A subcontractor helps you with work projects, which has a variety of advantages. The relationship between you, as a service provider, and your subcontractors is important for successful. The fact that you’re making your clients happy and your subcontractors are getting work is just the tip of the iceberg.
Growing Your Business with a Team
It can be difficult to grow your home business on your own. If you’re working alone, you can become overwhelmed if you take on too many projects. If you get sick, have an accident or just want to go on a vacation, you’re stuck, because you don’t have anyone to take care of necessary tasks.
If you’re busy doing everything in your business without help, you won’t find the time to do marketing and find more clients. You need more clients to replace those that move on and to continue to grow.
When you hire a subcontractor or mentor, that does high-quality work, you can outsource part of your projects, or even the whole project. A good relationship helps ensure you can trust this person to handle confidential jobs.
Your Management Role
If you are a virtual assistant, one of your job duties is to serve as a manager for your clients’ projects. You’re probably experienced and know who your target market is and realize that individual clients expect high quality work that’s delivered on time.
Your subcontractor may be new to the VA business but may have experience in secretarial or administrative work. She may also work in specialized areas such as blog design or media planning but needs to learn more about owning her own business so she can add more to her portfolio.
Likewise, let’s say you’re an affiliate manager, your responsibility is to make sure your affiliates have the materials and answers they need, and to find out what those are. Subcontractors or multi-VA’s with a variety of skills will work with you to create materials and come up with those answers.
So not only are you growing your business, you’re helping your subcontractor grow hers. It’s the perfect solution to help each other.
Increasing Profits and Capacity
As you become more comfortable working with subcontractors, you’ll be able to build a trusted virtual assistant team to help with all kinds of tasks.
For example, if you’re a VA who provides web content to your clients, you might subcontract to a VA who specializes in audio and video. The content you write is turned into a podcast and a video cast, which then helps grow your client’s business.
You could even outsource work to a VA with web design and SEO experience. This allows you to offer more of a variety of services. You’ll attract more clients if you offer many services, which means an increase in the amount of money you bring in.
Also, your productivity will be higher when you outsource projects because more work will get done. You may be able to only work 20 hours a week, but if you hire three subcontractors and each of them works 10 hours a week for you, you’ll be able to complete 50 hours of work per week.
When you bill your client, one option is to charge for the time your subcontractor spent working and for the time you spent managing the project. Some subcontractors charge by the hour or offer a flat fee for each project so you could setup a per-project fee that includes the amount they charge and the amount that you charge for your project management services.
Competent subcontractors or mentors bring their expertise to your VA business. More than one person working on a on a project, adds additional quality and makes it easier to meet deadlines.
As your business grows, you can accept more clients feeling confident that you can give them what they want. Your subcontractors will have more opportunities to grow their businesses with your guidance.
