Seth Godin, marketing genius and famous blogger, says in his recent blog post:
“As a bootstrapping entrepreneur, my instinct has always been to work before spend. If there was a way to spread the word virally instead of buying ads, I would. If there was a way to change the project so I could do it myself, I would. If I could trade or whittle my way into getting an asset on the come, I would. That’s the mantra of the bootstrapper.
It turns out that paying for stuff works too.
Ads that pay for themselves are worth buying. Employees and freelancers that produce more than they cost are worth hiring. Office rents that generate productivity, foot traffic or revenue are probably worth paying.
In the free media world in which we’re living now, it’s so easy to get stuck on not investing, on avoiding outlays at all cost. Frugal is an admirable trait, but being a miser is dumb.”
I fully agree with Seth. We all try to do things ourselves if possible because first of all, it’s fun and secondly, we like to feel we do the right thing and save us money.
The trouble is the tasks we often do ourselves are not expensive to outsource and cost us actually quite a lot: our time. The time of a coach or consultant is often well over $150 per hour, yet the same person sits faithfully in front of their computer trying to set up the shoppingcart while they could be serving a paying client who pays way more than it would cost to outsource this task to a virtual assistant.
Why do we do that? Why do we value our time so little? Many entrepreneurs get caughed up in feeling they need to do everything on their own to be a real success. That’s what they feel an entrepreneur is all about. The lone rider image comes up, he or she did it all by him or herself. We think about our online marketing heroes and want to be like them. But if you talk to them, did they actually do it all by themselves? Most will tell you they started outsourcing early on because they realized it’s wasting them valuable time to work out how to set up an ezine in Aweber.
Most entrepreneurs have become entrepreneurs because they are visionary and have the ability to think big. They feel caged in when they can’t come up with some idea or creative business approach. That’s what distinguishes the entrepreneur from the typical employee, yet the entrepreneur feels he or she needs to do all the tasks an employee would do PLUS the tasks an entrepreneur does.
Reality is that no entrepreneur who wants to grow the business big enough to live from the profit can do it all by him or herself. It’s simply not possible because the entrepreneurs spends highly valuable time on tasks that cost about $40 an hour while he or she could be earning three or four times as much offering coaching or consulting services.
This is not clever saving, this is stalling your business growth. If you want to stay where you are, continue doing it all by yourself. If you want major growth, then ask for help.
Virtual Assistant services help you save money by giving you time to spend on money making activities, like coming up with new programs, writing a book, holding teleseminars or webinars, talking to your clients, building joint ventures, etc. Virtual Assistants do the nitty gritty work and they can even help you with ideas on how to implement your big ideas.
No related posts.
Comments