I N T R O D U C T I O N

I know you work hard, even when you don’t ‘feel’ like it because

you and I both know a successful business is not built on feelings

or whims of passions, but on systems and your willingness to keep

showing up, day after day.  

But  if  you  really  want  to  grow  your  business,  you  first need to

 make  sure  you're  not  completely  overwhelmed. Once  you get

 overwhelmed  and  stressed to breaking point,  your performance

 will  suffer  (a.k.a.  burnout) and  so  will  your business.  

If  you  feel  piled  up  with  day-to-day  tasks  you  may  be

wondering  if  now  is  the time  to  start  offloading  some  of that

work.  Luckily  for  us, in  this  day  and  age,  there  are  so  many

ways  you  can  do  that  which  dont  involve  hiring  full-time

physical  employees  who  work  with  you  in  your  office  or home.

You  can  hire online  contract  workers  for  projects,  find experts

 with  obscure talents  to  do random  one-off  tasks, recruit  a

 remote  team  to  work  in  a virtual  office  set  up and you  can

 even  automate  repetitive  tasks  using online  tools and bots

without  having  to  hire  a  person  to  do  them  at  all.  

If  you  are  trying  to  figure  out  which  of  these  options  makes

the  most  sense  for  you,  I'm  here  to  help!

Congratulations!

Gina Romero

CEO & Co-Founder of

Connected Women

www.connectedwomen.com

2 signs you absolutely need to offload some work

#1 You are wearing all the hats

You started a business as a solo-entrepreneur. You are the boss, the admin, the accountant, the social media manager, the photographer, the DIY graphic designer, and more. There are not enough hours in the day to play all your roles properly, let alone have any ‘me’ time, enjoy a proper meal, read a book or have a social life.

A business can only go so far as a one-person team, and if you’re married and have children, it becomes almost impossible to balance.

If you want to see your business grow, offer quality services or products, have happy clients and still have a life to live (isn’t that part of why you became your own boss anyway?), then you need to stop trying to wear all the hats.

#2 You’re stretched in every direction

Because you are juggling so many roles, you are stretched thin. You aren’t able to focus good energy on one or two major components of your business, and it’s suffering.

So, what is better, saving a few dollars so you can do everything but not get it done as best as it could be? Or figure out how you can get some assistance, so you can get to work on the things you do well?

The answer is clear. You would most definitely benefit from delegating and automating some of those mundane and repetitive tasks. Not only will that help you get your business under control, but you’ll have more time for other things that matter besides work.

If this all makes sense and you are nodding in agreement, then you are ready to get started.

CHAPTER 1 - Becoming a Time Lord

What exactly do you do all day?

This might seem like an odd question because to be fair, some days you are probably so busy that you don't even have time for a proper meal or bathroom break.

But apart from being busy all day with a collection of random tasks and projects, have you actually done an analysis of how you spend your time?

This is one of the most valuable exercises you can do to identify what takes up most of your hours and if that time is well spent. After all, even though we are all presented with the same 24-hours in the day, you can't argue that some people seem to get a lot more done with the time they have.

Just like money, (or maybe even more so) time should be handled like a precious resource, to be spent, managed, invested and saved with careful consideration.

One of the most valuable things a mentor of mine taught me in the early days of starting a business, was to audit my time.

Even now, 10 years later, I still go back to this practice whenever I feel overwhelmed when my to-do list gets out of control and if I start losing track of my priorities.

Let's do a time audit

The exercise is simple, take a sheet of paper or a spreadsheet, or any online or offline tool you like to use for note-taking.

List down your daily working hours in half-hour increments and set an alarm to go off every thirty minutes. Every time your alarm goes off, write down whatever you did in that period of time.

Keep doing this through the day and repeat the exercise for five working days in a row.

If you want to, and I recommend this, you can also include your personal, non-working time.

At the end of the week, sit down and go through your lists. You should find that you can categorise tasks into groups, like 'errands', 'answering emails', 'calls', 'meetings', 'project x' etc.

Aim to put all the tasks into top-level categories by type of activity. If you have specific projects or clients that take up large chunks of time, you can group those tasks together too.

Once you have done that, add up the number of hours you have spent on each of those task categories.

This will give you a clear and sometimes shocking picture of where you spend your time. My mentor called this the 'Actual Diary'.

Redesigning your week

Now that you know where you actually spend your time, you have an opportunity to redesign how you should really be spending your time.

Take another sheet of paper or spreadsheet, and block off time as you would like to spend it. This can be in task groups like 'admin and accounts', 'follow up clients', 'work on book ideas'.

It can also include things that don't yet happen in your day but should, like 'twenty-minute stretch break', 'short focus meditation' or 'quarterly business planning' and 'watch an online tutorial video'.

In your personal time, feel free to include things like 'movie night', 'reading' and 'family time'

Once you have plotted out your entire week, add up all the categories again and see how much time you've claimed back just by being more deliberate about how you plan your tasks.

My mentor called this the 'Default Diary'.

Rocks in a jar

There's a famous parable about a teacher who illustrates the importance of time management to his students by using a jar of rocks, pebbles, sand and water. When you redesign your week, I really recommend you keep this lesson in mind.

If you aren't familiar with the parable, it goes something like this:

Take an empty jar, and place the larger stones or rocks into it. These represent the most important tasks in your business and life, the ones that really make a difference to your success and happiness, and help you achieve your goals.

Then take the smaller pebbles and add them to the jar. They will fall in between the bigger rocks and settle in the gaps. The pebbles represent the less important tasks that you need to do each day, that you can fit in around the main priorities.

Next take the sand and pour it into the jar so it fills all the small spaces between the rocks and pebbles. These are the tiny mundane things that only take a minute here and there. They may seem to take up an insignificant amount of time but could easily fill hours of your day without you even realising.

And finally, although the jar looks full of rocks, pebbles and sand, you can take the glass of water, and somehow, when you pour it into the jar there is still enough space. These are all the things that really don't matter that much and don't add much value to your life or your goals.

Now just think about if you had placed the items in the jar in any other order. If you filled the jar with water or sand first, you could end up with no space left at all for your rocks or even your pebbles.

Reimagine your life

Now it's time to get even more creative.

If you can reclaim hours a week simply by rearranging the structure of your days, what if there was a way to free up even more time?

What would you do with that extra time? How would that improve your business, your health, your relationships?

Could that time be used to make your life more meaningful and enjoyable?

If you answered yes, let's look at how we can reimagine your life, so you have more time to spend doing what you love.

The reality is, there is time being spent (wasted) on tasks you don't enjoy and tasks you are not good at. And tasks that you simply shouldn't even be doing.

