You will learn inside the video the system I use to manage an outsourced team with minimal effort. Whether you have one virtual assistant, or hundreds of people working for you this system makes your life very easy and is virtually mobile allowing you to travel and run this from anywhere in the world. There’s some great tools and softwares I share with you inside as well.
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Hey everyone, it’s Tyrone from Tyroneshum.com. Thanks very much for visiting this video today. I want to share with you something that a lot of people particularly my coaching students and subscribers have been asking me is how do I manage all my virtual staff and all the team together, not having to spend so much time checking back and forth and managing the projects.
Well, what I would suggest highly is to create or to buy a system such as project management system to put into place. One that I’ve been using very successfully is called ActiveCollab. ActiveCollab is not that expensive to buy, you can actually buy it outright for around $400 US. Once you set that system up, you can basically be able to access and transfer all the details and manage your day-to-day projects all in one place. Another system that you can use as well is called BasecampHQ and a lot of marketers out there also recommend it too, it’s very simple to use.
So, that’s what I recommend doing — to use a project management system. Inside the project management system, you can manage everything from your projects, staff, communication, etc. It’s simply having a backlog that’s loaded up into there. The great thing about running in a project management system is you can track what’s going on. That’s what I love — I’ll just have to hop into the system and see how progress is working on this project, what’s happening with this project, and so forth. That’s a great way doing it.
One other thing I want to mention as well is keeping track of all passwords and usernames can be a hassle so what I also recommend doing is setting up an account in this system called Lastpass.com. What you can do from there is setup all your passwords inside this little system which is free, and have it linked out to your project management system so that if any of your virtual staff or team members needs to access your usernames or passwords for certain projects, they can easily use this system, log it in and once they’ve put it straight up, they’ll have complete access to anything that they need to do.
So those are two things that I want to clear up with people — as I said, these 2 pieces of software that I highly recommend is ActiveCollab which you can just buy outright or setup for yourself which is a project management system, or BasecampHQ which is an online system which you just have to pay monthly fee and everything runs online there for you.
I hope you enjoyed that little tip and if you have any more questions, I’d love to hear from your feedbacks and your comments just right below down here. I’d love to hear any further interesting topics that you might want me to talk about and share with you as well. Have a great day and I’ll see you in the next video!
These last few weeks have been the most fun and productive times in my life. I just got back from a trip over to Hong Kong and Thailand and to share with you what I did, I’ve created a little video right below here that shows one of my most memory events whilst on holidays:
The reason why I show you this event is because when I look back over the time whilst I was away, not once did I check my email or have to worry about what was happening in my business. I literally left my laptop and mobile phone in Australia and I headed overseas and just had FUN! When I came back I was not surprised to only get 32 emails that were from my virtual staff and personal friends. Last time I traveled overseas when my business was not setup with the proper systems, I received easily over 200 emails in that same period of time. What a change it was!
How Did I Setup My Business To Allow Me To Be Stress Free Whilst On Holidays?
The key is outsourcing. I have a business that has core systems in place that allow full-time virtual staff to manage and run the business whether I am working or not. I spend a majority of my time creating video content which is the heart of my business and my members appreciate this. The rest of the work that still needs to be completed, such as customer billing, technical issues and marketing are all outsourced to people I hire from the Philippines. Though, even having full-time virtual staff working for me it is still vital to have proper systems in place. I am going to share with you the top 5 tips on how you can prepare your business to allow you to enjoy a stress free holiday:
Tip #1: Plan Ahead Of Time
Within my business, delivering video content is like running a TV show and if I want to ensure that my viewers receive what they paid for, then I need to follow a schedule. The best way to look at this is if you are writing content for a blog or uploading video to an online channel website, then you need to plan at the beginning and consider what you want to deliver to your market. As the saying goes, “if you fail to plan, you plan to fail”. Before I left for my holiday, I already had created over 8 videos which will be delivered over one and a half months. That way I am already prepared ahead of schedule. The same thing also applies to virtual staff and you will need to discuss with them the necessary work to be completed over the course of the year.
I’m happy to be sharing this tutorial with you today on a beautiful weather in my balcony where I’m located at. And yes, it’s another great day in Sydney and I really miss this opportunity to be creating a video on a very good environment so finally, here it is.
In this tutorial are simple guidelines of how to get yourself started when you got your first virtual staff. Obviously, you don’t just have to give them the work and let them do it by themselves. You should guide them, train them and really spend time taking their hands off to your system:
Hi, Tyrone Shum here. Thanks very much for visiting my blog today and welcome to my outsourcing video. Currently it’s probably around about 30 degrees today, it’s the beautify Sydney weather which we’ve been missing out for quite sometime. Been up and down lately these last few weeks and finally we’ve got full sunshine and as you can probably see in the background there, we’ve got nice blue waters as well. This is just the balcony I’m sitting at, at the moment where I’m at.
Okay, what I wanted to talk to you about today is a particular topic that I’ve been asked on many occasions is, the question is “Once you’ve got virtual staff, what work to give to them?” And, this is a very common question I’ve been asked regularly and I thought this is going to be a good opportunity for me to be able to share with you how I go about doing this and also what is important. I want to go through and outline just a few points so that you can get a better idea of how to go about doing this and also what to give to your virtual staff. Because when you do hire them, you might be thinking “Okay, why it isn’t easy just to give them all my work!” Yes it is, though if you can just imagine hiring a chimpanzee and wanting to get them to do some tricks or hiring and getting a dog to do some tricks for example, you get to teach them how to do it otherwise they don’t know what to do. And this is why I’m going to be talking about this particular topic because a lot of people struggle with this.
