Do you have a business assistant?
If not, I’d advise you to strongly consider hiring a business assistant.
Here’s why:
As almost any CEO, president or business owner will admit, successfully running a business today is a Herculean task. Busy leaders must constantly juggle between sales and service, profit and loss statements, employee relations and marketing, while responding to a volley of questions and requests from co-workers. Every day brings a seemingly endless array of cash flow issues, employee problems and customer problems, each elbowing one after another out as the most pressing issue of the day. To cut through the overwhelm and confusion a successful company can bring, hiring an assistant can help your business grow and prosper – plus eliminate some of the stress and chaos you may be experiencing.
Compounding the difficulty for you as the CEO, president or business owner is the weight of solving all those problems and the putting out of all those fires – which falls squarely on your shoulders. After all, you’re is the most valuable person in the company; the one who had the vision and worked tirelessly to turn the dream into a reality. But all too often your role which so critical to the organization’s long-term growth and success becomes embroiled in the busy work and putting out of fires. Rather than focusing on strategic thinking, planning, and investing critical time with other company personnel or especially, customers or clients.
There are probably days in your business when you’re not sure what to do next.
Does this happen to you?
- Have you ever thought about why it is happening?
- Why you seem to be constantly overwhelmed and not accomplishing your goals, even though your day never seems to end?
- Why you are always late to meetings or have to postpone something yet again?
- Why what should be an eight hour business day seems to be getting longer and longer and longer? Yet not always accomplishing as much as you needed or wanted to do that particular day?
The answer to helping you manage this blizzard of activity might just be a personal business assistant who can help make work (and life) easier for you. The right personal business assistant is someone you can trust with more than just traditional duties such as word processing or appointment scheduling. This individual can be a critical addition to your team. Helping take many mundane and time consuming tasks away from you. The right personal business assistant can free you up to focus in areas that are priceless to the company’s future growth and success.
CEOs, presidents and business owners of companies, small, midsize or large, all need to have assistants to help them manage the seemingly endless array of day-to-day details required of any leader. In today’s environment many point to the value of a personal assistant’s skills in intercepting potential problems. Taking on tasks and responsibilities to free up time that can be better invested by developing strategic plans or meeting with key customers – or potential new customers.
In fact, the list of rewards if you choose to work with an assistant is endless IF (that’s an important word) you are willing to share, delegate and even release power – without giving up ultimate decision making — to the assistant.
Of course the best relationships are based on a team attitude where both you and the assistant work together toward the same company goal path. The assistant may ultimately know the company so well that he or she gains a unique perspective and trust within the organization. A view that could well prove invaluable to you as he or she pinpoints problems or opportunities that you might never have realized existed. In the very best instances, the assistant’s role can develop into an extension of your own overall contribution to the organization.
To find the right business assistant for you and your company, consider the following three qualifications:
1.) Education: Finding the right assistant is not necessarily based on educational achievements. While a college degree or equivalent business level experience background certainly can be helpful, what you’re really looking for is a person who not only understands business, but can easily manage a number of tasks at once. Multi-task. The right person should understand both how to prioritize competing projects and how do get things done. The assistant should have an intuitive sense of what needs to be done, and even better, how to get it done efficiently and effectively.
2.) Skills: Excellent verbal and written skills, first-class word processing and computer skills are always a given, but you should verify other computer and technical skills as well. Specifically, you might ask about experience with particular software programs. Ask too about other experience such as clerical duties, demonstrated interpersonal or people related skills, experience working on special projects and to demonstrate proven organizational skills.
3.) Position Qualities: You should be sure to look for someone who is detail oriented and conscientious. The ideal person will also have the ability to work independently, yet be a team player. He or she should be able to work cooperatively with others, maintain the highest level of confidentiality, effectively prioritize work and delegate to others. In addition, he or she should always meet deadlines and keep timelines in check. An assistant who has original ideas and the ability to think out of the box can be quite valuable, particularly if the person is also a strategist who can stand up to you and tell you candidly, yet with respect, if you are taking the wrong direction. Perhaps most important, the assistant must have integrity and be honest.
The right assistant will become so valuable they will become an integral part of your day-to-day activities and you will wonder how you ever got along without one. So take the time now to carefully think through where you want to go with your business and how an assistant can make sure you reach those goals. Begin by thinking through exactly what skills an assistant could bring, and the responsibilities he or she could shoulder to help you propel the company forward. Integrate those skills and responsibilities into a job description that helps you find and hire just the right assistant that will set you on the path to success.
Finding the right business assistant can be time consuming, but the investment pays countless dividends for you and the company. Once you have the right assistant, together you can divvy up the responsibilities that have weighed on you for entirely too long. The added time you find thanks to your new assistant can be invested to find new profit centers just waiting to be tapped to help you and the company see your most ambitious goals come true.
So what are you waiting for?
Start TODAY to gather your thoughts, develop a specific job description, then find the right business assistant to help you and your business grow and prosper. It will be one of the best business decisions you ever make!
Have a better business day every day!
To your success!
Howard Lewinter guides – focuses – advises CEOs, presidents and business owners throughout the United States to MORE success – MORE profit – less stress. Get MORE from your business! Talk with Howard: 888-738-1855.