Bringing Business to Retail
The Top 2 Things You Need For A Successful Working Relationship When Outsourcing
Bringing Business to Retail podcast, Episode 7 with Diana Halvera. Welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast on SelenaNight.com. Stay ahead of the competition by opening your doors to business experts so you can learn, grow and be inspired. Passionate about bringing business strategies to independent retailers. Please welcome your host, Selena Night. Hey there and welcome to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast. Today we're up to part four of our four-part series on outsourcing. And I'd like to talk today about outsourcing success and what it takes to try and make sure that outsourcing doesn't become and it's easy to do it myself kind of thing and becomes more of a hey what can I delegate today mindset. So when I discovered Diana from PA on the go, I knew that she'd be perfect for today's interview. Not only does she outsource but she also runs a virtual assistant company so she gets to see it from both sides. Now that takes some organizing. Speaking of organizing, I'd also love to introduce you to a new resource called Simple Life, Peaceful Home. It's run by my great friend Eva Van Stripe. Now Eva seriously keeps but at being organized. She's like super organized. She's got five kids. She runs several businesses. She homeschools and yet she still seems to have time to snap peaks of her super gorgeous kids, enjoying family time and I see them everywhere on Instagram. So when you're a mum and let's be honest a lot of people listening to the podcast today are but you know you might be a dad too or perhaps you're just a person who has a whole bunch of stuff that you need to work on. Every day you need care, you need to worry about what you're going to do at work but it's really really important for you to maintain a healthy balance between being organized and still being able to enjoy life. So if you want to create a simple peaceful family home that's easy to maintain even if you've got young kids and put in place one of Eva's more than one, Eva's proven strategy for simplifying your life and start getting rid of the overwhelmingness that takes over our lives and living a more peaceful life in today's fast paced world, then Simple Life, Peaceful Home might be for you. If there's ever anyone I've met who can nail organization and still appear so serene, it's Eva. If you think this would work for you head on over to my website because I'm going to drop the link in the show notes. Now Eva can be found at eithervanstripe.com and that's EVA, V-A-N-S-T-R-I-J-P, a little bit difficult to spell so make sure if you're interested you head on over after you've listened to the show notes and I'll pop a link up there and you can see whether Simple Life, Peaceful Home would be working for you. Now let's jump in to today's episode talking outsourcing success with Diana Halverda. Welcome back to the Bringing Business to Retail podcast and on today's episode I've got Diana Halverda and I hope I've said that correctly from PA on the go and when I was thinking about who I should get on the podcast to talk about outsourcing I really wanted to have somebody who got the outsourcing given to them so a freelancer and then I thought well imagine if I had a freelancer who also outsourced and Diana is the perfect person for today's podcast because she can tell us what it's like being the client but also what it's like to be the employer. Diana welcome to the podcast. Thank you thank you for the opportunity Selena appreciate it. Now tell us a little bit about what PA on the go does. So P on the go we provide on-site and virtual office support so the on-site only applies to the northern beaches of Sydney and virtual is obviously anywhere in the world we tend to get most about business within Australia but we do have some overseas clients and so the focus is on and we my business has grown over obviously over the last six years from doing database management to now focusing on online marketing businesses so we do newsletter social media we do websites now any graphic design anything that's focusing on the online marketing of your business so that includes also Google ads and SEO. Great so if you're if you're if you're if you own your own store what sort of things could you do for that store owner what sort of tasks could they outsource to somebody like you? Well most of the people who actually have a storefront they come to me because they find that yes they have a storefront so people can physically visit them but how people actually find out about them and this is where we come into the online marketing again through social media and also Google ads and we also do Facebook ads and Twitter ads so how are we usually help them with their social media side of things and depending on that on their budget we then expanding to doing any online advertising. Great and let's just be honest as a retail person social media can eat up so much of your time I know that it's one of the tasks that I outsource to one of my my team members but when we're becoming busier and busier and busier it just gets to the point where sometimes you just don't have the time to get to that one more thing that needs to be done and social media does often just slip under the radar because it's it's just one of those tasks that you fit in between everything else but in reality it shouldn't be like that should it. No I think because social media obviously especially Facebook it's got a personal feeling to it so people connect to on there with their family and with their friends so the problem is once you get online and and trying to do anything for your business you'll go oh there's mum there's my friend one of my cousins mentioned something and I have the same problem I get on there and I find I get distracted by lots of other personal things so I have ended up outsourcing my social media so I do social media for my clients but when it comes to my social