To hire or not to hire…an assistant

Is the office work piling up?

The good news is that your business is going from strength to strength, you have a solid customer base and a number of new business queries.  Maybe you have a couple of people working with you.

Unfortunately you seem to be spending more and more time in the office, the paperwork is multiplying at an alarming rate, and your head simply isn’t big enough anymore to contain all the information.  Not to mention the fact that everyone is calling you at all times for access to the information in your head.

What can you do?  Hire an admin assistant, someone who can take on the tasks that are taking you away from building the business. Sounds simple enough… I’ve met many entrepreneurs who tell me that they have tried to hire a PA, but they just weren’t good enough, and that the business simply can’t afford to hire someone more senior.  Added to that the fact that many of us find it incredibly difficult to delegate, and you end up with business owners working all hours of the day and at some point hitting a wall in being able to grow the business.

A Virtual Assistant (VA) can be an option, but if you anticipate your company to grow, you might want to look for a more permanent and long term member of your growing team.  I can come in for a few weeks, grab the tasks that a PA should do, organise the office and the admin, set up systems and processes and put it into a neat package?  Whilst all of this is going on, the recruitment of the new PA continues. Once we have found a suitable candidate, I can then do a full handover and training for a clearly defined role.

This way you get the best of both worlds, the benefit of an experienced Office Manager/EA who can confidently take on the tasks (but one who will be too expensive in the long term) and one who can train a more junior PA/EA, someone who will become a key, long-term member of the team.