FREQUENTLY ASKED QUESTIONS

A Virtual Assistant (VA) is a business owner, not an employee, who specialises in undertaking admin tasks for their clients, who might be a small business or an independent contractor. As the title Virtual Assistant implies, they work remotely, not at their client’s offices.

A VA is often someone who has already had a career as a PA or EA, often working at a senior level e.g. for C-suite executives or senior management and has an immense amount of experience at providing high-level, professional admin support.

They have now taken the decision to work for themselves, happily giving up the commute to the office, and use their experience to support a number of small businesses, organisations and individuals. While this gives a VA greater flexibility to work around their own family and personal life, it would be wrong to think they are now only working with a part-time attitude.

For most VAs, VA services is their full-time business, and they are committed to providing professional support to each of their clients, in the same way they did when working 1:1 for their employers.

In a nutshell, a Virtual Assistant (VA) provides admin services to businesses, remote from their office (virtually), handling specific admin tasks as agreed with their client.

This allows their client to focus 100% on doing the things that will help grow their business, e.g. working with clients, developing products and services, without the distractions of recurring admin tasks.

An analogy to this could be a VA is like a golf caddy!

A golf caddy carries the bag of clubs for the golfer, they advise the layout of the hole they’re playing, they recommend which club to use. All of this allows their golfer to focus 100% on the next shot, without any other distractions.

A business owner will naturally want to focus on their core activities, the ones that will grow the business. Every company though, no matter it’s size, has its admin and repetitive tasks. The majority of these are necessary to keep everything running smoothly on a day-to-day basis. 

However many small businesses, particularly in the early stages of growth don’t have the luxury of staff to cover every position. The upshot is the business owner, entrepreneur, Managing Director or any other senior member of the company ends up doing the admin themselves.

The consequences are usually one of the following:

• Admin takes over and becomes the priority. This stifles business growth; you have less time for activities that generate income and less energy for clients.
• You focus on the service to your clients and growing your business but much of the admin doesn’t get done (causing problems later). Emails, enquiries and deadlines are missed. The diary isn’t up to date, meaning meetings are forgotten or double booked. Or, you spend your evenings and weekends catching up, which is not much fun.
• You try to do both, which results in compromises all round. Neither your business nor the admin gets the full attention needed.

A Virtual Assistant provides a whole range of VA services, handling as much or as little of the admin as you want, allowing you to focus on the service to your clients and business growth.

Your VA can bring emails and enquiries to your attention, keep on top of any deadlines and your diary up to date.

There are no compromises, both your business and admin get the necessary attention.

The range of VA services a Virtual Assistant can help with can be extensive. Some will cover a broad range of admin tasks while others specialise in specific areas.

The following is a list of the typical tasks a VA could handle but of course this is not exhaustive:

Of course we’re going to say the benefits of working with a Virtual Assistant are endless but let’s look at a few reasons that you may be able to relate to:

Financial

If you were to employ a PA or admin assistant, not only would you be paying their salary, but you will also be paying additional employment costs, e.g. employers National Insurance and pension contributions, along with holiday and sick pay.

Hiring a Virtual Assistant, you are only paying for the hours they work for you; the National Insurance and pension costs are their responsibility, and you don’t pay them if they are on holiday or off sick.

Time and Productivity

By working with a VA for the more routine admin tasks, you are freeing up more quality time to focus on what you do best, the core activities to grow your business.

Admin and repetitive tasks are huge time stealers for entrepreneurs and small business owners. For some clients, just having the time for some clear head space makes all the difference.

Flexibility

You choose the VA services you want your Virtual Assistant to work on, how many tasks or how few, depending on both your workload and budget. Some clients want their VAs to work on specific tasks only, while others set a maximum number of hours per week.

It’s also a flexible way to grow your team without the risk, commitment and legal obligations that come with employing people full-time.

Adding a professional image to your clients

This is a by-product of working with a VA, it enhances your professional image to your clients, e.g.

