Become a Creator today!Start creating today - Share your story with the world!
Start for free
00:00:00
00:00:01
060: Life admin for small business owners
525 Plays2 years ago
In this episode we interviewed Lee Doherty about how small business owners can drop their mental load and address their personal life admin, while streamlining their business admin.
Lee Doherty is the founder of Admin & Co, a market leader in the outsourcing of everything administration. As a senior administration expert with over 30 years of experience, Lee runs a team of Online Business Managers and Virtual Assistants.
She supports small business owners to become future-focused, less overwhelmed, less stressed, and to get back in the control seat of their business. She reviews, then does, then manages the tasks that small business owners shouldn’t be doing, don’t know how to do, or have time to do, so that they are freed to focus on the income and revenue tasks to grow their business.
Our recent Australian survey revealed that freelancers, entrepreneurs, and small business owners were increasingly overwhelmed by life admin because it was an additional burden to the business admin that they also had to manage.
So we turned to Administration professional Lee Doherty to get all her top tips.
In this fun-filled chat:
- Lee reveals that Life Admin or as she calls it “Fadmin” is the same as business admin – it’s important to have the right structures in place to deal with it.
- Lee discusses the importance of getting key structures in place including your schedule (particularly for families) and a budget.
- We discuss the importance of scheduling in time for both admin and self-care – setting boundaries and getting clear on what is important to you.
- We discuss the challenges of sharing life admin with your partner and Lee acknowledges that in her household she handles most of the life admin.
- We discuss the value of taking time away with your partner to discuss important life decisions and agree your goals – and how this sets you up to decide the life admin that is important for your household in your stage of life.
- We discuss how sometimes people realise they are operating their life admin as though they were a single childfree adult but in fact their life has materially changed and the life admin systems have not caught up with the complexity of their life.
- Lee also discusses the importance of enabling your children and teaching them life admin skills.
- We talk about the shame and inadequacy many people feel when they are seeking support or outsourcing
- We talk about the opportunity cost (and value of time) of not outsourcing
- We talk about what you need to prepare before you outsource: a task audit, documenting your processes (consider using loom), accepting it will take time to learn, and setting the acceptable standard.
LIFE ADMIN RESOURCES
Admin&Co – Lee’s business website
Loom – to record quick videos of processes on your computer
Kajabi – online course platform
SHARE
Please head to the Life Admin Life Hacks Facebook, Insta or Linked In pages to connect with listeners and share your thoughts, questions or suggestions.
Recommended
Transcript
Introduction and Host Backgrounds
00:00:00
Speaker
This is Life Admin Life Hacks, a podcast that gives you techniques, tips and tools to tackle your life admin more efficiently, to save your time, your money and improve your household harmony. I'm Dinah Roe Roberts, a commercial and strategy executive who didn't realise how much admin there is in a small business until we started our own. I'm Mia Northrop, a researcher and writer.
00:00:24
Speaker
We googled, are creative people more disorganized? And let's just say this is another topic where the internet is very divided.
Season Announcement and Resources
00:00:31
Speaker
This episode, we interview Lee Doherty, online business manager and strategist. Hello and welcome to Life Admin Life Hacks. This is our final episode for season six. And as our usual way, we'll be taking a short break and returning later on in the year.
00:00:47
Speaker
with more episodes. We hope you've enjoyed the last 10 EPs as much as we have in creating them. Please use this time to explore our podcast archives. Subscribe to our newsletter on lifeadminlifehacks.com, which will keep you on top of your life admin game.
Survey Insights on Admin Overwhelm
00:01:03
Speaker
And of course, read our book, Life Admin Hacks, available at all good bookstores and the usual online suspects. Okay, so done. Our recent Australian survey
00:01:15
Speaker
revealed that freelancers, entrepreneurs, small business owners are increasingly overwhelmed by life admin because
Interview with Lee Doherty on Business and Personal Admin
00:01:23
Speaker
In addition to the burden of the business admin, they also have to manage the personal admin. And for many of you out there, it's a blurry mess and you're trying to keep on top of it all. And it's either robbing you of the joy of your business or obliterating anytime you have the leisure and self-care. So in this episode, we reached out to an administration professional, Lee Dougherty, and we chat with her about that the same approach has worked for both business admin and life admin.
00:01:52
Speaker
and that it's best to schedule in time for self-care if you want to realize the dream of the flexibility and freedom of working for yourself. And outsourcing, it really is the key tool to help keep your passion for your business alive. If you run your own business or side hustle, this episode's for you. Lee Doherty is the founder of Admin & Co., a market leader in the outsourcing of everything administration. As a senior administration expert with over 30 years experience,
00:02:21
Speaker
Lee runs a team of online business managers and virtual assistants. She supports small business owners to become future-focused, less overworld, less stressed, and to get back in the control seat of their business.
