Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the importance of delegation and outsourcing for a business. She also shares her favorite December tradition, the “12 Days of Christmas,” which is a social media series that highlights popular tasks that are delegated to a virtual team. 

Tune in to reflect on your time management pitfalls from the last year, including the non-revenue-generating tasks that may have hindered your success. Plus, you’ll get a comprehensive list of tasks you can delegate in the year ahead! 

Key Highlights:

• Delegation is essential for business growth and efficiency.
• Doing non-revenue-generating tasks can dilute your business results.
• How you spend your time in the year ahead will dictate your level of success.  

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and in today's episode, we are going to recap my favorite December social media tradition that we do, which is a series called 12 Days of Christmas, AKA 12 Things to Delegate to a Virtual Assistant. So I love doing this series every year because I just feel like

It is such a busy time of year for so many people and certainly that can vary drastically depending on what type of business that you're in, especially if you are in retail and business and consumer, this could be the biggest month of the year ever for you. Or, you know, if you're in a service-based business and December is kind of when you and your clients are kind of winding down for the year, it's a good time to reflect and take a look at the year ahead and prepare. But

I feel like there's just so many things happening, especially outside of work where there's different parties to go to. There's different celebrations, depending on the stage of life that you're at. If you have kids in school, there's holiday concerts. There's just so many things going on. so with this series on social media, I love it because it's just simple little tools and tips and ideas for things that you can.

delegate and outsource and ultimately get some support on. And ultimately, this is very important that we take a look at this, especially at the end of each year as we're kind of in that reflection mode and planning ahead for the upcoming year, because if we did not hit our goals that we had set for ourselves for this year, it's a great time to really take a look at how did we actually spend our time.

And that might be the answer to some of the reasons why we didn't reach our goals that we've set. And there's certainly no shame. This is not about shaming or blaming, but it's also about course correcting because the bottom line is the non-revenue generating work that we do adds up and ultimately dilutes our results. So depending on the role that you're in, you know, I use revenue generating because so many of us are business owners and CEOs.

or executives of nonprofits where we have certain metrics that we are working towards. And so we wanna make sure that the way we're spending our time is in alignment with the goals that we have or the metrics that we are trying to meet. So all of that being said, I am going to recap the 12 common to-dos that can be delegated or outsourced. And I highly encourage you just to listen in.

and absorb what I have to say and maybe make a note of a couple things that you want to outsource in the coming year or a couple of things that you want to get extra help on because there are a lot of gems on this list. And so in no particular order, number one is email and calendar management. That is something that we frequently do for our clients because so many people are just drowning in information that's coming in.

And so having an extra set of eyes on your email, filing what needs to be filed, deleting what needs to be deleting, responding to common questions or requests to schedule meetings, things that can be templated and systematized, they can handle those things for you. And then ultimately when you jump into your email, you are seeing and responding to things that only you can and should be responding to. So we can save a lot of time with that.

That also goes hand in hand with calendar management because I can't tell you how many times I have somebody who wants to have a meeting with me. I offer them suggestions or send them my Calendly link. I usually do both depending on what's more convenient for them. And then they don't schedule right away. And then we need to send updated options for meeting. And maybe they say, you know what, response.

I'm about to go on vacation. Can you email me in a couple of weeks?" And then we just kind of lose sight of these things. It's really helpful to have somebody help managing your calendar as well and staying on top of those appointments and getting those set up for you. Now, you might be panicking because handing over your email and your calendar sounds stressful for you or you have a lot of confidential things happening. We have a variety of permissions that we walk our clients through.

to ultimately give access to our team to as much as we need, but not what we don't. And there's a variety of ways to do that. Just wanted to make a side note there in case number one that I mentioned automatically sent you into a panic. Don't worry. There are privacy rules and permissions that we can set and work through with getting help with email and calendar management. Okay, number two, tracking and following up with potential clients.

So similarly to number one, it's really easy for a sales conversation to stall, right? They need more time to make a decision on our proposal or you know what, now is not the best time of year because we're heading into tax season and we want to revisit after April 15th. I'm giving you kind of generic examples here, but you get the idea. For whatever reason, sometimes somebody might be interested in doing business with you, but

they've been hard to get a hold of or something came up and they had to cancel our call or they had to reschedule our meeting, it is helpful to have another set of hands keeping track of all of these things and making sure that we are following up when we need to. So this could look like implementing and fully utilizing a CRM. I know lots of clients and people who have a CRM tool, but they're not fully leveraging it or utilizing it in the way that they could.