media for my business or for my other business mom entrepreneurs I outsource it because it just I think it's harder for me to actually work on my own business than for me to work on somebody else's business it's like when you work when you look at your business you I think sometimes it becomes a bit too hard because it's too close to home you're like oh should I do this should I do that where if I look at somebody else's business I can see straight away I don't think that's going to work for you you better off going on to Pinterest or on Instagram don't worry about Twitter leave LinkedIn alone excuse me so I started outsourcing social media for my business because it like I said it gets too time-consuming and that way when I jump on I can actually have a chat to my friends I can send some messages to my mum and dad yeah so definitely outsourcing is the way to go and it takes so much I've been saying lately you get to actually enjoy your business enjoy your life and outsourcing can save so much time something that can take somebody who doesn't know what they're doing could take them three four hours where it could take us maybe 15 to maybe an hour 15 minutes to an hour tops and and especially if it's not something you enjoy if you're doing it for the sake of doing it that that comes through I think because these these things are so personal it is social media not business media yeah which brings me on to my next question because that is the perfect segue to how do you work as a client versus an employer so when someone comes to you and gives you the work that they want to outsource I'd love to know what you'd like to receive from them do you give them a brief do they have to provide a certain amount of information what sort of research do they do what do you expect that client to give you it all depends on their budget so when people say I want you to look after my social media I then say okay will you start providing me content will you start providing me images that means on a weekly basis they'll send me through content information any specials that they have going on or sometimes people say oh really no I don't want to have anything to do with it you do it all so the more time I spent on it obviously the more costly it's going to be I start social media from about $50 a week which is quite affordable but it does mean that people have to be a bit more involved so I start I guess in some ways it's educating the client because they are starting to understand what's involved when you do any posting on Facebook or Twitter and then they'll say oh okay so you don't need a whole story it's not like a blog I'm like no it's like one or two sentences a cool image and I can work with that and then okay yeah so what about if you're doing some more virtual assistance work like your email admin or perhaps some data entry those sorts of things what does the client need to provide to you to make sure that your relationship is going to be successful now I've just done this is part four of our series and one of the things that I actually suggest to people is that they give their potential freelancer or contractor or virtual assistant a copy of their vision and of their ideal customer obviously they get to read through the website and any other accompanying documents so that person becomes a part of your team so I'd love to know that's my take from being the person who obviously hires but but if from what's your take from being the person who becomes the not employee but the person who takes on the work um I'm quite hands-on so that if that means I have to do a few examples so yes I get the documentation I I read through the website also talk to them so I get an idea of what they want to do with their business which way they want to go or how they want to come across to their target audience but I find that when I do a few sample posts and say is this how you you know is this what you would like to put out there to your audience and then they'll go oh no that's a bit being I'm being Dutch I can be quite direct in the way I phrase things so sometimes I have to tone it down a bit and then or people would like less focus on the sales and less and much more informative so I find that usually the first two weeks is sort of this hands-on process where I'll talk to them a fair bit or I'll send them a message saying look I've put all your posts up and you can check them in your activity schedule on Facebook and they can go through it and they go yes I like that no that image is completely wrong and so we tailor it so by by the end of the first two weeks I have gotten a fairly good picture of how people want to actually um do their online marketing yes okay so and that was also the same for so virtual admin work that's not necessarily marketing but just your data entry or maybe some research well customer base well I don't really need a lot of input from them obviously I just need to know what they want a target you know who they want to target of what kind of outcome they want so people tend to send me a brief but I have a lot of I'll do a Skype session like this now and I'll get a fair bit of idea but I'm pretty I have to say I've been doing this for a while now so I'm pretty um I guess I know straight away what people want usually um and with data entry you don't really need you know a lot of information except for what they want to enter and what kind of software they're using it can be from a basic spreadsheet to an actual database um yeah so so someone so someone who's never done any outsourcing in the past I guess what you're trying to say is that they really should have a list of what their outcomes they're expecting so a list of the work that they want done but also a list of the outcomes that they're expecting so yes both of you know what what we're looking for at the end yeah so what happens when I have a new client coming on board we if they're local I'd like to meet them face-to-face because it's always nice to see the face behind the business I