Episode Details

Are you overwhelmed with tasks that keep you in the weeds instead of working on growing your agency? Are you paying salaried team to do things an hourly assistant could accomplish? STOP IT! Learn how you can increase productivity and save boatloads of time and resources. Plus, learn how to help your sales team be more effective so you can grow.

In this episode, we'll cover:

• Ways to save time and increase productivity.
• How to help your sales team be more effective.
• How to get unstuck from doing everything yourself.

Today's guest on the show is Jeff J. Hunter, founder, and Chief Freedom Officer at VA Staffer, the outsourcing agency he created to help businesses build virtual teams. With a background in IT and virtual project management he knows the ins and outs of getting projects done virtually. He's here to give us strategies on saving time and ways to help salespeople be more effective.

How to Save Time and Increase Productivity

Agencies are always trying to land more clients, right? However, there always comes a point where they can't take on more new business because they're too busy servicing the clients they already have.

Jeff's a big proponent of "don't hire until it hurts" so his advice is to make more time for servicing clients and growing your business by understanding what you do and how it impacts your business. He compared it to Pareto's 80/20 Principle from 1865 ~ the trivial many 80% and the vital few 20%.

However 150 years later, in a technology age, Jeff believes it's more of a 90/10 split. He advises his clients to list out all the tasks and activities they do. Then decide which are the trivial many and which are the vital few. The vital few are the ones making the most impact on the business. For most entrepreneurs, Jeff finds 90% of what they do can be delegated while they focus on the 10% which impacts their business.

Similarly, I tell my clients to make a list of everything they do and then rank each item as to how much it impacts the agency - low, medium, or high impact. This is how you can find the major time sucks (check out my productivity worksheet here). and then work on becoming more productive with daily tasks and increase productivity overall. I find that most will usually tackle the low-impact items first because they offer immediate gratification and make us feel good in the short term.

The hard stuff usually seems to get procrastinated, yet that's the stuff that makes the most impact on business growth.

How to Make Your Sales Team More Effective

A solid outbound strategy is one of the three sales channels you need to grow your agency. (The other two are inbound sales and strategic partnerships, by the way.) But are your or your sales team spinning their wheels on mining the information and making connections? That's a major waste of time and resources. Why spend your own time or pay the sales team top dollar to do the leg work, when you could use a $7-$8 per hour VA?

Instead, let a VA do the mining. They can do the research, make contact and set up introductions. This frees you or your team up for setting sales strategies and building relationships.

Jeff says knowing what not to outsource is just as important as knowing what you should outsource. And relationship building is definitely not something you can farm out.

How to Get Unstuck from Doing Everything

Stop doing the things you