• Your VA can be the point of contact for your clients
• Your clients see your business as responsive, efficient and professional
• They respect your time more
• Receiving emails from your VA signed as ‘EA to John Smith’ adds to your status

And more…

Having a VA take tasks off your hands helps reduce stress, creates a clearer ‘head space’ and provides more family and leisure time.

Yes, we know hiring anyone is a challenge which takes time, and hiring a VA is no different. And if you’re already drowning in work, it’s tempting to put off looking for a VA.

This is where you have to look at your medium and long-term business goals. Do you want to grow, or do you want to always be battling with the admin, often working evenings and weekends to keep on top of things?

To grow your business, rather than running the risk of finding yourself with just another job, you’re going to need help one way or another. To find the right person and make the process as painless as possible for you, here are 4 steps to hiring the perfect VA and some further ideas to help.

4 Steps to Hiring Your Perfect VA

1. 1. The first step is to identify what tasks you want to delegate
   2. Determine the skills, expertise and experience required to carry out these tasks
   3. Create a job description. Be clear about what you are asking a VA to do.
      
      1. Include ‘must have’ and nice-to-have’ skills
      2. List all tasks your VA will be responsible for
      3. Detail all expectations
   4. Book a call with us and let’s talk

When we have an initial conversation with a new client, we want to identify:

1. How much work / time is needed (estimated) to complete the task, or tasks
2. An outline of clear instructions and expectations
3. Whether the requirement is an ongoing or one-off task and agree the timescale

With this information, we can then provide a quotation for the agreed tasks.

Ultimately, working with a VA is the same as employing a Personal / Executive Assistant. You have to be able to work together and so it’s vitally important you get on together on a personal level.

For this reason when you have your initial discussions, use Zoom, Teams or similar software. It’s a lot easier to get to know someone than on a phone call.

Don’t overlook this aspect, it’s absolutely key to the success, or otherwise, of working with your VA.

Some clients know immediately what they need assistance with. Perhaps it’s to look after their emails, diary management, organising meetings or events.

For others, they may feel they are drowning in admin and have no idea how to get this routine work done and still focus on their business. Or maybe they just want to claim back some time to spend with their family.

So how can you decide what to outsource first?

List out your background activities and re-arrange them into 3 lists:

• The tasks only you can do
• Tasks you like to do (but could delegate later)
• Everything else

From your ‘everything else’ list, pick one or two tasks that take up the most time or energy and can be outsourced easily. Outsource these first and get comfortable with the process.

Enjoy the benefits of having more time to focus on your key activities, or more time for your family before anything else. Only then look at what else could be outsourced.

You may not enjoy doing some things in your business but that doesn’t mean you should automatically outsource this work.

Anything that is a core part of your business is really part of your business’s DNA, ie what separates you from your competitors.

An example is product design, which is integral to a company’s product. While the actual manufacturing may be outsourced, the design reflects the ideas, philosophy and values of the business.

Another example is sales. Many people don’t like sales but, for a small business, the personality of the company comes from the owner or founders. They are the creative force behind the company, which will come through to customers.

An outsourced sales person/team will not have the same effect. Learn about sales until the business is big enough to employ your own sales people, who will buy into the company ethos.

Think about your core expertise and don’t outsource it.

On the other hand, outsourcing anything that saves time, allows you to focus more on your core areas of expertise, without detracting from your DNA is what many small and growing businesses are doing.

Communication is everything.

Although Virtual Assistants enjoy working independently, they also need confirmation that they are on the right track and feel they can talk to you whenever they have a question.

While the reason for hiring a VA is to free up your time to do the revenue generating stuff, make time in your diary to have at least a weekly catch up call. In the early days it will probably need to be more than this, but it will quickly settle down into a routine that suits everyone.

Also let them know your preferred ways of communication if they need to ask you something quickly.

Good communication helps a VA understand you value their help and in return, means they’ll go out of their way to do a better job for you.

Our E-book “The Small Business Owners Guide To Streamlining Their Admin” includes the chapter “7 Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring A Virtual Assistant.” Avoiding these mistakes and following the advice will go a long way to helping streamline your admin, reduce stress and enable you to focus on your business. Download your copy here.