Five Things to Consider When Hiring a VA

Posted on 23 August 2011 by

Hiring a VA is an important decision for you and your business.  If you hire the right VA they can become a true business partner and help you grow your business.  A simply Google search is not enough to find that perfect fit.  How do you know what you to look for?  Here are my five items to consider before hiring a VA:

1.)    What skills do you need?  Do you need someone to help you with your website, social media, web analytics?  Or perhaps you need an expert with shopping cart knowledge and strong writing skills?  Maybe you are looking for a bookkeeper?  Knowing in advance of the skills you need will ensure you find a VA who can best help you.

2.)    Work Ethic/Professionalism:  What type of training does your VA have?  How long have they been in the VA business?  What software programs do they know?  Make sure to qualify your VA candidates and having a conversation to ensure they have the same business philosophy you do is also helpful.

3.)    Recommendations: Ask people in a similar business or industry as you who you know work with a VA for recommendations.  Often you will find that your colleagues have great VA’s working behind the scenes and you didn’t even realize it!  This is exactly the type of VA you want!

4.)    Availability & Management: What hours is your VA available?  Do they have a back-up?  What happens if your VA becomes ill? How about problems, is there someone you can speak with if you are not satisfied with the work your VA is doing?  You don’t want to spend time managing a VA or worrying about what to do if they aren’t available, so sourcing a company who has back-up plans in place is a great idea to ensure your business runs smoothly.

5.)    Budget:  I put this last for a reason, yes you do need to have a budget to hire a VA, BUT…if you hire someone matching the four items above, budget should be the final consideration.  The goal of hiring a VA is to take items off your plate so your focus can be solely on revenue generating tasks.  Think about budget, keeping in mind the savings you obtain by not hiring a direct employee (vacation time, benefits, taxes) and also think how much more your business can grow by having a right-hand person to do all the administrative work for you.

What are your golden rules for a VA?  Let us know below what you did to ensure your VA was the right for you and let’s build this list together.

Monday Mindset: If you want the staff to give great service to customers, the leaders have to give great service to the staff

Posted on 22 August 2011 by

This is Zingerman’s Natural Law of Business No. 5, which originally comes from Robert Greenleaf’s book, Servant Leadership.

Here’s the concept in a nutshell: The service that the staff gives to customers is never going to be better than the service that we as leaders provide to the staff.

Interestingly, your first priority when running your business should be to treat your staff well, THEN treat your customers well as a second priority. Not the way round you’d think eh? That’s because your team invariably will be the first point of contact your clients have with your business, and if they’re not full of excitement for the vision of your business, and don’t communicate that in everything they do, your customers aren’t going to stick around for long!

With that in mind….here are 5 Golden Rules For Working With Your First Virtual Assistant

1.)    Communicate, Communicate, Communicate! This could be all five rules.  The importance of regular and consistent communication with your VA can not be stressed enough.  Have weekly meetings where you can see one another (use Skype!), talk through the priorities of the week, and clarify project plans.  Take the time to build a relationship with your VA.  It’s more pleasant working with people than just faceless names on a computer screen, and you will be more likely to get better work from employees who see you as a person rather than just a task allocator.

2.)    Provide specific guidelines and timelines: Use a project management system, to do list manager or even a simple spreadsheet to list out tasks and deadlines.  This will ensure both of you can easily see the status of your projects and avoid any confusion over assignments or deadlines.  When communicating tasks be clear in your direction and available to your VA if they have any questions – see above – a weekly meeting makes this easier.

3.)    Don’t be afraid to delegate: You’ve hired a VA so it’s time to let go a little.  A great way to think about what to delegate is to look at all areas of your business.  What items do you simply not enjoy doing?  Where would an extra hand be the most help?  Are there things you do every day that takes away from directly increasing your revenue?  These are the tasks to delegate to your VA.  Think about this; if you are now free to concentrate fully on revenue generating tasks, how much more could your business grow?

4.)    Share Your Vision: To get the most out of your VA, take time to communicate the vision of your business, this will strengthen your relationship and provide your VA with clear direction and insight into you and your business goals.  When your VA understands how their task fit into the big picture, they can become a true business partner and offer more and more value.

5.)    Evaluate: Provide regular feedback to your VA on their performance and be open to their feedback too.  Let your VA know what they do for you that is excellent and what you would like them to do better.  A mix of positive and constructive feedback will help your VA improve and lead to better results for you.  Be open to ideas and feedback from your VA too.  If you are communicating well (see #1 & 5 above) then your VA will know your business goals and can offer ideas to improve your processes, make suggestions for new projects and more.

What are your golden rules for virtual team success?  Share below so we can all learn from one another.

Four Reasons I Love My VA…

Posted on 13 September 2010 by

The JigsawBox team has grown from just me to a much larger team this year and the latest addition to the team is our virtual assistant, Jennifer. Delegation, my experience this year, has shown me is one of the cornerstones of business success and here are my top four (amongst the hundreds!) of reasons why I love my VA, and why you should consider delegating more.

Share below the top reason you love your VA.

1. Jennifer does all the admin and support involved in running webinars, teleseminars, blogging, article writing, tweeting and all those other tasks, which frees me up to do what I do best – big picture, strategic thinking, delivering my webinars, and working with my 1:1 clients. And she does them far better, and far more efficiently than I can ever do – after all, that’s what she does best. The key here is to know what you do best, play to your strengths, and let others help you out by playing to theirs.

2. Jennifer lives and works in the US. This means she’s answering your questions on the JigsawBox Support desk while I’m at the pub. What’s not to like there?

3. Having Jennifer has forced me to systematise my business. In order to train her I’ve had to think through the processes and the ways I run my business and get all that stuff out of my head and into Word. But more importantly, she now creates the processes for me as we do them. So as we come up with new ideas in the business, Jennifer is busily taking screenshots of ‘how things are done around here’. If she, or I go under a bus, the business will be OK.

4. Having Jennifer (and Emma, our other support desk helper) means I can go on holiday and take a real break. Looking after yourself is a key part of growing a successful business. I’m certainly not perfect at this by any means, but this year, for the first time, I was able to take a proper break this Summer. Seriously – what would it mean to you to take a proper holiday (or indeed all Summer off) and still have your business run efficiently without you? Along with creating passive income streams, delegation is a key part of this strategy.

All of these reasons mean my business has truly taken off this year – taking on Jennifer and Emma have been one of my best investments this year – thanks ladies!! (Now I’m off to ask Jennifer to format and post this blog post – do you think she’ll blush!!?)

So share below – why do you love your VA?