Prizes: Five ebooks on writing from Anne Wayman and one full copy of Astraware Classic Collection, which includes Astraware Sudoku, Astraware Solitaire, and Astraware Board games. Astraware is one of Meryl’s favorite — if not the best — developer of handheld software. Leave a 30-word valuable comment in this post by June 30 for a chance to win.

Judy Schramm and I have known each other for over five years. She’s one of my earliest clients and my longest client referred her to me. We touched base from time to time over the years and now I do regular work for her. This shows you the power of staying in touch after a gig ends. I’ve seen her business explode as she added services and Proresource. I’m honored to have her as a client and friend. If I wanted to be more than a one-person business, she would be my role model.

Are You Ready to Hire a Virtual Assistant?

Everywhere you turn, people are talking about outsourcing.

It’s not just for IT work anymore. You can outsource a wide variety of tasks, including managing your overflowing email inbox, updating your web site or blog, doing bookkeeping, marketing your business, even finding outsourcers!

It sounds good, of course. Who wouldn’t want to offload mundane work and focus on the fun and strategic parts of our businesses.

But is it right for you?

Here are a few questions to ask yourself to see if you ready to hire your first virtual assistant…

1. Do you know what kind of work you want your assistant to do?

Can you list up to 10 specific projects with which you would like help? Optimally, you want projects that are ongoing, such as managing your email or updating your web site, that will require five hours or more each week.

Can you come up with a few easy projects to start with? You’ll want your assistant to begin work on projects that don’t require in-depth knowledge of your market or your company.

2. Can you define what experience, skills and personality characteristics the ideal team member would have?

Ideally, you’ll want to look for someone with combinations of experience, skills and personality that are easy to find.

For example, you might look for someone who is creative, loves graphic design and has Photoshop experience.

Or you might want someone who is detail-oriented, loves working with numbers, and has QuickBook experience.

You don’t want to look for someone who is creative and loves to work with numbers, who can do both your marketing and bookkeeping.

While I’m not going to claim there aren’t people out there with that combination of skills, they are few and far between. You want to make it easy to find the right person.

Think in terms of starting with one assistant and then adding more to do different types of work.

3. Can you provide the information your assistant needs to do these projects?

One of the main reasons projects aren’t done right is that the assistant didn’t have enough information about the project.

You need to explain:

• What you want done,
• Provide the background information, contacts, and data files needed to do the work, and
• Give a timeline and budget.

If you are so busy you can’t take time to provide all of this information, you won’t get the results you are hoping for.

4. Can you invest a little extra time to save your explanations?

Archiving your explanations about your industry, your company, and how you want things done saves you considerable time the next time you have a similar project or when you add the next person to your team.

5. Can you correct your assistant’s work?

If the work isn’t done perfectly the first time (and it probably won’t be), will you be comfortable explaining what was done wrong so your assistant can learn for next time?

6. Do you understand that you won’t gain free time immediately?

You need to allow time to train your assistant. In the beginning, in fact, it will take more time to explain what needs to be done than to do it yourself.

But if you can stick with it through the training process, you’ll get an assistant who knows what you want and does the work the way you want it.

7. Do you have a productive way to use the time you will gain?

If your goal is simply getting free time, you’re in great shape.

But if you need to get a return on the money you are spending to hire an assistant – increasing your revenue enough to cover the expense of the assistant – this is essential.

Plan projects you can do with the freed time to increase your revenue.

Or look for work you can give your assistant that will generate more income for you.

About the author: Judy Schramm is CEO of ProResource, a company she started to help other small business owners take advantage of virtual teams to grow their business. Before founding ProResource, Judy spent 14 years running a marketing and PR firm based entirely on virtual teams, with partners and clients around the world. If you’re ready for a virtual team, or just want to learn more about how you might use a virtual team to grow your business, visit www.proresource.com.