Enjoy Alex’s recent Insider Fix newsletter featuring the latest entrepreneurial, legal, and one random fix to help you. Alex hopes that these three hacks to be so useful that they will multiply and provide you a 10-fold return.
Virtual Assistants
If you’re a business owner or CEO and you don’t have a virtual assistant yet, you’re flushing time and money down the toilet. Trust me on this.
I’ve been using VA’s and personal assistants for eight years now and I’ll never go back. Finding the right one might take time but it’s well worth it. My VA, Sharon, is a thousand miles away and pays all my bills, collects bids from contractors, schedules all my personal appointments, waits on hold with customer service people for me, and generally keeps my attention and my frustrations in check. She saves me literally hundreds of hours. I spend that time making a lot more money for the company and for myself, which also makes it a good company expense as far as I’m concerned. So whether you pay $15 or $20 or $30 per hour, if you get a good one, it’s worth it!
Every once in a while I hear someone say, “Yeah but I actually like paying our bills and arranging my own appointments.” Really? Get a high-quality VA for a few months and see if you ever want to take those responsibilities back.
This is a no-brainer for any business owner. You’re just wasting time if you don’t.
There’s a ton of good information online about finding one. Just google “How to hire a good VA” to give you some ideas. And if you want some leads, check out Elite Virtual Assistants (mine is from EVA) and Outsource Access (I’ve heard amazing things about this one), although there are many others out there.
Limitations of Liability
Let’s talk about ‘em.
It’s really simple if you don’t have a strong Limitation of Liability provision in your customer contract or order form, then when your customers sue you for damage caused by your products or services, those damages are (take a guess…) not limited. They are not limited in:
- Amount (meaning that you can be on the hook when your $10 product causes $1 million in damages), or
- Type (meaning your customer may be able to collect from you for personal injury and property damage, not just property damage, among other types), or
- Time (meaning you’re bound by the state statute of limitations – anywhere from 3 years to 10 years later, depending on the state [check out this chart for your state] rather than a shorter amount of time set forth in your contract, or
- Other limitations (for example, making you liable when your cousin’s boyfriend’s mother-in-law uses – or misuses – your product, rather than proper use by just your purchasing customer).
This is different from the disclaimer of warranties we talked about in last week’s Insider Fix e-mail. A warranty is an obligation that the law says you owe to your customer about the quality of the product. Your liability refers to the money and consequences for which you’re liable when your product doesn’t perform or damages your customer.
If you didn’t have your business lawyer draft your contract, give her a call and ask her to review it, particularly that limitation of liability clause.
While you’re having her look at it, here are the other questions you should ask your lawyer to limit a lot more of your liability to your customers, your employees, and the other folks you’re dealing with in your business.
Catching zzz’s
I’ve been thinking A LOT about sleep lately, particularly after reading Why We Sleep by Matt Walker. (Man oh man is that an amazing book. I highly recommend it). The more I calibrate and optimize my sleep, the more effective I am the next day from a motivation, self-discipline, mood, energy, memory, and everything-else standpoint. It’s really mind-boggling how much of your life, including your immune system, is affected by the quality and quantity of your sleep. That book was amazing.
Speaking of amazing books, the one I’m reading now is Robert Greene’s The Laws of Human Nature. For fans of Green’s 48 Laws of Power, you’ll love this one. For anyone else with both a passion for history and a curiosity about the human mind, you’ll love this one too. Really fantastic read.