If you want to terrify yourself out of ever doing that again, try this:

Go through your diary and pick all the categories of tasks you really don't like doing. Or those that you are like doing but you aren't good at doing so they end up taking you a lot longer than they should.

Work out how many hours in your week that you spend doing these types of activities.

Now multiply those hours by fifty-two weeks and multiply that by ten years. If you are spending five hours a week doing and re-doing your bookkeeping, you've lost thirty-two and a half working days in a year (yes that's more than a whole month) and three hundred and twenty-five days in a decade which is almost a year of your life. Gone. Forever.

A painful thought, right?

Now let's get to work.

Do, delegate, decide, delete

Another one of my all-time favourite productivity tools is the Eisenhower Matrix or Eisenhower Box. This is a simple grid that can be a great help when it comes to prioritising your tasks.

The premise is simple, you draw a simple grid with Urgent - Not Urgent running along the top, and Important - Not Important Running along the side.

These are time-sensitive tasks that only you can do. They are important and can't really be given to anyone else to do. It could be specialised work that you need to do on an important project. It could be reviewing information and making a decision, or the final approval on work for a client. These are your DO Tasks that really should be dealt with right away or as soon as possible. These are the types of tasks that need to be blocked off as time in your Default Diary

Taking your tasks categories, look at the box and first decide which of your weekly tasks are both Important and Urgent.

The Important - Not-Urgent tasks are important tasks but don't need to be done immediately as they are not time sensitive, or they are not time sensitive yet. They fall into the DECIDE box and can be put on hold for now and can be scheduled to come back to later. They could be also tasks like submitting reports, creating plans, writing content or conceptualising an idea. Anything that hasn't yet been broken down into actionable steps or tasks will have to wait for now.

The next box is the DELEGATE box and this box will need some careful consideration. It could be that you already know that you are not the right person to do these tasks, but you don't have anyone else who can do it for you. Or maybe there are some aspects of the task that you could do, or you need to do, but there are also elements of the task that can be given to someone else. The DELEGATE box should include anything that you are not effective at doing or any repetitive tasks you find yourself doing over and over again. You should

also put it here if it's a task that you put off doing time and time again, simply because you don't like doing it.

The DELETE box is for anything that you could really do without. Or maybe you can move some tasks that are sitting in your DECIDE bucket. Are they really that important? Do they need to be done at all?

Oh, and if you have a habit of saying yes to things you should really say no to, you might want to put those types of tasks and activities in here as a reminder.

The Metta Matrix

Next, I'm going to share my version of the Eisenhower Matrix. I call it the Metta Matrix. It's similar to the Eisenhower Matrix in that it will help you make decisions. But this time are going to look at your tasks from the perspective of preference.

The Metta Matrix theory is, to achieve ultimate productivity, you should do the tasks you love to do that you are good at first.

Sounds obvious, right?

In a popular TED Talk by Sir Ken Robinson, he asks the question: Do Schools Kill Creativity?

The speaker talks about creativity and talent and how for the most part we are taught to "ruthlessly squander them" because of an out of date public education system built to serve the industrialism of the 19th century.

Sir Ken's argument is that the education system is built on a hierarchy that places the most useful subjects for work at the highest importance, followed by academic ability.

"And the consequence," he said, "is that many highly-talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not because the thing they were good at school wasn't valued or was actually stigmatized."

He goes on to talk about a little girl who was so 'hopeless' in school that the teachers told her mother that they thought she has a learning disorder. She was taken to see a specialist who observed her. After a conversation about all the problems she was having in school, the specialist asked to speak to her mother privately.

As they left the room, he turned on the radio on his desk and from outside the room he said to the mother, "Just stand and watch her".

The girl immediately jumped up and started moving to the music. After a while, the specialist said, "Gillian isn't sick, she's a dancer. Take her to dance school."

She went on to be a world-famous choreographer and a multi-millionaire.

Everyone is a genius

I think Einstein said it best with this quote:

"Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish on its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid."

The Metta Matrix embraces this perspective and recommends that we budget our time and energy for what we love most and what we are good at, we invest time in learning what we love but we are not yet good at, we manage the time spend on things we are good at but don't enjoy, and we save time spend on those we are not good at and don't enjoy.

We can now start plugging in all the tasks from your Default Diary into the Metta Matrix and figure out what needs to be done to free up your time.

What do you need to offload?

Before we can start to make this plan a reality, we need to do a bit more work on your Default Diary.

Take your Default Diary and put a line through all those tasks that you absolutely hate to do. And put a star next to those that you enjoy doing but you aren't good at doing and put a heart next to those you love to do. And finally, start making a list of anything that you want to be doing more of but isn't even in your list because you simply don't have time.

Now that you have reviewed all the tasks from your Default Diary, it's time to start assessing what time and talent you need to get them done.

If it's something you love to do that you are good at doing, you just need to allocate time to do that task. Put the task right in the top right corner of (your box and make a commitment to block time for that project or task. If it's something that you are not good at but really enjoy, then it is something worth investing time in learning and you need to block time to invest in that project.

For tasks that you are doing now, that can be delegated under your supervision, you can start thinking about who would be ideal to hand over that task to.

And for those tasks that you are not good and hate to do, you really need to delete it from your list or find someone who you can trust to take that right off your plate for you.

An example of this would be if you are very bad at accounting and don't enjoy accounting. It doesn't make sense to hire a junior employee because you will not be able to manage and train that person.

In this case, your best option would be to find a specialist who you can trust, such as an outsourced accountancy firm, handover the entire task to them and let them manage it for you.

However, if you are competent with accounting, but simply do not enjoy doing the task itself, you can hire a junior level bookkeeper or accounts manager, and simply delegate the majority of tasks to that person while still overseeing their work.

Now that you can see your tasks in a clear structure, you can easily group together the skills you need to outsource to an assistant or specialist. Let's start thinking about the role you need to fill.

CHAPTER 2 - Man vs machine?

“If a pretty poster and a cute saying are all it takes to motivate you, you probably have a very easy job. The kind robots will be doing soon.”

Ten years ago, I had a “demotivational” poster hanging in my office with those exact words. It was supposed to be a joke that IT geeks would appreciate. We were closer than we thought to it actually happening.

Can a robot do that job?

A newly emerging trend, or certainly a trend that is becoming more and more mainstream in both business and lifestyle applications is automation.

Internet robots or 'bots' are applications that can be used in a wide range of different scenarios to replicate and automate repetitive functions and tasks.

