Creating your own virtual team is a crucial step to doubling and tripling the income of your woman-owned business. For example, when I hired my first virtual assistant, Kathy, I quickly doubled my income. (I think I was initially so scared that I wouldn’t be able to pay her monthly fee that I gave myself a kick-in-the-pants and created more business!)

After hiring a second virtual assistant, Kristy, the income of my woman-owned business has skyrocketed to as much as $85,250.02 in a single month.

But hiring a virtual assistant will ONLY pay off if the woman business owner uses the assistants’ time to help create additional streams of income.

Which means you must be ready to both ask for and receive support. Women entrepreneurs admit that it is difficult to ask for help. But the more comfortable you are asking for and receiving support, the more you are valuing yourself. And the more you value yourself, the more money, time and freedom will begin to show up for you to enjoy!

Hiring a virtual assistant is not a cost; it’s an investment in YOU. It’s an investment in how much you believe in yourself and in the level of success that you will achieve. This isn’t just wishful thinking; it’s a fact, proven by women entrepreneurs who have found that adding support is pivotal to the core success strategies of their woman owned business.

Three important tips to help the woman business owner get the most from supporting relationships:

Tip #1: Give your assistant any task that drains your energy. (Yes, even the ones that seem “too small”! I started out by delegating all my email to Kathy. Believe me; it took a huge leap of faith on my part! Now she receives and answers all email that comes through the web site of my woman-owned business. Any questions that Kathy can’t answer, she batches up and forwards to me on Tuesdays or Thursdays.

My virtual team handles posting audio mp3 files and transcripts, maintaining shopping cart information, proofing and broadcasting email and newsletters, paying sub-contractors, processing monthly coaching charges, updating the website and more.

Tip #2: Allow your assistant to support the high-touch marketing that is so crucial to the woman small business. I love sending out cards but don’t like dealing with stamps, envelopes and address labels. So I signed up for “Send Out Cards.” I picked out a few dozen card designs and saved them in my favorites folder.

Now, I simply type the personalized message and recipient’s name in an email to my assistant, direct her to choose a card from my favorites, and she takes care of the rest. I now send out more cards than ever before. I feel good about connecting with my clients and I love how easily this important relationship task is accomplished!

Tip #3: Look at your assistants as in investment, not as an expense. If you think that hiring an assistant should be regulated to the expense category of your woman-owned business, then it’s too easy to delay hiring. And when you finally do, you will avoid assigning your “expense”-ive assistant many tasks.

Instead, write down the three main activities that YOU will focus on when you’re no longer buried under email, newsletter writing, etc. For example: If you had three more hours each week, in which business-building activity would you invest? You could easily offer a new teleseminar series, write an article or accept two more clients. Couldn’t you?

What if you had five extra hours a week? What about ten? Are you starting to see how lucrative hiring an assistant for your woman-owned, small business can be? I also hope you’re seeing that you can start small, get comfortable with asking for and receiving support, and then move up from there.

I’m clear that my “job” as a woman small business owner is to market, lead teleseminars, coach woman business owner clients and create new streams of income. When I find myself doing a task that is not in my “job description,” I send it to my team. The payoff has helped me leapfrog my business and triple my income this year. Now, THAT is a high-payoff investment that I’m glad I made!

Business coach Kendall SummerHawk, the “Horse Whisperer for Business” delivers savvy ways for entrepreneurs to turn hectic businesses into 6-figure successes. Get her “7 Quick and Simple Tips to Brand, Package and Price for More Money, Time and Freedom” at http://www.kendallsummerhawk.com.

Please answer these questions:
1) Would you pay someone to fill out an application for a credit card?
2) Do you want to make a simple process more complicated?
3) Are you lazy?

If you answered YES, to one or more of the above, then totally reconsider if you want to get SBA 8a certified, because you don’t have the right stuff to success in the business world even if you got certified.

Why spend the money to buy software, when you can just download the forms for FREE from the SBA’s web site and fill them out for nothing? The SBA provides all of the forms you need to use.

If you need to pay a middle man to provide you with free forms, you must have more money than sense! It is not logical to pay someone hundreds or THOUSANDS of dollars to fill out forms for you. Don’t let scare tactics fool you. This is just a series of forms, you can fill them out, it is not rocket science!

Also, why provide all of your sensitive personal and professional data to an outside source, when they take that same information and fill in the blanks on the SBA forms for you? Do you want to give your social security number, your tax return information and all of your personal data to a total stranger?

