Why Your Downtime Is the Perfect Time to Hire a VA

Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at growing your business with OFS Online Filipino Specialists. This is episode 238, Using Downtime to grow your business. So this is another episode where my newsletter kind of doesn't coincide with when this is going to be published. And so I can't really talk about Merry Christmas and using your Christmas downtime to grow your business. But let me just tell you the gist of what I wanted to talk about. So what I have often found is that work time is, it gets really structured for me where like I force myself to create content, I force myself to respond to project manager, my team, my project management system. So I work with my team, I give feedback, I give direction, I give instruction. Then last I answer email. And then usually I go skiing or I go ride my bike or something. And so there's little time left to, to push things forward in the business. And I feel like a lot of business owners are like this where you have these specific sets of responsibilities that you've created for yourself and your business and that takes up all of your time. And then when it comes time to hiring someone, there's like, there's no, there's no time left for that. And so here's what I have found for myself. When I have downtime, which might be watching a football game or it might be at night after I put my kids to bed. And then I usually I'll read a book, I'll do something, watch television with my wife occasionally. What I have found is that posting a job on onlinejobs ph is really, really simple to do in that downtime. And it's like, it's like the most, the single most productive thing I could possibly do. And it in like a 10 minute period, it's like a 10 minute process of posting a job. And it makes this downtime like the most productive time of the year because then it's gonna push me to hire someone and then other things are gonna get done, things that I wouldn't have otherwise done anyway. So when I find that I have some downtime that doesn't require my thinking and I'm looking to hire someone, it's such a good time to say, hey, let me write that job post that I've been putting off, because I know I'm putting it off and I know I'm delaying it. And I can easily write this job post on my phone and it doesn't have to be perfect. And if it's not perfect, it's okay. And here's what I found is I don't have a perfectly clear, organized idea here. I'm not super organized for hiring this person. I don't know exactly what what I'm getting into. But posting the job and starting to get applications back really helps me solidify exactly what I'm looking at. And it may be that of those who applied, I've had them help me clarify my role where they'll tell me things that, oh, I can do this and I can do this and I can do this. I'm like, oh yeah, that's actually what I want. Or other people will reply and it'll be like, oh yeah, I don't want to go down that path. But just getting those responses from people is really, really helpful for me in solidifying exactly what I'm looking for in hiring someone. So if you're not super organized yet, you don't know exactly. I would really highly suggest go post a job and see what happens when people start applying to your job. See if things become more clear. Because if they become more clear and you're not getting the right applications, then it's easy to just post your job again, tweaking it so that you're getting better, different applications. You don't need to respond to everybody who applied. It's okay. And I think a lot of people@onlinejobs ph expect that. Oh ye. I may not get an app. Get a response to every application. I mean, our average job post gets 54 responses, 54 applicants. So that's a lot of applicants. Not everybody's getting responded to. So. But my point with all this is using downtime to post a job post is like the single most productive time of my year where it leads to hiring and improving the business and growing. It's like me working on the business in time where I'm not working at all. Super, super effective.