They have been around for a long time now, since the 1960s in their basic form and in the 90's with the rise of internet chat rooms, but for the most part, to set up a bot you would have needed some knowledge of coding and the ability to write script to make the bot run. These days there are bots that are being created for the benefit of consumers with relatively basic technical skills and are easy to set up and use.

Lots of these bots have been integrated into day-to-day tools and applications that you already use. Chatbots are a popular way of automating the interactions with a customer on your website. That's not to say that a chatbot can replace a human customer service agent, or not yet anyway, you can think of them more as an interactive first stop that your customers will experience instead of a static webpage with no engagement at all.

For example, a chatbot can be used to ask questions and better route a customer enquiry, freeing up your first line support team to deal with enquiries that require a more personalised reply. Or to pick up messages from your website when your office is closed.

You can also use chatbots internally to gather and collate information from your team members. In my business, we use bots to ask about tasks progress and to gather feedback.

Automation tools can be set up to create workflows of tasks that are repetitive in your day-to-day business, or to replicate data across various tools. For example, if you run events, you can set up an automation that pushes data from event registrations, into your customer database without having to manually export and import the data.

AI (Artificial Intelligence) assistants like Siri, Alexa and Cortana can be set up to make calls, create events and reminders, open applications or find information.

As much as the world of automation and chatbots is evolving, they are still very much powered by humans.

Unlike sci-fi movies where the robots rise up against humans, most technologists are optimistic that the next age of work will be more about human-machine partnerships and how AI will enhance human capability.

The modern workforce

For most of us, the modern workforce looks less like Star Wars. One of the biggest shift employers will see in the coming years is the rise of the 'independent workforce' - those not in traditional employment.

According to a 2017 study by Upwork, Freelancers are predicted to become the majority of the U.S. workforce within a decade, with nearly 50% of millennial workers already freelancing. There are currently an estimated 57.3 million freelance workers in America, 36 percent of the U.S. workforce, contributing approximately $1.4 trillion annually to the economy.

Thanks to the incredible technological advancements of the last decade, our shift to the cloud means that we have entire offices, libraries, shops and even schools which are completely virtual.

We use a variety of methods and tools to make sure our communication is fast and furious. We share information instantly and track progress in real-time, and more and more back-office tasks are handled through online and digitalized systems.

And if a job can be done online, then there's no reason to hire a full-time person who is physically based in your home or office.

Of course, there are still some tasks that require a person 'on the ground' but where the job itself might be physical, hiring, collaborating and communicating are increasingly in the digital realm.

There are many variations of the modern workplace which includes online jobs, an increasingly mobile workforce, and a rapidly growing 'gig economy'.

Thanks to the location independence technology has given us, a person could be working remotely from home three or four days a week while spending one day a week doing tasks made up of physical chores and errands.

Or you may find that you would employ a part-time team member who is tasked with a specific project on the ground, while you have a full-time remote team member who works on everything that can be done remotely.

The main thing is making sure you have the right person for the job and you provide them with the best set up to do that task effectively.

If you are thinking about hiring a remote team member online who is based in a different city or country than you are, it's worth considering if they need to have specialist local knowledge which might be essential for that task.

There are a lot of different platforms out there for outsourcing both business and personal tasks, where you can find readily available people to get things done for you.

Using the accountant example, you may have a virtual assistant in the Philippines who manages your finance admin on a day-to-day basis, but then the quarterly accounts and finances are sent to a local accountant who has an in-depth understanding of the compliance, tax and other procedures specific to your country.

From shopping services where a random person is assigned to pick up your groceries, to task outsourcing services where you can assign a small job of almost any nature to be done by on standby errand runners, the nature of the sharing economy, or the collaborative economy is that any underutilised asset can be made use of by someone else in need.

These assets include homes, cars, skills and especially time. And they are available when you need them, on demand.

A world of possibilities has been opened by a shift in how we think about the resources available to us at any given time. Thanks to technology platforms, the supply and demand ecosystems of many industries are evolving.

And when you look at the success of businesses like Airbnb and Uber, you can see a whole new generation of work opportunities being created.

Types of remote role

Depending on the outcome of your Metta Matrix, you should have an idea of the type of role that you need to compliment you in your business.

We've already established that not everything should be delegated, and not everything can be delegated, but at least you should have a clear idea of what could be delegated and what skills you need to ease some of your workload.

Typically, roles that work well in a remote setting are:

• Admin • Finance • Design • Development • Sales • Customer Service • Marketing • Automation

Again, depending on your own skills and preferences you need to decide if you require a specialist for any of these roles, or if you need more of a generalist with basic skills across several of these areas.

If you are a one-person business or a small team, you will need several people to offload all the things you have been kind-of-sort-of doing in your business. But you don't have to hire them all at once.

It's also important to be realistic about your expectations for the role. It's tempting to look at all the things that we neither enjoy, nor do well, and lump all the other skills into one role. As much as it might be amazing to find a highly specialised and analytical marketing person who can also design and edit videos, write and do accounting, I haven't been lucky enough to find anyone like that. If they are out there, it will be like finding a needle in a haystack!

If you are like most small businesses and startups, you won't have an unlimited budget to hire a team. So, you need to figure out which key hire will really make a difference to your business and your life right now.

Systems and processes

Now that we know a little more about how we can leverage technology to automate processes in our business. And how it's unlikely that we will be able to handover most tasks to a robot in the near future, it's time to go back to thinking about what type of help you need to free your time.

One skill that is very much in demand by businesses of all sizes is the ability to build systems, improve processes and eventually automate tasks.

Note that in the line above, I mention three things, build systems, improve processes and automate tasks. These are not three separate things but rather a series of steps. Unless you have started the work of building systems in your business, it will be difficult to start automating.

If you are a one-person business who has been doing a lot of things by yourself until now, the chances are while you might already have systems and processes that you have developed over time, most of them will be in your head and not much use for training or delegating tasks.

Make a note that creating and documenting systems will be a task you will want your new team member or assistant to help you with. If you don't have documentation yet, the chances are you either don't know how to do it or you don't like doing it. Make sure this is something that your new hire enjoys doing and is competent in or you will end up with neither of you doing it and you will have two roles to document and systemise not just one.

When you are hiring for any role and you happen to spot a talented person with a passion for this type of systemisation and automation work, don't overlook them. Be sure though to understand the full extent of their expertise, and assess if they have the theoretical knowledge or hands-on experience

Good questions to assess this would be about the tools they have used, how they set them up, and how they use automation to be more efficient. Ask about documentation too, including what how they document processes and which tools they recommend for documenting business processes.

Batman, Robin, Mini Me or Superman?

