Today’s Quote: You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. John Maxwell
Welcome to another episode of the podcast that teaches you how to be a ridiculously good virtual assistant.
Today I am going to talk about daily actions you should take every day to grow your VA business. Actually when you focus on them every day, you can skyrocket your business.
Click the play button above to tune in, or choose your favourite podcast player below:
Connect with Tracey D’Aviero, VA Coach and Trainer
Episode Notes:
It’s a very well known fact that good daily actions create success.
Why?
Because the more you pay attention to certain things in your business, the better you can control and adjust them.
I am going to talk about 5 things in particular today that, if you focus on them every single day, will make you become a better VA.
1 Money
You need to look at your money every day.
Sales, account balances, payments, expenses.
Whether you do complicated reporting or not, if you don’t know how much money you have coming in and going out, you aren’t actually managing your business.
Checking your sales helps you to see what’s coming in of course, but it also help you to see opportunities to earn more.
A daily revenue tracking sheet can help you see how much opportunity you might be leaving on the table.
Even if all of your clients pay you on the 1st of the month, look at the rest of those days … where could you squeeze some more projects in to increase what you bring in?
Maybe you just have an opportunity to start a new client mid-month and renew their payment later in the month. It is nice to have money coming in more often during any given month, not everyone needs to be billed on the 1st or 31st.
Checking your account balances is always important because it keeps your money top of mind. If you don’t have enough, it reinforces that you need to do some connecting or finding clients work. Like, right now. 100% priority. Nothing else is more important for you to do than get a client.
Looking at your payments helps so see what has gone out, and what still has to go out. Cash flow is critical in business.
Monitoring your expenses is similar to watching your payments, but it goes a step farther because you are looking at things you have determined are necessary to pay for to in order to run your business. When you are looking at your expenses, you are always looking to see if they are still required, whether they are enough, or whether you should be taking on a new one. Your VA business costs money to run, and when you manage your expenses well, you can automate and get more done among many other things.
I can help you create simple checklists and tracking sheets to do this daily.
Daily money checks don’t take more than five or ten minutes. Schedule it in!
2 Goals
You know I tell you that what you focus on grows. well someone once said that and I know it to be true.
You must focus on your goals if you are going to achieve them.
What I mean by that is checking in on your goals every day.
Look at what you say you want to be/do/have. Look at where you are in the process of reaching it. Look how far you have come from the start.
When I teach VAs to set goals, I also teach them to break the action steps to reach that goal down into very small manageable pieces, and then put those action steps into the calendar every single day.
I watch VAs who fail at goal setting (or rather reaching their goal) every single day, and I wholeheartedly believe that it doesn’t mean anything about you as a business owner (like you’re not a bad one). It has everything to do with your plan for your action steps.
Here’s what I mean:
I see VAs set a goal.
Then I see them put their goal absolutely dead last, behind client work, behind the family calendar or needs, and maybe even behind their day job. They book in 2 or 3 hours on Sunday night to ‘work on’ their goal.
Sounds great but it actually sucks as a plan.
Why? Because when you only look at your goal once a week it doesn’t stay fresh in your mind. Because when you try to cram your working on into one large block you can get really overwhelmed, or paralyzed. Or go down a serious rabbit hole.
Or, most common, you will get to Sunday night and decide that something else takes precedence and you just don’t do it. Then you try to.book it in the next Sunday and the same thing happens.
So daily actions are better for so many reasons. Short daily actions. I’m talking 15 minute tasks!
Daily actions take less time.
You will easily have time to get the smaller task done. And if you DO miss it, you are only behind 15 mins, not 3 hours.
I can help you break down your goal into actionable daily steps, and a checklist to help you move closer to your goal every single day.
3 Read
You need to constantly be growing as a VA. Business owners need to learn new strategies, new tactics, new ‘stuff’ to improve their abilities in business, and VAs are business owners.
If you aren’t currently reading business books, you should be. It can be difficult what to choose to read, but I can give you lots of suggestions!
Whether you need to improve your mindset, marketing, money, team, strategy, or whatever, choose a book that you want to learn something from – and something that you plan to implement.
It will make no difference in your business if you read something and don’t make any changes to your business.
Building a good reading habit is also a way to remind you that you are in fact a business owner.
For several years, I belonged to a business book club called Thought Readers run by my business coach Lisa Larter and it was fabulous. She chose the books we read each month and then we would have discussions on the content throughout each month. She even brought many of the authors in to do Q and A calls with us which was amazing. I got to talk to Dan Sullivan who I think is awesome.
Anyway, the point I want to make is that I was not a reader before I joined Thought Readers. I would start to read a book and I would fall asleep or get bored. Like no books. Hardly ever.
I read all day long – but short stuff. I didn’t get into books at all, even fiction. And I certainly didn’t know how to pick a good book. So I learned to read business books, and I got business coaching from Lisa and from some pretty incredible authors too.