Having a VA help you with that can be hugely beneficial and ultimately could lend to paying for itself if it means that you are onboarding more clients because they are helping you follow up on these things. Okay, number three, marketing emails. Now these could be promotional emails, like maybe you have a special going on, you have a launch coming up, or just nurturing your list and keeping in touch with a monthly email newsletter. Your VA can help you stay on task

hold you accountable to put that information together and help you get that sent out every month. Okay, number four, website maintenance and updates. This is one that can be hugely beneficial and really a cost savings for clients because ultimately it's not always cost effective to reach out to your web developer or your web design company every time you want to make a little change on your website. So,

A VA can easily help you update a staff member, add a staff member to the website, or maybe update your menu of services, or update some things in your bio, or maybe you've got new brand photos and you want to swap out your old headshot for your new one. Simple things like that, a VA can help you with. I see maintenance as well because I know that we have several clients that we work with who have us going in and backing up their website and ...

updating their plugins, or maybe they are checking links on the website just to make sure that everything is working appropriately. These are all things that a virtual assistant can help you with and probably do so at a lower rate than a web developer could. Okay, number five, client onboarding. Now we talked a lot about client onboarding and ways to systematize and streamline this.

in episode 37. if that's something that rings a bell as I'm talking here, like, yeah, client onboarding, there's just a lot of effort that goes in to make sure that we get them up and running and they have everything that they need and we are serving them to the very best of our ability. Highly recommend going back and listening to that episode for some details, but VAs can help you with the contract stage, making sure that contracts go out, they get signed, that...

payments get set up, that intake forms get filled out, that welcome calls and kickoff calls get scheduled, that email drips for different programs are up and running, all of those types of things. Checking in to make sure things are going well. Client onboarding, client journey, VAs can help you with those things. Number six, bookkeeping. We help

clients with bookkeeping, many virtual assistants dabble in this, especially if we're talking about some light bookkeeping types of things like categorizing transactions, invoicing clients, following up on late payments, billing, paying vendors, paying bills, that sort of thing. VAs ultimately can help with that. And I again, highly recommend to work with an accountant on some of the more detailed and advanced accounting types of things that are happening in your business.

but a VA can easily help you with some of the lighter bookkeeping aspects of keeping your financials up to date and current. Okay, number seven, social media management and engagement, content creation, all of those things. A virtual assistant can help you not only plan out your content for the upcoming month or quarter, or even a year, if that's how far you're planning for your business, especially if you're in retail.

you are probably past the point of planning for holidays right now. You are looking into spring and summer and things like that. So a VA can help you with planning your content, creating your content, maybe creating visuals that can go up, maybe helping you edit reels and post TikTok videos and manage all of those things. Keep an eye on comments and messages that are coming in your social media inboxes.

engaging on your behalf and making meaningful connections with other people online. A virtual assistant can help you stay on top of all of those things. Okay, number eight, creating and maintaining standard operating procedures, SOPs. Now, if you're one of those people who tends to be more in the creative category and you start hearing me talk about operations and logistics, please don't let your eyes glaze over. I promise this could be really, really painless for you and I'll tell you why.

Briefly, I call this a tale of two coaches. So way back when I started my business, my business was about two years old when I was pregnant with my daughter and I was preparing for maternity leave. And I hired a business coach that summer to help me prepare for baby. And one of the things that he had me do was create the, basically an instruction booklet or a how-to manual for how to do all of the ongoing work I was doing for my clients.

and then cross-training the people who are going to be filling in for me on maternity leave. And I will tell you, it took me the entire summer to make this manual. It was like step number one, log into this program. Step number two, click here. It was written, it was painful. I hated every minute of it. It was just so exhausting. And I do have an operations background folks. So that was brutal. And so that was one of the things that held me back for a long time.

