Productivity Coaching - Finding Your Own Personal Assistant

In the recent movie, Iron Man, Tony Stark had an invaluable assistant, Pepper Potts. Pepper essentially looked out for Tony and made sure that he was not spending his time in less profitable activities. She handled his schedule, handled his laundry, responded to inquiries, and occasionally would "take out the trash". This allowed Tony to spend his time in his most profitable activities, which in his case was inventing new gadgets.

Several weeks ago, I gave a presentation to a group of high-powered executives. When I brought up the topic of having a personal assistant, one of the executives shared a long testimonial about the value of a personal assistant. He talked about how he has always found the expense of his assistant was well worth the benefits. The return on the investment was huge. The assistant screened most all of his calls. In the beginning he felt he needed to have a lot of control over all the issues in his life. Yet once he delegated many of the items to his personal assistant he found that of the vast majority of tasks he had been performing himself, he did not need to handle many of them anymore. Because of this, he was able to spend a higher than average amount of time in his most profitable activities. Where I see most business owners spending less than 30% of their time in their most profitable activities, he was closer to 60%.

How can you find a personal assistant even when it is not in your budget? Allow me to provide several different options for your consideration:

1. You can invest in a dictation service. The majority of this article was dictated over my cell phone using a service called MobiDic. For an ongoing monthly charge, it allows me unlimited dictations both in number and length. MobiDic will also create Outlook contacts, tasks, and calendar appointments for me.

2. You can invest in a virtual assistant, someone who has greater responsibility than just dictation. A virtual assistant may also proofread, create documents, perform research and do concierge work, such as booking appointments and making orders on your behalf. The Quench for this article was assembled and sent to my subscriber list by the very capable U.S.-based team at LongerDays.com.

3. Contractors may not work for you if you require greater control of the way things are done. In these cases, consider hiring a part-time employed assistant; someone who can be flexible with their hours and work from home, but also give you undivided attention. Be sure to develop a detailed position description and systems to help this employee know what they should do. Also, be prepared for the employment tax implication of such a hire.

4. Lastly, you may want to consider if it is appropriate for your budget to hire a dedicated full-time personal assistant. I call him or her the Alfred to your Batman (or Pepper Potts to your Iron Man). For a benchmark: if you are personally earning over $250,000 per year and work more than 40 hours per week, it may be time to consider a full time personal assistant. The most important question to ask is, "What is your most profitable activity?" When you perform that profitable activity, how much are you worth per hour.

You want to make sure that by hiring a personal assistant, you are more than making up for their cost by doing activities that will add up in greater value than the cost of the personal assistant. Use the Rule of Three to create a budget.

For example: if you are worth $100/hour, and you determine that by using an assistant you may gain an extra 10 hours/week in activities that are worth $100/hour or more (for a total of $1000 in additional value). Your budget would then be about 1/3 that increased value, or $333/week.