Small business owners often find themselves mired in administrative tasks the take them away from their true function as CEO of their company. You might be spinning your wheels doing day-to-day tasks that need to be done, but don't generate any revenue for your business. Hiring a good Virtual Administrative Assistant, like Administrative Business Consulting, can help move you from overwhelmed employee to super-productive CEO.
First you will need to determine what your core functions are. What are the activities that
are billable, actually bring in revenue, or set your business up for growth in the future? Those are the things you should be concentrating on, and you should be delegating the rest.
Many productivity management techniques recommend a "brain dump" activity. This is meant to be a time where you simply capture all of the items in your head and on your to-do list, either hand-written or typed. Those items can become task lists, calendar appointments, or project folders. A Virtual Administrative Assistant can help by organizing all of the information you've captured in to their appropriate locations. Simply email your notes to the VAA, and she does the rest.
Blogs and social media are activities necessary to build your business, but the minutia of putting them together may not be a productive use of your time. As the CEO, you should focus on the content of those posts. Your VAA can then be assigned to handle the formatting, editing, tagging, SEO optimization, and final posting. This same idea can be used for presentations and email campaigns.
Other activities that may be eating up your billable time and that are tasks that can be outsourced include:
- Travel and event planning
- Research for articles or marketing
- Setting calendar appointments for meetings and sales calls
- Anything that can be automated
Part of being a productive CEO is to identify your strengths and delegate the rest. Fire yourself from jobs someone else can do and promote yourself to jobs only you can do.
I'm loathe to admit it, but we're heading in to the fourth quarter of the year. Now is the time to look back on what your goals were at the beginning of the year and how far you've come towards meeting those goals. It is also a prime time to start planning for the future and setting yourself and your team up for success in the future. A good way to do this is to get your team together and hold a fall planning conference.
Getting away from the office and setting the strategy as a team is a powerful tool in helping your business get to the next level. Planning two half-day sessions with a dinner in between can build your team's relationships and help everyone to get on board with where you want to go. A sample agenda could be:
- 12:00 PM Lunch
- 1:00 PM Recap of the Year
- 3:00 PM Team Building Exercise
- 5:00 PM Dinner
- 8:00 AM Breakfast
- 9:00 AM Goals for Coming Year
- 10:00 AM Action Plans & Assignments
- 12:00 PM Close
A fall planning conference away from the office gets your team away from distractions, rewards them for their hard work over the past year, and gets their creative juices flowing. Some ideas for a location are a local hotel, a restaurant with private rooms, or even someone's house. The most important thing is to eliminate the interruptions so your team can really be productive.
Including a team building exercise adds some fun and laughs to your meeting. If you're not familiar with facilitating these exercises, businessballs.com has some great free ideas. Other ideas, if you're not comfortable with these activities, you could also:
- Assign a top-selling leadership book to be read ahead of time and have everyone discuss their take-aways
- Hire an outside speaker to motivate or train your team
- Any activity that will build report among your people
A dinner where you recognize the accomplishments of your team from the past year is a fun way to recognize the work they've put in for your business. Try to keep track throughout the year of good work and bring it up during the dinner. It's even fun to have individual awards such as top sales person, best attitude, etc. Certificates are easy to format and print from most word processing programs, or you can have small trophies or plaques made at a local vendor. You'll be surprised at how proud your team members will be to display these items on their desks after the meeting.
The most critical portion of the meeting is the goal setting and action planning phase. As the leader, you should spend time before this meeting seriously thinking about where you want to be in the next year and how you'll get there. Present your ideas first, but then ask for your team's feedback. They might have even loftier goals than you've thought of. Let them take responsibility for the different action plans that you develop. Once they have ownership, it's much easier to hold them accountable throughout the year. Take good notes during this section and compile them to be handed out to the team later.
This whole idea may seem a little overwhelming if you've never done it before. It takes planning, scheduling, and time to gather materials. The idea of all that extra work could put you off of the idea entirely. But you don't have to do it alone. You can hire Administrative Business Consulting to make all the arrangements and deliver the materials. They can also research vendors and activities for the meeting. You would simply give guidance on budget, preferred location, and activities and Administrative Business Consulting can do all the rest. Compiling the notes and sending out the follow ups can be assigned to Administrative Business Consulting as well.
Once you implement this as a regular feature of your year, you'll find that your team looks forward to it. A fall planning conference can become the highlight of your year and can get you off to a great start come January.
