Time is the Most Valuable Commodity – Treat It as Such and Respect Your Time. Time is a finite resource, and once it’s gone, there is no getting it back. Time is also a highly versatile resource because the options of how to spend your time are limitless. The goal is to spend as much time as you can on the things most enjoyable and minimize time spent on tasks or activities that are not enjoyable. With this in mind, you should try to capture back some of your time and optimize it by outsourcing tasks that you do regularly and that, with clear instructions, could be done by someone else.
How do I personally implement this?
Whenever I am planning a trip, I have my virtual assistant (VA) make a comprehensive travel guide with all top restaurants and things to do in the local area. I also have her put together a short list of recommended Airbnb options based on my preferences. Another task I commonly assign is data entry—converting data from a pdf or website into an organized Google sheet or Excel file. Having my VA do these types of task is very helpful at the end of the year, for example, when I need to convert a pdf credit card statement into Excel format to prepare a list of deductible expenses for taxes. I also have my VA help with hiring—she helped me find a personal trainer and personal chef by posting ads on a few different sites, screening the candidates down to a short list, and then scheduling short phone interviews for me to do the final round.
Get More Done
Get More Done by Outsourcing. There are many projects you never would have had the time to do yourself that become feasible with the help of a productive VA.
The key here is to change your mindset to consider what value add projects you could do if you had five extra assistants working for you that could do basic tasks at only $5 to $7 per hour. At such a low cost, many large scale projects that would be extremely tedious and time intensive all of the sudden become feasible and profitable to implement. This can be a huge advantage against other companies since many companies have not figured out how to outsource effectively and leverage the ability to hire and assign projects to freelancers around the world.
One example of a recent project we implemented using a highly outsourced system coordinated by my VA was the construction of a database of Immigration Attorneys that actively advertise and/or specialize in E-2 Visa Investor filings. My approach to any of these projects is to break the process down into manageable steps and then assign each step to the right person or team to implement.
Situation: Our company is launching a new E-2 Visa investment business, and we want to promote it to all immigration attorneys who focus on E-2 Visa filings and work with foreign investors who are seeking business investments that qualify for an E-2 Visa.
Goal: Build a database of all immigration attorneys in the U.S. who are active and promote E-2 Visa processing services to investors.
Step 1: Go through the steps yourself of how the data will be obtained—in this case, going to Google and searching “E-2 Visa Lawyer” and then visiting the first website that shows up.
Step 2: From each subsequent website in the search, copy down the name of the firm, its address, the name, email, and phone numbers for the top 3 listed attorneys, and a link to the website. All of this data should be entered into a Google sheet (link here).
Step 3: Maintain best practices by always including columns for where the data was sourced from, what freelancer did the data entry, and the date the data was entered.
Step 4: Decide who will manage the project and oversee the individual freelancers who are entering in the data. Normally, I have my VA serve as my project manager. She checks the data output from each freelancer and makes sure instructions are being followed correctly.
Step 5: Define the scope of the project. For the project above, I would make a list of additional key words to search and then limit the search results pages to the first 30 or 40 pages per key word. In other words, for every key word I list to be searched, the freelancer will enter each term into Google and then check every single website on the first 30-40 pages of search results. This could take 20 to 30 hours per search term! Obviously, this is something you would never do yourself or pay a high cost U.S. employee to do, but with effective outsourcing, this entire database can be built for only a few thousand dollars.
Step 6: Once the Google sheet is completed, you can easily download it into Excel format and import the email list into a new MailChimp list.
Step 7: Design a MailChimp campaign to promote the product or service you are offering (with several clickable calls to action), and then send it out to the MailChimp list of potential clients you compiled by following the steps above.
