1.    Outline your mandatory must-haves.

Every business has goals they’d like to achieve – corporations have mandatory goals, or “must-haves” that must be met throughout the year in order for them to be deemed successful. If it works for a corporation, why shouldn’t it work for you?

Sit down and take time to assess what your business needs to succeed, and build those ideas into your mandatory must-haves. The DemGen Future Vision Map can help you realize clarity in what goals you should be working towards. Once you’ve decided upon them, your future goals, projects, growths, to do lists and activities should all match up accordingly.

What do you want your business to achieve this year? Do you want to increase visibility? Do you want to receive more feedback on current projects? Outline your mandatory must-haves and begin focusing on meeting those “must-haves” every month, or quarter.

2.    Reposition your time and resources

As leaders, our time is valuable! At this point in the game, your time and resources should be allocated and strategically delegated to projects that are revenue generating. Delegation, as always, is key here.

If you find yourself spending two hours scanning through reports looking for important information, have someone from your team scan through them first and highlight the most important parts so you can get through them quickly.

3.    Constant evaluation and monitoring is necessary

When trying to grow your business, you know you can’t just leave things to the happenstance. As tedious as it sounds, measuring and monitoring areas like revenue, sales, marketing, visibility, and productivity is extremely important.

By constantly refreshing your knowledge about where you stand in all of these areas, you can spot weaknesses and threats before they become a larger problem. Working with a virtual team with experience in monitoring and evaluating will help you notice patterns of what’s working, and what’s not, and help pinpoint exactly where you need to make changes.

4.    Build a team of top talent players

Big business CEO’s know that a jack-of-all-trades generally means a master of none. Hiring one person to manage, and complete, all your miscellaneous tasks isn’t going to help your business grow. They are likely to become overwhelmed and that just pushes tasks back onto your plate.

With business platforms changing constantly, a virtual team will offer a group of top talent with specialties in a variety of areas. Virtual teams also mean you don’t have to worry about the office space, and can trust your team to be motivated and focused.

Of course, these changes can’t be implemented immediately. Over time though, and with the help of your team, you’ll see your business changing in ways you had only imagined!

© Pam Christie, DemGen Inc. 2014

Here at DemGen, we all work from home offices and can’t imagine commuting!  We’ve usually been working for hours while traditional employees are still stuck in traffic.

Staff.com – Connecting Great Companies with Global Talent

With ‘going virtual’ becoming a trend in the workplace, it’s key to understand the differences between a virtual team and virtual assistants before making any hiring decisions.

Though both have value, their capabilities and focus are very separate and distinct. It’s key to understand the difference to determine which will best suit your needs.

Virtual Teams

Virtual teams are typically comprised of a number of experts in their respective fields with complementary skills such as: project management, lead generation, marketing, graphic design, etc. These team members are professionals with years of experience. Most have an extensive background and have worked in the corporate world for many years, before making the decision to work virtually, to be their own boss and work with diverse clients not limited by their physical location.

Virtual teams are a literal ‘jack of all trades’ minus the ‘master of none’. The team dynamic allows for many people to work together and balance each other with their specific skills.

Virtual Assistants

Virtual assistants are just what the name implies – assistants. They often also come from a corporate background, although it tends to be in secretarial or administrative roles. As a ‘one man show’, they have limited capabilities and are best suited for simple tasks such as calendar or email management, travel arrangements or dictation. Virtual assistants are able to apply their specific skills to the tasks provided to them, but rarely have an additional person to collaborate with when they do not have the expertise for what they have been assigned.

Which one is right for you?

Whether a virtual team or virtual assistant is best for you depends entirely on your business needs. Please also keep in mind; a virtual team is not a grouping of virtual assistants.

If you’re just starting up and have very simple and straightforward tasks you need assistance with, a virtual assistant may be the best bet.

If you have an established business with a lot on the go and multiple needs, a virtual team is probably best suited for you.

You can learn more about how DemGen’s virtual team works by scheduling a Discovery Call.

© Tamara Smith, DemGen Inc. 2013