Stephanie Watson's Virtual Assistance Team

One of the hardest aspects of running a business is learning to manage time.

A lot of people believe that there is a limit to money, but there really isn’t. There is however a limit to time. Recently my passions over took me and I started running out of that precious commodity, time.  How did it happen?

Like anyone else, I over scheduled and under delegated.

Learning to delegate can be one of the biggest obstacles  in terms of learning time management.  If you’re anything like me, sometimes you feel such an ownership for a project that you have a hard time turning it over to someone else. Whether that be making phone calls, formatting a book, a website, or other task – as the owner of the project or the leader of the project you feel that it must be  you personally dotting every “i” and crossing every “t”, yourself.

You give input after input until the professional knowledge that you paid for is gone completely. You become an extension of the professional and you’re essentially using your mind to run their body to do what you want, whether it’s right or wrong.

If you find yourself hiring someone to do a task and then you micro manage and spend just as much time on the project (or more like me) than you did before you hired someone else – you have a problem.

Take a deep look inside and ask yourself – “What am I trying to prove?”

I mean seriously, what is going to happen, what is the worst thing that can happen if you let go, and let the person you hired, the person you interviewed and determined shared your vision, do their job?

If your ideas are so different from the person you hired, the PROFESSIONAL you hired, then maybe you hired the wrong person?

Or, maybe you just don’t know how to let go, and let the professional do their job. To get through this, I thought about the idea of telling my doctor how to do her job.

Most of us would not dream of telling our physician how to do their jobs, especially say, a brain surgeon – but most of us will try to tell our graphic designer, web designer or our SEO expert how to do their jobs.

We can’t seem to find the balance between getting our voice into the design and out and out ruining the design. I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be like that. I want to delegate and then let the person I delegate the task to, do the task. Before I could do this, a transformation in my thought patterns had to change.

Like when I ask my husband or child to fold the laundry. Do I micro manage that, and make them fold them exactly how I want them folded, or is the important thing that they ARE folded and put away? Does it really matter? Is someone going to care in 100 years that the towels weren’t folded my way (the right way)?

So, that is what I was doing the last couple of days while writing papers for my graduate school courses. I was cleaning out the old thoughts, and bringing in the new thoughts. I hope my process helps you, if just a little, learn to manage your time better by clearly delegating tasks and then letting go – if only just a little.

One wonderful aspect about working for myself is that if I choose to further my education on any topic I choose. I don’t have to ask anyone permission. I love school, and I love learning, so this is perfect for me.

However, today I am tired. I just finished up my first semester of graduate school. I am majoring in Human Environmental Services with a concentration in Interactive Technology. It is an exciting field and one most of us who work on line already know a lot about – or at least we think we do. I am tired because I was up all night long thinking.

I think my brain might explode with all the new information I have floating around in my head. It will germinate there for a bit, and then I will figure out how I can add value to my offerings from what I have learned. But first, it will cause a few sleepless though productive nights.

One thing that I love to do is teach others how to do what I do. Not necessarily Virtual Assisting, but article marketing, working with Wordpress, social media and that type of thing. So, with that in mind I am going to teach a class at the Life Long Learning Institute (hopefully in the spring) about blogging and social media.

Check at your local community college or university to see what programs they offer. You might be surprised to find out that there are classes you can take and things that you can learn, no matter how successful you are today, you can always learn more.

Recently someone posted on a popular work at home message board that they wanted to hire a website designer but they did not want to pay anything up front, they only wanted to pay when the work was done to their satisfaction. The person felt this way because apparently they had given money to more than one person up front and not received any services.

This disturbed me for a couple of reasons.

The first reason is that I personally will not provide any sort of services for anyone without being paid up front. I do not think it is fair that I should be punished for some other dishonest and unscrupulous person’s actions.

As a Virtual Assistant I am still relying on hourly work to earn a living,  and there are only so many hours in the day. I need to be sure that I will earn the amount of money that I need to feed my family. This means for me I must book a minimum of 20 billable hours per week. The only way to be sure that I have booked enough hours is to have been paid, up front.

I am an honest person so it disturbed me that this person had bad experiences giving money to people in advance and not getting work done.  Problems like this could ruin my ability to work from home, or cause me to drastically up my hourly fee to make up for people who don’t pay.

The second reason this really bothered me is because I wondered if this person had a contract with the Web Designer. I always have at least 50% in hand plus a signed contract before I do anything.  Even with first time long term retainer clients in my VA business I require a contract. Sure, people break contracts too, but it is less likely when you have a written contract. In addition you have a way to take someone to small claims court to have some justice administered when you have a contract.

In my other life I also own a Blog Design Company with my husband.

We always charge 50 percent up front for all design services and many times we do not end up receiving the last 50 percent even though the person claims to be very happy with the design. Due this issue, we have taken to only creating designs on our own hosting provider and never transferring ownership of the blog until we receive final payment. This way we can just turn it off if they do not pay. I hate doing that, and we give them many chances, but eventually, I have to buy milk.

I hope that it is not as hard as that blog poster stated to “hire good help”, maybe he wasn’t looking in the right places, or was expecting to much for the amount he was willing to pay, but I do know this: If you hire me you will get what you pay for, or you’ll get your money back.