Is that "mission critical" task really that important? It's worth taking a second look.

Sometimes you need a shift in perspective to see that the things you thought were important were really not important at all.

For me, that shift came after I hired a virtual assistant.

I have needed a helping hand for a while and finally pulled the trigger a few weeks ago. It made me realize just how bad I am at delegating. The downside of being a jack-of-all-trades founder is the tendency to try and do EVERYTHING. I have chronically had too much on my plate for over a year and hiring this VA is the first step to fixing the problem.

There was one specific workflow that finally made me hire my VA: new author outreach. I have done low-key new biz development for Damn Gravity since Day 1. I landed my first author through a cold DM on Twitter. Since then, I’ve tried to reach out to 5-10 potential new authors per month, but I have been very streaky. During busy times, I’d go for months without doing outreach. Then, as books were completed and I got less busy, I’d pick it up again.

Last month, I finally decided I needed this faucet of new business turned on 24/7, and that’s when I hired my VA. My first and most important task for her was to identify potential new authors and send first messages. I wasn’t looking for high volume outreach, but personal, highly relevant, REAL connections. I felt confident I could delegate this task because I had worked to codify our ideal potential author and how I like to reach out.

But here is where the perspective shift happened…

As I prepared my CRM, outreach templates, and author personas for my VA, a little voice in the back of my head piped up. It said, “Cold outreach doesn’t work.”

I stopped to think about it. The voice was right. Cold outreach never worked for me. In fact, only ONE of Damn Gravity’s authors came from cold outreach: that very first one! Since then, after hundreds of messages sent, I hadn’t landed a single new author.

So where have my new authors come from? Referrals. Referrals from past authors, existing authors, and even people in my network who have never worked with me.

Then I thought, if virtually all of my authors come from referrals, why am I having my VA do cold outreach?

Then it dawned on me: I was holding onto cold outreach like a crutch. Even though it didn’t move the needle for me, it made me feel in control. As someone whose first “real” job was cold calling doctors to sell insurance, this was my wheelhouse. And it felt infinitely better than “hoping” someone would refer my next author to me.

But faced with the prospect of hiring someone else to do this useless task, it all became clear to me. I can’t grow my business on the back of cold outreach. I need to make myself more visible online and attract the right authors (and their friends) to me.

“So what now?”

That was my next question. I had hired this person for THIS specific task, and I suddenly deemed it irrelevant. What could they help me do instead?

That’s where this blog post comes in. I decided to re-build my regular writing-in-public habit to become more visible online. I was prolific in 2021 and 2022 but have been quiet in recent years as work got busier. Now with my VA on board, I can focus on writing, while she edits and schedules out content. I get to focus on the thing I enjoy, and she helps me execute on the rest.

I used to think that I didn’t have time to write… now I see that I don’t have time NOT to do it. My business (and those precious referrals) depends on it.