For most entrepreneurs, their first hire is quite the opposite of them. They need a Robin to their Batman, someone who compliments their skills, brings a different perspective to the business and generally keeps them on track. This person will pick up on the tasks you let slide because they love to do the things you least enjoy.

If you are analytical and organised, you will probably need someone more creative, conceptual and creative to bring a bit of sparkle to your content, marketing. If you are shy or introverted, you may need someone with a bubbly personality who loves dealing with people.

If you are flamboyant, creative and full of ideas, you might need someone adept at capturing those ideas into an actionable plan, who will help you follow through on getting it implemented.

Sometimes that first hire is more of a Mini-Me. If you are great at marketing and love marketing but just have too much marketing work to do, your next best hire could be passionate about marketing and is eager to learn from someone more experienced and take some of the load off your shoulders.

And sometimes you need someone who can come in and do the tasks that you can't do, complimenting your strengths but bringing their strengths to the table too. This person is more like a Superman, who can team up with you almost like a business partner or co-founder. They will have skills that you don't have, and you can trust them to get the job done without your help or you can even learn from their expertise.

Bear in mind that each of these different hiring personas will have a different background and experience and so you will need to consider the budget of each. Hiring a specialised accounts person with a business management degree will, of course, be more expensive than a junior admin person and bookkeeper - but they may bring more return on investment to your business in the long run.

The cost of hiring remote team members

Depending on what skills you are looking for, the rate can vary. It also depends where they are located geographically.

If you hire a general virtual assistant in a Western country, you might pay five times more than an assistant in a developing country. This is mostly because the cost of living in developing nations is much lower. Their rate also does not always reflect the quality of their work.

Someone might charge three times more in America but may not necessarily have better skills than someone outside the US who has a lesser rate.

It's worth remembering that someone with local knowledge could add more value to certain projects, so make sure you carefully assess how important this is to the role.

My remote team is based in the Philippines because I can find almost all the talent I need here at a more affordable rate compared to other countries.

Remote teams require fewer resources in terms of office space and it gives you a much wider talent pool to find people with the right skills plus a much more flexible budget. That allows you to allocate some of your hiring budget to specialists in your local area when you need them.

If you can hire a person for three or four times less, they can do the job equally well and you don't need a person physically there to do the work, why wouldn't you select the best and most affordable person to do the job, no matter where they are in the world?

Part-time, full-time, flexible, freelance

So now that you've decided it makes sense to hire a remote team member, and you've decided what tasks you can give them.

One of those decisions is what type of working schedule do you prefer? There are so many options, but here are a few pros and cons to consider.

In my experience, freelancers are more entrepreneurial in nature and prefer project-based, flexible on-their-own-time work, often working simultaneously with several clients and on multiple projects. There are some roles that work well like this, for example, end-of-year accounts, design or development projects and other project type work. It's also much better to hire a freelancer when you don't have enough ongoing work to hire a long-term full-time person in that specific area.

Another consideration is whether you are comfortable with your team member having other projects and working with other clients.

For roles that require getting to know you, your business and your customers, I always prefer to hire long-term team members who want to work with me and grow their career as we grow business together.

Typically, those applying for long-term remote roles will see this as a career opportunity, where they enjoy stability and a chance to learn new skills through ongoing mentoring and training. Because they see their role with you as their main source of income, they have a long-term vested interest in the success of the business.

There's no right or wrong way to hire a remote team member but it's important to establish any flexibility requirements at the beginning. Decide what works best for all parties, and set clear boundaries and expectations for both availability and productivity.

If your business and the role you are hiring for can afford to offer more flexibility, then why not. The new way of working is no longer bound by the old rules of 9-5 and there's certainly no reason to enforce them unnecessarily.

If the role is demanding and requires the person to be readily available with a 'fast and always-on' attitude, be clear about it and I'm confident you will find a person who thrives in that type of role.

Work-from-home and digital nomads

Thanks to technology the Global talent pool is huge, so you no longer need to rely on hiring the best person in your city or local area. You can expand your search to anywhere on the planet, look for a person that is a great fit for the role and - the best thing is, they can stay right where they are.

On the other hand, employees now have more options and the new generation of workers are looking for careers that suit their preferred lifestyles. Some look for work that integrates well with family life, others are looking for freedom and adventure opting to be digital nomads, working from anywhere while satisfying their wanderlust.

As employers, offering work options that suit the type of team member we are trying to attract means we can find people that are more than qualified for the role we have available and levelling the playing field of hiring between big companies that offer more traditional benefits.

I've found there are two main types of remote worker.

Those who value flexibility and freedom and prefer to work much more on project-based, freelance type jobs. They like to have a variety of projects and clients, they are self-motivated and are focused on deliverables and deadlines. The contract period would normally be short to medium term (like a specific task that will take a week or two, or a more complex project that needs a few months to complete).

There are also those that prefer to work within an online version of a traditional work environment, and in a way that is more collaborative and structured.

This type of role can still offer the flexibility needed by each individual, for example, a mother with small children may be better able to work from 7 am till 1 pm followed by a 6 pm to 8 pm shift to complete a full day. This gives her time to pick up children from school and handle household chores or homework and dinner before resuming her work.

You can now hire a seasoned executive who would otherwise be unavailable to a small business, simply by offering her a part-time, flexible role while she is out of the corporate world with young children to care for. Or you can attract tech-savvy millennial digital natives because a traditional office role isn't aligned with their goal to explore as many countries as they can, while they are young and single.

Inclusivity and social impact

For women, the ability to work from home and choose flexible work means more women can say in the workplace after having children, it provides an alternative to the traditional workplace or entrepreneurship which were pretty much the only options for many years.

In the US alone, approximately 43% of women drop out of the traditional workforce after having kids. In our experience, travelling to and from work and the lack of flexible work options is what makes it hard for women to remain in their jobs even if they want to. As leaders in a tech-powered workplace, we can rethink the options we provide to parents and creates a practical solution for keeping talented people in the workplace.

Most of my team work a regular 9 am to 6 pm day with a lunch break, but we also have a few team members who work on special projects with specific KPIs and deliverables to be met and so don't need to present and available during normal office hours.

The beauty of running a remote team is having all the different options available so you can come up with solutions that best suit the needs of individual team members as well as the business.

Being able to work flexible hours is especially helpful and empowering for women.

Offering a more practical arrangement is not only beneficial for the team member but can also help her maximize her productivity during times when she can really focus on work.

One of the main reasons why I am an advocate for remote work is because of the economic empowerment it brings to those less advantaged, not just by gender but also those less able-bodied, those who live in remote locations and those without a formal education.

We can all do our part by being more inclusive as we build and grow our remote teams.

