There is nothing I like better than a shiny new online tool, piece of software, plugin or app. Particularly if it makes my life (and by life I of course mean running my blog) easier.
And over the years I have tried, tested, rejected and become obsessed with many (many) nerd tools, and today I am going to share with you the ones I am loving (right now!), and how I am using them to run my team (the tools I use to run my business and myself will be up next week..)
Tools to find a team
Now before you can actually RUN a team… you need to find and hire a team. And there are a few places you can look to do that.
1 – Upwork
(they actually bought both of their main competitors so it’s pretty much the only place to go to find freelancers online).
You post your job, review the applications and can even track the time being spent on each task… and automate payments all through this app. And better yet, it costs you nothing.
2 – Virtual Freedom (book)
If you’re not sure where to start, how to start, or what to do next, then have a read of this book by Chris Ducker (it’s only a few dollars on kindle).
This is also a service run by Chris Ducker (and no I am not an affiliate of his, although he is a friend of mine). It’s like a recruitment firm for VAs, where you submit your job description and they match you with three possible candidates.
Their finders fee is US$500, so unless you are looking for someone to work 20-40 hours per week, it might not be worth the spend, but if you are then it’s a god-send.
When you add anyone to your team, you’ll want to get them to sign a contractor agreement and/or NDA (non disclosure agreement). You can download free legal document templates from Docracy, and you can get them digitally signed on Panda Doc (first 3 documents a month a free).
5 – Pedestrian.tv
If you are Australian based, and would like a uni student to help you out (either as a free internship, or a paid gig), you can list your job description on the Pedestrian.tv job board.
HINT – When listing a job description anywhere I always like to make sure I add a couple of random questions they HAVE TO ANSWER in their cover letter at the end, to prove they actually read the job description, and actually also care about the role, and can follow instructions… and have good attention to detail!
Tools to run a team
So you’ve found your new right-hand woman (or man), now what?
– Job / task management – Asana (Free) & Google Drive / Hangouts (Free)
I love Asana (a lot). It’s free to use, beautiful, has lots of clever features, integrates with everything, and you can turn on celebration unicorns (which are the actual best thing ever!).
How I use it is I create a new project for each team member, or job role (aka my VAs share a project).
I then create new tasks for each of their recurring tasks (which you can set up to automatically repeat… yay!), and inside each of those tasks I either write out the full details & instructions including any login details or links to templates or pages they might need.
Or if it’s a bit more fiddly I write the instructions in a Google doc, and then paste the link to that doc into the task description so it’s always on hand if they get stuck.
It can also be really good to actually film yourself doing a task, then share the link to that video as well (and the easiest way to do that is to run a Google Hangout On Air with screen sharing while you do the task… these are free to do, and automatically get uploaded to Youtube as unlisted videos so you don’t need to worry about uploading them etc.. too).
– Communication – Slack & Meeting Burner (Free)
It’s recommended that you at least have a weekly catch up with your team, just to check-in, make sure everyone knows what’s happening, what you are working on and what they are doing (and to also help build rapport… very important when they’re based all over the world).
To do this you can either again use Google hangouts or something like MeetingBurner, Zoom Meetings or Join.Me to run quick video meetings. They are all free (and all have their own different set of features).
And then for on-going chat, things like quick updates on projects, asking basic questions etc.. I have actually just started to use Slack. Again it’s free for the basic features, and it also connects in with Asana and Zendesk (below), although I haven’t set that up yet.
It’s really a cross between an instant messenger and email, and just makes the little back and forth a lot easier to manage (well for me anyway!).
– Customer Support – Zendesk ($4 a month)
If you start selling any products, or even running any free challenges, things are always going to go wrong. And people are going to want your help fixing it (no matter how perfect or straight-forward you think it is).
Emails will get lost, payments will fail, people will want to ask questions etc… and again just running this through email is a bit of a nightmare.
So this is why I moved over to Zendesk.
It’s super cheap, you can pre-save common answers (and even show them in a handy FAQ section), you can assign different tasks to different team members (or they can just assign the one you need to answer to you), and you can also link it up directly to your support email (aka ours is help@secretbloggersbusiness… ), so all emails to that address are automatically added into the system.
– Passwords & logins – Last pass Enterprise ($24 per user, per year)
You would hope that this is never going to happen, but when you are basically allowing total strangers into your business you can never be too safe. So I love using Lastpass. Not only does Lastpass save your passwords for you (so you don’t forget them), but it also allows you to create folders of different logins, and share access to those folders with your team. You can even set it so that they never actually see the passwords, it just automatically adds them in via the Google Chrome extension.
This also means when someone does leave your team, you don’t need to run around and change your passwords to everything. You can just remove their access to that folder. Simple (or it should be, it can be a little buggy at times, but it’s still the best solution I’ve found!).
Obviously everyone likes to work slightly differently, and no system is perfect, but I have found my rate of accruing grey hairs has more than halved since adding these (mostly free) tools to my arsenal, and hopefully they’ll work for you as well.
Up next week, my fourth and (probably) final post in this series – The tools I use to run my business (and to run me!!).
And if you’re a little late to this part check out my previous posts below;