00:02:34
Speaker
She reviews, then does, then manages the tasks that small business owners shouldn't be doing, don't know how to do or have time to do so that they're free to focus on the income and revenue tasks to grow their business. Leigh is both a hand holder and a doer. Welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. One of the things I loved on your website, there was a sentence that said, you want your evenings and weekends back and spend time with your family and friends.
Balancing Work and Personal Life with Admin Strategies
00:03:01
Speaker
And I think whether you're drowning in small business admin or life admin, we can all relate to that statement. Definitely. It's one of my keys is when people come to work with me is my goals is for them is to actually get back loving their business, but also getting time back. And it's not just about, you know, I know we just said the statement about, you know, generating more income. It's actually about creating a better life for yourself.
00:03:27
Speaker
not being working all the time, coming home, putting the dinner on, putting the kids to bed and then having to jump on to do more work. Do the admin that you didn't get to do during the day.
00:03:39
Speaker
It's really important that, you know, if we're running our own businesses, that we actually enjoy what we do. And, you know, we should be creating businesses that work around our lives, not around us living to work, basically. So, yeah, that's one of my goals for people that I work with. We're going to explore how you help people do that. It occurred to us that we've interviewed many subject matter experts during our five seasons, but you're actually the first administration professional we've had on the show.
00:04:08
Speaker
So we're really excited to tap into your expertise today. Yeah, thank you. Yeah, it is been quite a challenging career, I suppose, working in admin. There's been admin work that I've done that's been very structured. It's been done the same way for 20 years and you just have to just go, which is quite
00:04:28
Speaker
boring, but coming, you know, 30 years on the tools, as we would say, it's an exciting time for admin. We've got a lot of systems and automations that come in with the processes. So basically, I have learned through the journey that I'm inherently lazy. My skills with admin and organization have basically come from me going, there's got to be a quicker way to do this.
00:04:52
Speaker
There's got to be a better way to do this. I can't spend the rest of, you know, five days a week doing this, this way sort of thing. So yeah, the best organizers are probably the laziest people in the world, I would say inherently. So yeah, I'm stepping into my power of being lazy. I think that's an awesome insight, Lee, because I think often people think that they're lazy because they don't do things. But I think sometimes being lazy inspires you to find the quickest way to sort things out.
00:05:22
Speaker
Well, we define life admin as the personal and household administrative tasks that make our lives work. So we're so keen to hear how life admin is handled in your household. Well, I had to remind you girls that it's called fadment in our house. That's right. And there's two different versions of what the F stands for, but we call it family admin in our house.
00:05:45
Speaker
But I always call it the swear word admin because it tends to fall to me. And I think that I have always worn the admin organizer hat for my friends, for the workplaces I've been, for my family, all those types of things. It's been natural sort of thing, but life admin or fadmin, I think is very similar to business admin. You've got to have structures.
Developing Admin Skills Over Time
00:06:11
Speaker
You've got to have.
00:06:12
Speaker
things being done regularly consistently to move you forward to.
00:06:18
Speaker
just the same as business goals, whether they be revenue goals or, you know, growth or scale. The same with life admin. You got to keep doing those little things for your health to get better or for, you know, to send your kids to the school that you want to send them to or for the cat to get better because you keep forgetting to make the vet appointment that, you know, has been sitting there on your task list for every other day sort of thing.
00:06:44
Speaker
managing kids, you're throwing kids, then you've got, I've got three kids. So that's three different schedules, as well as my own, my work schedules, my personal schedules, my husband's work schedules, his personal schedules. So we operate, you know, a Google Calendar, everyone's got a Google Calendar, everyone's got an email, and I say if it doesn't arrive into Mum's diary, it doesn't exist.
00:07:07
Speaker
So you don't go to the party. You don't get to go to work that day. There's so many competing priorities. I don't know whether it's the perfect way to run my life admin, but I run it the same that I run my business admin. I have structure to when
00:07:26
Speaker
certain things need to be done. I've got a responsibility as a junior netball coach. You know, I've got to put that time in the diary and I've got to put the travel time to get there to make sure that I'm not booking a client appointment over the top of it and all those types of things. So having a real clear, probably the important thing is that
00:07:44
Speaker
We probably shirk away from life admin and business admin at sometimes we shirk away. So it's that consistency of always looking, always looking at your, at your calendar, always looking at, dare I say it, you know, your budget, your cashflow forecast. So my cashflow forecast for the business is the same spreadsheet as it is for my family as well. So I, I have an eye on the prize basically of when things are happening and need to happen and everything like that. So.
