In the last blog we talked about how businesses can hit a wall and how business owners need to figure out what they want to accomplish in their business before they move forward. And one of the solutions to moving past that "wall" is to hire someone.

The hiring possibilities are wide open, thanks to our highly connected world. This gives business owners a huge advantage because they no longer have to hire whoever is fits the equation: local + skilled + broadly capable + has potential to grow with the business. Instead, they can find people on the web who are tightly skilled in just one area.

In our earlier post we gave the example of Mary who runs a web-based store selling hand-painted decorations. She can hire a virtual assistant to do a variety of administrative and customer-facing tasks. She can also find someone who can do some of the hand painting.

Depending on what your business needs are, you can probably find someone online to do the jobs you need, no matter how specialized they are. In fact, the more specialized the jobs are, the easier time you’ll have finding someone to do it.

Aside from an assistant, you might consider hiring a marketing guru, a sales associate, a bookkeeper, a webmaster, and a telephone receptionist. Going from a "small business" mentality to a "big business" mentality doesn’t mean that you have to hire all of these staff for 8 hours a day, 5 days a week. Using sites like Elance.com and Guru.com, or finding part-time contract staff through Monster.com, allows you to put experts into all of these roles while building slowly.  You can even utilize a Virtual Assistant Firm that has individuals focusing on their areas of specialty.

So here is how to do that effectively:

1. Figure out what roles you want to fill. Start with non-revenue-generating activities that you perform right now and make those among the first things you delegate out. Also, consider things that you might not enjoy or might not be good at. Mary, from our example above, might be great at hand-painting decorations but might not be good at sales so she might want to hire a commissioned sales person.

2. Get onto Elance or Guru (or find a site that provides some of those services, like Contemporary VA for a virtual assistant) and look for service providers in the areas where you need to focus. Don’t make the all-too-common mistake of hiring the lowest priced professional. There’s a reason that they are the lowest priced! You may not need a "gold-plated" professional who charges an arm and a leg but you should find someone in the upper-to-middle price range who will likely deliver the best service for you.

3. Set out your parameters. Describe what you want to accomplish. Most importantly (and often overlooked) describe your vision for your business and how their service or deliverable fits in with what you do. That way, they’ll have a clearer understanding of what they’re contributing to and maybe they can draw from their own expertise to give you some ideas that you didn’t consider yourself.

4. Set up goals and a deliverable calendar for each role based on the types of things they need to get to you. In the case of a marketer, this might be easier; in the case of a sales person, this might be more difficult. (The marketer will need to deliver marketing materials to you within a certain date but it might be unrealistic to expect the salesperson to deliver customers to you within a certain date; instead, expect them to report back to you on how many they contacted or how many presentations they made).

5. Review the project with your professionals from time to time. If things aren’t working the way you envisioned, solicit feedback from them to make it work or find a new professional.

By hiring this way, you can move your business past that wall in a way that makes sense without over-committing yourself to an employee who shows up each day at your office expecting to get an assignment from you.

Contemporary VA

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