Do you have a Virtual Assistant yet?
They’re one of the best business-building resources available. And they can prevent you from getting overworked, burnt out, and just plain old cranky. Yes, a good Virtual Assistant can be a real life saver. However, many business owners aren’t making the most of their Virtual Assistant.
Here are a few tips, ideas, and strategies to make sure you’re using your wonderful Virtual Assistant in the best manner possible.
Specialize
Some Virtual Assistants provide a wide variety of services while others specialize. In general, it’s often better to find assistants that specialize. This ensures that you’re getting help from someone who is an expert at a given set of tasks and has specialized knowledge. They’ll be more efficient at their specialty task which means they’ll be able to accomplish more. Most assistants charge by the hour.
Broaden Your Horizons
You don’t have to have just one assistant. You can hire one assistant to manage your bookkeeping, one to manage client communications, one to manage social media and so on. Specialization means you’re getting the best for your money and it makes good business sense to hire assistants for all of your administrative tasks.
Beyond Basic Admin
You might be surprised just how sophisticated Virtual Assistants can be. You can hire an assistant to write code for your site. You can hire an assistant to do market research for you and you can hire one to find clients. Don’t limit your assistants to checking email and sending invoices. Find assistants to help you with all of your business administration needs.
Create a Central Communication System
If you’re working with a number of Virtual Assistants, consider creating a central communication or project management system. This will help keep all files, milestones, and messages in one central location. It also makes it easy for your assistant to ask questions and for you to see the status of projects and tasks. Project management systems that can get the communication happening are TeamworkPM or Central Desktop.
Don’t Micromanage
Presumably, you’ve hired top-notch assistants who are more than capable of handling the tasks you’ve asked them to manage. Let them take care of it without your interference. If you spend your time micromanaging them then you’re wasting your time and probably irritating your assistants. If they can’t handle a task without your constant interaction, find a new assistant.
Virtual Assistants are significant business assets. If you’ve never worked with an assistant before, consider hiring one to take some of the workload off of your shoulders. It frees you up to focus on the profit-generating tasks of your business. And if you’re presently working with an assistant, consider hiring them to manage one more task or seek to add another assistant to your team
 Are you making the most of your Virtual Assistants?
Don’t have Virtual Assistant yet? Hire one by posting a RFP to our network.
I current’y have 6 different VAs working with me in my business and they all specialize in different areas. One does my books, another social media, another webdesign/blog, another marketing, one copywriting and the other one overlooks the rest and does the administration stuff. It works very well as I can rely on them knowing they are experts in their niche. Since starting to outsource more, my business has grown 3 fold the past year and my biggest mistake in business was not hiring VAs early on in the game when I first started out LOL!.
Sounds like you are way ahead of most in your knowledge of how beneficial a VA can be to your business success. Kudos to you! 😉
I don’t like to micromanage but find myself doing that more times than not. Any tricks of the trade to quit this bad habit of mine so I can let go and do the work I was meant to do in my business?
John it’s really just a matter of letting go and trusting that the VA you hired will get the job done for you. We can’t do it all and at some point in business you have to learn to delegate and live with the results so that you can have the time to build your business bigger and better 🙂
I agree with Tawnya. You have to trust your VA. I’ve worked with clients who micromanaged and it made my job more difficult. One wanted to approve everything I did and it cost him a lot of time because I would have to wait for his approval to continue. On the flip side, I had another client who just trusted me to do what was best and I loved doing the work and he loved the results he got. There were one or two things over the 6 years I worked for him (in the beginning) that he said he didn’t like so I changed it. But…once I got to know his style, I could interact as him on his facebook page and answer member forum posts as him, etc…
Let go and trust your VA to do his/her job. It’s their job to make your life easier, not give you more to do. 😉
Good luck!!
Roxanne
I had never thought of having more than one VA. That’s a great idea to have different ones specialized in different areas. I could use a bookkeeper tomorrow LOL
Yes, you’ll find when you talk to other business owners that they have multiple VAs working for them each with their own niche. You can hire a VA here at our site at http://www.vanetworking.com/rfp
I’ve yet to get my first VA and still researching this topic. Thanks for the post. I’ve downloaded your 2 free ebooks at the top right of the page and thanks for these! I’m going to dive into them tomorrow and start reading 🙂
I wish I had gotten my first VA earlier in my business game plan. I wasted so much valuable time on administrative issues that I could have used working on marketing or new product for my business. Don’t wait too long, hire a VA today! You’ll wonder how you ever survived without one 😉
Hi Ravi,
Yes…do hire a VA soon. It’s better to have one before you get overwhelmed. You don’t want to wait until you are frustrated and struggling to get someone to help.
Good luck!!
Roxanne
I’d love to hand over all my social media work to a VA to manage. Tawnya doe you know of any offhand that you’d recommend?
I highly recommend my VA, Danielle Beauchemin of http://www.ProactiveVA.com
She has really sped up my following and helped me engage more with my audience. I don’t know what I would do without her LOL
Another option to consider when using multiple assistants is to look for a multi-VA company. We are set up so the client has one point of contact but each task is handled by the team member who has the expertise in that area.
~Karen Salter
Karen, great share and thanks! Working with one company that has many VAs with their own specialties also keeps the communication all under one roof.
I have been thinking about getting a VA but just don’t think my business can afford one yet. I know it would really help me but how do I justify this extra cost so early in my startup?
Your business can’t afford to be without one 😉 Let me expand on that a bit. If a VA costs $30/hr and you sell your services for $85/hr, hiring a VA to do the tedious administrative work actually saves you $50/hr. Does that make sense? Now you don’t have to do that work and you can focus on doing what you do best, making money for your business 🙂
Good answer, Tawnya. Another note — the business owner actually saves more than the difference in hourly rate because chances are, a good VA performs certain functions faster. So comparing one hour of the business owner’s time spent on admin, marketing, or something they don’t enjoy, a VA would likely end up billing for less than an hour.
Additionally, if your business has deals with other countries, considering bilingual VAs is another great option, so you can communicate timely and efficently.
Virtual Assistants are business owners and we take care of your business as we take care of our own.
Great to hear that business owners are saving time and money hiring multi-Va companies!
I have started using http://www.sgsolutionsus.com VA for almost 2 years so far it’s been a great experience. They have a web development and SEO team also working along with the VA’s so that basically takes care of all my business needs. I guess that’s one advantage of working with a VA company. Will let you know if my opinion changes about them though, but so far so good.
I really enjoyed this article. I agree that its best to let the Virtual Assistant handle taking care of the administrative side of your business. I like to really take the time to find out exactly what my client needs when offering services. I feel that communicating regularly with my clients about what I am doing for them helps them see the money I am saving them.