10 Steps to Becoming a Successful Entrepreneur
Growth is the difference between individuals who are working for themselves and an entrepreneur. If you are a freelance writer, a marketing consultant or a business coach, when your business is not growing your revenue is directly proportional to the word done. But as an entrepreneur, your focus is on building a business rather than generating money. As an entrepreneur, your money grows as your business grows ultimately leading to an unlimited potential.
If you are interested in business growth, the use of a virtual assistant is the key to business growth. Putting together a team of virtual assistants, business managers, web developers, and marketing experts is the difference between a freelancer and an entrepreneur.
In today’s world, the motto of the virtual assistant is Delegate, Focus, and Grow. When you delegate your office tasks, you have time to focus on more productive tasks and service rendering. By doing this, you are on your way to becoming an entrepreneur.
Here are some 10 steps that is recommended if you want to grow from being self-employed to becoming an entrepreneur.
1. Team: You need the services of an assistant or a team. Your team could comprise of a virtual assistant, an online business manager, a social media manager, and affiliate or JV coordinator.
2. Dislikes: You need to delegate the things you dislike doing. Some of the things that could be delegated are billing, customer service, and research and data entry. If you want some credible hands to delegate the task to, you can find additional help.
3. Limitations: Are there things you are unable to do as a result or lack of skills or needed knowledge you need to delegate the tasks. Some tasks that can be delegated are the programming of the shopping cart, updating your website, designing your twitter background and loading your email newsletters. A contemporary virtual assistant can be of assistance to you with respect to tasks you can not handle.
4. Time Constraints: Delegate task that you cannot do due to time constraints. Tasks like blogging, submitting your articles for marketing, monitoring, PR opportunities, and locating that business liability insurance. You can create some free time by delegating tasks.
5. Bottlenecks: Identify whatever it is that slows you down and delegate those tasks. Some of them are sorting emails, scheduling appointments, responding to colleagues requests and gathering data for your accountants.
6. Needs and Wants: As you delegate tasks, you will have more free time, focus on the needs of your clients, prospects, and community. Here are some considerations to keep in mind.
• Do your clients want more newsletters?
• Do they leave you messages on social media that you need to respond to?
• Do most of your clients want information that you can write on an eBook?
7. Next Steps: When you have some free time, identify the next steps in your business. This can be achieved by monitoring your competitors. You need to know what they are doing that you are not doing. Ask yourself, have you ever done a webinar or done a teleseminar? Probably you do not have an affiliate or JV program. Are you out of ideas? If so look to others to help inspire you.
8. Automation: You need to consider automation alternatives as this keeps cost low. You need to consider the following:
• If billing is taking t much of your assistants time, consider a software that will automate that task and that is less costly than the assistant.
• Maybe generating the transaction details per transaction takes to much time, you can consider options like placing products and services on your website. Make these available for just one click. This can be achieved by using 1 Shopping Cart infusionsoft.
• If monitoring your emails is burdensome for you and your team, consider transferring them to Gmail or Google App. Set up filters to help reduce the time and effort spent on sorting out emails per day.
• If you spend to much time locating files and documents, consider creating a cloud based filing system like Dropbox. This could make things easier.
9. Goals: Set long and short term goals. Spread them between three months and three years. This will keep things in perspective. To achieve this you need to be specific, measurable, attainable, and realistic. All tasks must be done in a timely fashion. If you are not sure what you should be aiming towards, seek guidance from others.
10. Freedom: At this point, you can not enjoy your freedom, business success and time. Knowing that your bills are already paid, your team is hard at work. Knowing that focus on growing your business and aligning with affiliates and automating your processes increase your efficiency, resulting in lower costs and increased growth. At this point, you know that your vacation is truly a vacation and not a trip to the beach with your laptop.
Although millions of people visit Brandon's blog each month, his path to success was not easy. Go here to read his incredible story, "From Disabled and $500k in Debt to a Pro Blogger with 5 Million Monthly Visitors." If you want to send Brandon a quick message, then visit his contact page here.