What can a coach and mentor do for your virtual assistance business? Plenty.

You see, as virtual professionals, there’s often that feeling of being removed and it can also get a little lonely. We don’t always have someone to talk with that understands what we’re going through, whether that be from a celebration to a major frustration.

Working for ourselves and by ourselves in most cases, also means making mistakes, which can really sut us back in our businesses and result in us having to go back to square one.

When you partner with a coach and/or mentor who has, as they say, “been there, done that”, a great deal of these missteps can be avoided altogether. This is because your coach can guide you through those difficulties or help you to bypass them using their past experience as the teacher.

Another biggie is accountability. Your coach/mentor should be working with you to create goals for you and your business, and then the two of you should create a plan of action together. Those items that make up your action plan should have specific dates attached and your coach or mentor should hold you accountable through completion. They often do this by checking in with you at regular intervals, cheering you on when you’ve accomplished what you said you would do, or giving you a proverbial swift kick in the bottom when you’ve veered off-track. If you’ve strayed from your plan, your coach/mentor should be working with you to devise a new course of action for getting that unfinished item check off your list as soon as possible.

A good coach and mentor can also act as a solid sounding board for you to bounce ideas off and let you know, from their experience, whether it’s a good and realistic pursuit.

In my experience, no really successful person has arrived there alone.

Working with a coach and/or mentor can allow you to see success in your business in a much bigger way and much faster than going it alone.

I’d love to hear what you have to say about working with a coach and/or mentor. Have you had this type of relationship or do you have a coach now? What are your successes?

Guest Blogger: Melanie Benson Strick

I’m sure you’ve heard many times from different experts that delegating can help you grow your business quickly. I mean just this last week I saw at least 25 articles alone espousing the benefits of having other people implement your marketing tasks, alleviate you from tasks you put off, and speed up the process of launching your programs to the world.

You may also know that I’m a firm believer in getting everything off my plate that I don’t do well or is not prudent for me to spend time on so I can always be focused on my personal money making magic! But what if I told you that maybe you SHOULD NOT delegate? Maybe there is some times in which it just makes sense to do the opposite of what works to achieve six and seven figures.

Curious?

Here are my four reasons why you should absolutely, positively NOT delegate or outsource to expand your business this year:

1. The idea of making more money is revolting.

Why allow other people to help you get more money making tasks done? That’s just silly! You love staying stuck exactly where you are because you must do everything yourself. I mean come on, money doesn’t grow on trees so why should you wisely invest it in capable, hard-working, efficient associates who help you achieve more in a week than you normally do in a year?

Even if you could see proof that learning how to hire “A” players to manage your social media, update your website, handle your organic SEO strategies would free you up to triple your income, why bother with stuff like that when you’ve got so much to do today, right?

2. Doing tasks that suck the life out of you is the highlight of your day.

When you wake up you are ecstatic knowing that you’ll get to update your bookkeeping records or spend 2 – 3 hours answering routine questions from tire-kickers who never plan to buy. But the highlight of your day – filing! Why, cause it’s an excellent use of your time. Who wouldn’t want to spend countless hours putting papers in folders when they could be putting together a launch strategy that could result in over $100k in revenue?

Then there are your personal favorites…the tasks that make you feel like a Mac truck ran over you. You know the ones ….you feel completely exhausted afterwards. As you dig into these tasks (if you ever get to them) you think how lucky you are to be an entrepreneur with all this freedom. Why would you ever want to spend most of your time doing things that make boat-loads of money?

3. Perfection, not progress, is the only route for you.

You are committed to getting things done yourself — correctly. Can you really trust someone else to do things right (I mean really what does Bill Gates know about delegation…he’s the genius in the business.) As you release every product perfectly with great pride, you somehow overlook the consequence of this choice – it takes you 5 – 10 times longer to get things done.

Even though you are frustrated with your slow progress you fear handing things off to someone else. You witness your peers who have discovered the secrets to hiring “A” players soaring to new heights and wonder what must be wrong that you can’t get these same results.

4. Work-a-holism is Under-Rated

Who needs sleep, right? There is so much to do you can barely get a few winks at night let alone actually meet your friends for a nice evening out. Family? Who are they? Oh those people who walk up and down your hallway waiting for you to come out and have dinner together.

Don’t they understand that you have hundreds of tasks to accomplish in record time and you don’t have anyone to help you out? Not that you couldn’t – you just have your head in the weeds and you haven’t yet seen the brilliance in slowing down, hiring some capable people and multiplying your accomplishments in record time.

All silliness aside, why on earth should an entrepreneur delegate or outsource? Because it’s how you create a business that can grow into six figures and beyond, profitably, without losing your mind!

When you pay attention to the business owners who consistently generate high six and seven figures, you’ll notice the one thing they all have in common is: they don’t do it alone.

In today’s economy, many make the fatal mistake of holding off on delegation. They key is to find is learning to hire people who will take tasks off your plate so you can focus on doing what you do best — profitably! And that requires a system of identify the right tasks to hand off, the right people who can do the job, and the right delegation techniques to ensure the tasks are done correctly the first time.

Stay tuned over the next few weeks I’ll be sharing with you some of my insider secrets to exponentially growing your revenue and results through delegation and outsourcing!

But first, my question for you is:

WHY DO YOU HOLD OFF DELEGATING? Please share in the comments below. I’d love to know what’s holding you back.

Most entrepreneurs are continually battling overwhelm with too many things to do, opportunities to capture and money to make! Melanie Benson Strick, Million Dollar Lifestyle Business Coach & Virtual Team Building Expert, teaches entrepreneurs how to stop feeling overwhelmed so they can create more money, more freedom and more prestige.

Get the Entrepreneur’s Secret Weapon to revolutionize your results and get on the fast-track to a freedom based business. Take this free chapter from my book, The Power of The Virtual Team, as a gift from me at http://www.thepowerofthevirtualteam.com

Copyright 2007-2011 Melanie Benson Strick and Success Connections Inc

If the circus is coming to town and you paint a sign

saying, “Circus is coming to Fairgrounds Sunday,”

that’s Advertising. If you put the sign on the back of

an elephant and walk him through town, that’s a

Promotion. If the elephant walks through the

Mayor’s flower bed, that’s Publicity. If you can get

the Mayor to laugh about it, that’s Public Relations.

And, if you planned the whole thing, that’s

Marketing!

–Author Unknown