Rabby
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I guess we need to break up those things into discreet jobs. There's a good chance that if you find someone to do customer support for you, they will not also be an SEO person, description writer, and administrator. One person might be any one or two of those things.
Is there anything that would stop you from starting with, say, the support emails, assuming those take a lot of time? Could you document your basic procedure, and indicators of success (eg: all emails answered within 20 minutes of receipt during business hours)? Maybe come up with a way to visually show average time to reply, or another important indicator of performance, to provide a feedback method for your helper? Then just hire a part timer and spend some time with them, helping them do it the way you do.
No office, no problem. Most of my people work from home. You can use Slack to keep track of everyone. We use slack's API to alert us when things happen... orders come in, it's time to reboot a server, etc. It's good for making sure the ball doesn't get dropped, or two people don't both try to respond to the same incoming item. You can bounce email copy around in the chat until you get something that works.
When I started having people do all the things that I had been doing (one category of thing at a time), I used the rule that they just needed to be able to do it 80% as well. That's usually fine, especially when they're starting out. Now we have people who are better at everything they do than I ever was. One or two people are better at literally everything than I am, and I can't figure out why they don't just own the company.
I hope this is some help so far Someone will jump in here with good ideas.
Is there anything that would stop you from starting with, say, the support emails, assuming those take a lot of time? Could you document your basic procedure, and indicators of success (eg: all emails answered within 20 minutes of receipt during business hours)? Maybe come up with a way to visually show average time to reply, or another important indicator of performance, to provide a feedback method for your helper? Then just hire a part timer and spend some time with them, helping them do it the way you do.
No office, no problem. Most of my people work from home. You can use Slack to keep track of everyone. We use slack's API to alert us when things happen... orders come in, it's time to reboot a server, etc. It's good for making sure the ball doesn't get dropped, or two people don't both try to respond to the same incoming item. You can bounce email copy around in the chat until you get something that works.
When I started having people do all the things that I had been doing (one category of thing at a time), I used the rule that they just needed to be able to do it 80% as well. That's usually fine, especially when they're starting out. Now we have people who are better at everything they do than I ever was. One or two people are better at literally everything than I am, and I can't figure out why they don't just own the company.
I hope this is some help so far Someone will jump in here with good ideas.
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