Now what I’ve done when I started up my whole system of hiring virtual staff to outsource my entire business is I need to setup a system to be able to do this and obviously without a system, you are going to be spending a lot of time training and managing, and running everything yourself therefore you’ve created more extra work. But by having a system in place, it makes it so much easier and it’s a hands-off approach and you can spend more time doing things that you enjoy like I’m doing right now and also letting people do what they’re best at.
The first point is setup a project management system. And, I’ve recently setup a really customized project management system in the Mass Outsource Mastermind course and I’ll probably show you what it looks like down below in the resources section so just click on below and I’ll show you exactly the link to it and also some of the screen captures of what you can get. But, inside the project management system, you want to setup particular modules so that firstly it has training modules, and also daily accountability modules and lastly, week to week modules. What I mean by that is I’ll break these things down. The first thing I’ve been talking about is training modules. Training modules is where you store all your business training videos, anything that’s related to the materials that you need to train up the person or the virtual staff to run your business. And it can be putting it anytime you want so that if you’ve come up with how to setup and run your email for your virtual staff, put that in there. At the end of the day, whatever comes out of your brain that is required in your business, just put it inside there and that way you start to catalogue and also to build up a list of training modules for your virtual staff.
Next thing as well is having a daily accountability module setup inside the project management system and by having that in place, you can have your virtual staff being kept accountable on what they do. You don’t have them keeping accountable to what they do, they can do literally what they want and you’re paying them for work that they have to do in your business. So that’s important to have and they need to submit it to you on a daily basis, that’s crucial.
Now, the next module that I was talking about was your week to week module, what I call weekly tasks module. And, what it comprise of is the set weekly tasks that they need to complete everyday or everyweek and these are the things that they always have to fall back on if there are no projects there. Say for example, right now I don’t have very many projects for my virtual staff to do particularly my programmers. My programmers are currently going “Okay, what do I do?” So there’s been this module that has been setup for them for quite sometime now and if there’s nothing for them to do, they just simply fall back into this particular module, review any of the training material that I have there, review any of the outlined and step by step guides that need to be followed and just simply complete the work. So for example, one of them that I’ve got inside there at the moment is to complete and setup multiple websites on numerous different sites and or different areas of the Internet and linking them back to my major sites such as Internet Business Path, Mass Outsource and also for Asknreply. And those websites all create those multi links which help build up the page rank and also the search engine optimization and these things are always continuous that you can assign to your virtual staff to do. That’s something that you can do for your virtual staff whether it be for virtual assistants, programmers or for anyone that needs to do anything that’s related to your business and you set these things up in your project management system. It’s easy to do and setup.
Okay so once you’ve got these systems in place and they’ve been assigned this work, then the most important thing is obviously to monitor it. And, I usually give myself about 1-2 months to monitor the progress, to see if they need additional training, to see how much more I can help them. Or, if they’re fine with everything, then give it to them and let them to be on automatic mode and continue to repeat these tasks everyday for you. And, once I do that on a day to day basis, you start to see that all your efforts of setting off these systems will start to payoff or all the results will start to show. And you can obviously set this up by having right reporting systems in place like Google Analytics on tracking traffic, setting up Time Record sheets that I’ve done with my virtual staff, all those kind of things can help manage and also allow you to see what tasks to give to your virtual staff. That’s crucial that you understand how this system works or how this goes about.
Now as I mentioned at the beginning of this video, I said what kind of tasks I should say can you give to your virtual staff? And maybe let’s just start off with the basics. A lot of times, people hire virtual assistants just to start off when they’re hiring their first virtual staff and for my first virtual assistants, what I got them to do was to check my email and to respond to my customer service inquiries. Becuause a lot of times, I used to spend about 10-15 hours a week just checking emails and then replying to customer inquiries, customer complains and feedback, etc. And because of that time, I could have spent doing other things that I enjoy doing and this is why offloaded it for them to do. Imagine multiplying that by three businesses, that’s like 30 hours a week. That pretty much goes three quarters of my time spent on replying to emails, and managing and administration stuff.
So you can probably that being the first thing if you have a lot of emails and a lot of these tasks. Otherwise, if you don’t have that much emails in comparison to what I usually get, you can also assign them to do research tasks. You might want to assign them to research all about different websites that you might be able to get. Say for example, link exchange with other website to build up your network of links for your websites, things like those that they can do.
Another example that you might want to give them to do is also submitting to different article directories, submitting to Technoratti, Digg, doing all the different types of social media submissions. They take time and a lot of times, you don’t need to physically sit there and enter in your email address and names, passwords and stuff, you can assign that to your virtual staff and let them do it for you. And if they do it correctly and do it right, then you have yourself a very much automated system of how to be able to setup an easy way to drive traffic to your website. Those are some of the simple tasks that I’ve already assigned for my VA to do and anyone could do it as well.
All right well, that pretty much ends this tutorial on what to do about assigning tasks and stuff to managing your virtual assistants as well or virtual staff. I hope you enjoyed today’s tutorial and you got a lot out of it, and I hopefully see you soon then. Well, I’m Tyrone Shum and all the best with everything that you do and talk to you soon.
Leading up to Mass Outsource Mastermind program opening on Tuesday, 17th November 2009 at 9am US EST, I’ve produced another video for you, showing you exactly how to train your virtual staff. This information is different from anything else you’ve seen because I’ve shown you step by step exactly how I do it – and (more importantly) how you can do it too. Furthermore, I also give you a run down of what’s in my course:
I have a very specific way (and some may say uncanny) of outsourcing so that my business takes up as little of my time as possible – and training up your virtual staff is key – which is why I’m introducing you to this now.
If you haven’t seen my 10 FREE videos on how to outsource your business, visit www.massoutsource.com now. Remember to download my free report “Secrets Of Outsourcing Experts Revealed” which has lots of useful resources too!