Your Assistant Working For You – Finding the Appropriate Tasks

You’ve hired an Assistant!  Congratulations! Now you have to put them to work. First, you have to determine what types of tasks you can delegate and maximize the help they will provide. Here is a unique way to look at the issue.

Let’s break tasks down into three categories: Expense, Revenue, and Sales.  Expense tasks do not generate income. Revenue tasks generate income. Sales-related tasks don’t generate income, but there is expected revenue from doing these tasks.  After assigning our tasks to one of the three categories, most of the tasks on our list are Expense tasks. Let me explain why these are the tasks you want to delegate to Assistants.

	TASK Is Related To:
	Expense	Revenue	Sales
Admin / Customer Service Tasks
Answer phones	x
Return Calls	x
Reply to email	x
Update CRM	x
Bookkeeping Tasks
Enter bills / Pay Invoices	x
Bank Reconciliations	x
Sales Tasks
Network & Prospecting			x
Sales			x
Marketing	x
Advertising	x
Client Related Tasks
Existing Client related project work		x
Prepare for a client meeting			x
Client meetings		x
Social Media Tasks
Content Creation	x
Website updates	x
Social Media updates	x
Other Tasks
Industry Education	x
IT & Desktop support	x

 

Administrative / Customer Service and Client Related tasks are the first places to begin delegating tasks to Assistants. These tasks can include answering, screening, vetting, and routing phone calls, returning calls, scheduling meetings, first-pass inbox support, copying and assembling client materials, editing documents, filing, and more. These tasks require the least amount of training, and you should be able to see an increase in your available time within a few days.

Assistants can do bookkeeping tasks, or you can outsource all of your bookkeeping to a Bookkeeper.  Assistants will need training on cost codes, chart of accounts, and billing cycles before beginning bookkeeping tasks. Once adequately trained, Assistants can enter bills and receipts into your accounting software, enter invoices and print checks, call customers who have not made payments, and reach out to vendors for questions on invoices.  Assistants are not usually tasked with Bank Reconciliations. This is a task traditionally completed by a Bookkeeper or Accountant. You can hire a bookkeeper who can come in once a month to reconcile your bank accounts and run financial reports.

Sales tasks are where you shine and have the best bottom-line impact.  However, you can have your Assistant perform online research on potential clients, do preliminary research on new industries you may want to do business in, compile business directories, update customer records in CRM software, and monitor competitor social media profiles.

In addition to monitoring competitors’ social media profiles, your Assistant can help streamline your social media process. Assistants can create a spreadsheet of posts to be used regularly. They can make daily posts directly to your social media accounts or use a scheduling/publishing tool to schedule posts for future posting.

These are all examples of how an Assistant can save you time. It will take time and patience, but once you start working with an Assistant, you’ll become more productive, have more time for sales, and see an increase in revenues.

In my next post, I’ll discuss the end-goal for your working relationship with your Assistant: Teaching Your Assistant to Read Your Mind