If you're an Electrician, a Plumber, or any other tradie, we've got you covered! Check out the key reasons why tradies use a virtual assistant, and benefit from the flexibility.
Welcome to Savvy Sessions #21.
In this session, we are going to be explaining to you how a tradie uses a virtual assistant.
Firstly, one of the top things that a tradie gets a virtual assistant to do is answer the phone. Because we all know that tradies have lots going on and they're doing lots of work throughout the day, going to different jobs and driving and often they aren't able to answer their mobile phone. So what we do is we have the tradie divert his phone, it's just a matter of some settings in the phone, to our landline number that we have for our clients, and that landline number is unique to that specific tradie so we can actually answer the phone in their company's name. We can take calls where a client is asking how far away your guy is, or "Can I schedule in a job", or "Can I get a quote?". We take those details. If we have access into something like Fergus to schedule the jobs, we can actually schedule those clients in or we can let them know how far away someone is because we can see on the tracker, on the GPS tracker where that person is.
You need to remember, any call you miss is a potential sale missed.
Secondly, we can also help with things like quoting. We can help you get your quotes out efficiently. There's nothing worse than calling someone to get a quote and having to wait two weeks and then call again to ask as it doesn't come through. So we're able to help facilitate getting quotes out quickly and also working with you to follow them up. Again, when your time is poor because you're on the tools managing jobs, it can help to have someone else actually call up or email potential clients to check if they've got the quote, any queries, and get them accepted.
Thirdly, is to manage the supplier bills that are coming in and make sure that those are on-charged to jobs. Often when we're using something like Xero or Fergus, the supplier invoices come in and we can make sure that those are actually being processed through and checked, and make sure that we have all of them in the system. So you know all of your supplier bills, how much that is and what you owe, and ensuring each of those - because they have been purchased with a job number - are put on to the relevant jobs, and then ultimately invoice them on to your clients.
The next key point as helping with invoicing because, again, cashflow is so important. So getting invoices accurate and out on time to clients all helps your cashflow. We can do that, whether it's just getting invoices drafted up, and then you can approve them and get them sent out. Or just doing the whole lot. You might think "Oh, but it's really hard", because you won't know the jobs, but if your virtual assistant is actually answering the phone, and they're scheduling the jobs, and they're creating quotes, they get to really know what jobs are on, and what should be on invoices. And if you've got a good system of how much people are invoiced, how much the labour is charged out at, and you know what markup there is, then there's no reason why your virtual assistant can't, over time, learn how to do the invoicing. Even just get them to a draft point where the tradie can then actually have a look at them and review them and send them out.
The next one is, once you've sent the invoice, there's a lot of debtor follow up that gets left and not done. And it means that you really struggle with cashflow if that doesn't happen. So, your virtual assistant can see all the invoices that are outstanding, and they can make all the phone calls, send all the emails. Whatever the follow up process is to bring in that money into your business, and help you keep on top of your cashflow.
It pulls you out of the equation as well. Because, often that can be really awkward if you've been on the job doing something, and then you're the one that has to then call up to say, "Hey, you haven't paid your bill." Have someone else doing it. We can be the bad guy.
Thanks for watching. That was Savvy Sessions #21.
See you next time!
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