know this is virtual systems but um if I can I'll meet up with them or we'll have a Skype session or a phone call um that actually then I ask several questions that I then put that into an email and sent them back to them and say this is what we've discussed is this what you want out of my services and then they'll say yes or no or that's great yeah yeah because then you both you're both on the same page if anything's been missed then you can pick it up at that point I've learned I've learned along the way that communication is the main thing when you're working with people whether you're working with your subcontractors or with your clients if you don't communicate properly and sometimes emails can be misconstrued so I find it easier to sometimes pick up the phone and say okay this is what you want but obviously you don't like to look a bit so how can we change it what do you want give me an example um so like I said I'm quite hands-on so I might give people um one or two phone calls a week just to make sure that we are on the right path I'd rather do that than just keep going and making mistakes and then nobody's happy and that's what we're trying to avoid that's that's what my whole series has been about is trying to make sure that the process is as easy and not complicated and actually successful yes rather than you getting stressed because the person didn't quite understand and I had this happen myself I mentioned it in episode in part one where I had asked my assistant if she could do something because I wasn't it was something that we hadn't done before and she said yes and I of course had assumed which we should never do that she would then go and do it but when it hadn't been done I was kind of like oh why haven't you done this task and she said well you only asked me if I could do it you didn't actually schedule it into my my tasks so it was just that simple you know I had assumed one thing and she had assumed another thing um and not wanting to go outside of her normal parameters because this was something that was a little bit different she was actually waiting for the go ahead to go and do it because it would it would have increased hours and whatnot so it is that you just said just that communication in from my experience is really really important and one of the main things that I've been trying to get along in this series is when you outsource even if you're the only person in your business when you outsource you then become the owner of the business not just the person who works in the business and you have to start thinking about all of these things that come with having employees even if they're outsourced employees well I'm sorry I was just going to say it's so important that you get the communication side correct because once you start outsourcing it to subcontractors you are then relaying the story from the client to the subcontractor and if and you're the middle person and especially when you're dealing with people even here in Australia whose first language is not English like mine it's not my first language you've got to make sure that you are getting it right because if you stuff up that's spent that's a cost on your time the client's not paying for that so that's your expense so that the the the better you are straight away in getting the right brief and asking the right questions one of the biggest mistakes I made way in the beginning was I asked all the questions I did all the work I did all the whole quotes send it back to them and then they said oh no that's too much we can't afford that and I learned okay let's ask straight away what's your budget what's your budget yeah and that's one of the I only learned that probably in the last two years so I spent a whole four years wasting a lot of my time putting out all these quotes and sending out these emails and then never hearing anything back until and it doesn't yes it doesn't necessarily mean that because if your budget is maybe a hundred dollars a week it doesn't necessarily mean you can't be hired it just means that this person needs to prioritize what it is that they want you to achieve in that time yeah because I think a lot of people are a bit afraid of giving the actual budget of giving their pricing because then they'll think that I'll be quoting exactly to that budget and I'm like yeah no but I need to know if it's going to be worth your time and worth my time you know it's as simple as that so honesty within business is very important that you're honest with your clients and honest with your subcontractors and tell them what you expect tell you know and what they expect from you I find that yes having that first conversation or the first two conversations I'd rather do that than putting all that time and effort into an email or a pro you know a nice looking quote and then afterwards they say oh I'm sorry but we're not going to continue you know we're not going to do this and I've just wasted you know maybe one or two days of putting this all together and they've wasted their time as well if they haven't come to the meeting prepared I mean it's a waste of your time but it's also a waste of you know what what could they have done in those two hours that they spent with you discussing this so it's really educating your client too because a lot of people who come to me don't really have an idea about social media if they you know like let's say they've attended a recent network event when I've done a workshop and they've come to me and say oh I've got a link to now but I have Twitter now and I'm like all right calm down what's your business what do you sell is it a product is it a service and then I'll be able to say oh look I don't think Pinterest is going to be really valuable to your business because you're selling the service kind of thing do you know what I mean it's it's very important that you have that first or second conversation to make sure that people are on the right page on the same page with you and I can't stress that enough to be