00:08:14
Speaker
Maybe it's just because I'm generically disposed to doing admin this way, but that's the only way that I know how to do it. It probably was not taught to me, which I think is probably a life skill that's missed for people. No one's born, I think, with admin skills. I mean, maybe I might had, I mean, I was born lazy.
00:08:41
Speaker
But I've always been probably naturally a little bit of a leader, if that makes sense, you know, like always a cheerleader and, you know, good team player and everything like that. So maybe that's where it came from. But certainly in my 20s, I probably wouldn't have known really how to do life admin well. So I don't think anyone can, should beat themselves up about not having the skills to know, you know, no one knows how to do a
Challenges for Creatives with Admin Tasks
00:09:07
Speaker
job straight away, I think.
00:09:09
Speaker
I do think some professions like lend itself to becoming better at things like, you know, life admin. So I think, you know, accountants, for example, tend to be reasonably good. I guess I'd be interested to know from the people that you work with, are there some professionals that struggle the most or some professions that really, I guess, you know, maybe their creative side makes it a bit harder for them to think in the systematic way that may admin demands of you.
00:09:35
Speaker
Yeah, and they're probably the perfect client that comes to me. Do you know what I mean? Because they've been two to three years in business and they've realized, okay, I'm a creative. I'm not an admin person. I know what needs to be done, but I'm forever fit. Why don't I have money in the bank account? Because you haven't sent out your invoices. Those type of things aren't natural to people. So I really try and help
00:10:05
Speaker
teach them basically. Okay, let's have a look at, you know, like recording this podcast, you would have had to have known that we do podcasts at a certain time of the week or month, we're going to record them. But there's all those steps behind it that you need to do to organize the podcast. So when are you going to do that? So a lot of the time, when those type of clients come to me, they've never had a structure to what they do.
00:10:32
Speaker
They're doing, they've started a business because they love it. And that, you know, we talk about creatives and everything like that. They just need to be shown how to do it. I'm smiling now because as a creative person, I'm going to highly disagree. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And obviously your experience in terms of your clients are, that's
Diary Management and Goal Achievement
00:10:52
Speaker
the facts, but. I didn't say facts. All in terms of the kinds of clients you've had and what you've encountered and you know, you've been creative and you've been disorganized.
00:11:02
Speaker
but then it's not where they're focused. I don't think it's disorganised. I think that creators do have a special skill set that they actually have to allow more time to actually do creation than a number cruncher or someone else who's you know professional services and stuff like that. So you need to allow more time for creation than the making and the doing and all that type of stuff. So probably in your 38 hours let's say of a week or whatever you do
00:11:32
Speaker
you probably have to allow more time than I would for creation, if that makes sense, as a creator. Gotcha. Does that make sense? It's better with me, thank you. It's okay. It's okay to everyone. Everyone comes to me as a blank slate, and it's my job to make sure that I've identified correctly what's holding you back, what your skills are, what your skills are, everything like that.
00:11:58
Speaker
enabling you to move forward. Well that's really interesting sort of diagnosing where things are going wrong. So what do you notice? People like creatives who need more time for making just you know they're just not dedicating enough time to it perhaps. What other things do you diagnose it? Yeah so it does come down to diary management a lot of the time that they haven't actually
00:12:20
Speaker
factored in the Tuesdays they want to go do yoga and that's not negotiable for their mental health and things like that but then they have it they then stop doing that and then that's impacting on other sides of their lives and everything like that or their you know time away from their children that's impacting on other things so I hate being a Dari Nazi but
00:12:45
Speaker
But we have to be a diary Nazi. We have to protect our energy and have boundaries. And, you know, like a lot of the time I find a lot of my clients have trouble saying no. And I probably was guilty of that for a long time. And that the more you say yes to stuff that doesn't light you on fire or it takes you away from
00:13:03
Speaker
what you want to do, the more you're living not your true life, if that makes sense. You're not, you're not comfortable. You're waking up every day. You're having that sense of dread, a little bit of, you know, what am I doing? I'm on the hamster wheel. I'm doing all that type of stuff. So unpacking a lot of that.
