When you’re a small business owner, there’s always a lot of work to be done. You have to handle product production, deal with the ways your services are provided, market effectively, attend to the obligations you have to existing clients, while doing what you can to continuously nurture leads, and handle mountains of paperwork annually.
When you’re a small business owner who’s also an introvert, things become more complicated in several key areas. For one thing, you’re obliged to find ways of leveraging your strengths and overcoming your weaknesses in terms of communication with clients, so that you’re put on the spot as little as possible. Emails are generally good. Skype voice calls are generally not.
Fortunately, there are more ways now than ever before for an introvert to work past their weak points and emphasise their strengths in the business world. Hiring remote staff is one of the big innovations in this regard, facilitated by the ongoing digital revolution.
Here are a few ways in which hiring remote staff can help you as an introverted business owner.
By helping to support your existing operations
People who you employ remotely and who perform their tasks from a separate location, can attend successfully to a huge number of the roles which need to be filled in a modern white-collar business.
One area where remote staff can be invaluable, is in sales operations roles — and, for that matter — in all forms of support role.
Sales operations was pioneered by Xerox more than 40 years ago, and involves hiring a team specifically to support the efforts of your sales team.
The role of sales operations is, generally speaking, to streamline the work done in other parts of the company, by forecasting, planning, and so on.
By handling some of the workday chores that get in the way of your core competencies
Virtual assistants often need no particular background in your industry in order to handle a good amount of the admin work that you will likely find you just don’t have time for as a busy entrepreneur, yet which still needs to get done.
In his best-selling book, “The 4-Hour Work Week”, author Tim Ferriss recounts having a virtual assistant not only create business presentations for him, but even to plan his next vacation.
You may not want your virtual assistant to get involved in your personal life, but they can still help to save you a lot of time on the day-to-day chores of the workplace.
By interfacing with clients so that you don’t have to do it as much
As an introvert, you are likely to find that you are at your best when you don’t have to speak to your clients too much in real-time. You might, for example, find that you are playing against your strengths if you’ve set yourself up, professionally, so that you’re answering the phone multiple times a day.
Virtual receptionists can remove that particular worry, by answering the phone on your behalf, with a professional manner, and relaying messages to you, so that you can plan your response in advance, and follow-up with your would-be client on your own terms.