honest because you're just wasting so much so much of your time and especially when I've got both kids in school now but before that I had my daughter with me before that I had two kids and a lot of my time went up into running around after my kids and trying to do this so it's taken me about six years to actually narrow down to exactly how I want to actually come across to clients and what I want from a client that's that's a great tip so how do you manage then outsourcing your work to somebody else well I've been again I've built this up over the last six years where I've built up a team of six women who work for me and they're all Australian-based and they mostly are months they don't have to be mostly are and they all have specialties so one girl does SEO the other one's a copywriter I've got a website developer I've got a graphic designer and I've got somebody who's looking after the social media side of things which I still do myself but sometimes when it gets too much too time-consuming I'll outsource it to her I recently for the first time started outsourcing to overseas and I've always been quite reluctant because I'm very much about supporting my own community but as you know the hourly rates are very different to what they are here and overseas so once I got to talking to this virtual assistant company overseas they explained to me that all the virtual assistants over there are months mostly are and they are supporting their families and a lot of the times there is no husband there is no partner they tend to look after supporting their whole family so grandparents children sisters whatever and it because I sort of had to sort of morally I guess justify it and I went okay so I'm actually supporting months in another country supporting them and they basically said yes if if they don't get enough work then it's usually you know they'll end up somewhere in in not such a very nice situation and so that sort of justified it to me so I still have for especially for copywriting and all that stuff or called calling or I'll have that based here in Australia but any database management any data entry I'm sending that overseas now so I'm very happy that I'm able to support women months in this country and moms overseas and that's something we we haven't talked about funnily enough in my episodes because I I'm the same all of the people that I've ever hired have had family commitments they haven't all been moms yeah but I've had you know like you said when you outsourced to somewhere like the the Philippines or Sri Lanka a lot of the times it's extended family living in the same household so everybody has to pull the resources and the money together and we have again we haven't really talked about bonuses but one of the things that I discovered just because I've been outsourcing for about the same amount of time six years is something as simple as going on to somewhere like Amazon because they ship all over the world and sending them a box of nappies or you know sending them something that they can use in their home that may have just come up in conversation yeah I mean a bonus is always great but the fact that you've actually been listening to them I know I've sent I've sent children birthday presents and things like that yeah that that means so much more to them because they actually feel like they're part of your business well I mean that's yeah I mean I've done it with some of the moms here in Australia who've had babies and I've sent them a little gift in you know to congratulate them with the birth of the baby you know being a small business owner I can't obviously do that a lot because it is actually now quite expensive to do that especially when you have six women working for you and sometimes even more depending on how busy I get but I do find you build up that relationship and if you build that relationship with your subcontractors then when an urgent job comes through and even though they're busy or you know they're not feeling that great they'll go okay because it's you Diana I'll do it for you you know and I do the same for them when I get you know let's say they've done an amazing job and even even though they have been paid the normal fee that they you know have quoted me on if they've done an amazing job and the clients really happy with them then I'll give them a bonus I'll give them something extra I'll give them an extra hour or two hours whatever I can afford you know and and anything to just make them feel like yeah the work that they they're doing it's appreciative and that's in my opinion that's really really essential when you don't get to see those people we're talking about virtual people so the fact that you don't see each other every day and can give each other a higher five about a great job that just got finished yeah these little things just show that you're paying attention yes and like I said when you when you build up that relationship when you need that extra pair of hands and it's in the middle of the night and they need to work over the weekends then they can turn around and say because you've been so wonderful to me and so supportive of me I'll help you now because being a subcontractor they're not obligated to take my work on you know they have been but if the occasion rises and they say look you know the kids are really really sick or I've got another job on I'm gonna have to say no to you and that happens but I've been always quite lucky I have lots of like I said I've been and again this is about communicating as well so I try to give them as much time as I as I can so if they'll say look I don't have the time this week I'll go okay I'll let the client know that you'll do it next week if the client is happy with that then I'll book them in if the client says no we can't we need it this week in worst case scenario I'll have to do the job myself it depends what it is yeah so with all these people you've got people in Australia who are working remotely and now people overseas how do you keep track of