Today, I’m talking about assistants — Help assistants, virtual assistants, personal assistants, whatever you want to call them. You need help.
I’ve told you before and I’ll tell you again that you shouldn’t be doing all this stuff yourself. There is much that you should not be doing.
You shouldn’t be opening your emails, because you’re going to get a lot of them. You shouldn’t be doing your admin, you probably shouldn’t be editing the content on your blog.
You should be doing the work that makes you the most money that is to your unique ability. You are brilliant at something. Do that.
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The other stuff, get people to help. But you think to yourself, where can I get people? I can’t afford them. I can’t do this. I don’t want someone in the Philippines or India or in the other side of the world.
There’s people willing to do that work, next door to you, just around the corner. If you’re looking in the right place and doing it the right way. And people will work very very very little hours.
This is December, what do we do? We buy Christmas presents. Far too many. We’ll buy loads of extra food, lots of extra drink, lots of extra chocolates and peanuts and things like that.
And we haven’t got any money. So we’ll want extra money. How about doing a bit of work for you? There are many people who in their normal work say they are a student, they do writing.
They’ve been at school for years, they are good at writing. They write. Why can’t they write for you? Why can’t they do that kind of stuff?
Anything you can do, other people can do. So instead of thinking about, of course you can outsource. You can outsource on www.fiverr.com, on www.freelancer.com, or on www.upwork.com.
Those are the three sites that I use and my team use. But at the same time, in my fire protection business all our staff are local.
In Marketing for Owners, we are a desperate team spread around the world. But there are different ways of doing it.
Now we have at fire protection online, we have part time staff, and we have full time staff.
You’re thinking how can I get staff? How about putting a little notice on the board in your local supermarket, or in the corner shop or corner store, or anywhere that has a notice board that will allow you.
How about going to a local university or college and putting it on the board in the student union, there must be.
You know students come out of college with huge loans. What’s the alternatives, stacking shelves at night, working in a bar, working in a restaurant?
How about sitting at their desk, doing work for you remotely. Doing it couple of hours a day. Three hours a week.
How much do you think you’re going to pay them? You decide. Pay the going rate. What happens if they don’t work out? Replace them with someone else, but have rules.
Now, when you interview someone, you can interview them by skype, you can talk to them on the phone, you can meet up somewhere.
Remember, if you are going to ask someone to come to your house for an interview, say if you are a man, you’re going to ask a 19 year old female student to come to your house, that’s scary.
Please remember things like that. Why not meet up at a Starbucks? Why not buy them a coffee? Why not meet up at their student union, a place somewhere near they found the ad, okay.
But, when you’re talking to them and explaining, you obviously need to explain what the job is. But don’t spend all that interview process talking about you, trying to sell your job to them.
You are the prize. They’ve read whatever you put on the ad and they voluntarily come to you so don’t waffle, don’t talk around the houses, don’t keep on talking about you and about how wonderful the company is or what you plan to do.
Try and find out what they can offer you. How they can help, why they would be good, why do you want to employ them?
You can say, “Of all the people I could pick, tell me 3 reasons why I should pick you, what will you offer?”
You can also tell them to think of a scenario. I don’t know, for instance they are answering your emails for you.
And don’t worry by the way, you’re thinking, ‘Oh what about personal emails’, people answer other people’s emails all over the world, don’t you worry.
If you’ve got personal stuff separate it from your business email address. My advice, okay. So, say for instance, you say, you are away on a holiday. You will be out of contact for 5 days.
This person is answering the emails and an email comes in about some disaster emergency scenario, what would they do? See what they answer. Now if they say, “oh gosh, I don’t know.” Perhaps they are not the person for you, depending on what the job is.
But if they make an effort to try and think on their feet, of course they won’t currently know really what to do, but if they try and make an effort to think on their feet and are clever and come up with an answer that makes sense, whether it works or not, you start to see that they have the right attitude.
Now I recommend, when you are looking for someone, you look for two abilities — atitude and character.
Now lots of people can do stuff. Anyone can, so talking here about answering your emails, anyone can open emails and answer emails. Easy. Yeah.
So, unless you want to give them a test whether they can write, who knows? But how about character, attitude. That’s what you are after.
You want people who can grow with you, people who are prepared to learn. So if you’re going to have them work for you for one hour a day. You want them to learn something.
Are they prepared to learn that in their own time? What happens if you, in the future, want to uplift 2 hours? Will they be available? Is that what they are looking for?
So ask pointed questions at them. Don’t just keep talking about yourself, expecting them to go, ‘Oh that’s fantastic, I’d love to come work for you’. Of course they want to work for you, they want the money. You need someone brilliant, okay.
They are everywhere. You can interview them anyway you want. Go back to my previous episode #265, In that, I talked about various jobs that you should not be doing yourself.
You should be getting others, so think about it. Remember, no more excuses. Remember, I don’t like excuses.
Friendly Follow
Okay, it is a Wednesday and on a Wednesday, we have normally a friendly follow, where we pick someone on twitter to have a look at, and we follow, we look at what they do on twitter.
We study how they interact with people. We look at the type of tweets they put out. How they mix it with their Instagram, we look at their Facebook.
If they are good at twitter, they are probably good at Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest and generally they are likely to have a blog.
Well today, Danielle Laporte is the target of our interest. Danielle is fantastic.
She is Canadian I think. She is an orchist, pretty describe herself as an ortha but she is very very passionate.
I think she would say that she is an introvert but in her bio, she says she seems like an extrovert. But she has programs. She is an inspiration to women.
But don’t give up men, people like Danielle are just plain brilliant. Now she has a couple of signature things, one is called the fire starter sessions.
I don’t believe she is an arsonist, but the other one is a newer one which is the, the Desire Map, I think that’s right but if you go to her site, it is at www.daniellelaporte.com,
Follow her at twitter, her twitter handle is @DanielleLaPorte. Probably try and get in touch with her. Say, ‘Hey Danielle, lovely, like reading your tweets, keep it up. Thanks.’
You’ll be amazed, she may tweet back and then her followers will think, ‘Ooh, who’s this she’s tweeting to’. See how this stuff works? Go for it. Let me know how you and she get on. I’ll see you tomorrow.
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Who will you hire to help you?