How to Optimize, Automate and Outsource Everything in Your Business
Create a successful business in just one day!
Have you ever encountered a new product or service and thought, "I had the same idea!""
Imagine if you didn't let your inspiration go to waste but instead took action and transformed your idea into a successful business.
Numerous factors prevent us from taking action on excellent ideas. Perhaps you experienced a sense of being overwhelmed by the intricacies of launching a business or felt daunted by the potential financial requirements to begin.
However, times have indeed changed. Setting up a company has become incredibly convenient and affordable, allowing for a quick and hassle-free process.
This summary provides you with a comprehensive guide on the necessary steps to start and sustain a business, from the very beginning to long-term success. What's the secret? Streamline, automate, and delegate.
In this summary, you'll learn.
Why a lack of available funds should not discourage an aspiring entrepreneur;
How to effectively build and manage a remote team of workers;
The importance of customer engagement cannot be overstated when it comes to the success of a company.
1. If you want to capitalise on a time-sensitive opportunity, starting a company within 24 hours is entirely feasible.
Starting a company may seem like a daunting task, but it doesn't have to be. However, there are instances when it is most advantageous to embrace an idea on the spur of the moment and pursue it.
It may seem unbelievable, but it is possible to launch a start-up within a mere 24 hours. This has been accomplished, proving it is not an exaggeration.
During a dinner in August 2015, Ari Meisel and Nick Sonnenberg conceived the concept of a company that offered virtual assistants. Both friends had a wealth of experience in maximising business efficiency and productivity, making it very possible.
In a mere 24 hours, their business was operational.
How were they able to bring their idea to life so quickly? And what prompted their sense of urgency?
Their timing was perfect, as Zirtual, one of the largest US-based virtual assistant firms, had just gone out of business. This resulted in 2,500 clients needing more assistants and 400 assistants losing their jobs. Ari and Nick recognised a golden opportunity that required swift action.
The authors were aware of the limited time they had. Indeed, this holds true for all start-ups, regardless of the industry they operate in. Smart business owners understand the importance of seizing opportunities when they arise.
That evening, the pair hastily outlined their plans for a virtual assistant venture. They acquired their initial clients and assistants from the fallout of Zirtual. Within 24 hours, their company, Less Doing Virtual Assistants, was operational, utilising free online tools and apps as the foundation. They had no initial capital, but their business was immediately profitable and had the potential for growth.
Throughout the year, Ari and Nick successfully managed their company, addressing any challenges that came their way. This summary captures the narrative of an eventful year.
2. The authors' keen business sense enabled them to pinpoint the shortcomings of other virtual assistant services.
The authors were fully cognizant of the shortcomings of other virtual assistant companies and were confident that their start-up could tackle these issues with greater efficiency.
One drawback of the virtual assistant business model was its limited options for assistants: either on-demand or long-term dedicated.
On-demand assistants handle straightforward, one-time tasks like organising a delivery or scheduling an appointment. Due to the lack of continuity or long-term relationships, it becomes challenging to undertake large projects. On the other hand, dedicated assistants are accountable for a variety of tasks for a single client. However, this can sometimes create a bottleneck as there are only a limited number of hours in a day for one person.
With the Zirtual model, a dedicated virtual assistant takes care of all the client's needs, from booking meetings to conducting marketing research or designing a website.
However, it seemed doubtful that the virtual assistant possessed the necessary range of skills to handle the diverse array of tasks given. Here is where Ari and Nick discovered the market opportunity: a gap existed for a fresh approach to connecting clients with assistants who were ideally suited for their specific tasks.
Offering customers a different or better service than what is currently available is essential for achieving business success. The pair's understanding of the business world led them to realise that high-level professionals were seeking a convenient way to hire virtual assistants.
Ari and Nick devised a solution that effectively addresses both issues: matching a client's unique needs with the specific skills of an assistant, all through their company's platform.
Clients would benefit from a team of assistants. The team would be small enough to remain intimate and personal but large enough to ensure that each client request was completed by a person uniquely qualified for the task.
A manager would lead each team and serve as the client's point of contact, thus ensuring a personal touch and maximum efficiency.
3. Infrastructure can be built with free tools, but services should always be of the highest quality.
If you think a start-up can only launch with sophisticated, expensive infrastructure, think again. A new business can be run efficiently with software tools that are not only free but also easy to use.
To manage client tasks, Nick used a free management program called Trello. Trello's structure is straightforward. It offers boards for specific projects, lists that give the status of a project, and cards that show which tasks still need to be completed.
Nick found an innovative way to use the software's project boards, deciding to assign a board to each client. He then created a template to make uniform lists for each client, ensuring continuity.
Each board now reflected a client's requested tasks and the status of each – fulfilling the basic operational needs of the start-up at no cost.
The next step was to ensure that the new business wasn't merely offering essential services but was going above and beyond each client's expectations.
