One way to destress your business is to outsource your more routine tasks. Or, better yet, outsource those particular tasks and activities that cause you maximum stress, eat into your time, and don’t directly make you money – for example, setting up your shopping cart or uploading your podcast episodes and writing show notes for them.
No one is good at everything. Spending your time on tasks you hate and/or aren’t good at makes you miserable and wastes your energy.
When you hire talented contractors to support you by doing those tasks, you get to do more of what you love and less of what you don’t love. This makes you happier and helps your business thrive.
This month’s theme is Destress Your Business and in today’s episode, I give you the basics of outsourcing plus my most effective tips for de-stressing your business.
Welcome to Systems Sunday, today we finish up with this month’s theme of Destress Your Business. I am Lisa Wells, your Virtual Assistant Trainer.
In today’s episode, I explain why outsourcing will save your sanity.
One way to destress your business is to outsource your more routine tasks. Or, better yet, outsource those particular tasks and activities that cause you maximum stress, eat into your time, and don’t directly make you money – for example, setting up your shopping cart or uploading your podcast episodes and writing show notes for them.
No one is good at everything. Spending your time on tasks you hate and/or aren’t good at makes you miserable and wastes your energy.
When you hire talented contractors to support you by doing those tasks, you get to do more of what you love and less of what you don’t love. This makes you happier and helps your business thrive.
It’s easy to fit outsourcing into your budget if you:
A. Identify ahead of time the most important task or activity to outsource and start with that one particular task.
B. Determine a dollar figure you can afford right now and how much you have the potential of earning while the non-money-making task is being taken care of by someone else.
Freelance outsource contractors are entrepreneurs like you. They run their own businesses, set their own hours – and sometimes they will outsource too. A transcription freelancer, for example, might have several transcriptionists working for her if her volume of work is high enough.
Outsourcing is about more than just hiring freelancers, though. It’s about hiring specialists, so always make sure that any freelancer you are considering specializes in the tasks or areas you want her to handle. And we do mean ‘specialize’! There’s a huge difference between a legal transcriptionist and a medical transcriptionist.
There are other benefits to outsourcing: Hiring contractors means bringing in people who’ve done work for other entrepreneurs and experimented with dozens of different workflow styles. They might be able to see easy ways to improve your strategies or processes that you’d never have thought of yourself.
If you are new to outsourcing, don’t let that intimidate you.
• Decide exactly what task(s) you need doing
• Set a budget
• Look for a specialist
• Be sure to check her references
• Start her out on a trial basis – on a single task or project.
Finding out what she charges per hour and calculating how many hours you need per month is a necessity before you commit yourself. Looking for freelancers who offer package deals – so many hours per month for a fixed price – is a sound strategy for those new to outsourcing.
When you do everything yourself, the day-to-day work often sucks up so much time that you can’t plan for the future or grow your business. Bring in freelance support, and suddenly you’ve got room in your schedule to scale and build.
The most effective tips for de-stressing may also be the hardest:
- Limit communication and social media time at ALL times (not just during the workday)
- Turn off notifications. They’ll distract you while you work, and clutter up your family/relaxation time.
- Remove apps from your phone that pulls your attention away from important matters.
- Consider an email cutoff, like 7 p.m., so your mind can’t latch on to new work issues in the evening when you should be unwinding.
- Never deal with work communications in bed, on the weekend, or on vacation.
- Create an auto-responder telling people you’re offline to reinforce your boundaries.
- Use client contracts to specifically lay out your hours and conditions – and stick to these written boundaries
But the single best way to destress?
Take action.
Realize it’s not just your business that’s at stake, but perhaps even your health and life itself.
Honor yourself, your health and well-being, and put all these suggestions into practice today.
If you’d like a shortcut in ways to destress your business, check out my Business-Building Action Kit, 7 Ways to Destress Your Business over in my shop. These action kits contain a full done-for-you action plan to give you guidance, resources, and keep you on track with checklists and worksheets.
Stay tuned next month for an all-new Systems Sunday. Until then, have a great week!
Catch up on other DeStress Your Business episodes:
Did you enjoy this episode and want to put it into action? Grab this kit!
7 Ways to Destress Your Business
$25.00
Stress has become part and parcel of being an entrepreneur these days – particularly if you work online.
It’s been estimated that people who work for themselves suffer from more stress than those who work for others. There are still bills to pay, time and people to manage, responsibilities to meet, and expectations to fill. The difference is, when you work for yourself, you can choose what to do about it, and how you are going to diffuse or eliminate that stress.
Life passes swiftly, at an increasingly frenetic pace. It’s easy to get caught up in all the drama involved with multi-tasking, responsibilities, and trying to be all things to all people.
Learning how to destress is as important to your business as learning how to make money, so don’t neglect it.
In this complete kit, I give you the step-by-steps as well as some tools, resources, and powerful strategies to put into practice today.
What you Get with Your Kit:
- 21-Page Guide giving you step-by-step, visuals, and examples of how to destress your business
- “21 Idea Blueprint” giving you twenty-one ideas
- 4-week done-for-you calendar
- Comprehensive action checklist
- Resource Directory with links to tools and resources
- Worksheet – Use this Worksheet to make sure you are taking consistent action to destress, gain clarity and focus
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