Congratulations! You’ve decided you’re ready to take back the reins of visionary CEO of your business and hand off the day-to-day management of your business to an Online Business Manager! All of the systems setup, project management, hiring, creating processes, and overall management of your team is finally going to be someone else’s responsibility, and you can get back to doing what you do best! But, those are pretty big roles to fill. How do you know you’ll be choosing the right person? After all, not all Online Business Managers (OBM) have the same zone of genius, and some might even specialize in a particular area or two. So it’s important to know how to choose the best Online Business Manager for your team.
How to Choose the Best Online Business Manager for Your Team
Just as with hiring for any role in your business, it’s important to start by knowing what roles and tasks you need to prioritize. Are you looking for someone who will be primarily client facing handling project management, onboarding clients, delegating tasks to your team members, and then wrapping up all the deliverables? Or are you planning for your OBM to work more with hiring and onboarding your team members creating processes and systems so everything is running smoothly behind the scenes like a well-oiled machine?
Make sure you read these Five Questions to Ask Yourself Before you Hire an Online Business Manager. Once you’ve made the decision to take the next step, here are some key questions or things to think about when considering working with an OBM to help you organize and streamline your business.
Know Their Zone Genius
If you aren’t familiar with the zone of genius, the term comes from Gay Hendricks’ book The Big Leap. He talks about someone’s zone of competence, zone of excellence, and then their zone of genius. The zone of genius is a place where a person thrives, and it’s a place where a person can add the most value to the world and to themselves.
You should ask questions about their zone of genius or favorite parts of being an Online Business Manager. You wouldn’t want to hire an OBM whose main priority would be team management, but it is their least favorite aspect of the OBM role. If you do, ultimately your organization and your new hire could suffer. When you know what roles you are hiring for as well as what a person loves to do, you can find the sweet spot of choosing the best Online Business Manager for your team.
Ask them what their typical day looks like as an OBM, what aspects of it they love, and their least favorite part. You’ll learn a lot about if they are the perfect fit or not based on their answers to those questions.

Find the Right Personality Fit
As an OBM, I become the right hand for my clients. It’s so essential to make sure your personalities are a good fit to work together long-term. Ask yourself some key questions and really reflect on your answers about who is right for your business:
- Do you thrive when someone is holding you accountable?
- Are you very easygoing?
- Do you get overwhelmed by someone with a loud personality?
- Does this person align with your values? What are your brand values?
There’s no right or wrong answer to any of these questions, but it will help you determine, personality-wise, what it would look like to work with someone long-term. Most of the time, your Online Business Manager, is involved in many aspects of your business, so getting along and working well together is pretty essential.
I’ll add that I have colleagues who also use personality tests as part of their hiring process. These may or may not be valuable. If you are intent on asking someone what their DISC, MTBI, Enneagram, Human Design, Kolbe, or some other assessment is, know what that means to you and your organization and how you intend to use it. All of these scores or assessments have valuable and less positive attributes, so you can’t automatically dismiss someone because they are “low” in one area on a test or you think they won’t compliment you as a business owner. Be responsible when using these in your hiring decisions.
Ask for Referrals
This should be pretty self explanatory, but ask for referrals before hiring. Making a hiring decision for your online team is no different than making the choice of a babysitter. You are entrusting them with something extremely important to you, and it’s key to ask for references.
Some potential questions you might ask a referral:
- We need a candidate who has [these specific skills]. How would you rate the candidate on these?
- What are the candidate’s greatest attributes?
- How did the candidate handle challenging or stressful situations?
- How would you rate the candidate in terms of being a team player?
- What were some of the key contributes the candidate made when working with you?
Of course, you may have some additional questions of your own, but these are a few ideas to get you started.
What if you are hiring a new OBM who doesn’t have any referrals? It’s possible the candidate you are considering for the role is transiting into Online Business Management from a Virtual Assistant position or Project Management role. You can still ask for referrals and determine how they have handled experiences in the past and used their strengths and opportunities to grow and provide value to the team and organization. Attributes like integrity, timeliness, organization and team integration will likely not change.
Experience or Interest in Your Niche
You definitely want someone interested or who has experience in your industry and going to be invested in the growth of your business. Remember, your OBM is like a mini-you in your business and is someone who will be acting in your place between you and your team as well as you and your clients.
Having familiarity or experience with the type of work you do so they can make educated decisions or brainstorm ideas around systems and processes will allow your business to run more efficiently.
Let's Work Together
If you want to learn more about me and if we’d be a great fit to work together, you can book a call or you can learn more about my services by exploring my services page.