As someone that has worked with thousands of entrepreneurs on their outsourcing strategies, one of the biggest stumbling blocks that I’ve come across is simply just getting started.
If you’ve been on the fence about building a virtual team to help you run, support and grow your business, I’m going to share a very simple exercise to show you how to build a virtual team that will help you on your way to becoming a super productive and successful entrepreneur.
The Art of Letting Go
The fact is that getting started on building a team actually doesn’t need to be as painful as a lot of people envision it to be. Once you get over the fear of letting go of certain tasks, you will actually start looking for more tasks to get off your plate, freeing up more of your time that you can spend growing your business.
My homework for you today comes directly from the pages of my book, Virtual Freedom. It’s called the 3 Lists to Freedom exercise and it’s going to change your life forever. To get started, all you need to do is to grab a piece of paper and draw two lines down, creating three columns.
1. Things You Hate Doing
In the first column, list down all the things you hate doing on a day-to-day basis. These are tasks that you might put off all day long but they are essential to your business and quite frankly, your business is demanding that you do them.
2. Things You Can’t Do
In the second column, list down all the tasks you can’t do. As entrepreneurs, it’s tough to admit that someone else out there can do a task better than us. This is the time to be really honest with ourselves and acknowledge that there are plenty of things we struggle.
3. Things You Shouldn’t Be Doing
Finally, the third column. This is by far, is the single most important list because it really gets you thinking. List down all the things as a business owner that you feel you shouldn’t really be doing on a day-to-day basis. Now I want you to think long and hard here – there might be tasks that you enjoy doing, there might be tasks that you are really good at doing but the million dollar question is: as a business owner, should I actually be doing them?
Can my time be better spent on more high-level activities such as strategizing for growth, spending more time with my top 20% clientele, creating and launching new products and services, traveling to conferences, networking… or maybe just playing a little more Lego with the people that you love? 🙂
Now once you’ve created these three lists, you’ll fundamentally have a roadmap where you can go ahead and start grouping these tasks together to create new roles that you can plug into your business to start making everything so much easier.
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