How Can We Run A One-Person Agency With the Help of Remote Staff? Explaining the Economics involved
Running a one-person agency sounds nice until you have to face all the challenges it comes with. Even though you are the boss of your agency and make the most profit, you still will struggle to manage your work, meet clients, and deadlines, and juggle between tasks.
Finding a remote staff who can give you their hand to lower your burden is like a dream come true. By leveraging the power of a virtual staff you can manage your work more effortlessly and make the most out of it. Here we will talk about how you can run a successful one-person agency with the help of a remote staff without making a hole in your pocket and making a profit.
Challenges of running a one-person agency
Like any other business solo-entrepreneurs also struggle and fail to grow their business. Your business fails because you are the only person who is doing everything. You have to wear multiple hats but at the end of the day, you won’t be able to manage everything alone. There will always be challenges and risks of failing a business. Let’s look at some of the common reasons and how to overcome them.
Lack Of Skills
You may have the basic knowledge of your business but you can’t learn every skill and run a business alone. Let’s say you need to write blogs for your business website, you have basic knowledge of SEO and keyword research but to make your website rank on top of search engines and bring organic traffic can only be done by skilled professionals. A content writer remote staff can understand your vision and write compelling content for you with great research, keywords, and storytelling to target the right audience. You don’t have to spend hours on writing a piece of content, a remote staff will handle it for you and make it easier.
No Scalability
Solo entrepreneurs often hit rock bottom because they are thinking of running everything alone. You will choke on managing everything without any growth. To run a successful business you need a support system to help your business grow. Without a team, it’s nearly impossible to grow until a certain point. If you are a graphic designer and want to learn video editing then you have to spend time learning some new skills and software. But as a solo agency, you won’t be able to manage it alone as you already have existing clients and projects to work on. This is where a remote staff will help you take the lead so you can spend your time on other stuff and increase scalability.
Poor Client Management
You have overpromised your client and taken multiple projects at a time but are delivering below average. This leads to a bad reputation and unhappy clients. Due to multiple clients and projects, it’s difficult for you to manage them all at the same time. Delays in communication, email response, and calls can all lead to suffering for your business. Hiring a remote staff who can manage your project and maintain regular contact with your client for any updates will build strong relations with the clients. They will be responsible for signing a contract, managing client requests, and delivering projects.
Lack of Support and Isolation
Most of the time a one-person agency faces a lack of motivation, and support leading to a lonely life. Solopreneurs make poor decisions, accountability and ideas because there is no one to do the brainstorming. This leads to burnout and stops growth opportunities. Even if you put in extra effort then you can only work for just 12 hours a day and even after that, you will miss a lot. Juggling from projects and clients will leave you with incomplete work. The best solution is hiring a remote staff team that will build a real connection and support system to work with. They can make decisions on your behalf and do brainstorming to create new ideas.
Ignoring Marketing
You can too be caught up in finding clients that you forget to do self-marketing. Let’s say you found five clients in the first month of your business and when they are one you are just left with nothing for the next month. You leave with an empty pipeline when the project ends no leads lead to no work. Rather than focusing on getting clients, do self-branding that will help you bring clients automatically. A social media manager will help you improve your visibility. They can take charge of doing the marketing and promotional work for your business. They will build your brand for your business so you don’t have to walk and knock on anyone’s door to get clients they will simply come running to you.
Also read: What is an E-commerce Virtual Assistant or E-Commerce VA?
How Remote Staff Helps Your Business
A remote staff can help you with multiple tasks at a time. They are responsible for your business growth as they dig deeper into your business to understand your needs and provide you with the right solution. Let’s look at some of the major aspects of how a virtual assistant can help a one-person agency business.
Streamline Your Business
Administrative tasks like emails, scheduling, and marketing can eat up all your time and lower your revenue generation. A graphic designer hires a remote staff who can handle client emails, manage the calendar, and do the marketing, which will save a lot of time so you can invest your work in more important aspects. To understand it better let’s understand it with an example. A designer spends 10 hours/week on admin tasks, leaving less time for creative work. If they hire a remote staff they can handle all the admin tasks, freeing the designer to take on 3 extra clients/month, boosting revenue by 30%.
Lead Generation and Sales
You know better than how important it is for a business to get constant leads and convert those leads into potential customers. Inconsistent lead pipelines can cause a gap in your revenue generation. For you to generate leads, doing cold calling, sending emails and turning them into sales will take up a lot of work and time. Hiring a lead-generating specialist will make your work easier. The specialist will use different social media platforms like LinkedIn Sales Navigator to scrape 500 leads in the niche, and then send personalized cold emails. Even if 1% replies to that email 50 people will engage, converting to 10 paying clients. Generating a revenue growth of $20K/month.
Cost-Effective and Boost Margin
We all know very well that the cost of hiring a remote worker is much lower and affordable compared to hiring an in-house employee. The cost of office staff and equipment is cut because a virtual staff can work from anywhere without the need for an office. A tech startup hired a full-time web developer for $100K/month and an extra $20K/year office cost. On the other hand, if you hire a remote developer on a per-hour or project basis and you are paying them $50/hour this will save a lot more.
Marketing and Branding
Self-branding and marketing is an important part for any business. If people don’t see your brand then it’s tough to build trust and gain followers. The best way to boost marketing and branding is through social media. However, crafting creative social media posts needs time and effort. While you post 2 posts/week, the same thing can be improved by hiring a social media manager who can create the most engaging posts and increase the posting by 3x/week. This increases your social media followers and drives 10-20% more sales.