00:13:19
Speaker
and going, OK, what does your perfect week look like? What are you missing now that that's not in your diet that you're not committing to? You only want to work three days a week. OK, is your income currently what you're producing? You know, you've only got available 15 hours or 20 hours to do that a week. What do you have to do? Do you have to up your prices to be able to do three days a week? Do you have to? Someone I know recently started working with me. We worked out that her income was down because
00:13:47
Speaker
She didn't have any structure to how many appointments of certain types that could be booked in her diary. And let's say it was a $20 appointment. She only had availability to say 10 appointments a week. She was getting filled up with $20 appointments rather than the $300 appointments that she was saying no to because everyone else had booked the $20 one sort of thing. So putting in some of those structures.
00:14:11
Speaker
and hand holding them through the change because it is changed to say, I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm not going to do that. And, you know, putting being the supporter and the champion of designing your work around how you want to work and how the life you want to live sort of thing.
Admin's Impact on Business Success
00:14:27
Speaker
I love that because it really honours why so many people go into business for themselves in the first place.
00:14:33
Speaker
because they're looking to either have some flexibility or they really want to focus on something they're passionate about. And yet, as you said, boundaries become an issue. You can't say no, working on the
00:14:47
Speaker
activities that actually aren't the things that light them up. So I think we've had some great insight about scheduling, which, you know, we talk about being as one of the most important pillars of anyone's life admin system. But I'd be keen to know what the other pain points are for small business owners when it comes to business admin.
00:15:07
Speaker
Yeah, again, too busy in the business, doing all the things that that take them off, looking at the admin of the beers, if that makes sense. Yeah, for listeners who aren't familiar with the idea of working in the business versus on the business, could you walk us through that? Yeah. So on the business is basically like thinking time or time taking out of your working week.
00:15:31
Speaker
to look at, okay, have you done your invoices? What's coming up in the week? Is my marketing happening? Am I doing my socials? Have I scheduled the newsletter? All those things that will actually do those marketing of your business that you need to do to bring people into your business or to sell the product that you're
00:15:50
Speaker
lovely running your business or sort of thing. We can't run our business for payment of Maltesers and flowers as one of my girlfriends said, oh, but I love doing work for them. They pay me in Maltesers. I go, no, no, you need to pay a mortgage. But yet the business admin, it can be, it is draining. And sometimes people start businesses and as I said, they don't have the skills.
00:16:16
Speaker
Although not, I didn't have the skills that I have today from, you know, when I started the business, there was a huge learning curve, even though I had worked in places like accounting firms and banking and finance and real, you know, I sort of had an idea of how the professional services sort of worked, but I think people running businesses don't underestimate how much is involved in business admin.
Life Transitions and Admin Management
00:16:43
Speaker
And that it's tough, it can be tough, it can be draining. And unless you have some structures and carve away, we talked about scheduling, carve away a regular time. You mightn't be able to do it during the week, but you might have to do it Sunday afternoon. You might have to do it Sunday night. I actually don't mind Sunday night to actually, it prepares me for the week ahead. I know that I can wake up Monday morning and have
00:17:09
Speaker
an idea of what my week's going to look like. That sort of gives me comfort. And that Sunday Nightly, are you looking at just the business side of things or are you also looking at the life admin, like what's happening for the family during the week? Life admin is very ad hoc at the moment because, how do I say this really nicely? He's not here, my husband's not here. He'll never listen to this podcast. He opts in and opts out of how much life admin he wants to do.
00:17:37
Speaker
And he goes, right, okay, I'm going to look after the I'm going to make sure that the and I go through the list and not it hasn't been done. So I have my I have a guy I use Google, I don't know if you've ever answered a fight, but I love the functions of
00:17:54
Speaker
task list on the side, you have your emails coming in, your task list, lease tasks, all the stuff that needs to be done. Talking about life admin, the best, so I've been married 20 years. During that time, he has opted in and opted out of when he actually, no, no, I know you're busy. I'll look after this and then you know naturally it's kind of be circling back to you. And now that we've been married for 20 years, he understood that I go, is that really going to happen?
00:18:23
Speaker
Is that really? So I'm sure I'm not alone. I'm sure every household in Australia is having those conversations. Yeah, I think we are opposites attract. So my strengths are in managing the admin and everything like that.
00:18:42
Speaker
The best thing that I heard as far as life admin and a business owner is, and I learned this through a business coaching program that I did last year, was you will always naturally have to do something life admin in your day. It's just a female thing. Whether you're looking after kids or you're a carer for a parent, you'll always have to do something. Their perfect diary was literally put in half an hour, repeats every day, and it just said, she called it stuff. She said stuff.