from hiring a team when I was back at work and building my business. And then I went on a business retreat where the woman who was facilitating, when she asked me, would be your next step with hiring a team member to help you and help your clients? And I said, well, I would need to make this manual. She's like, no, no, no, no, no, that's a waste of your time. And frankly, it's never gonna get done. She said,

hire a team member who has the experience and expertise in the things that you're looking for help with. Have them sit in on a Zoom call with you or you can create a screen share video like through Loom, for example. You've heard me talk about Loom if you've been listening to the podcast, L-O-O-M, to record screen share videos of me performing the task. She said they can document the steps for those processes.

have you review them to make sure that they're accurate and then move on from there. So a virtual assistant can help you with this. You do not have to prepare everything and have it perfectly wrapped up on a silver platter to hand off to somebody else to help you with. You can have a virtual assistant help you document the processes and procedures that are crucial to the running of your company. Okay, number nine, event and travel planning.

So we can definitely have VA's research. We can have them inquire about accommodations or space if you're going to be hosting a business event or look into activities for vacation. In fact, had a client, gosh, it was probably last spring where she was getting stressed out because she's like, I don't know where we're going to be going this summer for our annual vacation, the week of 4th of July. And she was stressing about this in our

our team member was like, wait a second, I can help you with this. And she's like, really? Yes. So whether it be a business event that you're going to be hosting or even just a family vacation, you can have a virtual assistant help you at least plan those steps. And then you can ultimately make the final decisions on the venue you want to book or the place that you want to visit. And they can help you with making those arrangements. Okay. Number 10.

of common things to delegate to a virtual assistant or to outsource or to get help from an assistant on podcast management. And I would also throw in there, including guest coordination. So I will tell you guys that this podcast is a breeze for me to create. Now I do need to be consistent and show up and record episodes for you each and every week, but I have a fantastic team behind the scenes that I just let them know.

Hey, episode is in the system and they run with it. So they are the ones who are editing the show notes. Now they are AI generated show notes through the system that we use. I practice what I preach. We do as much as we can with, you know, systems and the software that we're investing in. But then we have a real copywriter go in and edit those notes just to make sure that everything makes sense and it's in the right tone of voice for our company and our brand and all of that. And

The podcast gets posted on all the various platforms. It gets posted to my website. Guests, when I have somebody that I want to bring on the show to talk about something related to growing your business beyond you, my team sends them release forms. They send them prep forms to make sure that we can get their headshot, their bio, all their information ahead of time. My team is handling all of this. So that is an absolute dream. If you are a podcaster,

If you are managing your podcast yourself, maybe in the coming year, it is time to take a look at getting some help and support on this. number 11, creating and formatting documents. Yes, that sounds a little bit old school. Like when I think about creating documents, I think of, you know, high school and college, like my Microsoft Word and Excel classes, and now maybe I'm dating myself. you know, if it's some of you might even remember Word Perfect.

My mom had a secretarial services business when I was a kid, so WordPerfect was a big one, there was Lotus. You get the idea. We start thinking about some of these old school software systems, but the reality is that creating documents, especially client-facing documents, is extremely important that they're polished and professional, and a virtual assistant can help you do that. Okay, and last but certainly not least, graphic design, especially when it comes to putting together

maybe infographics or polished and branded PowerPoint presentations, or you get the idea. PowerPoint or similar, know, slide decks, you get the idea. There's just so many things that a graphic designer and a virtual assistant can help you create that just elevates the whole look and feel of your brand because it's so much more on point and polished and professional. I know for me, if I love Canva, don't get me wrong,

But even my graphic designer can take a simple graph graphic in Canva and elevate it to the next level So it is lovely to have that support and access to her talent on the team and that is something that you can easily have for yourself as well if Creating graphics is not in your wheelhouse. Maybe you just don't even have the time to do it graphic design is definitely something that can be delegated and outsourced so

I need to hire a marketing strategist because I'm just doing way too much, feel free to share this episode with them. This might help spark some ideas of things that they can outsource or delegate, even just taking it one step at a time. Like this is my biggest pain point. This is what I want to start with and get some ideas flowing there for how they can get some support and get some relief of their time and energy from all the other things that they need to get done throughout the course of a given day.

So thank you so much for tuning in today. I really appreciate your support with this podcast and I hope that this has been helpful for you in growing your business and I will be back next week with more tips and tools and strategies for growing your business beyond you. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.