what they're doing well I guess it's I don't know I don't seem to have a problem with that so each because they they don't do the same kind of work so like I said one does SEO the other one does the graphic design another done another person built a website for me they're very specific job so it's not like they're all doing data entry or graphic design for me so they're all I guess you know I obviously have a my own database running where I keep track of how much time they have spent how much time I've quoted to the client which client and all that but I don't know I've never seen to have a problem with keeping track of who does what so I can't do any advice how do they book how do they book their time in with you the client you mean no no so that the freelancers do they use a system like teamwork or a freelancing website to log the time that they've used and now what we are trying to think of the we have a little timer that sits on our desktop I'll just Google it because I can't remember the name of it but yeah so it's it's a little timer so basically every time they work on on my work on one of my clients they'll just keep track of it and so they'll come back to me and say look I've done two hours I've done three hours it's not yeah I've don't use teamwork or anything like that and I guess I also trust my subcontractors I know they won't do the wrong thing by me so if they tell me it's it's taken them three hours and I usually know so if I send a job out to them and I'll say look I think this is going to take about two to three hours and then they'll come back to me and say look I'm close to three hours I'll be finishing it up but I sort of know how much time a job will take so I know with graphic design okay that's probably going to take about an hour and when they when people design logos you're looking at about probably about three four days to get it right because you're doing different drafts so to me yeah I don't really actually have a database or a program as such um I'm just trying to think of the timer that we use well when you find it we'll pop a link up in the show notes you're way more organized than me I only have one assistant and she logs in through teamwork just so that I can it just means that because we're on different time zones um so I do I have two assistants but one does just podcast related stuff so I just send it off to him and he sends it back all all nice and neat and ready to go um so I don't tend to track him because he's a set fee for the work that he does but the assistant who have who works all the time she uses the teamwork system just so it means that if I want to log in during the day and see where she's up to on a certain project I can see that that's half done or oh yay that's you know that's 98 done and and it'll be ready for me tomorrow it just means that if we haven't had a chance to catch up I can keep track of where we're at in terms of certain projects so you are way more organized than I am I guess because um like I said I've I've built up this team now for over six years um they'll let me know like I'm basically in touch with them either every day or every second day and I'll chase up and they'll say um how's that job going have you done it so maybe I should start looking into teamwork I don't know I've never had a need for it because at the moment what I've got going works really well and I don't have um I guess all these different types of subcontractors working for me so it's not like um every week I'll have different people working for me I have the same people working for me now like the one of my VAs has been working for me for over three years so her and I know each other quite well we've never met um but we know each other really well um so I've never had a need to do that but who knows I might look into it actually I've never I just I just thought of that when you talking about the timer because it's got that little timer in there so essentially they go in when they start a task and they turn the little timer on on their desktop on the on the computer and it logs the time in and it just means that um when my invoice comes through to me at the end of the week I can yeah and it's good for me too because I can see oh you know maybe they spent four hours doing a task I thought would take two hours is that because I didn't you know lay it out very well or is that you know is it my fault or is it because I haven't actually communicated what I wanted or perhaps I didn't keep on top of it or did it just actually take that long and in future if I want that task done I need to allocate four hours rather than two right well like I said because I sort of um I guess I've been doing this for a while and I used to do a lot of the jobs myself I I know how much time it would take so social media for instance posting for a week I know there's probably a couple of hours and you're done it doesn't take you know five six hours it takes one or two hours so the girl that I've been working with we've been doing this for a while too so she's I'll tell her look I've got a new client key host for this week this is the content these are the images or sometimes she'll have to source her own images and she'll tell me look that's going to take me about two hours and very rarely does she actually go over what she's quoted me and again that comes back to communication doesn't it because if you're if you if you don't know how long something's going to take there's no point in asking your person your new new team member essentially to take a task on when you've only allocated five hours when in fact it's a 10 hour job so it works both ways it works on the employer's side to say how long is this going to take and on the freelancer side to say well if you want that job done it's going to take more than the time you've allocated do you still want to go ahead with it yes yes correct and so do you have any favorite apps that you use like I know you said you didn't use teamwork but is there anything that you use day to