00:19:10
Speaker
because we can actually get pulled off doing our work knowing that I've got to ring the doctor. And if I don't ring the doctor, you know, the tonsillitis is going to set in and all that
Managing Life Admin in Relationships
00:19:21
Speaker
type of stuff. But knowing that, OK, I can do that at 11 o'clock every day is my stuff and I can jump on, make that appointment, check my personal emails, see what's coming in. And then it's done rather than, you know, when you start something during the day and then you get distracted and
00:19:38
Speaker
I've got to do this, I've got to do that sort of thing. That's a brilliant idea, I think, as far as life admin, you've got to do a little bit every day. And that's the same with business, you know, it can look really overwhelming and over, over, you know, encompassing. And that creates anxiety. Yeah. I think for a lot of us that I've got all this stuff to do, I've still got to go to work, I've got to do this and I've got to do that. But
00:20:03
Speaker
And I said, eating the frog, eating, doing one, one task a day will actually chip away at everything. There's two points there that I think are worth drawing out. And that's sort of, you know, you've had explicit conversations with your husband around life admin and come to an acceptance about the strength. This is both of you. And, you know, it sounds like while you can recognize that the load is, is you're carrying a lot of that load, there's an understanding between the two of you. And so that's sort of.
00:20:33
Speaker
removing some of the friction that we hear from listeners about how these things go down because so much is unsaid or there's so much expectation that's not really worked out. Oh yeah, it's sad. It's sad. The second thing was around scheduling and just Dana and I talk about... It's so romantic, isn't it? Having like an hour of power a week or having these little 10 minute time killer activities where you know if you
00:21:03
Speaker
approach it by thinking all right if I have some white space in my day I know what I'm doing or just blocking out that time because you know inevitably there'll be things on that to do list and so I've been together my husband 20 years in January this year was the first time we took ourselves so my children are 18 16 and 14 we took ourselves away to a cafe we had to move we went to two cafes because we could only be there for
00:21:30
Speaker
two hours or something like that. I can't think what the restrictions were then. But we basically sat down and had a D and M about, what do you want to do when you retire? Where do you think that we're going to live? Lucky we still saw each other in the picture.
00:21:49
Speaker
It was quite frightening to step into that to go, well, this is really awkward. And I just thought if I didn't do it now, so I'm turning 49, we needed to know what our plans were. And I just done through this business coaching program, really wrote down, what does Leigh in five years' time, what's she doing? What does the business look like? What does the thing?
00:22:14
Speaker
we decided to translate that into what does our life look like? Are we living here in Shalom? Where, you know, like, do we keep this house? Do we move down to which we want to move back down to Torquay and stuff like that. So, you know, yeah, I like because I'm heading towards, you know, the end on my final runway. I sort of say that at work. So my job in this business is to build, to build it, to get me off the tools, if that makes sense.
00:22:44
Speaker
But, you know, to head into retirement comfortable and like I know that I need to be near the ocean.
Life Admin Across Different Life Stages
00:22:50
Speaker
I know that I need to be able to glimpse a piece of sea every day, whether I can drive there and that's a goal that we both need to have if that makes sense in as far as life.
00:23:02
Speaker
This sort of aligns, you know, if you think about small businesses and people have a vision for that business, they might have like a one year or three year or five year plan. And then you talked about working on the business and thinking about the admin and how the marketing is evolving versus in the business. And this is sort of this personal life equivalent to that. Yeah, correct. On your line.
00:23:23
Speaker
How do we want to be living? And then on the business side of that is, well, how do our weeks flow? How is time allotted? And where do we need to pay more attention and get more organized versus just being in the day, in the household and all of the tasks and stuff.
00:23:43
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. And I think my husband and I identified we still saw ourselves as the parents of young children. Do you know what I mean? Whereas my daughter's going to first year university this year. But a lot of our decision making, I think, was blocked with we're back at one income where I'm doing part time work that's not very stable, all that type of stuff that was happening. And we had breaks around having kids and doing all that type of stuff.
00:24:13
Speaker
I think we're still back in that mindset, whereas we really needed to talk forward to ourselves and go, is that true in what we're saying that we can't do this, or is it just that we still identify with Lee and Jason 15 years ago, rather than now sort of thing.
00:24:31
Speaker
It's an ever-evolving, I think, relationship life admin. Life admin will change with whatever stages you are in your life, I think, and what you discuss and what you do. It's like my father passed away earlier this year. He was six hours away from me. I now have his ashes. We recently had Father's Day and I'm like,
00:24:54
Speaker
I don't know what to do. I think I need to put a memorial somewhere, you know, close to me so I can visit him. But then the lady was asking me, did I want to consider a family plot? And I'm like, that's just another life admin. Do you know what I mean? It is. End of life admin. It's another whole episode, Lee. I'd like to Jason.