The virtual assistant industry mostly targets demanding, high-earning professionals, so guaranteeing maximum quality would be vital to the company's success.
To secure the most talented assistants in the market, Ari and Nick committed to paying employees two to six times the going rate for requested services. Doing so also meant the company would charge clients four to eight times more than other virtual assistant companies. Offering top-notch services was how they justified the higher prices. They also billed by the second and openly shared all timesheets with the client.
Here's just one example of the start-up's focus on premium service: they created a business website for a client of theirs, a real estate agent named Chip, and had a virtual assistant follow up on the leads coming through it. The assistant only booked appointments for Chip if the lead was qualified – so all Chip had to do was show up on the date and time of the appointment to seal a deal, allowing Chip to do less but win more.
This was precisely the kind of time-saving service that the company's name promised!
4. Be clever when hiring. Have a plan and look for potential employees with a proactive attitude.
Applying for jobs is a gruelling process. But hiring employees isn't a walk in the park either – in fact, hiring can be one of the most energy-consuming tasks for a young company.
So, when you begin to look for new team members to grow your start-up, you need to have a thoughtful, efficient strategy in place.
Once Ari and Nick had established their start-up's infrastructure, they were ready to hire some high-quality assistants to build the business – seeking maximum returns for minimal effort.
First, they created two email addresses: jobs@lessdoing.com and interview@lessdoing.com.
Candidates would send an application to jobs@lessdoing.com and receive an automated response detailing the position available. The applicant was then instructed to send a two-minute video pitch and upload it to YouTube, sending the link to interview@lessdoing.com.
Right off the bat, this two-step process eliminated about 80 per cent of applicants. Those who needed help to figure out the instructions correctly or create a poor-quality video were immediately filtered out.
Ari and Nick figured that if an applicant couldn't come up with a creative solution to the problem, then that person certainly wouldn't make an excellent virtual assistant.
Second, the team made sure they identified proactive candidates with a winning attitude. Top-notch virtual assistants need to have not only excellent problem-solving skills but also the ability to plan ahead and seize opportunities when they arise.
One of Less Doing's many experienced virtual assistants offers a prime example of this ideal type. By following the Facebook posts of an important client, the assistant learned that they loved a particular brand of whiskey. The company could then send the client a bottle as a special birthday present.
It is this attention to detail and dedication to customer service that sets a proactive worker – and business – apart from the rest.
5. Networking can help your company proliferate, but growth can also present structural challenges.
Networking is essential to moving your company to the next level. You can't just make a great product; you have to get out there and show it off.
In November 2015, Ari and Nick were invited to speak at a Genius Network event that Ari had participated in a few years earlier. Joe Polish's Genius Network brings together industry leaders, well-known authors and high-powered entrepreneurs.
They didn't have sufficient time to prepare for the event, however, and delivered their presentation off the cuff. Yet the two entrepreneurs had so much to say about their start-up's methods of tracking and outsourcing tasks that they held the audience rapt for some three and a half hours!
Audience members also posed some questions about the service, giving Ari and Nick the opportunity to demonstrate their company's approach to solving problems right then and there.
After the workshop was over, 90 per cent of the people in the room signed up for Less Doing's virtual assistant services – a networking success!
Getting a flood of new clients is good news, right? Sure – but sometimes proliferating also brings new challenges and might require restructuring.
The start-up had to quickly come up with a way to deal with this boom. Nick built a new tool, a custom-coded dashboard that would give him and Ari an overview of all their Trello client boards.
The dashboard enabled them to quickly see all tasks and each task's status so they could optimize where to focus their attention and the attention of their team.
Now, the team could keep an eye on the company's overall performance while maintaining rapid growth.
6. Don't let negative feedback fester; use innovative problem-solving techniques to keep ideas moving.\
When you're nurturing a project that you feel is your "baby," it's not always easy to hear negative feedback. But when you do, it's vital to act decisively to fix the issues before they bring down your company.
By January 2016, Less Doing was thriving, but some customers were complaining that the onboarding process wasn't smooth enough.
When Ari and Nick realized that this was costing them clients, they started to proactively attack areas of improvement in the company. One of their tools was the 5 Whys method.
First, articulate the nature of the problem, then ask why the problem exists. Once you find an answer, ask "Why?" again. Repeat the questioning process three more times. By the end, you've led yourself to the root of the problem.
This method led Ari and Nick to realize they needed to simplify their software interface and also provide clients with better instructions for using it. Once tweaked, the onboarding process for clients was seamless.
To avoid future client complaints, the entrepreneurs decided to encourage employees to think proactively by using another tool called the Kaizen method.
This method was pioneered by Japanese companies such as Toyota and Mitsubishi. Kaizen translates to "change for the better."
With the Kaizen method, every person in a company – from cleaners to C-level leaders – is asked for input on what the company could improve based on personal experience.
For Less Doing, this meant asking every virtual assistant to submit one idea per week on how to improve the company's processes or methods.
