What are your activities that make you money?
If you’re anything like me, you know that there are 2-3 things that you do that make you 90% of your income.
I’m going to share with you how I have kept my focus on my income-producing activities as my company has grown.
Knowing what those things are is key to building a successful business. As salespeople, we know what these are.
- Sales Calls
- Consultations
- Face to Face with customers
- Negotiating deals, etc
You get the point.
Every time I get pulled away from these activities, I can feel the revenue slow down. Several times in my career, I’ve got busy and needed to refocus.
“Focus on your highest and best use of time” … “stay in your core competency”
Here is what I’ve done almost every time I’ve run into this, and I recommend you do the same.
Most of the time, I was being pulled out of sales activities and into admin activities. I was taking myself out of $500 per hour activities and pulling myself into $5 per hour activities. To say that is not the highest and best use of my time is an understatement.
Enter our first Virtual Assistants (VAs).
We have two incredible VAs, Darren & Donita, who do incredible work for our team. They’ve also been with our company for YEARS!
Here is how we started…
We had more work in marketing than we had time for. When we were considering hiring another marketing person, the cost didn’t make sense. W2 employees are expensive and take a lot of time and energy to manage.
Also, we realized that 95% of what we needed done didn’t require a person in the office. At a Tom Ferry conference, we were introduced to the idea of a VA. Someone overseas who can do 95% of the work at a much more affordable price.
You can hire a virtual assistant for $3 per hour and above. Yes, that is affordable. Much better than $20 an hour for someone who doesn’t want to be there.
So, we hired our first VAs, Darren and Donita. At first, we didn’t know if we would have enough work for them to do (we had more than enough). But after two weeks, we realized just how powerful this leverage was.
We added 2 VAs at a cost of roughly $3 per hour each, working a 40-hour week (on our local hours). For those that don’t like math, that is…
$3 per hour X 40 hours = $120 per week (you probably spend that on Starbucks)
After a week or two of training, I was able to go back to my income producing activities.
Guess what happened…
I was able to DOUBLE my income. Because I took the time that I was spending on admin and added it back to my income-producing activities.
Not to mention, there was 80 more hours of work getting done while I was out selling houses. Of course we got more done!
Now I can hear your objection. “Nobody can do it better than me”. You’re probably right, but they’ll be able to do 90% as well as you. You’ll have to get over that last 10% if you want to really increase your income and leverage your time.
This is something we’ve done time and time again. For example, we were just doing our EOS Business planning, and we realized another problem. We might have a future bottleneck in our marketing department.
Can you guess what question I asked? “Does it what we need require someone in the office?”. The answer was no, and we know that we can hire another VA specific to what we need done. Without adding a massive expense for our P&L.
For reference, here is our current staff of VAs:
- Executive Assistant
- Marketing Associate
- Video Editor
- Transaction Coordinator Assistant
If you think the quality of work is bad, you’re wrong. In this email or blog that you’re reading, it was…
- Written by me (Christian, yes I write all our emails)
- Video was edited by our VA
- Email and blog were sent and posted by our marketing team
After I finish writing and filming, I send it off to the team, and magic happens. I’m pretty confident that we put out a higher quality than most.
I don’t know where we would be if we didn’t have the support of our amazing VA team.
Pro-tip: Finding the right VA is important. You want to make sure you’re getting someone who knows what they’re doing. There are SO MANY options, you might as well get the best. I’ve hired all our VA’s through one company. They find, vet and set up interviews with VAs of all different skill levels and pay scales. From marketing to admin work, they have VAs in event category.
If you want to set up a discover call, you can book through this link – click here.