Outsourcing Tasks (Aaron O'Sullivan 1 of 2) - a podcast by Michael Veazey

Aaron O’Sullivan is an expert in outsourcing. At Systems, Culture & Impact, Aaron teaches his readers and clients the secrets to delegation and outsourcing efficiently so they can handle the workload of their Amazon business.





Systems Will Set You Free!

How Aaron Got His Start

Since 2013 Aaron has sold many millions of dollars worth of product across the Amazon marketplaces. He's been involved in building some fairly large teams in the Philippines to handle many different private label products across many different brands. It's been his role to figure out all of the systems and process within the team.  Through that process of trial and error, he's been able to learn quite a few things along the way. Today, he's here to share some of those things he's learned on his journey so far.

Reaching Your Capacity

Eventually, there will come a time when you, as a business owner,  will hit your capacity. You're fighting fires all day; you're the bottleneck. You are working every day on low-value tasks like customer service, inventory management, bookkeeping, etc. Businesses have failed because of this. Offloading tasks and creating systems can be crucial to the growth of your business.



If you've reached your capacity, you'll see the signs of the problem seeping out into your life. For some, it's missed dinners with the family. For Aaron, it was a broken promise to his daughter. He let his business take up so much of his time that it hurt his family. That's when Aaron decided it was time for help.

How to Quickly Offload Tasks

The first mistake many people make when they're looking to hire a virtual assistant is failing to build a list of tasks ahead of time. If you don't know what jobs need doing, you'll never be able to teach someone else what to do or how to do it. It's imperative that you have a transparent onboarding process for your new virtual assistant.

Download, Track & Rank Your Tasks

Download

Take a look back over the past few weeks and months. Collect all the tasks you've done. Plug these tasks into a google sheet so you can keep track of them. Build a list of all the tasks you do on a day-to-day, week-to-week basis.

Track

This will change your life. For 3-5 days, keep track every time you switch tasks. Context switching costs a lot of brain power and focus. You'll be astonished by how much time is wasted just moving from task to task in your daily workflow.

Rank

Now that you've compiled a list of all the things you do to run your business, it's time to rank them. At the top of the list go the time consumers; the little things you wish you could get off of your plate that stand in the way of doing the high-value jobs that will move your business forward regarding productivity and growth.



Now draw a line somewhere between the 10th and 15th task on that list. This is your strike list. You can hand it to your virtual assistant as an outline of what they'll need to do to help you open up your schedule to do the things that matter.

Record Videos

UseLoom.com and SnagIt are a couple of great tools to help you build a portfolio or training videos that you'll use to teach the help you hire how to serve you and your company better.  Loom is an easy and free screen recorder for Chrome.



You're going to be doing these tasks anyway so why not hit record and never have to do them again?!



Let's use the example of checking and responding to Amazon customer service emails. Before you hit record, it's crucial to map out the steps. After a while,

Further episodes of Amazing FBA Amazon and ECommerce Podcast, for Amazon Private Label Sellers, Shopify, Magento or Woocommerce business owners, and other e-commerce sellers and digital entrepreneurs.

Further podcasts by Michael Veazey

Website of Michael Veazey