00:25:18
Speaker
But I want to be cremated and you want to be buried. I don't like the idea of someone like that. That's on the life admin discussions for the next. It is. We have found that some people, you know, they kind of look around and they realise, oh, I'm still operating my life admin as if I was a single child free adult. And here I am with two teenagers, you know, family.
00:25:43
Speaker
and it's not working and it's you need to update in terms of the ages and the stages and the complexity yeah yeah and teaching and teaching the teenagers that they have to be responsible for the impacts you know mum and dad can't drop everything just because sally's got a pool party you can go sally's pool party but please book it in so that you know dad and i know
00:26:08
Speaker
who can do it, who can all that type
Outsourcing Admin for Work-Life Balance
00:26:11
Speaker
of stuff. So my daughter sometimes helps me with admin, and I can see that they've picked up on some of it sort of thing. And I'm thinking, well, maybe I have imparted some of my knowledge to them, you know, like that, if it's not in the diary, it doesn't exist.
00:26:26
Speaker
Here's your email addresses, email them, ask them, you know, like one of my daughters is wanting a hair appointment now that it's opening up here in Rachel, Victoria. I'm like, will you contact them? We've got to enable our kids as much as we can, I think, and support them through because they're not going to learn these skills. Well, they might have a really good teacher who teaches them time management skills and, you know, like planning out their diary and stuff like that.
00:26:52
Speaker
you know, that's another whole whole ballgame is helping kids through studying. Yeah, it's something Dana and I have talked about, because we're quite passionate about equipping kids with these life admin skills, like time management, productivity is one thing, but you know, if a kid's moving out of home to go to uni when they're 18, how do they know how to compare electricity providers? Pick a plan? Yeah. Or how do they know what to do with their super and what kinds of insurances they need? Like this, we would like to
00:27:21
Speaker
to educate through school. There's like, needs to be another thing after school, I reckon, a year of like, you know, not going into the army, but going into Life Skills University. Yeah, the School of Life. How to manage a household. Here's your budget. Yeah. And they have a test firm. Feed yourself and close yourself. A test firm need to look after or something like that. Yeah. And just understanding that there's sort of day-to-day life admin that just keeps your household ticking over.
00:27:50
Speaker
And then there's other life admin triggered by life events, like she was saying with your father passing away, you know, I'm sure leading up, you know, the care of him, depending how it happened, but you know, that end of life planning or even organizing funerals and cremation and there's so much life admin wrapped up in that life event.
00:28:10
Speaker
It did impact on business, you know, like I just had to have time to be human. And unfortunately some clients that wasn't quick enough for them. So, you know, like, then we talk about letting things go to allow the right people into your space and energy and all that type of stuff. So people are caring for elderly parents and, you know, trying to do everything as well as, you know, their own family, their growing family and stuff like that. So.
00:28:38
Speaker
There's a lot that falls on, I'm going to say women, it falls on women. Let's just say a lot that falls on our shoulders. The load. So I think that's a good segue into thinking about outsourcing. And I guess when people come to you, they're outsourcing part of what often they were already doing themselves. So I'd be really interested to know, and we have done a whole episode on outsourcing. So episode 22 listeners, if you want to go back and listen to that.
00:29:06
Speaker
Why do you think people struggle to outsource? Sometimes the first discovery call I have with people, people feel shame. People feel that they should be equipped to be able to handle things. And unless they know or they've had a good role model or someone has helped them, they feel the small business owners sometimes feel that they should, you know, this is silly. I should be able to handle this.
00:29:30
Speaker
We're not all built the same. We, we all have different skills and strengths and stuff like that. So yeah, I think that that's holds people back. People sometimes are too scared to let people into their business. They might feel threatened, but a lot of it does come from, you know, feeling inadequate that they don't, they can't solve this problem themselves, or they can't find the solution. Being an online business manager at OBM, sometime my relationship with clients is just
00:30:00
Speaker
once a week, going through what's happening in the business. What stopped you? What problem have you got? And here's the solution. Go away and implement it. And we talk about it next week. How did that feel? How are you feeling now? So I try and cover the whole gambit of, yes, the business, but how are you actually feeling, especially in today's climate? It is slowly impacting on people. People are feeling
00:30:24
Speaker
anxiety probably for the first time and I'll put my hand up and just say last year was the first time that I'd ever thought, Lee, you can't control a global pandemic. You can not normally organize your way out, but I have not got the answers for that. And that was quite unsettling to me. I feel better now. I felt better once I got my first vaccination. Like I felt it dry, you know, go down. I'm feeling even better now that, you know,
00:30:53
Speaker
four, I'll have four people in the family vaccinated sort of thing. Um, that's just my personal opinion. I don't judge or anything like that, but yeah, it is a lot of all. They don't understand what outsourcing can actually bring to them. They're thinking that I'm not going to pay X amount of dollars because I'm not going to get that back maybe, but are you going to actually get a relationship back with your family? Are you actually going to get a relationship back from your husband? Are you, you know, like, are you going to sleep better at night?
