As a business owner, you will often find yourself carrying out a wide range of tasks across the whole of your business. This requires you to wear a number of different hats in order to help your business thrive and grow. When building a business, it’s not always possible to employ a person to take care of each individual task and oftentimes as a business owner, you end up taking on a variety of roles. So, how do you decide which hats to wear and which to outsource?
Chief Marketing Officer (“CMO”)
Marketing is crucial for any business and even new start-ups need to market their products or services. Without customers or clients, your business will not survive, so you need your marketing model to work like clockwork in order to cultivate leads and drive sales.
In your role as CMO, you will cover the likes of social media, email marketing and branding, ensuring everything aligns and works towards your goals. To do this takes a lot of work. However, many of your marketing tasks, such as sending emails and newsletters or posting to social media, can be outsourced*, freeing you up to negotiate larger partnership deals and to work on your organisation’s overall marketing strategy.
Director of Sales
As you start to generate leads, you will need to turn them into sales. The approach you take will be dependent on your business model. You will need to identify what works in terms of taking your customers or clients through the sales journey. This will involve asking the right questions to identify your client’s needs and then offering your product or service as the solution.
Many sales tasks, such as making sales calls, sending emails, booking appointments with potential clients, preparing quotations or asking for customer testimonials, can also be outsourced*. Outsourcing some of your sales tasks will ensure you have more time to focus on demonstrating your product or service to your larger clients and securing those bigger contracts.
Chief Operations Officer (“COO”)
This is a considerable role that is especially important to ensure your business runs smoothly. A COO generally oversees all your business operations from administration to IT, to resource management to sales, distribution and more. If your resource, sales and distribution operations are not aligned, then your business will not operate effectively.
However, despite the importance of this role, many of the administrative tasks that a COO oversees can indeed be delegated or outsourced*. Hiring a Virtual Assistant to help you with your administrative tasks can help reduce your overall workload and give you time back to focus on the important stuff.
Human Resources
Once you’ve started to scale your business and you begin to hire employees and outsource work to freelancers, managing a team can be hard work and time-consuming. You suddenly have to deal with additional HR tasks that you hadn’t done previously, such as writing job briefs, updating personnel records, responding to queries about absences and leave, setting up interviews and liaising with recruitment companies.
A virtual assistant can help you with your HR tasks and offload some of the stress that comes with looking for and hiring an employee.
Chief Financial Officer (“CFO”)
Many businesses fail because they struggle to manage their finances correctly. Your role as CFO is therefore crucial to make sure that your business makes a profit and also has the necessary funds available to ensure smooth operations.
Many of a CFO’s more general administrative tasks can be outsourced to a Virtual Assistant*. Tasks that can be outsourced include data entry, managing receipts, assisting with the preparation of financial reports, invoicing clients, paying bills and keeping track of accounts payable and accounts receivable.
When Should You Outsource?*
As you can see, although a business owner has many hats to wear, the good news is that you don’t have to wear all of these hats alone. In fact, you can easily outsource tasks that take up too much of your time or aren’t your speciality.
Hiring a Virtual Assistant is the perfect solution for this. A Virtual Assistant will help you streamline your workload, meaning you can get on with the important job of running your business. Ultimately, this will help you to save time and money in the long run and enable your business to grow. Hiring a Virtual Assistant should therefore be seen as an investment in your organisation’s growth.
Do you need flexible business support and want to make savings by hiring a VA? Get in touch!
qVirtual – Virtual Assistant Solutions