I hired a person in India primarily with cheap in mind. I hadn’t screened her background, except for her being able to do 1 sample project for me.

I didn’t think to connect with her regularly by phone (and didn’t even think to arrange for a set time by phone because I thought it would take up too much of my time & I was already too busy). Somehow, I thought it would save me time-since I hired the person to save me time, right? I also thought that if I were to just hand off instructions to enter something in the computer & asked her to listen to the training videos within the database, she would be able to catch on how to enter information.

It hurt my business because it took me more time in the long run to be pointing out all the errors rather than have clear directions upfront. It cost me placements because I had limited time anyway to work on my business after I worked a full-time job. In addition, it cost me because I had to repeat certain things (more of my time taken away from being able to connect pharmacists with the right job) and it drained energy out of me. I ended up having to train & hire someone else. So it was a disaster. Primarily it was because of the worst delegation in the world I gave & secondarily in not establishing set times to communicate & train her. I am sure it could have worked out much better if I had not been so messy in my delegation.

First of all, this person who did the work did not have any industry background (that much I figured out). When I would get the results back, I would not be satisfied and wondered why someone could not do such a simple task correctly. Little did I realize I was such a big part of the equation to not getting the results I wanted.

I wish I had more training in delegation before I ventured into this. In fact, I wish I went thru Virtual Team Building Bootcamp before I created this mess and done it right the first time. It would have saved me a lot of money & headaches!!

lesson learned…never let someone answer your business phone if they don’t care as much about your business as you do!!!

My biggest mess is me. I am causing myself to lose money, waste time and spin my wheels. I have cost myself thousands of dollars and hours because of my resistance to delegating. I have attracted the right people, yet I never fully hand over the projects. The result? I devalue them and overwhelm me. And, all woo-woo talk aside, this sucks. For them. For me. For my clients.

Because of that, I’ve decided enough is enough. Just as a child is raised by a village, a business is grown with a team. This year’s Virtual Team Building Telebootcamp is the tool I want to do more than delegate to my dream team, I want to empower them.

Yep, I am committed (not just interested) in attracting and empowering my dream team. And with that, I gotta go write a press release, get my ezine together, get my kids lunch, return two calls, write copy for a sales page…. Forget Calgon! Melanie, take me away. (Or rather I should say take the me out of mess.)

In character, service & gratitude,
Julie

Thanks,
Julie

I received a referral from a business friend whose husband was a computer programmer and had said that this was a great company and that his company was considering working with this group.

I went through what I thought was the right process – hired an intellectual property attorney to review the contract, developed a flow chart and sat down for strategy sessions with this company. Everything was set in place (so I thought).

Within one month, they had billed me (& I had paid – dumb me) for 80% of the work – after they told me everything was going fine & they would be ready for the preview meeting.

When I went to the preview meeting, I brought along my business friend who had referred them. It was very obvious that they were no where NEAR what had been laid out in the plan PLUS, they tried to hire my friend as a project manager during the meeting!

They promised to fix all issues and have it up & running. Six months later, I still had no working pieces. In the meantime, another partner had come in & he insisted it was “work for hire” and I owed them MORE money for all the hours they spent.

Interestingly, one of the programmers quit working with this firm & later told me that they were in over their heads, they knew it & were trying to stall me, hoping that I would walk away.

I ended up hiring the law firm to assist with getting my money back – the money I received was less than the law firm’s bill (which I renegotiated). It was a NIGHTMARE!

I learned ALOT from this situation, but I have to admit, it’s caused me to be ultra-cautious which is hurting my business growth.

The reason I would like to enroll in the Virtual Training Bootcamp is so I can learn the RIGHT way to hire and delegate tasks so that it results in growth for my business and positive cash flow and frankly, so I can sleep at night!

But if it helps other small business owners, then it was worth it. Last year I used a VA (who is also an extended family member) that lives in a foreign country to put together copy for an online Social Media class I was facilitating. I’m no stranger to working with foreign born professionals, so it felt natural for me to have an extended family member working overseas on my behalf. She asked me to give her examples of websites I liked, so that she could model my strategy off of theirs. I provided the websites, and received the copy and internet promotions within a short period of time. Well, a few weeks later I receive a VERY angry email from a sole-practitioner who is HIGHLY visible and honored in the Social Media industry. I quickly discovered that the copy that my VA created was blatantly plagiarized from this other entrepreneur.