00:31:21
Speaker
Is your health going to be better? There's other things to look at rather than just the cost of dollar value outcome. That's a good point, is that it isn't just the dollar cost, is it? It's the opportunity cost of what else could we do? Definitely. You don't get time back. You don't get time back when your kid's young. I created this job, probably this business out of health reason that was probably accelerated because I chose work, probably over health.
00:31:50
Speaker
So I'm a big believer of, is it serving you? Is it getting you to where you want? Oh yeah, your business is really accessible. Look at you. You're anxious. You're not sleeping. You're not. So how can we fix that?
Preparing for Outsourcing Admin Tasks
00:32:04
Speaker
This is how we fix this sort of thing. So looking at all the outcomes that outsourcing anything, you will receive results. Something will come back to you, even if it is just time. Time to have a break.
00:32:18
Speaker
Time to have lunch because someone else is doing that thing that I work through to do. So what factors do people need to consider when they're deciding to outsource? They need to be ready. Do a little bit of preparation as far as right. Okay. Do, I always say do a bit of a task audit. That is basically, I would just say write down on a piece of paper everything you do in a day. Have a think about how am I feeling when I'm doing it? Am I like gritting my teeth and going, Oh my God, I've got to do this now.
00:32:46
Speaker
Every time you do that, that's probably a little bit of a star. Like, maybe I could outsource that. Working out exactly if there is any time wastage, because there might be stuff that you're doing that you go, I could actually just do that all at once rather than five times during a day. It could be, I'll only look at my emails between a certain time, because then that will allow me to focus on other things. We talk about preparing to work with an outsourced resource.
00:33:14
Speaker
It's not sorry, BA, it could be with a graphic designer, it could be with a podcast editor or anything like that. What your process is, how you do it and how you want it to be done. What are the timings? How often do you think you need it done? A good OBM and a VA, we basically come in and design the work with you, if that makes sense. So we work out, you know, you want something done on a Monday, Wednesday and a Friday. You want these tasks achieved and everything like that.
00:33:42
Speaker
probably just making sure that you have a little bit of a job description for each task that you want done. If you know that it's on a computer, make sure you take opportunities of things like loom video recording that actually records. You can actually talk through how you actually do something and save that. And you might be doing that for one outsource resource, but that then saves as part of your business, becomes part of your processes and your systems.
00:34:10
Speaker
how you do stuff, be aware that the person you're outsourcing may not know everything about your business in the first hour of working with them. It's going to take a while. It should be about week two or week three. They should know enough about your business, have investigated what's happening, should be asking questions of, Mia, this is not working. What are you actually doing here?
00:34:35
Speaker
I think you're missing a step, all those types of things, but you should start seeing some outcomes from your outsourcing by about then, but just allowing time.
00:34:45
Speaker
This is all good stuff to keep in mind if you're going to outsource your life admin as well in terms of having that preparation and that patience, you know, outsourcing to a professional, even outsourcing to someone else in your family. Like you used to do it and you're delegating it to someone else, having that same preparation and approach instead of expecting them to instantly get it and do it to your standards, you know. Yeah.
00:35:11
Speaker
I'm a very big believer of I know they're not going to do it to my standard. You know, we talk about life admin or, you know, like looking after the kids or, you know, I would never send instructions of needs me unless it was a health issue. But do you know what I mean? Like, yes, they're probably going to eat the wrong thing and they got, you know, but that allows me to actually, you know, especially people looking after my kids, but I had to earn an income or, you know, so I can actually have a night
00:35:38
Speaker
out with my husband for the first time in a year or something like that. Feed him whatever you want. We'll come back and deal with it. It's all okay. Just focus on the most important, the standards that are the minimum acceptable we like to call them. What's the minimum acceptable standard so that you can let it go?
00:36:00
Speaker
Yeah, I just want to hear if there's blood or like that. So Lee, is it possible to outsource all of your business admin? Yeah, a lot of people do. A lot of people really go, I'm just worth, you know, my dollar value is worth doing all my consulting. People can build whole teams in remote out teams now. And that's what COVID has done too.
00:36:24
Speaker
Unfortunately, offices have closed, leases have been let go of offices, so businesses have had to work out how I'm actually going to run a remote team. Their incomes might have halved too, so there's a lot of rebuilding happening in businesses across Australia.