My Story: In 2004, I decided to apply online for SBA 8a certification. There is plenty of explanation during each step of the process to guide you through the steps. (Note: If you have questions, you can even call the SBA office in Washington DC to get free guidance. They do answer the phone and they are very helpful.)

Before I attempted to apply for SBA 8a certification, I made sure I had all of the required registrations in place. For example, I registered with Dun & Bradstreet to get my DUNS. Again, this is a free service, you don’t have to pay someone. In the SBA 8a application, they provide a driect link to D&B.

The beauty of applying online is that you can complete a section, save it and then come back. But once you have completed the entire application, you submit the entire application electronically and it gets reviewed quickly.

There is one document you download to have notarized and send in via snail mail. Once that is received by the SBA, they review your application.

It took only a couple of weeks to hear back on my decision. I received an email requesting two more documents to complete. One was a simple form that required notarization. The other request was to complete a social disadavantage narrative.

Again, I spent some time researching the narrative and prepared one on my own. I submitted it and within a week, my company was certified.

How much money did I pay someone else to fill out SBA 8a forms or write my own social disadvantage life story? Zero, zip, nada.

Bottomline: If you can’t fill out a form on your own and you are intimidated to even try, you might want to consider NOT giving up your day job. Owning a business is hard work. Getting your certification is only the beginning. Once you are certified, then the real work begins as you market and move your business to profitability.

Design2Train, a SBA 8a certified company, was founded by Karen Miller in 2001, an award-winning instructional designer with 30+ years experience. Need help with writing your SBA 8a social disadvantage narrative? Visit the Design2Train.com

Since mentoring many small business hopefuls, I have come to realize a very disturbing fact. Many very bright and hopeful female entrepreneurs have crossed my office threshold with the mistaken idea that just being a woman gives them an advantage over their male counterparts. Sadly, this is not as true as we have been led to believe.

Certainly the female population of today is much better off than their mothers or grandmothers, but obtaining financial support, loans is not viewed by bankers any differently than it is for male entrepreneurs. A myth has been circulating for years that has led entrepreneurs to believe that womenowned and minorityowned businesses can obtain loans easier. Unfortunately, that is only a myth.

If your entrepreneurial dream requires a bank loan, the process is not any easier if you are a woman or a minority. The only slight advantage is that there may be additional lending sources available if you are in either of these categories. But you still have to sell the lender on your business and means of repayment.

Both male and female executives in the corporate arena have much in common in terms of professional aspirations. However, the playing field is far from being equal. A survey was done by a non-profit research group called Catalyst recently. Male & female executives at 1,000 of the largest corporations in the U.S. were surveyed and more than half of the women said that they aspire to a CEO position. They were even willing to make sacrifices such as delaying a marriage and or children, and that very willingness shouts to us that the field is not equal.

Other survey results were as follows:

49.5 percent of all employed managers and professionals are women, but they still tend to manage only other women.
The highest-paid female executive still earns only 68% of the salary paid to her male counterpart.
Firms that include women on their senior management teams showed greater improvement in corporate performance.
62 percentof the firms that included women on their senior management team saw their market share grow, compared with only 39% of companies with no female senior management.

Advancements in technology should help ease the movement of more women into leadership. Computers enable women to work more flexible hours and better balance work and family commitments, which is not expected of their male counterparts. (How equal is that?)

So-called feminine leadership traits will grow in importance in the 21st century, according to more than 160 international companies and 75 senior executives a view of their firms progress toward gender equity.

Most respondents, predominantly male, predicted wide-spread abandonment of the command and control managerial style for a more team-oriented approach. That does not seem all that bad to me. I can think of a lot of companies that could use more teamwork and less monarchy leadership.

These business gurus saw this new style as requiring skills that are more feminine than masculine, thus giving an edge to female managers. However, another 15-year study has shown that female managers are no more inclusive or democratic than men when making workplace decisions.

As grim as these facts might be, I do not want to discourage any prospective female entrepreneurs. We female business owners know that we may have to work twice as hard for half the recognition and pay, but ladies statistics show we will outlive our male counterparts.

We know that any woman who is a wife and mother and also in business, could do the job of two air traffic controllers without breaking a sweat even as the airport burns to the ground.

To read more from Annie and to find the best businesses for woman visit her blog:
Annies Home Journal
http://www.annies-home-journal.blogspot.com