Jo and Joy take you through how hiring a virtual assistant works and what you can expect in the process.
Get ready to delegate!
Welcome to Savvy Sessions #2.
Today's session is on how it works, how does this virtual assistant, hiring one, whole thing work?
The first thing you need to do is make the decision and decide that it's time to outsource and have a virtual assistant on board with you. Because if you don't have a virtual assistant, then you are the assistant.
How does that make you feel? You might be feeling overwhelmed. Some of the signs might be that you're doing everything and you're doing low-level tasks when you should be out there actually selling or servicing your clients or working on your business.
If you don't even know what to outsource, it's okay, we've got a great list that we've put together, giving you suggestions of things you can do, so if you read through that, decide it's time, then the next thing you need to do is give us a call and arrange a meeting. That's easily done, we can do it over the phone, we can meet you in person over coffee, we can do a Zoom call.
And then the next step would be talking about options and what your pin points are. What are you struggling with, what are you feeling overwhelmed about, and sort of start talking to see where your business is, where we might be able to slot in a solution, and what sort of tasks we might be able to undertake.
From that we can recommend a plan for you. So whether it's a one off type thing, for example you need help with a certain project, or you need us on occasional at help basis, just whenever the need comes about for random things. Or whether you do need a bit more, the daily support or the ongoing support with managing inbox and emails and phone calls.
The next part is to actually assign a virtual assistant to you, so we will figure out and identify, based on what we found out about your personality, what you need, what sort of services you need, which of our team members is the right match for you. It could be personality, it could be the types of specialties that they have, and then they get assigned as your one point of contact. Your dedicated virtual assistant that will project manage and make sure that all of your tasks are completed and be proactive for you.
The next stage is organising a handover session with you. Depending where you are, that can be a face-to-face handover in our offices, but quite often we handovers via Zoom. It's just a good way to have a chat with people regardless of where you are. And in that session we just define the initial tasks that we're going to undertake. We work out some of the quick ones that we can do. The things that we can build trust actually completing, the really important and urgent tasks.
You don't even need to know everything you want to hand over in that session, you could just start off with something as simple as "Can you help me manage my inbox every day", "Can you reconcile my Xero", things like that. Start with a few things and then as it grows, you just hand over more and more tasks.
As you build that relationship with your virtual assistant and the trust builds, you find out how you can best use them and in what way. That leads into, as well, us learning more about how you operate so we can then recommend apps and tools that you can use.
We love automation, we love streamlining tasks and workflows in your business. Because we look after so many businesses, we see so many tools and apps and we are always researching and looking and finding out about all of them so we know a lot about all of the apps that might be suitable to implement in your business to streamline things.
The critical factor when you do get a virtual assistant is communication, because just the pure factor of being virtual, we're not there, we're not beside you. So, communication is key, we encourage everyone to communicate regularly, daily, numerous ways to do it, but we need the feedback. If anything is not working, if it is working, let us know. It's not going to go perfectly, there will be things that don't go well, that aren't done correctly, that aren't done the way that you like, and it's all just about that feed back and that communication, and making sure that you're building that up and teaching and actually verbalising what it is that you don't like and do like so that we can do a really great job. Because all of our virtual assistants really want to do a great job and they want our clients to be happy.
Communication is definitely the key, and it is a long-term strategy so it will take a while to get fully up and running and up to speed. No different to having someone, an on-sight employee. You've still got to teach them how you do things, your processes and systems. You're just teaching us remotely, but we've got a number of tools to help you with it and just make it so much easier.
Thanks for watching. That was Savvy Sessions #2.
See you next time!
Want to start delegating to a virtual assistant? Book a call with us to chat.