How a virtual assistant can help you achieve your goals

It’s now February and we’re a month in to a new year.  Did you write your business and personal goals down at the beginning of January?  How are you getting on with them?  Are they hidden in a notebook or on a piece of paper at the bottom of a pile somewhere, or are you setting mini actions every week and reviewing them regularly to ensure you reach them?

One of the best ways to ensure that we stick to your goals and blow them out of the park is by sharing them with other people.  That doesn’t mean you have to share them with all and sundry on your social media profiles, but you can choose a few people who you trust: your coach or business mentor, your business buddy, your mastermind group, your best friends or your life partner.

Sharing your goals will help you ensure that they are SMARTER (read this) and can give you a dose of reality whether you’re aiming too small or too high.  But no matter what the people around you say, listen to your heart and your intuition first and foremost.

It’s always a big decision to delegate anything in your business or your personal life to a virtual assistant, but what if this year you went all in and actually shared your biggest annual goals with them?  Sharing your goals with them can help them understand where you want to take your business and allow them to think of ways to support you getting there.  For example, if you have a goal of speaking on stage this year, they can research opportunities, help you prepare your media kit and send those all-important first emails reaching out to the people who might book you.

They may have ideas and make suggestions about systems, processes and tools that could help ease your workload.  If you need a CRM, but don’t know where to start, a VA can make a list of why you need it and what your objectives are.  They can research options and give you a shortlist so that you can pick one to try.  They can then set it up for you, inputting the necessary data and getting it to work for you, without you thinking about it.

They can also help with support and accountability, if you don’t already have a coach,  accountability partner or you’re not in a mastermind.  Running your own business can be very lonely and staying on track when you have a hundred other demands on your time isn’t always easy.

A virtual assistant can take care of those tasks that don’t need your involvement, leaving you free to concentrate on other more rewarding tasks.  For example, preparing your invoices and records for the end of the year, so that you can hand over a file of nice tidy accounts to your accountant, well before the deadline for filing, making you your accountant’s favourite client.

A virtual assistant can also save you time by managing your team for you, even if you only work with 2 or 3 other professionals.  Instead of you having separate meetings with your team members to review their progress, your VA can set up a project management tool, centralising all the information, helping the flow of communication around the business and allowing you to see what’s happening in an instant at any time of the day or week.

If you bring your virtual assistant on board completely, it will only add more value to your relationship, and ultimately your business. Sharing your goals with them will help them to understand where you’re taking the business and they’ll feel like a valued member of the team, increasing motivation, enthusiasm and trust.

This advice is equally valid for employed administrative professionals, if you understand where your company and your boss are going, you’ll find your role so much more interesting and motivating and you can look for ways to step up even more!

If you’re an overwhelmed business owner and would like to chat to me about how I and my team could support you this year, then do send me a direct message via any of my social media accounts or an email via my website.