day that just helps you with productivity or motivation um I don't think I need much more motivation except for my coffee and I love working what I love what I do so that's my motivation I love working with my clients I've recently started doing more PR work for one of my clients which I'm really enjoying so it's a whole different aspect to being a PA but as far as apps I guess what I use use on a daily basis would be a Dropbox and I use Google Drive and that's just mostly because the amount of images the amount of stuff that I have it would just just slow down my laptop and it would just and it's an easy way of of sharing things with people from overseas especially and I also have I guess most of my apps are actually on my mobile and so a lot of these I love Wunderlist I don't know if you've ever heard of them but it's oh tell us about that yeah so that's a little app that tells you so you create your own little list so I have my little to-do list usually every week but sometimes you have your little to-do list for the day and I'll say you know personal stuff too like you know you need to go to the dentist or I need to go to the post office check the mailbox um pay a bill make that phone call they're just the little things that I sometimes forget and I use Wunderlist so it's W-U-N-D-E-R-L-I-S-T. I'll put a link to that in the show now yeah and you can create your own little list your own categories so you can have one for jobs one for personal one for the kids one for school and you create your own little jobs within those categories I'm just trying to think oh that sounds awesome I think I need to look at that one and I'm a great big drop box fan it's in I created a list of my eight resources that I use every day in retail and drop boxes on that list it's yeah and to this day I have not actually had to pay because I will um you can actually upgrade the um the account by sharing it by getting other people to sign up through you um and if for some reason I can't then I'll take something out and I'll stick it into Google Drive is definitely something that I can recommend because it's so huge you can store so much on it and there's no payments there is no fees um the other thing I like about Google is that um it it gives you for free word and PowerPoint and Excel wow that's a good tip yeah so you actually don't have to um install um office on your on your laptop or on your computer um the other thing that I obviously use a lot is um is MailChimp now we definitely we do use different uh mailing software but MailChimp is my favorite especially because I have all these different apps so they have an app for on your mobile and I love this it's called MailChimp Snap so you can actually send your newsletter from your mobile which is great when you're product based so let's say you're a florist you're picking up some beautiful flowers um from the markets in the morning you take a picture and you link it to your MailChimp it's called Snap and it then sends out you can add a couple of um you know um probably about two three sentences you can have it linked to your website and you send it out to your whole database on MailChimp and so you can do that you can you know probably wouldn't do it every day but maybe two or three times a week you can go fresh produce great flowers look what I found today and it goes like instagram for your mailing list yeah and I love it it just you have to look at that one a bit a bit more in detail I use MailChimp and I haven't seen that um so and obviously the other one that I use a lot is um is Fiverr which is um um you know I use Eland sometimes but I found that Fiverr especially in the last couple years the quality of the graphic design and um also building little apps for clients have been quite good on Fiverr like it's not you're not getting the work done obviously for five dollars you're actually spending a lot more than five dollars but it's a great platform for finding copywriters graphic designers um and um I wouldn't I wouldn't go there for websites but also for um database entry management um and it's you it is a bit of a um it's a platform where you you have to spend some time and spend some money and find the right people so this is where I have actually done the groundwork I have found people through Fiverr that now are actually part of my team as well so they and for those that don't know Fiverr is a freelancer website where you um have people who will do what's called gigs for you for five dollars so typically they're very small tasks like um I know that I had so I paid somebody to mesh my voice over with my podcast intro music because it was something that at the time I didn't have a podcast editor and I didn't know how to put the two of them together yeah so for a small fee and you can buy more than one so sometimes things might be ten dollars or fifteen dollars or twenty dollars well for instance I just did an interview on the local radio uh northern beaches and we had to edit the actual interview because it was like an hour long um and so I sent it off to one of the guys on Fiverr and for ten dollars he cut out all the music and it just it's now uh twenty-three minutes so it's great it's um you know I don't obviously have people like that on my team so I can go to platforms like that and occasionally I'll look at e-lens but e-lens is just quite expensive in the um for me where with Fiverr um it's it's a lot more affordable and I can send small little jobs like you said I wouldn't like there's people who build websites on there I cannot recommend that for for that service um keep it to small things um great graphic designers great business card designers flyers and um and some of the copywriters are not bad either just look where they come from so they come from different countries I tend to pick the ones that are from the US or Canada um because obviously English tends to be their first language um but yeah so because I've done all that groundwork when people come to me now I can say yes we can