Series: Using a Virtual Assistant to Grow Your Business Part I: Why Hire a VA?
From Concept to Implementation:
Finding, Hiring, & Managing a Great Virtual Assistant.
Part I: Why Do It?
Why hire a virtual assistant?
This is the first part of what will be larger series of posts on finding, hiring, and managing a quality VA, and will be included in the BizNexus newsletter as we kick that back up with a focus on offering clear value for our entrepreneur members.
One recurring point of frustration I’ve heard from almost every type of user on our platform (buyers, owners, intermediaries, etc.) is how to successfully hire quality support to help scale operations on a limited budget, -how to hire dependable help to run the day-to-day operations of your business so that you, as an entrepreneur, can consistently focus on the strategically valuable initiatives that will actually help you succeed.
Less brush-fires, more time on shit that actually moves the needle.….
We’ve nailed down a pretty great process for running a distributed team here at BizNexus, and we’re going to start sharing some of the lessons we’ve learned along the way so you can hopefully not only benefit but ideally avoid some of the near-fatal mistakes we made early on (and continue to make).
Our VA team has been a game-changer value-add for us, so we’ll start with that piece…
The first huge mistake we made at BizNexus….
When we first started BizNexus we did what everybody else in startup land is told to do. We built the pitch deck, we tweaked the pitch, we told the story, and even won some big New England startup competitions talking about the “Baby Boomer Business Bubble” business drivers & TAM yada, yada, etc., etc.
We met with “angels” who all had their own opinions about how we needed to revise the pitch deck, tweak the pitch and tell the story. It was exhausting, and we were burning our time and effort on optimizing for the wrong thing:
Investment.
Sure, we took some initial capital to get the platform up and running because we thought we didn’t have a choice at that point. But somewhere early on we realized how much time we were wasting speaking with interested investors & groups who we had very little real background clarity on, very little data on as to whether this person or group typically invests or not, how long does that process take, how much will they ultimately invest after they deduct their own legal fees for diligence, will they want to "finesse the terms of the offering with “advisor shares” etc.. -It became exhausting, and our product development and month-over-month performance was clearly suffering, which in turn hurt our negotiations and valuation leverage.
We stepped back for a much-needed SOTU and wound up looking at five things:
We were running out of cash.
We were operating in a market (M&A) where there were (are) clear pain points and major inefficiencies when it comes to traditional methodologies around biz dev. sales & marketing.
We knew there were (are) successful, cash-liquid potential customers who were already engaging with us.
We knew (know) this niche really, really well.
We knew we were (are) really nailing something with the emerging concept of digital sales & social selling, and leveraging that to drive personalized lead generation at a long-term scale. We were well on our way to $1 billion in organic inventory growth, and we had refined a duplicable process we could potentially package up and sell.
Enter Paid Services & VA-Facilitated Bootstrapping…
Let’s fast-forward to the end takeaway here because nobody really reads past 50% of the post anyway according to our Hotjar analytics.
Today, BizNexus is still early on in the business life-cycle, but we’re at a point where we’re regularly fielding investor inquiries but don’t have the pressure to drop everything and respond because we’ve been able to bootstrap the platform development through our B2B digital sales agency, BN.Digital. We love speaking with the investors about future opportunities in the market and with BizNexus, but the conversation no longer has any underlying stink of needy desperation.
We got to this point by making some major pivots along the way and switching our focus to what I believe is the right thing for 99% of the fundraising-focused startups out there in today’s crazy market:
Profitability.
By transitioning early on to a clear focus on profitability over outside investment, we’ve taken a different approach to build BizNexus than most startups out there these days and we’ve had to be lean since day #1. We’ve built a cash flow positive, scalable operation and we’ve done that in a large part by leveraging the opportunity to work with virtual assistants through a distributed model based on Slack, Basecamp, Upwork, and Google Hangouts.
This blog post series will be all about finding, hiring, and managing a great Virtual Assistant for your business, and we’ll share the tricks we’ve found to be successful, along with the major red flags you need to avoid (trust us on these…).