And that’s how I know that it made me a better business person. I chose at least one thing to implement from every book that we read, and that’s what I tell VAs to do too.
It’s like any training that you take – it’s just a waste of your time if you are just going to watch it and then not take action on it.
If you develop a good reading habit – 30 minutes every morning or at lunch, you can improve your business vocabulary, knowledge, strategy and so much more.
It also adds structure to your day – and routine, which is so important for your success.
I look for inspiration in the things that I read too – so if I read a chapter every morning (which is what I try to do), then I think about maybe how to do something that day or week using that bit of knowledge – or look for some kind of wisdom or content to share.
Reading is very good for your brain – and so easy to start! Just pick up a book!
If you struggle to read or to choose books, that’s something I can help you do too, by sharing what worked for me.
4 Brainstorm and Strategize
Strategizing is a good thing to do regularly. Daily it is not necessary to create a full new strategy, that’s not what I mean. But checking in on your strategy, your plan, your action steps, your productivity … all of those things.
Brainstorming to me is making lists. In fact I give this advice to VAs all the time – to make lists of things that are cluttering your thoughts and your mind. It helps you to address the things that you want to get done at another time.
Not everything is urgent – in fact very little is urgent. You can schedule time for all the things, in due time.
So brainstorming is a great way to unload some stress from your mind. A bullet journal can be really good for this. I talk a lot about my bullet journal. I love it and I used it daily in my business, I have for years.
Its a series of lists and notes that I can refer to anytime I need to. And I make new lists every single day!
When you are focusing on your strategy, you can track it, monitor it, analyze it, change or alter or tweak it.
Say you are looking to find VA clients and you need to do daily outreach to do it. By keeping a daily eye on it you can see what is working for you. You can see what doesn’t work and do less of that, and you can see what is working or what needs tweaking and then you can do more of that.
Our time is really important, we only have so much of it, and so we need to be efficient and not waste it.
That is definitely one area that we can waste time is doing networking, and that’s why it’s such an important thing to work with a strategy.
And this actually leads me into my last point which is Conversations.
5 Conversations
If you are not having daily conversations with business owners, you are going to struggle to get good clients.
I know so many VAs who only do marketing or networking when they are looking for a new clients. Starting from a standing position is so much more difficult than doing a little all the time to keep your name top of mind in the communities that you choose to network in.
So I recommend daily conversations with at least two people every day. You know this if you listen to any of my trainings.
It’s manageable no matter how busy you are to talk to two people. I’m not talking about discovery calls, I’m simply talking about interactions. On social media works.
The numbers work in your favour all the time for this – if you talk to 2 people every day, that’s 40 to 60 people in a month. If you can’t get one client from 40 interactions, then you need to revise what you are saying in these interactions. It’s simple math and it works.
How many people to do you need to connect with to get a client? You need to know that number. It’s called your conversion percentage. And the only way to know it is to have the conversations.
It’s easy you go from connecting to conversation to client. Not everyone you will connect with will want a conversation right away. So maybe you have to talk to 10 or 20 people to get 2 or 3 sales conversations. When you are networking with the right people this is not hard, and actually those numbers are quite bad. But you see what I mean.
Then from the conversations, you should be able to get at least 5 or 6 out of 10 to sign on as your clients. Again, you have to talk to the right people for these numbers to work. So your plan and strategy definitely play a role here as well.
But the numbers do not lie. I can help you with finding your people, deciding how many you need to talk to, with figuring out what to say to them, and how to manage a sales conversation so you get the client.
I’m going to leave it off here for today, I feel like that’s a lot!
Which of these daily actions can you start taking tomorrow?
To introduce a new habit, focus on one thing at a time. Then once you have that one under control, add another one. You could be doing all five of these within the next few weeks or month, very easily. They aren’t hard to do.
And if and when you do, you’ll be telling me your VA business revenue has skyrocketed. It happens every time!
One step at a time – you can do it!
Remember what John Maxwell said: You’ll never change your life until you change something you do daily. The secret of your success is found in your daily routine. It’s an incredible quote and you need to write it down and stick it up at your work station right now! I have it at mine. 🙂
Need Some Help?
This is exactly what I help VAs do. As a VA coach and trainer, I help you set yourself up for success, helping you fix the specific things that are going wrong in your business. When we work together either privately or in a group we talk specifically about your business and you – there is no one stop solution for everyone when it comes to service businesses like VA businesses.
I’ll help you get clarity around your issues, and cheer you on as you walk through the steps to fix them.
I’ve helped hundreds of VAs through their challenges and got them on their way to growing their business and the lifestyle that they dream of.
I’d love to do the same for you.
You can work with me privately, or you can join The Virtual Circle, my mastermind group for Virtual Assistants. Check it out at www.YourVAMentor.com/TVC (the virtual circle) – I bet it’s exactly what you need to start running the VA business you dreamed of.
Reach out to me if you are interested.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week, see you next time!