I was angry, embarrassed, scared, and frustrated to say the least. I fired the VA for copyright violation, in tears I asked her not to speak to the family about this issue, and ended up apologizing up and down to this Social Media entrepreneur. I lost money, time and confidence to lead a virtual team.

The reason I’m choosing a seat at the http://www.virtualteambuildingtelebootcamp.com is because I believe that there are no self-made millionaires…only team made millionaires. I have at least 3 high-revenue activities that I need to delegate, and I feel the Boot Camp will get me over the fear that I might not manage my virtual team properly. I also feel that the Boot Camp will tell me what order I need to delegate tasks, so that I don’t drain my working capital.

No matter who the winners are, I wish everyone continued success. ~ Kim

We decided to do the IP protection ourselves … not a good move because it only took 6 months before a copycat was coming on to the market. Our legal advice then was we missed a couple of key points in our IP and it would cost us $100,00o to fight this and most likely lose.

We probably lost $50,000 worth of opportunities while spending time on this which should have and could have been avoided if we had have outsourced the IP protection in the first place.

I have 3 other programs and products (with proven demand) that I have sitting on the shelf because they are at a stage that need external input.

I havent really gone down the outsourcing route because I’ve seen that sometimes managing people takes more time than just doing it yourself.

What would the Virtual Team Building Telebootcamp mean to me? Well I would love to see how to get more done in less time as well as learn how to find experts in their field that can do things better than I can.

I need an external team to work with to expand my business…it is as simple as that.

A project idea is born. It seemed so simple, we calculated that as knowledgeable programmers the job would take approximately 30 hours to complete.

This was a project that we could do on our own; however, as we have grown in our business we decided that now was the time to try outsourcing.

We did our research and we looked at sites like Elance, we even put the project out for bids. We finally settled on a company that had been diligently calling us once a month for over a year simply to find out if we had any outsourcing projects coming up.

The price was right, and what really closed the sale for us was when the salesman said, “All we want is one project to gain your trust, we are confident that it will be enough to create a long lasting business relationship.”

Hook…line…and sinker. We fell into the feel good trap and even paid the company up front to commence work on the agreed upon project.

As the project started, we started to see signs of communication gone awry. These subtly signs turned into huge problems.

By the time we were at the end of the project, we went over schedule by three weeks (it took 5 weeks to do a 30 hour job), we had difficulty actually getting the files once the project was completed, and we were asked for more money to finish the job.
Only to find out that it was not even close to what we had requested, it had the pretty front end, mind you that is all we ever saw, but the back end, the important part, was an empty shell.

Needless to say we ended up trying to have the project done yet again, only to find significant flaws in the second program that left it unusable in the end.

In short, we paid two companies for the same product and we still don’t have a useable product.

It really doesn’t matter how much money we lost, or the number of clients that we lost. For some businesses a shocking number may be $1,000 for others it may be $100,000 and of course for the even more advanced $1M. In the end the numbers don’t matter as much as the fact that when any business experiences losses at the level of “Big Mess” it can often spell disaster for the business.

I remain hopeful, since there seems to be a pattern for failure I am absolutely certain that there is a pattern for success.

I think all business owners at one point or another try outsourcing, get burned, and never try it again. It leads to business models that can only go so far.

For our business, we realize that being burned is part of the learning process, and that outsourcing still needs to be a part of our business model. Yet, I must admit that I would value the knowledge of how to hire that team, delegate to them, and find success at the end of the tunnel instead of the train wrecks that I have been finding.

In business there are two ways to achieve the same goal.

The first is to plow through it, make all the mistakes, and struggle; this method of course has the highest rate of failure.

The second is to learn from those that have been through it, ask questions, make much smaller mistakes, and most likely achieve the goal at hand.

The Virtual Team Building Telebootcamp would help our company eliminate years of traveling the hard road.

Melanie, you always have such great information, so thank you for the opportunity. Even if our company does not win, we will continue our journey and we will continue to learn.

I did things a bit backwards, I wrote a book and then wrote articles and started to try to get a website. I started working with a web designer that was well recommended. I supplied drawings, mindwebs on how things would work, content and such. After 6 months of frustration and unmet deadlines and hiring a programmer too, I still didn’t have a working website. Mean while, I wrote 20 articles, two more books and got joint ventures but I had to keep everything on hold or rather damned up because I didn’t have a website. It also prevented any income. The web guys just wouldn’t admit they were over their head and couldn’t do what was needed. I fired them and they finally admintted, with relief that they wouldln’t have taken the job if they had really understood it because it was over their abilities. They took no responsibility for their actions.