Immediately, Ari and Nick were presented with a problem and an easy solution. They learned that some virtual assistants needed help with how to properly charge clients. It turns out that assistants had been performing extra administrative work free of charge, leading to some frustration.
The Kaizen method raised this issue to a level where it could be addressed by taking care of both the clients' and assistants' needs appropriately.
7. Once you've nailed a strategy for success, you can teach it to others.
By the time your business is going strong, you will have acquired many skills and a lot of insider knowledge. You'll then have the opportunity to create a secondary source of income by teaching other entrepreneurs what you've learned along the way.
To gauge the potential of training as a new offering, Less Doing advertised on Facebook that it would sponsor a business boot camp.
Some 20 participants signed up, and the presentation overall went well. However, feedback after the event made it clear that the authors had come on too strong, overloading the audience with complicated technical terms and demonstrations.
While the experience on the surface seemed like a setback, it provided Ari and Nick with some valuable data. They realized that hosting live events required a considerable time commitment and also could have been a better format for the information they wanted to share.
This is an important lesson: you need to be flexible and ready to adjust course as you develop a new branch of your business.
Ari and Nick didn't put an end to their teaching venture; they instead reconfigured their strategy. By moving all its operations online, it eventually became a sustainable arm of the business.
8. There are many ways to optimize a company's processes, but getting clients hooked is a priority one.
Building a successful company requires an entrepreneur to constantly optimize operations, such as considering which tasks can be delegated or even outsourced.
Many managers try to keep a tight grip on a business as it grows, but sometimes it's wiser to let go and step back from the day-to-day.
Until April 2016, Ari managed Less Doing's dashboard, ensuring no assistant was late in completing a task and that all clients were satisfied with the company's services.
Eventually, he delegated this task to a virtual assistant who performed so well that she was named general manager just two weeks after taking the reins.
Ari and Nick decided to train another virtual assistant to handle the company's financial and payroll needs. Soon afterwards, she was named the economic head of Less Doing.
Each of these situations was undoubtedly a win-win for Ari and Nick, who now had more time to dedicate to improving other aspects of the company.
And there was much to improve! More is needed for a company to offer an excellent service; it has to ensure that clients are truly engaged with the product.
Less Doing still needed to work on getting its clients to commit fully. For example, some clients continued to perform tasks themselves that a virtual assistant could have handled.
The authors sought the help of behavioural psychologist Nir Eyal, author of the bestselling book Hooked, to help them find a better strategy to increase client participation. They discovered that they needed to invest more time and energy in the onboarding process to ensure new clients got hooked on the Less Doing service.
So, the company changed its approach. Instead of spending 15 minutes on the phone with a new client, virtual assistants were to spend at least an hour coaching clients on how to best use Less Doing software to address personal and professional needs.
This process better-acquainted clients with the range of Less Doing services, allowing clients to use their time more efficiently and commit to relying on more virtual assistance.
9. Once your structures are solid, start working with your company's numbers and keep investing.
Once you've solidified the processes that keep your company running, it's time to start working with your performance numbers.
When Ari and Nick took a hard look at their company's numbers, they realized the next task was to optimize the company's "churn rate." This industry term describes the percentage of clients who drop a company's services or product after a given period, such as within three months.
Using a tool called ChartMogul, the company tracked precisely how long customers used Less Doing services. The authors soon discovered that clients who ended up dropping the service were those who used it less than once every few weeks.
This knowledge helped Ari and Nick to establish a best practice. When a client was inactive for two weeks, they made sure to personally reach out to the client and address any issues to ensure Less Doing didn't end up losing the client's business.
This sort of extra effort might seem time-consuming, but it's always better to invest in your company than to lose clients based on inaction.
It can be challenging to muster the motivation to go this extra mile, of course. It can also be frustrating to discover that after a year of hard work, you're still investing a lot of time and money into your company.
But remember: if you want to grow, you have to keep investing.
By mid-2016, Ari and Nick were still working hard to improve the company. Ari logged dozens of hours talking to inactive clients, working to drive the company's churn rate from 11 per cent down to three per cent. Nick automated several aspects of the dashboard to help further remove menial tasks from the team's plate. They also strengthened outreach efforts by personalizing the company's newsletter and increasing its presence on Facebook.
At this point, Less Doing's managerial team had grown, so the founders decided it was time to give critical players an equity share in the company.
These moves paid off, and as of July 2016, Less Doing had its most successful month ever, chalking up $100,000 in revenue. It's alright for a company that started as a dream over dinner!
Final summary
You don't need a lot of money to launch a start-up. All you need is the ability to use existing tools to create a solid company structure and the tenacity to search for ways to improve your services.
Actionable advice: Be brutal when you're running a services company.
To make sure virtual assistants were providing the best client experience possible, Ari and Nick implemented a policy of "three strikes, and you're out." If an assistant made three crucial mistakes, the person was fired. It might seem harsh, but such a policy ensures that only the best people are working for you.