An incorrect mindset that we often establish when setting up our remote teams, and even ongoing, is to focus on the skills of our employees. We look at our team members or our potential needs in regards to staffing and look at those associated skills. The correct mindset that we need to have is to focus on our own skills.

Ultimately, setting up remote teams is about reinforcing your current skills or staffing the weaknesses that you have with your current work. It may seem illogical to look at your own skills but it is actually the most important starting point that I believe you need to have.

There are three questions that you need to ask yourself when focusing on your own skills:

 

1. What task and processes GROW your business?

Every business, whether you are an organization or a solopreneur, can create a list of tasks that are critical to the growth of your business. My list, and perhaps yours would include some basic principles like winning more contracts, gaining more customers and selling more services. If you do not already know the tasks, the skills or the processes that you need to operate within your business for it to grow, then stop reading and create that list now. If our businesses are not growing then they are essentially dying.

These tasks could be things that you are currently doing, or a list of tasks that you should be doing. By looking at what your business needs, and in a sense the essential steps for it to grow, you can then analyze what skills you NEED to make those happen. If you lack any skills then it highlights exactly what you need to recruit for.

 

2. What tasks are dependent upon you and restrict your business?

Similar to the first question, you may already know and be operating particular tasks or skills that actively grow your business. For example customer sales and post-sale marketing to your existing customers. These may be items that are completed by yourself and therefore when you are busy (when time is critical) they are not undertaken.

Knowing these attributes and then analyzing your ability and set of skills to complete them, can help you to identify where assistance from a remote team might come in to play.

 

3. What can you do better?

This is essentially the ultimate question to ask when focusing on our skills – what are we currently doing that could be done better. My whole story of outsourcing and working with remote teams arise from the realization of this question. Previously I had done  a ‘decent’ job of building and creating websites, but to take my business to the next level I needed to become an expert in the different fields and not a jack of all trades. I therefore recruited and built an expert team on all the different requirements for building websites, and therefore my business grew.