Virtual Partner

5 Signs That You May Need to Hire an Online Busi­ness Man­ager
by Tina Forsyth

Won­der­ing if you should hire an Online Busi­ness Man­ager? Here are 5 tell-tale signs that it may be time for you to add an OBM to your team.

1. Your busi­ness is grow­ing while your own free-time is shrink­ing.
I’m bet­ting you started your busi­ness to cre­ate more free­dom in your life yes? Free­dom of time, money and choice. Let me ask you – as your busi­ness grows are you actu­ally work­ing more or less time?

If you are on the ‘work­ing more time’ side of things you cer­tainly aren’t alone… I can’t count how many times i’ve talked to busi­ness own­ers who have shared how they are actu­ally work­ing more hours in their own busi­ness than they ever did in their ‘old job’. How­ever it doesn’t have to be this way… as a busi­ness owner you have the ‘free­dom of choice’ to be able to make changes in your busi­ness, includ­ing hir­ing the right help to get stuff off your plate.

This is exactly what an Online Busi­ness Man­ager does – their main focus is 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.

2. You are hav­ing to turn away oppor­tu­ni­ties because you are so busy!
This is a sad by-product of the first point. Are you so busy that you can’t take advan­tage of the oppor­tu­ni­ties that are com­ing your way? Do you ever find your­self say­ing “I would love to do X and know it would be a great new rev­enue stream… but I sim­ply don’t have the time for it right now… “

Not only can an Online Busi­ness Man­ager help free up your own time to be able to explore these oppor­tu­ni­ties, they can also work on bring­ing some of these oppor­tu­ni­ties to life for you! An Online Busi­ness Man­ager is very focused on imple­men­ta­tion, and can help man­age the process of cre­at­ing new rev­enue streams in your busi­ness from con­cept to launch.

3. You are still doing things the same things you were doing when you started your busi­ness.
Remem­ber when you first started your busi­ness and had to wear many hats? You were the cook, host­ess, wait­ress and bus­boy (so to speak, hehe.) Now that your busi­ness is grow­ing, are you still doing the same things as you were in the begin­ning? Are you still updat­ing your own web­site? Are you still man­ag­ing your shop­ping cart? Are you still answer­ing all your cus­tomer ser­vice emails?

As your busi­ness grows your role will (and should!) change. An Online Busi­ness Man­ager can lov­ingly ’slap your wrist’ when it comes to you doing some of these things… help­ing you let go of some of the ‘old’ stuff tak­ing up your time that gets in the way of you grow­ing your business.

4. You have a great team, but find your­self frus­trated by them always ‘bug­ging’ you.
This is actu­ally a very com­mon com­plaint from busi­ness own­ers – they have a great team of VAs, web­mas­ters and such. And yet they are con­stantly frus­trated by how much their team needs from them. They feel like some­one is always tap­ping them on the shoul­der with a ques­tion or request.

The thing is, your team does need some­one to man­age them. They need some­one who they can turn to with ques­tions, to get what they need to com­plete their projects quickly and on time. And if there is not an Online Busi­ness Man­ager on the team who do they turn to? You – the busi­ness owner.

As a col­league of mine so elo­quently shared:

“My VAs were doing a fine job – it was ME who was unhappy man­ag­ing them.”

Most busi­ness own­ers really don’t enjoy­ing being man­agers, and i’m guess­ing this may be the same for you. An Online Busi­ness Man­ager becomes the key point of con­tact for your team – all ques­tions, requests and such go to the OBM instead of you.

5. You are stuck at $X rev­enue and can’t seem to get past that point!
When you find your­self stuck at a cer­tain point in rev­enue there is usu­ally one thing get­ting in the way – you! My busi­ness part­ner calls this the quar­ter mil­lion dol­lar speed­bump (can be more or less than that of course) and a big part of the solu­tion usu­ally requires you remov­ing your­self from the day-to-day of your business.

Start to ask your­self as you go about your day – do I need to be the per­son to do X? (with X being the many things you spend your time on each day.)

Chances are many things on your to-do list could be passed along to some­one else on your team. And an Online Busi­ness Man­ager can help with that process by del­e­gat­ing and man­ag­ing those tasks on your behalf.