CHAPTER 3 - Hiring remote team members

“Clients do not come first. Employees come first. If you take care of your employees, they will take care of the clients.” – Richard Branson, Founder of Virgin Atlantic

Wise words from one of my favourite entrepreneurs! Take good care of your team and they will take good care of you and your business. But first things first. The best way to ensure you hire a virtual assistant who meets your needs is to be properly prepared.

Using the right tools

First, establish what you need to do. This will be based on the list tasks that you need to delegate and delete from your Metta Matrix. Figure out what you expect your new team member to work on in the first two weeks and what tools and information they will need to access to get the work done.

Plan to spend time with your new team member, allocating at least day to get them onboard and have regular check-ins with them a couple of times a day initially, and twice or three times a week, after the first few weeks.

Next, think about how you will work with them on a day-to-day basis. Email is no longer the go-to form of communication when it comes to having a virtual office.

Not only do you need a tool for communication, but you also need to know how you will share documents you’re working on together. How will your team log their hours, if you require it? How should they store passwords to certain platforms you might both need to use?

Collaboration, communication and transparency are the backbone of successful remote teams and there are so many cheap or free tools available to make working in a virtual environment both seamless and intuitive.

I've spent quite a lot of time testing various communication, task management and collaboration tools over the years and although I have some personal favourites there are a few things I look out when choosing new technology to use with my team.

A lot of tools have free accounts for small teams but before you choose a tool, check the limitations of the free version so you aren't faced with a sudden cost of upgrading or the big task of moving to a cheaper or better option when your team grows.

You'll need a tool for general communication, a tool for collaborative project management or to-do list management. You'll need to be able to share files and documents as well as passwords, notes and ideas. You may also need a cloud accounting tool and possibly a dashboard to create basic data visualizations to track progress against business targets. You also want to make sure that you have a system for measuring the productivity and workload of your team members.

Measuring performance

There are also lots of tools out there for real-time monitoring of work. They typically take a screenshot of the team member's computer and provide you with a report of what they have been working on. I'm not a big fan of these as they feel intrusive in a 'big brother' way, similar to installing a CCTV camera over each desk in an office. In my opinion monitoring tools don't foster trust or transparency within a remote team.

It is important that you emphasize the importance of delivering tasks and projects on time, being available and responsive, as required by the role, and that updates and progress reports are submitted regularly.

There are many ways to measure performance, but the foundation is to set clear expectations for tasks and projects and to make sure you are both on the same page when it comes to deliverables and deadlines.

Be very specific about how often you want progress reported and how. You can have regular video call check-ins to make sure you keep projects moving forward and address any stumbling blocks along the way. There are a variety of tools available to help you stay on top of task progress.

In our team, we have integrations set up to provide automatic updates via chat apps, we check-in to share our tasks in the morning and check-out with progress at the end of each day. We also use bots to automate reporting and ask management tools to stay on top of deadlines.

I'm not going to mention specific tools here because there are so many available and the landscape of online collaboration is always changing, but I'll include a special section in the resources section of this eBook.

I'll include some of the most essential tools and examples of how we use them in our remote team.

Remote work culture

A lot of emphasis has been put on company culture in recent years and for good reason. Successful company culture advocates such as Zappos take great pains in selecting and hiring people with the right 'cultural fit'. In remote teams, this is no different. You will be spending countless hours with your new team member, remote or otherwise, and your shared values and company culture is what will help keep you both going through all the ups and downs of business and life.

One of my favourite companies to follow in terms of culture and values is Buffer. While their CEO Joel Gascoigne attributes many of their practices to Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh and other mentors, Buffer has done an amazing job of growing their startup, getting profitable and maintaining a strong culture based on their six values: transparency, positivity, gratitude, reflection, constant improvement and acting beyond yourself.

I believe that this is what has helped them survive and thrive in an increasingly competitive and volatile space.

Apart from your company's own culture and values, there are certain key qualities that are absolutely essential in any team member and especially for remote teams. I'll include some of Buffer's excellent content about defining and building a strong company culture in the resources section.

Here are some values that I believe are important to remote teams, and some that I look for in my own team:

Remote team values:

Communication

Collaboration

Transparency

Consistency

Focus

Discipline

Values I look for:

Honesty

Integrity

Curiosity

Fun

Resilience

Kindness

If you haven't created your team's culture and values, I highly recommend spending some time on an exercise that helps you understand and communicate these. Having a clearly defined team culture will help you make good hiring choices as you expand your team, and they will guide your decisions as your business grows.

Creating a job description

Based on my experience, here is a helpful script that should cover the basics of your job description. Feel free to tweak as you require.

Role description [Example: Experienced and tech-savvy, executive assistant - full-time, remote]

Describe your business, where you are based, the size of your team and a little about your culture and mission. I also recommend including a little about yourself, to make it more personal.

We are looking for a [role] to [why you are hiring them]

You must also be efficient in: [mention soft skills, past experience and specific tools if necessary]

Optional skills or willing to learn and master [skills you are willing to take the time to train them on]

You must have [any specific equipment you require them to have, ex. stable internet connection, headphone and mic, etc.]

Please submit your resume and [design portfolio/article examples] to [your email] with subject: [role name]

If you want to you can include any special qualifications required as well as a benchmark salary offer, this is worth including if you have a limited budget and don't want to waste time interviewing those who fall outside of your offer range.

For flexibility you can put something like:

Rate offered: [$500-$600] per month depending on experience.

Add if you are open to flexible hours and highlight if this is remote, full-time or part-time work.

This is a [long-term] [remote] role with [fixed hours (9am-6pm, Monday to Friday)]

It's also important to consider the time differences and local holidays when you define the working hours in a role you need to fill. In my experience of working with Filipino remote teams is that while many job seekers will be willing to agree to almost any working hours and conditions, working a permanent graveyard shift is not conducive to long-term productivity or happiness.

If you have a big time difference, rather than expecting a team member from the other side of the world to be available through your entire working day, which is through the night for them, consider choosing blocks of time that overlap for project discussions and updates.

For example, if you have a twelve-hour difference and you work 9am-6pm, you might want to ask your team member to work from 8am-11pm her time. This gives you a two-hour overlap each day to virtually meet, then allocate the other hours to working on the projects and getting the job done.

I offer all my full-time Philippines based team paid Filipino holidays. Holidays can be quite confusing, for example in the Philippines we have National Holidays as well as several Special Non-Working Holidays which are only specific to local towns. Some holidays are also much more important than others to some team members, for example, religious observances.

Do a bit of research and ask around before you finalise the number of holidays you offer and if the holidays will be paid or unpaid.

