James: James Schramko here from SuperFastBusiness.com, I’m having a chat with Kat Jarman from YourOnlineTeam.com. Kat, how are you today?
Kat: I’m good, how are you?
James: Good. You’re in the business of helping business owners run their team. You often place someone in there as a business manager to help out with their team. And I’m curious what sort of things do they actually do like, if you bring someone on, most business owners are like, Look, I’m way too busy, I can’t even tell you what needs doing. You know, and often it’s tempting to sort of park someone to the side, but they’re just ready to go. So are there some simple tasks an online business manager can get started with if you didn’t have a clue where to deploy them?
Kat: Yeah, definitely there is. So I actually came across a document that somebody had created the other day, and it was called 100 tasks that your online business manager can do. Now, I’m not going to go that crazy with it. But I just spent two minutes thinking of five things that an online business manager could pick up and run with, like right away.
So number one, and this is one of my favorites, is liaising with any contractors that you’ve got to make sure that they’re moving forward, they have the information that they need. Another one is leading a team, a virtual team. So if you find yourself too busy to do that, an online business manager can step in and run with that right away.
Another really cool one is that an online business manager, if you get the right one who’s got experience with this, they can manage any launches that you’re doing. And that can be super valuable because we all know that they’re so time intensive.
James: That’s one reason I don’t really do them, you know? For me, running an annual live event is enough of a launch to last me for the rest of the year.
Kat: Exactly, exactly. They can do that, too. They can help with events. Another thing that we do a lot in our team because we’ve got some experience with it is managing people’s membership sites.
James: Yeah.
Kat: So, you know, all the onboarding and the off-boarding and the customer service, setting up all the systems around that.
James: And community management.
Kat: Yeah, yeah, that too, just making sure that the business owner has the focus on, you know, getting more members and doesn’t get so much stuck in the, you know, all the bits and pieces of the membership site, because there’s a lot there.
And the other one that I was thinking of, it’s kind of an oldie but a goodie, is making sure that everything in your business is documented, and that you’ve got procedures and processes for the rest of the team to follow. So those were five things just off the top of my head. One day, I will sit down and write that list of 100, but not today.
James: Well, you know, there’s so many things that have to happen in a business on an ongoing basis. We’ve ended up setting like Slack alerts for regular stuff you know, like check the sales page to make sure that the offer is still relevant to what we actually sell, to check for new case studies that we could publish, to update plugins, to check which content is performing better, like, if you forget to do them, it just sort of falls away. I really think a big success driver of most of the businesses I’ve seen go from six to seven figures is when they’ve got good systems.
And, of course, you have to have a team in there to run the system. Otherwise, it’s you. If it’s just you, and you got no systems, then you are literally flying by the seat of your pants. I imagine your online business manager is usually going to be familiar with or ready to research and learn some kind of project management system or team communication tool?
Kat: Yeah, they will. Quite often they’ll have their favorite, either Asana or Teamwork or whatever it is, but they are high-level enough that they can jump into any project management tool, and make sure that things like updating plugins and all of that sort of stuff is systematized and people are reminded to do it, and you never have to worry about it again.
James: Yeah, or they could use 10XPRO and not worry about plugins for the rest of their life, which is what I’m encouraging these days. With your team manager, if you currently don’t have a system in your business, that’s like the absolute ideal opportunity to say, all right, please come in and just roll out your favorite system that you’ve seen before working really well. And just let’s get to that up-and-running stage really quickly. And they don’t really need you for some of that, they can just go and set it up. And then they just come to you with the right questions like the minimum possible inputs so that you can get a maximum result. And you’re leveraging all that intellectual property they’ve built up on all the previous assignments, right?
Kat: Yeah, that’s exactly right. So we just implemented Asana for a client, we’ll go in there, set it all up, teach him, in this case, and his VAs how to use it, and then go away again, and where there are further questions as they go along the way.
Same with time tracking systems, we actually just did that for him as well. And because we’ve used almost all of them. We saved him a lot of time by saying, look, this is the one that you need. Don’t worry about the rest of them. And we implemented the one that we’ve worked with and we know the best.
James: Perfect. So if you want to know what that time tracking system is, get in touch with Kat, YourOnlineTeam.com. Thank you so much for coming and sharing some tips.
Kat: Thanks, James.
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