Research and Strategy
Constant market research and lack of data can lead to insignificant business growth. You have to stay updated on the market and your competitors. You as solopreneurs can’t invest that much time in researching a product or your services. Let’s say you are a product-based company selling herbal products for skin and hair. To improve the quality of your product you need constant research and also check more new market trends or else you will stay behind. A remote researcher can analyze the market, and your competitors, and do a lot more digging to understand your customer needs by conducting surveys. This will help your business with more opportunities and growth.
Build Professional Image
Clients and customers will doubt your professionalism if you’re a solopreneur. Clients will doubt your incapability of completing a project on time because you are the only one running your agency. Having a team gives you bigger opportunities and trust. Having a team will give you collaborative work and increase productivity. You may have basic knowledge of every task but can’t handle it all at once. Using remote staff to create a team for customer support, project management, social media management, web developers, etc. Building a core team member will give your client a positive attitude to trust in you meaning more clients and projects for bigger and longer contracts.
Also read: How Do You Hire a Shopify Virtual Assistant or a Shopify VA?
Finding The Right Remote Staff
We have discussed how a remote staff can solve most of your pain and give you ease to focus more on other business aspects. But now the question is how to find the right remote staff for your business. You will find many remote staff ready to work with you but do they mean your business needs? How to identify the right virtual staff for you?
Identifying Pain Points
The easiest way to understand is to find tasks that are time-consuming for you. For example, lead generation can take up a lot of your time, making cold calls or sending them email campaigns can take up most of your day. Another example could be customer support. We all know how difficult and time-consuming it is to manage customer queries. It takes days, weeks or even months to resolve an issue. If you just focus on these aspects then how will you manage other business areas? This will stop your growth and one reason why most one-agency businesses fail is because they think they can handle everything alone but that’s not the case. Find your pain points to choose the right remote staff for your work.
Choosing The Right Platform
Now, many people make this mistake when they have to look for remote staff. You search at the wrong place for the wrong niche. You first need to understand whom you are hiring and for what purpose. Do you need a freelancer or a part-time employee? There are multiple platforms from where you can hire remote staff like Upwork, Fiverr, LinkedIn, Freelancer.com etc. But to make sure you select the right candidate and for that, you need to explain and provide enough job detail before hiring.
Start Small and Build Trust
It gets tougher for you and the employee to build a connection and trust each other in the beginning. Start small which means hire a small remote team, the one you need the most and set a pay rate for them. Once you are familiar with their work and have built enough trust then you grow your team and increase the pay. You can assign a 1-2 week trial task to conduct a performance check. Set clear expectations and communication with your remote staff for deliverables and deadlines.
Managing Remote Staff
This is another important aspect when hiring a remote staff. As you all won’t be sharing any physical space this can make it difficult to manage your remote team. Setting up communication, and staying updated with tasks and projects will keep everything manageable. There are multiple tools to manage your remote team. Set communication with them using Slack or Zoom. For task management use Trello or Asana. Organize meetings with Google Meet or Microsoft Team.
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How Remote Staff Benefits One-Person Agency
Hiring remote employees is not just a cost-cutting approach; it is also a wise investment in long-term business growth. Using remote workers allows you to dramatically cut overhead expenses such as office rent, utilities, and equipment prices. Because remote employees work from home, you won’t have to worry about maintaining actual office space or investing in new infrastructure.
Beyond overhead savings, remote staffing reduces labor expenditures. Remote workers have more flexible payment alternatives than full-time in-house employees, who must pay salary, benefits, and other employment-related fees. You can engage them on an hourly, per-project, or contract basis, so you only pay for the labour you require.
Assume you engage two remote staff workers, each earning $500 per month, for administrative and customer support duties. With their assistance, you free up your time and capacity to add 2-3 new clients, each of whom pays you between $1,500 and $2,000 per month.
- Total revenue from new clients: $3,000 to $4,000 each month
- Total cost of remote staff: $1,000 per month.
- Net profit: $2,000 to $3,000 per month
Instead of being overwhelmed by everyday responsibilities, you now have additional revenue to invest in hiring more talented remote employees, scaling operations, and enhancing overall business productivity. This cycle of strategic outsourcing enables you to focus on high-value tasks, create more cash, and sustainably grow your firm while keeping operational costs low.
Eliminating Office Cost
Without actual staff, there is no office rent, furniture, electricity bill, equipment, or other services. You can save anywhere from $500 to $2,000 per month on office rent and $300 to $1,000 on maintenance or utilities. Equipment and facilities will save you between $5000 and $10,000, depending on the size of your company. You can save anywhere from $2000-$5000 every month.
Remote workers help one-person businesses to compete with larger corporations by lowering costs, improving service quality, and encouraging scalability. By effectively distributing work, owners can concentrate on growth, innovation, and customer connections, transforming their solo effort into a dependable, profit-driven business. If you are running a one-person agency this is the time to leverage the power of remote staff. Work smarter not harder as remote staff will give you more opportunities to grow your business to reach new heights.
If you want to hire remote staff for your one-person agency, reach out to us so we can help you find the best remote team according to your business needs. Get in touch with us and embrace the power of virtual staff.
Learn more about: What is a Customer Service Virtual Assistant?