Outsourcing tasks in your business can seem kind of scary at first.

After all, so many of us business owners tend to be control freaks about the things we’re doing (that’s why we started our own businesses after all) and we have a hard time handing them off to other people. We worry that they can’t do them as well (or fast!) as we can. And the truth is that there is a bit of a learning curve when you first start handing off some of the work you do to others, so it can take time to have someone take things off your plae BUT in the long term, it saves you a ton of time.

By not being willing to turn over tasks to other people we can often limit the growth of our business because we’re just 1 person with a lot of different responsibilities.  Plus the truth is we can’t be experts in everything and there are amazing people out there who are much more skilled in those areas than we are and they can do things better and faster than us. When we try to do it all we burn out and we can’t focus as much time on the money-making tasks in our business.

The other issue is the cost — so many business owners worry about investing in extra support for their business and try to save money by attempting to DIY everything. This ends up taking much more time as you try to learn skills that you don’t need to or spend hours watching tutorial videos on Youtube. The support you hire can often do these tasks much more quickly than we can. That means we can focus our time and energy on the money-making tasks in our business instead and as a result of that we can actually increase our sales and bring in more profits.

Outsourcing has been so important in my business because I’m not skilled at creating images or making website tweaks or anything techy (if I’m going to be honest about it). When I have to do things like that they stay on my to-do list forever, cause me a lot of stress, and take me hours and hours to do because it’s not anything I feel confident at and I overthink all of it. And I usually make a dumb mistake that then takes even more time to fix. I know my strengths and outsourcing allows me to focus on them so I can do my best work

The truth is when I hired my first virtual assistant in my business, I wasn’t really making enough money to do that. But because I hired her I was able to quickly put together a low-cost course to sell so that I could increase my income. Without her, it would have been months or even years before I figured out how to do that and it would have been another project that never left my to-do list. A lot of business owners delay hiring a virtual assistant because they think that they need to commit to paying for a ton of hours with them each month but you can get started with something as small as 5-10 hours a month. You can also just hire someone for a specific project like setting up your email list platform or designing your freebies.

Let’s talk about which tasks are the best to get started with when you have a virtual assistant that you’re ready to outsource to.

1. Onboarding new clients + customers

This is such a great task to get support with because you want your clients and customers to be taken care of as soon as you start working with them. When I wasn’t getting support with this, things definitely fell through the cracks like contracts, scheduling links, welcome e-mails, etc. You can set up a process that can be started as soon as a new client signs on so that your assistant knows exactly what forms they need to send to the client and they can also follow up with the client if anything is missing or late. You will feel much more secure knowing that you can turn your clients over to the reliable hands of your virtual assistant.

2.  Blog  Process

There are a lot of steps involved with publishing a blog. I know just thinking about what to write and then actually writing it wears me out. When I think about how I then have to find and edit an image to go with it, upload the blog into WordPress, format it, and then get it out to my mailing list and social media channels, I don’t even want to get started because it feels like such a huge project!

Creating content is not my favorite thing to do in my business. But to be honest, when I don’t have to worry about all of those extra little tasks that come after writing the blog (which can feel super hard some days!!) then it’s a lot easier for me to just focus on the writing so that I can consistently show up and nurture my audience (which is really important). When you have the system in place, you can also batch writing a few blogs at a time so that you can stay ahead of your content schedule and your assistant can do all the behind-the-scenes work to get them ready for publishing. 

3. Follow-up process

Following up with potential leads and previous clients is such an important part of creating consistent income. A large percentage of sales occurs when you follow up with people and if you don’t have a  process in place for that it will turn into a massive money leak. Now some of the following-up will have to be done by you, but you can make sure that your support staff creates a follow-up spreadsheet for you and creates and schedules reminders for you so you know exactly who to follow up with and when to follow up with them. This is one important task that you need to stay on top of and the virtual assistant will support you to make that happen.

4.  Website updates

Have you ever had old services and products on your website for much longer than they should be? Do you hate introducing new services because you don’t want to have to deal with publishing the sales page and formatting it to look good? Do you worry about losing everything that’s on your website because you know you don’t have a good backup system in place?

These are all tasks related to your website that you can hand off to someone else. I know that I can’t stand going into the backend of my website and I have no desire to learn how to do it either, but it’s something that is important so I can keep people up to date on all the ways that they can work with me. Even though you’re a business owner you don’t have to become a website expert as well.

5.  Social media

Consistency is key with social media if you want to use it to grow your business and increase your visibility in front of your ideal clients. So many business owners create social media accounts and then get frustrated because those accounts are not getting them any new clients or sales. You need to be posting regularly and you need to be creating content that matches your brand and engaging with your audience on there. This can be something that your virtual assistant does and they can also use Planoly to manage it so that your content is scheduled for weeks in advance and you can have time to do final reviews of it. The virtual assistant can also create systems to keep track of your content so that you can reuse the content in the future which will save you a lot of time and energy.

6.  Graphic Design for Your Content

There are so many different kinds of content to create when you’re running a small business and trying to grow an audience of customers and clients. It’s important that you create the content and the courses and the writing so that your audience can get to know you and your personality but you do not have to design them as well. Get your support staff to create PDFs, images, and social media content so that you can spend more time generating income.

For example, I’ve seen many entrepreneurs hesitate to create new opt-ins and lead magnets because they don’t know how to create fillable PDFs or get caught up in the design of the cover. This doesn’t have to be something that you waste time doing. Your time should actually be focused on getting the freebies in front of your audience so you can grow your mailing list and get more clients. The more time you postpone these tasks, the longer it will take to grow your business.

7.  Any other task you don’t want to do

You should hand off just about any task that you’re not a fan of in your business as long as it’s not something that can only be done by you (like your client work). These tasks can really weigh us down and delay any progress that we’re making towards building a bigger business that will allow us to grow our income which is why I created this guide with 30 business tasks that you can hand off to a Virtual Assistant ASAP. You don’t need to be a master at EVERYTHING in your business in order to grow it.

Your next question is likely to be, “Where do I find a virtual assistant?” I recommend creating a job description and posting it on Hire My Mom. I’ve done that and gotten great results.