Building A Virtual Team
Having a team and contracting professionals who are able to take on the tasks that are not within your genius will help you build a stronger, scalable, and sustainable business.
We live in an era where our teams can now be virtual; you may not need a brick and mortar office with full-time employees. Over the years having owned several businesses and having started several non-profit organizations, I have had the opportunity to create different office/team models, each having its strengths and challenges. In my current businesses, Hammond International Inc. and Raise A Dream (which I co-own with Rebecca Kirstein), working with virtual teams has been a big plus.
Rebecca and I live in different parts of the country, yet effectively run our business by setting it up to be mobile-friendly so that we can work from anywhere in the world. When we created Raise A Dream in January 2017, we explored our strengths individually and collectively. Importantly, we identified both the tasks that we love and those that give us “grey hair” or cause us to drift into space and zone out.
To complement our creative and visionary goals, we discovered that we needed team members that enjoyed and were skilled at creating systems, building out processes, and designing the architectural components of the business back end.
Our team is comprised of a certified Online Business Manager (Stacey) who is not only exceptionally skilled at systems, processes, and the back end of the business operations, she loves managing details! We also have Tom and Chris. Tom has expertise in branding, website design, creating the communication flow architecture, and copywriting for sales copy. Chris edits video, does SEO, and also handles some of the web responsibilities. We also have Jaime who LOVES research.
This team, created by design, helps us raise the dreams of our clients. Their unique skill sets support Rebecca and I in having the time and energy to do what we do best and stay in our genius.
We meet virtually by Zoom every week. Our priority setting and daily business activities are created through our RPM system (Results / Purpose / Massive action plan), which is put into tasks through the team tool we use, Asana. For everything we do more than once, a system or process is created. This adds tremendous value to your business and how well it functions.
Recently, I interviewed Tina Forsyth who has an Online Business Manager certification program. Tina is highly respected in the entrepreneur world for her experience in helping entrepreneurs and businesses create high-functioning teams. Tina stressed the importance of knowing your own strengths so that you can hire to your skill deficits or the tasks you don’t like to do (or don’t know how to). In the interview, Tina reported that many entrepreneurs attempt to save money by trying to “be everything and do everything” in the business. The challenge is that this approach delays profit and business success.
A great exercise is to track where you are spending your time every day. From there, you can better identify what specific tasks make sense to delegate or contract out for maximum results and to free up your time to work on the business and in your genius!
Charmaine Hammond, Raise A Dream
www.raiseadream.com