtual Assistants Worth The Investment? How Do They Support Small Entrepreneurs With The Challenges?
“If you deprive yourself of outsourcing and your competitors do not, you’re putting yourself out of business.” – Lee Kuan Yew
Definitely! Hiring professional individuals helps business owners by contributing to creating a scalable venture that thrives. By functioning solo, an entrepreneur is risking a lot. His or her schedule will reflect time-drainage that contributes to nothing in the long run. Right from income generation to sustaining in the evolving market, a business will always remain in a compromised state, miles away from stability.
When entrepreneurs start hiring virtual assistants, they not only open the door to more opportunities but also skill sets that the in-house employees seldom have. Hiring a virtual assistant makes the entrepreneur shift from the daily working slog in the business. Once the virtual assistants are delegated with tasks, entrepreneurs can get a lot of time to focus on their other jobs and activities that have a greater impact on the business income and growth.
Now let’s take a look how delegating business tasks to virtual assistants helps small-scale entrepreneurs thrive in the long run:
- Focus more on income-generating tasks
Every business requires money to survive. When an entrepreneur hires a virtual assistant, he or she can focus on other activities that have a direct impact on the business growth.
- Entrepreneurs, do more of what you are good at
Even being an entrepreneur, does not mean he or she is a master at everything. So, in case, as a business owner, you are good at managing finances, resources, etc., it’s ideal and logical to delegate the task of customer communication to a dedicated employee or a team, like virtual assistants.
- Reduce workload significantly
Delegating repetitive tasks to the VAs means reducing the workload & stress significantly. Trying to do everything by oneself, goes without saying, is tiresome as well as risky. In a market full of competitors, let’s cut the risk by choosing to hire a virtual assistant for the purpose of doing business with less pressure and more finesse.
- Hire the best talent in the market
A virtual assistant, hired by companies like Curingbusy, acquires the best talents from all around the world. Each and every candidate has vast experience in working for various countries from across the globe, which gradually enables them to build a dependable skill set and unparalleled knowledge in their respective areas of specialization. Work with the best industry talents by choosing a VA or a team of remote employees for your business.
- Work from anywhere and at any time
Physical office spaces have become way pricey, especially for medium and small-scale entrepreneurs whose businesses are still in nascent stages. For such business owners, setting up a team of remote employees can prove to be more economical and logical in many ways. Keeping the expenses low would mean the entrepreneurs can allocate that money for setting up or improving another sector of business.
An entrepreneur has to decide which tasks to outsource and hence, here’s how he or should proceed with the selection and onboarding:
- Document your business need
Initiate by making a list of the task/s or process/es you want to delegate to the remote employees. Create training documents for the tasks as well. Document the outcomes that you, the entrepreneur wants the remote employees to achieve, rather than any specific procedure or tasks, in case a specialized (more skilled, subject matter expert) virtual assistant is hired.
- Create a related job description
After documenting the tasks you should delegate, it’s time to create a brilliant job description. All tasks that are delegated to a virtual assistant must have a skill level and an hourly rate mentioned. Tasks that need specialized skills must not have a place when you desire for a general virtual assistant. Here’s a bulleted outline of how it should be:
- List of apps and tools they must have knowledge about
- List of responsibilities and duties
- Level of skills, experience, and educational qualification needed
- Background information about your business and a brief about the clientele you work for
- Mention additional skills (if needed)
- Post the job description online & to choose the right talent
Once the description is ready, next comes posting it online to initiate accepting of applications. As an entrepreneur, you can definitely rely on the services of freelancers from the market, but when it comes to professionalism, nothing beats trusting reliable organizations like Curingbusy, which specializes in providing businesses with the right virtual assistants with the right skill set. Here’s why you should always place your bets on the efficiency of Curingbusy:
- Convenient and swift onboarding
- Documented assurance of data safe-keeping and handling
- Affordable and customizable packages
- A VA for every job for your business
- 14-day money-back guarantee
- No infrastructural support needed
- No prolonged training required
- Transparent communication
- Operation 24/7/365, thus putting the client first, Etc.
- Review applications and conduct interviews
Once the applications are received and applicants are scrutinized for the VA roles, the company can initiate with interviews for final selection. Since you are interviewing for a remote candidate, hence video interviews are always the best option for the purpose. This way, you can definitely be able to analyze the candidate, as good as the face-to-face interviews.
As for selecting the VA-providing companies, you can always go through their decorated clientele and testimonials of the clients on their dedicated web pages. This will give you a clear view of their capabilities and also, cut down the time for final selections. As mentioned earlier, the VAs they work with are all talented and best in their fields, and hence, choosing them, automatically makes you choose the talents to work for your company.
- Go for a trial period first!
It is always important to try and test for companies working with remote employees but when it comes to selecting with freelancer, they seldom get the chance to do it. Instead, working with virtual assistance-providing businesses comes with a greater advantage that offers a money-back guarantee if the client is not satisfied.
We Are Curingbusy, Your Dependable Team Of Virtual Assistants For Many, And Yours Too!
Virtual Assistant For Entrepreneurs – Looking for a reliable team of virtual experts? Choose us, Curingbusy. We offer so much when it comes to delegating your business services. Right from conducting digital marketing to handling accounts and finances, our virtual assistants can DO IT ALL! Take a look at some of the services provided by Curingbusy to its global clientele.
Digital Marketing
- Research – Trend, Keyword
- Content Writing (Blog, Copywriting, Editing)
- Marketing Automation
- Email Campaigns
- Paid Promotions
- Local SEO, SEM, Backlink building
- Content Strategy
- Market Research
- Content Creation (Graphics, Video & Images)
- Content Scheduling
- Hashtags Research
- Captions Writing
- Follower Engagement
- Content Writing
- CRM Management
- E-Commerce Management
- HR Administration
- Bookkeeping
- Event Management
- Administration Tasks
Website Management
- Website Creation (WordPress, Wix, Shopify)
- Website Maintenance
- Customization
- Updation
- WordPress Administration
General Virtual Assistant
- Admin Work
- Personal Assistant
- Calendar Management
- Inbox Management
- Customer Support
- Google Workspace
- Web Research
How To Hire A Virtual Assistant For Your Business?
Every process and task in the business belongs to one of the following four:
- Task it cannot do
- Task it does not want to do
- Task it should not do
- Task it should do
Conclusion – A Small Tip
The process of hiring a virtual assistant is just the beginning of embracing growth and sustenance for your company. Once they are onboarded, as an entrepreneur, it is important for you to have your faith placed on the employees. Conduct regular communication, ask for weekly or monthly reports, create a positive culture of feedback management, and never rely on micromanaging – these are the four ways you can establish a productive relationship with the VAs. Don’t hesitate to contact us for a free consultation or email us at: contact@curingbusy.com– Let CuringBusy help you elevate your business to new heights.