Results: more of a billboard website that couldn’t do what was needed, loss of $3000, searching for a new web designer/programmer, no income, working with a VA and more importantly – frustration, loss of motivation, sometimes will just to give everything up, loss of self-esteem and more.

I went to another web designer/programmer who is very successful and highly recommened. I had learned from past experience and checked things out must more closely. Everything looked good, he said he could get a site up in a month and I thought – great. So I wrote, planned and was ready for launch and making money and success. Then came delay after delay, and then 3 mns later after missing deadlines, postponing marketing and everything while incurring more monthly bills and no income and with his bill going to be $2500 the END came.

My new VA (cheaper and better), accidently submitted my best traffic generating article to submission engines, so a deadline of having a working website had to happen. A date was set, press releases were set to go out based on that web launch date, my joint ventures to start and I was more than ready to open the damn holding my business back. Social media was a big part too.
Launch date came and website didn’t work……….I actually can’t describe all the emotions I have been feeling. The date was 7/17/2009. Complete devistation in all aspects. I know that a bad repurtation and unhappy visitors is worse than no reputation and no visitors. My mini book sales site was to launch that day too – it wasn’t working right either. The mini site was done by another designer because I knew the main website designer didn’t have the time and this site will cost $500. I almost gave up, no real motivatio left, no money left but debt, demoralized, extreme anger. No once else seemed to really care…again.

My VA came to my aid and tried to help but to no avail. So I fired the web designer – knew that he still couldn’t complete his probject for several weeks. I had no confidence left in him at all. I fired him and thus loss all the money and website (customer platform) and as soon as I fired him, he unhosted my website and wrote to me that everything had been my fault. Everything, he too, took no responsibility of his actions. I’ll take blame, if I feel I’ve contributed to things but there is no way I could be to blame for everything.

I asked the VA what any ideas or possible solutions could be. She found a way that we should be able to get a website up in 48 hrs for $1200 – that means by July 24th.
Results: I have press releases promoting books and website and have no webite as of today and not a working book webite as of today. I have a speaking engagement this week but no site for visitors to go to, I’ve started a social medial campagin and yet no website to come to, holding back articles still, holding back everything. I’m at everyone elses mercy. Debt: just on websites -$6,500+ and no income. I don’t sleep, eat or even function well. It’s like dieing inside.

I had been blessed with so many very successful people believing in me and saying I’ll be successful because of my mindset, offerings, plans and such which they reviewed….yet all I see after 9 mns is no website, debt and damning up success and dieing inside. My soul is not only not getting fed, it’s dieing.

I hope that by Friday, I’ll actually have a website, if my VA and pull it off with who she got for a webdesigner. You know, I’m in so much tourmoil inside that I don’t even have hope right now. We’ll see what happens.

Attending the telbootcamp would help me tremendously. I used to be very confident, organized, productive and thought I had managed my hired service providers well…..that’s been so lost. I really believe your bootcamp could help me on so many levels, get me back on track, moving forward faster and easier into a successful future.

I have to create a good ‘team’ so I can focus on what I’m good at and which makes money and feeds me. I have to know I can trust my team (VA, sub-contractors, web, etc.) and that they get things done but also can think on their own – doing not just what I assign for work but they come up with tasks that will support my goals and success. Bootcamp would be priceless for me.

Thank you for allowing me to apply for this free and fantastic opportunity. I will try to hope.

Tonia

Not only that, but promotion on the event lost opportunities when I didn’t take full advantage of blogging, article writing, issuing press releases, and involving offline business strategies.

Bottom line – the biggest MESS was my own fault because I tried to take too much.

Getting a seat at this bootcamp will be the “kick” and more importantly the accountability I need to organize a team and learn how to delegate responsibly and effectively.

In addition to running my own business, I have had the unique chance to support a few other business owners during launches and promotions. I’ve had the unique perspective to see how a team can help, while also learning that a team is not enough. You need to learn how to communicate with that team and delegate properly.

That’s what I know a seat at your bootcamp can do for me. The timing couldn’t be better for me, as I have just brought on a new VA and am looking to systematize and structure my business for growth over the next 6 months.

Thank you for this chance.

Rory