Virtual Partner

What is an Online Busi­ness Man­ager?
by Tina Forsyth

The offi­cial def­i­n­i­tion of an Online Busi­ness Man­ager (OBM) is:

A vir­tu­ally based sup­port pro­fes­sional who man­ages online based busi­nesses, includ­ing the day-to-day man­age­ment of projects, oper­a­tions, team mem­bers and metrics.

How­ever I like to look at the role from a bit of a dif­fer­ent angle — what is the pur­pose of an Online Busi­ness Man­ager beyond ‘what they do’?

The role of the OBM boils down to one sim­ple thing:

To free up the busi­ness owner so that they can focus their time and energy on the things that only THEY can do in their business.

Most busi­ness own­ers look to hire an Online Busi­ness Man­ager (OBM) when they sim­ply can­not grow their busi­ness any­more being the only one in charge. In order for them to take their busi­ness to the next level they need to pull them­selves out of the day-to-day man­age­ment activ­i­ties and focus on growth.

This includes areas such as prod­uct devel­op­ment, strate­gic alliances and big pic­ture busi­ness plan­ning, all of which are essen­tial to the growth of a busi­ness. Every­thing else becomes the respon­si­bil­ity of the OBM.