Communication

For most employers hiring global remote teams, English will be your common language. Make sure your team member is fluent enough to communicate across your preferred platform, whether that's calls or chat. If you need a team member to communicate with customers on your behalf by email, messaging or calls, be sure to assess their competence and confidence to do that.

Bear in mind that not all remote workers have a suitable environment for making calls, especially if they have a noisy household with children or pets. Be

sure to specify in your job description if you need them to make occasional or regular calls on your behalf.

One more thing to consider is bad weather conditions which affect electricity and connectivity. Here in the Philippines, depending on where your remote team member works, you may find they sometimes have connectivity issues. If this is the case, expect them to have a backup plan, like a local co-working space where they can quickly transfer, or where this isn't possible, they should be able to inform you immediately and make up any hours of work that were lost during the outage.

If any of my team are not able to work, whether it's due to connectivity, technical issues, sickness or family emergencies, I absolutely expect to be informed within a reasonable amount of time (a maximum of one to two hours) from when they were expected to report for duty.

Make sure you have a few options for how your remote team members can communicate with you in case they lose access to the regular work apps. SMS or Facebook are the most reliable and there is no reason why they wouldn't be able to contact you through these channels even in the most unexpected of situations.

Connectivity issues and work interruptions should be the exception rather than the rule. If you have team members that have regular issues in reporting for duty, regardless of the reason, I would urge you to consider if they are able to realistically manage a remote role. It could be a temporary setback that you can afford to be flexible with for a period, but as a business owner, it's understandable that the operational needs of the business should come first.

Some of my team have been with me for almost five years now and come from both urban and rural locations all over the Philippines. I can count on my fingers the number of times they have not been reliably able to turn up for work.

Job platforms

The platform that I've been building along with my co-founders and team for the last two years is specifically focused on matching entrepreneurs from all over the world to Filipino women virtual assistants and team members.

Based on my thirteen years of experience working with women entrepreneurs and small business owners, we use the Metta Matrix mentioned in this eBook to match entrepreneurs to Filipino women jobseekers. We focus on matching based on complementary skills, preferences, aspirations, flexibility and training requirements.

Our advocacy is to help women entrepreneurs grow their businesses by leveraging the right technology tools, as well as matching them to high quality, affordable talent. At the same time, we also help qualified women in the Philippines find meaningful work and career opportunities with entrepreneurs globally.

If you are a male entrepreneur, a company or small business who is looking to support and empower women through jobs, we are also happy to help you find the right talent for your business.

Currently, our women jobseekers are all from the Philippines, and we have thousands of talented and experienced women who are looking for meaningful remote work opportunities, so they can earn a livable wage while staying close to home. We also plan to open our platform to women jobseekers from other markets soon.

If you aren't looking for this type of specialised matching, there are many platforms out there for sourcing and hiring remote staff. I'll include some of these in the resources section of this eBook.

Shortlisting applicants

Depending on the platform you use, you can usually search and browse resumes, or simply post your job description.

If you've decided to start with a manual search, you will need to block off a reasonable amount of time to focus. Probably a couple of hours for the initial search and then another few hours to review applications and screen applicants after a few days.

I recommend the advanced search keyword function and being very specific with keywords to narrow down search results to a few hundred from thousands. A good keyword is any specialised tools or skills you are looking for. If you use generic keywords like "admin' you might find you are left with too many profiles to review. Something like "automation + MailChimp" will be a lot better if that is what you specifically need. Or rather than using a common word like "editing" try using something like "content strategy" for higher quality results.

Use a process of bookmarking and contacting suitable applicants and keep narrowing down until you come up with a final three to five applicants to shortlist.

Reach out to the applicants with a quick intro and a link to the job description, ask them if they are still looking for work. Expect that not all applicants will

reply, and some will reply quicker than others. Make a note of those who are responsive and how well they communicate.

If you posted your job description on a few different platforms, names, resumes and references will start flowing in. Depending on which platforms you used, you might have dozens of applicants gunning to work with you. But more isn’t always better. It can be confusing and overwhelming if you don’t know exactly what should qualify a potential candidate.

The list will ultimately come down to what type of person you want to work with. Of course, qualities like punctuality, honesty, and consistency should be a given in any team member. But if you don’t have much time to train, then you need to first eliminate the candidates that have very little experience or those who didn't submit the work examples/samples you requested.

I must admit, when I have a lot of applications, the cover letter is a great way to narrow down the most suitable options. You would be surprised at how many people don't take the time to look up your business and personalise their cover letter.

I look for:

People who show interest in my business by doing some basic research

Those who put a personal line about why they would love to work with us

Why they think they would be well suited to the role and relevant experience

Applicants who show a bit of personality and warmth in their email

Something important to note is how they write. As we rely less and less on formal letters and more on chat and instant messaging tools, it's important to select people with a polite, friendly and conversational manner, rather than those who use a very old-fashioned tone.

This is especially important if the team member will be interacting with your customers and representing your brand, how they write a cover letter will be a good gauge of their comfort with conversational English.

Personally, I prefer to search for applicants rather than posting up jobs even though it might be more time-consuming initially. There are a lot of hidden gems out there and if you have a good shortlisting process and you are clear about what you need you might be lucky enough to find a diamond!

Don't forget to have a simple "thank you, but no thank you" email ready for those who didn't qualify. For those that made the shortlist, it's time to screen.

Screening applicants

Their online profile looks incredibly promising, and they have previous work experience with great people and companies. You send an email to them, eager to begin communication. The next step I recommend is to screen them in an informal interview using a chat or instant messaging app.

This is important as you may find, as I do, that chat is the most convenient way to communicate with your remote team on a day-to-day basis.

A few things to consider during the screening process:

1. Did they arrive on time as expected for an interview? 2. Were they professional while conversing in real-time chat? 3. Was their communication style and pace, as you expected? 4. Do they match your required availability and budget? 5. Are they looking for long-term or project based role?

It's a good idea to make a list of questions ahead of the screening. More than anything, if you are happy with the skills and experience on their CV and online profile, this stage is to see if they are a good fit in terms of personality and drive.

If you are looking for someone to really grow the business with you, you will want someone who is eager and motivated for success without too many conflicting responsibilities. You can look for someone who wants to learn new things and stretch out of their comfort zone.

Or maybe you are just looking for someone to support your business and free up some of your day-to-day tasks, so you can have a bit more freedom and flexibility in your life. In this case, you will probably want someone experienced, easy to manage, and reliable.

Now is the time to ask all the questions you need to know before you proceed to a formal interview and make an offer.

The interview

I'm not going to cover interviewing techniques here as, to be honest, an online job interview should really be treated like any other interview. There are thousands of excellent resources available online for this and I recommend you research and select a couple of resources which provide solid interview advice that would work well for you.