do that for you because I already have somebody that I actually spend a fair bit of time and money on and they now know what I want when I send a job over to them where if a new client would go straight to Fiverr they're probably going to waste some of their money to be honest yeah and and I mean that's it's a great it's a great um platform to start the whole outsourcing thing out to have a go um sometimes you can you know have a few cute little things made that you're not you know 100% needing just to see how the outsourcing process goes but like you were saying if you if you want something detailed like a website you need to go to a proper website designer yeah yes so I'm very conscious of the time and they're getting towards the end I would love to finish up I love to ask my customers a retail based question and it's what makes you go wow when you walk into a retail store because I have a marketing background I I love anything that is that they're showing that the the actual store has actually spent some time in um attracting people into the store so the window layout is very important to me um if they've done an awesome job on on the on the windows um and I guess also colors so if it's appealing colors so not too bright but you know quite interesting and that would probably impress me quite a bit and also obviously the quality of the product but for me it's always the window shopping so if the window looks quite interesting then I'll go inside otherwise that probably won't even put a foot inside see take that tip your window is important yes I think if you look at all the big department stores look how much time and money they spend on them on their windows yeah they often get well they're two people in to do their windows yeah they get yeah like they don't add a feature in their windows which is not always possible as a small retailer but it is really really important to make sure that that window is your first impression I also think a quick advice you can look at the bigger ones and sort of base your design your marketing skills on that so see see what they do it's inspiration yes because obviously the big ones are selling and they are getting the customers in so there's nothing preventing you from copying a little bit of what they're doing yeah I have to copy it directly obviously but just taking out the elements you love yeah all right I think that's it isn't it Selena because I can get something where where can we find you Diana okay so my website is live woohoo I've got a new website with a new domain so you can find me on virtual assistant number four your biz.com so it's virtual assistant for your biz.com great we'll put a link to the show notes any you on facebook or twitter i'm on facebook and twitter so facebook is facebook.com forward slash pa on the go all one word and on twitter we are on twitter.com forward slash pa on the go.com written full out great fantastic well thanks so much for your time Diana and thanks for those tips on how we can have a great outsourcing relationship with our freelancers i'm hoping it's inspired anybody who's still thinking about whether they should be outsourcing to go ahead and take the leap i always say to people if you don't outsource you will not grow your business because if it's just you you're not going to go any further you need other people to start growing your business and outsourcing is the way to go well you can't be everywhere at once can you that's right thanks so much diana thanks lina bye some great tips there from diana hollverda from pa on the go what did you think i love the fact that one of the things that has continually come up through this series is communication and this does not just apply to outsourcing in order to make any business relationship successful you need to communicate with each other so keep that in mind when you're outsourcing or when you're working with your employees that if things go wrong it doesn't always go wrong because there's a problem with either one of you it could just be because you're not talking to each other and the other thing that diana was quite passionate about was building that relationship now even if you outsource you're going to have a new person on your team and we're talking about the long-term outsourcing here not just the short one-off projects but even then short-term one-off projects that person is contributing to the way your business runs so it's really important to make sure that you've got a great relationship with someone if it's a long-term outsourcing project then it's great to have those relationship foundations you know it's as simple as asking someone how their day's been how their kids what have they been up to on the weekend you don't have to become best friends but you just need to show that you actually care and even something as simple as just saying happy birthday on their birthday if you can't afford to send them a gift just remember to send them an email or even better send them a Skype message to say hey happy birthday i really appreciate all that you've done for me and i really wish you a great day so communication and relationships they're the most important foundations for our outsourcing and other business relationships if you've loved this episode then i would love if you could share it with your friends or you could leave me a review on stitcher and iTunes now why do i always ask if you can leave me a review because that's the way that other people can find this helpful resource and my goal is to be sending out information every week that you can use to take actionable steps in your business so if you think that you know somebody who needs a bit of a kick up the butt or perhaps just needs to open their mind to some new processes and procedures and what's happening out there in business land feel free to send the link on over to them so they can listen in their time and learn while they're doing something they love so until next episode i hope you have a fantastic day and i'll see you next week