I may be preaching to the choir by reiterating that, as a small business owner, you simply cannot grow a business all by yourself.  The overwhelm you feel weekly may be a clear indication that help is absolutely necessary.

 

You may be able to get by with no help for a little while, but if you’re on the path to significantly increasing your income, one of the sure ways to do so is by delegating and becoming focused on income-generating tasks. 

 

OK, so you’ve bought into the fact that delegation and getting help is a must for you as a business owner, but you also face a harsh reality.  You have little extra cash to get help.  Little or no money to delegate.  Well, you’re in the right place because this article will reveal 4 ways in which you can delegate and get help on a shoestring budget (and even for zero dollars).

 

Document your processes first

Allow me to be your personal business coaching for a second.  Truly, you will be well served to document as many processes as you can on the path to getting help.  Don’t get overwhelmed by that though.  Try documenting just one process a week; start with the ones you’d really like to delegate to someone else.  Get it out of your head and write down all the steps for getting that task done.  It saves you a lot of training time and it’ll also help your assistant to hit the ground running when they show up (thereby saving you money too).

 

Venture Online for help

We live in a virtual world these days.  If you haven’t already checked out elance.com, you may be missing out.  Here’s my story.  In my early days, all I could afford was $25 a month to get help.  So I hired an assistant on elance.com to do small but time-consuming tasks.  Guess what, that small task freed up about 2 hours a week for me and gave me at least 8 hours back in my schedule to focus on income-generating activity.  Not bad for $25.

 

Do a google search for virtual assistants and you will no doubt come up with a whole lot of options. Of course, due diligence is required.  Make sure you know what you want in an assistant so that you know when you’ve found a good match.  And of course, check references.  Other sites include guru.com

 

It's fine to start small... very small

That $25/month task I mentioned earlier was just one task.  Sometimes when we think about hiring an assistant, we think too big so we don't take action.  If finances are an issue for you, you may need to think a little smaller.  There are assistants you can hire for just one hour a month if that’s all you need.  Some even get paid by the minute so you can pay for just 15 minutes of work.

 

Now you may be thinking, what’s one hour or 15 minutes going to help me with.  First, it’s more than just than just the time.  The act of delegating is a business habit you must adopt.  Doing so, even at a miniscule level, shifts your mindset to that of an entrepreneur on the path to lucrative growth.  You may start small with delegating but once you get used to the idea, you will become aware of additional delegation opportunities that free up your time.

 

And here’s something else worth considering.  If you free up more of your time and you can do more marketing or high-payoff activity, your income increases and you are able to delegate more, which frees up more time to make more money, and so the cycle continues.  So delegation = increased income if you play it right by using the extra time to focus on income-generating actions.

 

Go to college

You can get help for FREE at your local college by hiring interns.  Yes, I said FREE so go get it! What you’ll need to do is a small ad for specific expertise (e.g. web design help, market research project, etc.).  Stop by your local college to find out more.

 

Remember to make the work (and the ad) enticing enough so a student would be interested in helping out.  Your college ad is not about you and what work you need to get done, but it’s about the student and the benefit they would receive from working on specific tasks and with an entrepreneur in your field (you!).  It may be beneficial for a student to get close to someone and watch how to sell services.  You can get online and search for “how to find interns in CITY” or “how to get interns from your_local_college” and I’m sure you’ll get lots of possibilities.  And again, it’s FREE help folks.  Zero budget required.

 

Now a common concern is the quality of work you’ll get with an intern and/or whether you can safely delegate to a college student.  As with anything else in business, you’ll need to do some research as you would for any virtual or live assistant.  Due diligence is always required.  Check references.  Ask questions. But there are many business owners out there using interns with fabulous success.

 

If you enjoyed this article, you’ll enjoy the Ultimate Clients and Cash system which reveals several untapped opportunities for you, as the small business owner, to regain the freedom you envisioned when you first started your business endeavor.