“Man I’m so stressed! There’s so much to do!” hissed the Snake. “I think that I’m just going to hire a virtual assistant” said the Snake to his BNI group, between “payroll, running the business, marketing the business, sales, finances, managing employees, I just don’t seem to have time for anything.” The Dog, the founder of the group said, “Hold up while you might think that it’s a lot, you should hold off on outsourcing too early before you get a viable business model that you know works and can generate money for you.”

Lesson: This lesson is from the Teach a CEO post “Outsourcing & Virtual Assistants – the real story”. Carlo Pandian wrote, “The truth is that, as much as it may be tempting to outsource everything from day one, it does mean that your fragile new business is dependent on the efficiency of others – and that could very easily go wrong. It also eats into the start-up fund and those all-important initial profits. In the first few months you may only make a very small profit (if any profit at all!), and paying out for outsourcing services or virtual assistants could wipe out that tiny margin completely. So the first piece of advice is at this early stage in your business’s life – do as much as you can yourself.”