Entrepreneurs!
How much do you love admin! Let’s hear it
Let me tell you a story. I knew an entrepreneur once. She had a real head for business, and had started up a couple of different ones – a diner, a cleaning company, an organic snacks distributor. When I worked for her, she was starting an app and serving on a corporate board.
In the beginning I was wondering why she was not still involved with the earlier businesses. One had closed, one had been sold, one had been left in the hands of a partner. She seemed successful, why did she not keep going?
But after working with her and her team for a short while, it became clear to me.
- She worked on important documents on her local drive and shared them (with the team and with customers) as attachments, so it was a challenge to tell which version was which – if you could even find them
- There was one position they couldn’t seem to keep filled, so this one other person was spending all of their time recruiting and training
- Their business relied on a platform (set up by a temporary consultant) that nobody really understood how to use, but it was too costly to try to change now
- They were always scrambling to put together responses to standard customer inquiries
- They got so many emails, and didn’t even need to open most of them
- All this chaos resulted in a lot of incoming calls from potential and new customers looking for answers, and causing more chaos
She knew she needed a VA, but there was so much to do and she didn’t even know where to start. Anyone she hired would have quickly become overwhelmed, and my friend would also have been overwhelmed by all the questions the new VA would ask.
So what did I do for her?
- Walked her through some Google Workspace collaboration tips, together figured out some strategies that worked for her, and drafted plain-language instructions for her to use and share with her team
- Helped define her goals and expectations for recruitment
- Had a session with her team for a conversation about the platform to re-establish what they needed it for, engaged with an expert to figure out how to make it do that, and drafted custom guidelines
- Drafted standard templates for common customer inquiries
- Cleared out daily inbox by unsubscribing from lists and notifications, and using filters and labels to set up automations
All of these streamlined her day-to-day activities, and removed a lot of clutter from her desk and her mind. All of these also produced documentation – an employee handbook, which streamlined everyone’s use of different platforms, helped train new staff, and left her with the infrastructure to sustainably grow her business.