Turn Your Assistant or New Hire Into an Operations Superstar

In this post, I'm going to share three things you can do to turn your front desk person or receptionist into an operations superstar who can help you scale your business. For the sake of clarity, I'll refer to that position as an executive assistant or an EA.

Even if you don't hire an EA, these things can really be done by anyone and they can greatly impact your business. You will: 

• Be able to move closer to a self-managed office
• Free up time to focus on your highest-value activities
• Move closer to scaling your business

I’m going to share these three things from the smallest impact to the largest impact on your business.

Manage Team Assignments and Deadlines

You can have your EA act as a project manager. If you don't already have someone tracking the clear deadlines and owners of tasks and projects, then things are going to take a lot longer to get done in your office. One of your highest values should be strategy and setting a plan for the team that's realistic, but also challenging. Your EA can be the person to track and follow up on everyone's projects to make sure that the deadlines are being hit on time. And if your “office” is just you and one EA, this person could still help hold you accountable and make sure that these projects and priorities are getting done on time.

Here's what you can have your EA do each week:

• Look at the big projects and priorities that the whole office is working on
• See if they're in progress or if something is stuck
• If it's stuck, find out why from the team member who's in charge of it
• Share the status of the top five projects at the weekly team meeting

Run the Weekly Team Meetings

These weekly team meetings are critical to your business, but only if they get done correctly. Otherwise they end up being a big drain on your people and on the company. But when it's done correctly, it keeps everyone aligned and motivated. Anyone can run these meetings as long as you keep it simple and focused. It should be just 30 minutes max and should accomplish three things:

1. Celebrate accomplishments from the previous week
2. Review incomplete items from the previous week
3. Update deadlines and expectations based on new information

You could also use these meetings to clarify a main focus for each team member for the upcoming week.

Your company might have a few tweaks and the team meeting might look a little bit different for you, but you want to make sure that it doesn't become a long, drawn-out meeting that really becomes despised by people coming into it. Sometimes they'd rather be working than focusing on these big projects, but the big projects and team meeting is important.

Protect Your Time

You already know that your time is the most valuable asset you have and that a five-minute interruption in your day is really like a 25-minute interruption before you get back to that original focus that you were in. No matter how good you are at planning out your day or planning out your week, there's always going to be things that pop up.

A simple way to have your EA protect your time without having to create a big system or process is really just being clear on when you're going to be time-blocking for focused time. This means your EA knows exactly when you're in Do Not Disturb mode. Anything that comes up during that time will be noted, but it won't be given to you until after your focused time.

Also, be sure to note the things that you might want an interruption about: a call from your spouse or child, or, if there's a really important call from a client that you’ve been waiting on.

Those are the three ways to turn your front desk person or receptionist into an operation superstar. Doing these things will help you scale your business. And each one can save time and move you one step closer to a self-managed office so that you can focus more time on those highest-value activities.