Here are some absolute basics:

Before you welcome your new employee, you need to have an interview. No matter how good their resume or application looks, do not skip this part, make time for it. 60 minutes is more than enough and should give you a better feel for their personality and understanding of your business.

Once you make the call and are passed your initial greetings, the ball is in your court.

If you need a bit of leading, a good way to start is by mentioning what you liked about their application or resume, and then ask them what they enjoyed most about their work at [previous employer’s].

Based on their reply, you’ll most likely come up with more questions. Although I would suggest coming to the interview with a list of questions you need to be answered. Going through them one by one is a safe way to play it while making sure you learn more about your potential team member.

Be sure to discuss your business’ pace and culture. This means explaining a bit about how you work personally. Are you fast-paced and quick to make up your mind? Do you like to be more flexible? Explain your work ethic and how you expect a team member to complement that.

You don't have to make a decision at the end of the interview. Let them know you’ll get back to them within a few days and end with any good feedback you might have for them.

Let's jump to the offer

If the interview goes well, you can make them offer with a paid trial/training period. A trial gives you both a good opportunity to see how well you work together and to see if a person is reliable and able to do the job you set out to hire for.

I find a two-week trial is long enough to test out if they work well within your team, and a three-month period is a good length of time to see if they can sustain the good performance in the longer term.

Before you start the trial, you need to agree on a rate and a start date. If the candidate is asking a little above your initial budget, or your job offer included a range (for example $500-$600) you can start with a mid-way offer, with an increase to the higher rate after a period, say after the first three months.

Of course, if after interviewing you realise that they are under qualified or over qualified for the role you advertised, and you still want to hire them, you may want to adjust your offer accordingly.

Most good advice about recruitment also says that while skills can be taught, personality and attitude can't. That's a really important point to remember. Regardless of how good the applicant might seem on paper or during the interview if you don't "click" I recommend you either follow up with a second session or call it a day.

In my experience, I haven't yet had long-term success with a team member when my initial gut feeling was off.

When making an offer, bear in mind that if that person is from outside your country there may or may not be laws governing how you hire a remote team member.

Most of the time, the simplest way is to hire them as an independent contractor where they invoice you every month or every two weeks and you pay them directly. At this point, they are responsible to pay for their own taxes and any other contributions locally.

Again, there are lots of resources about this available online, but it can get a little complicated, so it's worth asking your local lawyer or accountant about any specific laws or compliance in your country and ask your remote team member to do the same.

In terms of paid sick days and holidays, depending on the contract advised by your local advisor you may not be required to pay these.

I give my long-term, remote team members paid days off for major public holidays, paid leave and as paid sick days. I also don't expect them to work overtime or weekends or holidays unless something urgent comes up.

When I hired them for the role, I told them what to expect in the beginning. If you have the type of business that needs frequent overtime or out of hours work, just agree that with them, well as the rate and process for logging extra hours.

You can also offer performance-related bonuses. For bonuses, again, be sure to define very clearly what the expectations are so there are no misunderstandings about the targets or success metrics that you are both working towards.

If you can, you might want to cover part of or all of their health insurance. You can also make this an incentive which kicks in after they’ve been with you for several months.

It's a good idea to create a simple independent contractor agreement or employment contract that covers anything you have agreed, as well as important terms you expect your remote team members to comply with to safeguard your business, such as data handling, trade secrets (non-disclosure) and a notice period.

There are templates available online to get you started, but it's always worth getting it looked over by a local expert to make sure you comply with local labour laws.

Chapter 4 - Onboarding and training

Training your virtual assistant

You have a new hire! Congratulations! If all works out well during the trial period, you’ll have a new team member.

During two-week training, you’ll get to experience first-hand what it’s like to work with them.

Here are some crucial qualities to look for during their trial period:

• Are they consistently on time? • Do they do good work in the time allotted? • Do they communicate well (an absolute key to working remotely!)? • Do they catch on quickly, or do you find yourself explaining basics

repeatedly? • Do they still require a lot of training from you, only some, or are they truly

an expert at what they said they could do? • Do you feel confident delegating a task to them, knowing they will do it to

your standards (or thereabouts)? • If you need to provide constructive criticism or feedback on any aspect of

their work, are they easy to talk to?

Setting realistic expectations

Mind you, it’s important you have realistic expectations for the trial period as well.

If you’re introducing your trainee to a new communication platform that they’ve never used before they might even need a bit more than two weeks to get used to it. Start with the basics; communication platform, file sharing, email/calendar setup (if you want your team to share a primary email at this stage).

The cold, hard truth is that you need to be patient when hiring any new team member, and even more so with remote team members. They won’t learn everything in two weeks.

You may even find that as much as you hired this person to take over some of your work, you've spent even more of your precious time working with them.

This is normal, and you can only really expect them to be fully able to work independently and start adding real value after the third month. You should be able to see their potential within the first month, as you should be slowly able to start offloading some responsibilities to them at this point.

It took months (maybe years) for you to learn what you know now, and there are still things you might not have had time to learn. So be gracious with your trainee, meanwhile being aware that there is a thin line between a new learner and a slow one.

If it takes you thirty minutes to edit and proof an article but it takes them an hour on their first few tries, that is normal. But if after two weeks it still takes them an hour to edit and proof one 500-800-word article, maybe they’re using up too much valuable time to complete a fairly simple task.

Along the way, offer your trainee feedback. Are they working well? Do you like their work? Is it too far off from what you asked for?

Also, take time to understand their learning style. Everyone is different. You might learn by reading an article, but someone else might learn better by watching you do it (via screenshare) and then trying it for themselves.

Managing The Relationship

If you’ve ever worked for someone else or been an ‘employee’ then you know what it’s like to have a boss. You might have also personally experienced the significant differences between a good boss (a leader) and a not-so-good boss.

A not-so-good boss will tell you how to do it, where a leader will show you how. A not-so-good boss will take all the credit while a leader will give credit where it is due. To the point, some bosses are more focused on getting the job done. A leader will take the time to motivate and empower you as you grow in your role.

As a leader of a remote team, just like any other team, you now have a duty of care. You are not just paying someone to work for you. You are responsible for another human being who has their own life, family and dreams.

Referring to Richard Branson’s quote in Chapter 2, your team will take better care of you, your business and the tasks you give them if they’re fit to do so. If they’re exhausted and cannot find balance in their life, their performance will suffer. This is not your fault, obviously (unless you’re running them into the ground asking for 60 hours a week). BUT, by actively listening to them when you check in on them from time to time, you can help offer them options that help them build a better lifestyle.

