Coaching Entrepreneur: What Does Your Success Team Look Like?

Having a great business team can mean the difference between going through your day with struggle, overwhelm, disappointment, and fear, and a thriving business with happy clients, strategic alliance partners, unlimited income potential, and plenty of free time for yourself and your family.

After nine years of running my business, I finally pin-pointed exactly what a success team should look like. It’s definitely been trial and error, and I am still working on filling some of the positions, but it make so much sense today!

I am going to share it with you, but keep a few things mind:

1. This team designed is for someone who works from home as an expertise-based entrepreneur, who has programs, products, web site, content, and who relies on the online marketing.

3. Your team will vary depending on your own strengths and unique abilities.

2. You can expand this team any time by adding more specialized people as needed. You can also combine several positions into one, which will be especially helpful when you’re first starting out.

Here’s your success team that will keep your business running and growing:

Strategic Mentor. This is your trusted adviser who helps you make decisions to grow your company faster and more effectively.

Implementation Coach. This is a coach who can help you with day-to-day tactics, answer detailed questions, help you find the right tools and resources, etc.  You may need this person more at the beginning of your business or project, and perhaps not so much later.

Virtual Assistant. A VA can help you manage and implement daily tasks to make your business run smoother and keep you less occupied with things like travel, event management, teleseminar scheduling, refunds, and so on. You can have more than one, depending on which area of your business you want to enhance. For example, I have a client care assistant whose only mission is to take care of my customers and clients.

Marketing Assistant. This might also be a virtual assistant, but I wanted to put this person as a separate team member. A marketing assistant will make you visible via article submission, social media exposure, press release submissions, setting up strategic alliances, and other activities you use in your business.

Web Designer. Many virtual assistants can maintain your web site, but to get it initially designed should be done by a professional web designer. Especially if you’re building an “authority web site” full of content, pages, and links (very much like this one). Consequently, you could have a web designer set up other sites, like product mini-sites, landing pages, etc.

Graphic Designer. There is no substitute for a professional graphic designer in your business. Although virtual assistants, web designers, and other technical people can use graphic design software, it’s worth getting a pro to get your logos, e-covers, product covers, web headers, and other graphics designed.This makes all the difference in the world when it comes to standing out from the crowd.

Copywriter. This is a person who turns your message into sales. A very good copywriter may charge thousands to write a sales letter for a product. And you should know someone like that. However, even having someone who understand direct response copy on your team (to write e-mails, autoresponders, and web pages), you’ll be ten times better off than if you were struggling through it yourself. Even if your copywriter can fine-tune what you write, you’ll be amazed at the results from all your writings.

E-commerce Expert. This is a technical expert, who takes care of your shopping cart, autoresponders, affiliate program, opt-in forms, merchant account, and possibly even search engine optimization. This is the person who makes everything work on your web site, and can easily be someone who is a virtual assistant.

Where do you find these people? Everywhere! I like to start with my favorite outsourcing sites – www.rentacoder.com and www.elance.com, then build relationships with those I enjoy working with. I know people are building their team by using www.craigslist.com or posting their search request right on Twitter and Facebook.

As I mentioned earlier, you can start small (e.g. a good virtual assistant can be extremely helpful to take care of most of the above things). But as you grow – and as you want to grow faster – you will find that hiring specialists in each of these areas will make a huge difference.