Daven Michaels – The #1 Way Marketers Throw Away Their Time, Energy & Money

By now, just about every marketer knows they ‘should’ be using a virtual assistant to free up their time for more important matters like strategizing, organizing campaigns, arranging JV’s, creating new promotions, fine-tuning offers, etc. But still, many marketers continue doing all the little things themselves. This is like bending over to pick up a penny while dollars drop out of their pockets — and they end up with a big rip in their pants!

Can you afford not to hire a virtual assistant? Let’s take a look…

What is your yearly income? Please write down that amount, because it’s important.

Now let’s say you wrote down $50,000 per year. Have you ever figured out what that means in terms of your hourly rate? It’s easy to calculate. You simply take $50,000 and divide it by 52 weeks. Then you divide that by 6 days (assuming you work 6 days like many marketers). Then, finally, divide that by 8 hours to come up with your hourly rate. In this example, your hourly rate would be $20/hour.

What this means is that if you are doing tasks that would cost you less to outsource, then you are HEMORRHAGING money by doing it yourself!

Some of the excuses marketers come up with to avoid hiring a virtual assistant include:

1. Excuse #1: “I don’t trust anyone to do my work for me.”
2. Excuse #2: “I can do it faster myself.”
3. Excuse #3: “I don’t have time to train an assistant.”
4. Excuse #4: “I don’t know if I can come up with 40 hours worth of work for them each week.”

So, let’s just get these out of the way, shall we?

1. “I don’t trust anyone to do my work for me.” What this means is if you don’t trust others to do any of your work for you, then you’ll end up doing everything YOURSELF. And while, yes, this is quite obvious, did you consider that you would then be making yourself a slave to your work for the rest of your life? Also, that you’d end up losing out on any possible leveraging of your time or energy and would lock yourself into the dreaded “Time = Money” equation, where you can never make more money than you invest into work with your own hours?
2. “I can do it faster myself.” Depending on the task, perhaps you can. But even if it took your virtual assistant twice as long as you to do the same task at $6 per hour, you’d still GAIN $10 per hour if your hourly income was $20. If you did it yourself, you’d actually LOSE $10 per hour. So, you might as well grab a stack of $10 bills and set one on fire every hour that you decide you can do it faster yourself.
3. “I don’t have time to train an assistant.” What you’re really saying here is that you’d rather do the same repetitive task over and over and over again instead of training an assistant just ONCE so they can do the task for you FOREVER without further investment of time on your part. Think about the power of investing just a few minutes to train your virtual assistant to complete a task that drains away countless hours of your time. This is the ultimate leverage. Provide your VA with a system to follow just once, and you’ve automated that process for yourself for the rest of your LIFE! So the question is, can you afford to NOT train your VA in repetitive tasks that suck away your time and energy?
4. “I don’t know if I can come up with enough work for them.” A superior outsourcing firm will always provide work for your virtual assistant in their “down time” that will actually monetize them for YOU. That is, when you don’t have work for your VA, the outsourcing company will provide work for them on your behalf — such as promoting an affiliate program where YOU would get paid ongoing commissions for sales they help you generate — without your even assigning work to them. So, in theory, you could end up earning more per month than you actually pay your VA, without your even assigning them a single task. In addition, a client-centered outsourcing firm will offer a variety of monthly plans to suit your needs, so if you only needed 10 or 20 hours of weekly support that would be all you’d pay for.

There are literally hundreds of tasks that your virtual assistant can take off your plate immediately and handle for you on any given day. Imagine all the time that will free up for you.

As you finish your day, you make a list of your priorities for the next day. You notice that at least half of your tasks can be easily delegated to your virtual assistant. So, you send him or her an email with instructions on what’s to be done for the day. By the end of the day, your assistant emails you, letting you know that your tedious, repetitive tasks were completed for you — while you invested TWICE the amount of time into far more valuable, money-generating tasks.

One Final Tip:

If you’re ready to hire a virtual assistant, then choosing the right outsourcing company is crucial. One of the main reasons marketers start out with a virtual assistant and let them go is because they went with the wrong company.