When you ask them how they are, if they often mention being exhausted, you might like to offer them to come in an hour or two later (but also make up those hours by working late another time). When your team member feels like you’re really listening, they will feel cared for and in turn offer their absolute best.

Managing a team can be challenging in any work environment but even more so with a remote team. As a leader who has been working with a fully-remote team for almost five years, the most challenging aspect is helping to balance everyone's workload.

Even today, it's sometimes hard to know when my team are overwhelmed with work or handling a relatively relaxed load. The best way to keep tabs on this is to insist on transparency.

If you use collaboration tools with real-time chat and a combination of private messaging and public channels, train your team to use public channels as much as possible to you all have a feel for how busy a certain team member is.

Having shared to-do lists and project management tools also helps keep workload transparent and visible to all team members.

Create a culture and a system where your team knows to let each other know if when their workload is low, and they have time to help with other tasks. Equally important is to let them know to ask for help if they are getting overwhelmed, burned out or need support.

Often the best way to know how someone is doing is just to ask them, so as much as possible schedule time to have a regular 1:1 catch ups with each of your team members.

How to pay

Your method of payment will vary depending on where you and your team are located. A safe, reliable option is to use PayPal.

A trusted platform used by millions of merchants worldwide, PayPal is FREE for those making payments. Setting up an account is easy, and all you need to do is add your bank account or card details and you can send payments to anyone with a PayPal account.

There are almost no downsides for the employer if you ask your team members to invoice you.

If your new team member doesn't have a PayPal account, I would recommend that you encourage them to open an account. Although there are some perceived disadvantages, such as relatively high fees for the recipient and some initial delays when setting up and verifying their new account, PayPal is still one of the best options out there for sending money quickly and conveniently.

Apart from PayPal, there are a number of remittance services that you can use to send cash instantly to almost anywhere in the world, and of course, you can also send funds through an international bank transfer.

Check with your local bank to see if they have a fast and affordable transfer service to other international bank accounts. If there's a specific bank-to-bank service that is cheaper and more convenient for you, you can always ask long-term team members to open an account with that bank, to save fees and to make it easier to pay them in the long-term.

I'll include some options in the resources section, but as payment options tend to change from time-to-time, I won't include any specifics here.

Hiring a replacement

If you hired a remote team member but it didn’t work out, or they’re moving on and you’re looking for a replacement to fill the role, you will need to hire again. It happens, and sometimes it takes a few tries to a find the right person who will stay long-term.

You now have an opportunity to fine tune the position and improve your hiring to make sure the next person you hire is a better fit for your business.

Truth be told, hiring doesn’t really get any easier, but you can certainly get better at reading people and you can tweak the process to make it more efficient.

One very important thing to remember from something we discussed in earlier chapters is to make sure that project management tools and business processes are well documented and kept up to date. The last thing you want is that if one of your key team members decides to leave, you don't have all the information you need to hand over their role to someone new.

Make time to regularly review your team's documentation and insist that project trackers, customer databases, tasks, to-do lists and systems are readily available.

Hopefully, you have a good relationship with your outgoing team member and they will be able to help train and onboard their replacement.

You need another team member

In this case, your other team member didn’t leave; they are still with you and working hard. You’ve realised that you need to hire an extra pair of hands to share the load, or you need someone more specialised in a key area that isn’t

managed well right now. Or you’re freeing up even more of your time and want to delegate more tasks, so you can keep focusing on your main goals.

At this point I recommend you audit your time again, take another look at who does what and go back to your Metta Matrix. Ask your team members to do this process as well, so you can find someone to strengthen your weaknesses, fill the gaps and focus on any important tasks that might be slipping through.

And finally

Like any type of growing business, there are things that fill your heart with joy on an (almost) daily basis, and things that make you want to pull your hair out and cry. Hiring and managing a remote team is no different and I have days where both are true!

One of the most rewarding and life-changing things that I ever did in my business was to hire my first remote personal assistant, Moren.

Moren is the daughter of my mum's youngest sister, and she lives in a small rural town in the Northern part of the Philippines. While I grew up in the UK (because my mum married my dad who is British), Moren grew up in my mum's hometown.

One day, while I was on an expat stint living and working in Singapore, Moren came to visit me with my mum who was on holiday at the time.

I remembered Moren from when she was little. The youngest of four children, and the only girl, she was the smartest one, who the family had 'invested' in educating. She did very well in school, received several awards, and eventually went on to take a vocational course in IT.

When I met her in Singapore after many years of being out of touch, I wondered how she was doing in her career. I was surprised when she told me that she was unemployed and taking care of her older brother's children.

It turns out that although she was smart, educated and capable, there simply weren't enough jobs available near her home. And travelling to work in a call centre in the nearest city was so difficult that it ended up costing her more in travel than she was earning, not to mention the requirement to do night shifts, which her protective brothers were not happy about.

As a solopreneur running a women's network in Singapore, I didn't have a lot of work to give her (or so I thought) but I couldn't bear the idea of someone so

talented being unemployed. So, I hired her to do some basic data entry work. I gave her a box of business cards and asked her to key them into a spreadsheet.

After she diligently completed the task, I asked her to go onto YouTube and study how to import the emails into my CRM system. She watched the tutorial and with my help, completed the task. I then asked her to study calendar management, email management, event management and so on.

In the space of her two-week visit, I had discovered that I could offload more tasks than I initially thought, and I made her an offer to work for me full-time and remotely when she was back home in the Philippines. She gladly accepted, and over the next three months, I slowly handed over all the tasks I hated to do in my business because it turned out, Moren loved to do them!

I then went on to hire a talented, newly graduated designer for a few projects and she ended up working with me full-time, a self-taught front-end web developer and a full-time bookkeeper who is a qualified accountant in the Philippines (they are all still with me too!).

Fast-forward to today and I am happily working with a growing remote team from all over the Philippines as we build Connected Women, a social impact startup that matches Filipino women with remote work opportunities from all over the world.

L E A R N H OW Y O U C A N H I R E

A V A T H R O U G H C O N N E C T E D WOME N

I hope that this eBook has helped answer some of your questions

about delegating and automating tasks!

Here are the resources I mentioned throughout the eBook. I'll be

updating this page with the latest information as things change.

I also hope I've inspired you to build a remote team to help grow your

business and to think about the impact you create when you offer

flexible employment opportunities.

I wish you the best of luck in your virtual leadership journey!

Let's stay connected <3

Gina Romero

CEO & Co-Founder of

Connected Women

www.connectedwomen.com

W W W . C O N N E C T E D W O M E N . C O M