00:36:42
Speaker
a lot of people are realizing maybe I'll just start taking little steps and just work with an outsourced team, if that makes sense. So you only have to look at a lot of business coaches. They build in, you know, as needed and as required type requirements, they might have an OBM who's managing the resources. So rather than the business coach managing, it's the OBM that actually manages the team.
00:37:06
Speaker
They might be looking after a social media VA. They might be looking after a podcast VA. They might be looking after, you know, Kajabi, the people that upload onto the course platform. Kajabi is like a website. People deliver their courses on it. It's a bit of a CRM. It's an all singing, all dancing type thing.
00:37:30
Speaker
They outsource their bookkeeping, they outsource their, you know, accounting, everything. You know, there's people that they might even have a chief financial officer who is outsourced. Their legal team might be a online, you know, someone running a legal profession online and remotely type thing. So definitely can be done. And the same with life admin.
00:37:54
Speaker
I'm ready to outsource, I'm trying to outsource the washing, folding. Yeah. Well, there actually, there are services now, interestingly, you can have your laundry taken away and delivered folded up. Correct. There's actually three teenage girls. Insourcing to family members also. Yeah. Someone's trying to negotiate out of doing the dishes. Could I not do the dishes anymore? Can I swap to washing? I said, yeah, but it's not just putting it in the washing machine.
00:38:24
Speaker
the out, it's the hanging and the folding. She's still not 100% sure whether she can commit to the whole lot. But yeah, that would be my dream, would be the washing fairy. Nice one. I think that's, yeah, the idea of outsourcing housework. I mean, childcare often outsourced already. Housework, yes, laundry, meal prep, cleaning.
00:38:45
Speaker
life admin, definitely it all falls in that domestic labour bucket.
Professional Approach to Life Admin
00:38:50
Speaker
Not the parenting part of looking after kids. There are personal assistant VAs that are out there that if anyone's having trouble with life admin, that will actually jump in, pay your bills, you know, do those phone calls and stuff like that. If that's, you know, not in your wheelhouse and you know, your hour that you would allocate to that is served better, do it. And then it's done and it's consistent and
00:39:14
Speaker
You'll get regular results. So, Lee, when you're working with entrepreneurs or freelancers or business owners and their life admin is out of control, where do you suggest is a practical place to start? First of all, I'd say if their business admin is out of control as well too, because then that will actually tell a story. Is it time or is it the skills or there's no structure to both of them, if that would say?
00:39:39
Speaker
But if their life had been out of control, as I would ask them, are you carving out time in your day? When do you actually, how often do you regularly check or do the tasks? Are you actually even focusing on them regularly? You know, all that type of stuff. So we try and convince them to carve out some time in their day or their diary or regular time of week. Set up some of those, right, what's the most important thing?
00:40:05
Speaker
your power is going to be cut off. If you do, if you do not, I'm a very big believer of, you know, look at your 12 months, how much you actually spent, let's divide it by 12 and set up an auto payment. Like very rarely do I ever go and have to pay a bill because I have normally done the analysis at some stage, you know, normally once a year, go on it, like you would do in your business, do an analysis of the cost, divide it by 12 and try and put away regular amounts, be pay.
00:40:35
Speaker
so that I can afford it basically. You still need to look at it. So yeah, people sometimes don't apply that business mindset to their life. I can't see any difference, but that's me personally. I can't see any difference. Well, I think that's, you know, it's from an admin professional, you need to have a professional approach to your life admin.
Closing and Contact Information
00:40:56
Speaker
So I think that's an awesome place for us to finish up today, Lee.
00:41:01
Speaker
So thanks so much for sharing your experience and ideas with us. It's been such a pleasure having the conversation. No worries. Thanks for having me. And I do want you girls to please, please use FADMIN. Please take that word and run with it. I want to hear it on some podcasts. We'll definitely call it the the episode title. So this will be the FADMIN episode. But where could our listeners find you if they want to hear more about you or if they're looking for an online business manager or virtual assistant?
00:41:31
Speaker
there's my website so it's adminandco.com.au so it's a-d-m-i-n-a-n-d-co.com.au my insta handle is the same and my facebook is the same as well so would welcome anyone to make contact with me i'd love to help anyone who even just wants to have a quick chat i can normally sort of assess where you're at quickly and give you some quick solutions
00:41:57
Speaker
Thanks for listening. Show notes for this episode are available at lifeadminlifehacks.com. And if you're a fan, please subscribe and share the love and tell a friend or review us in your podcasting app. You can also follow us on Facebook, Instagram, and LinkedIn.