How do you know when you are ready to hire a Virtual Assistant? What steps do you take to get started? I asked myself these questions and more. I also had some pretty common fears around outsourcing and bringing on outside help.
In this video I share with you how I recognised the need to outsource. How I overcame my fears, mistakes I made and solutions to help prevent them. The steps I took to get started and why outsourcing at the right time to a virtual assistant makes good business sense.
If you prefer to read, below is the transcription of the video for your reading pleasure.
Are you thinking about hiring help? Hiring staff, employees, contractors in your business but you're not sure if it's the right time yet? I'm going to tell you how I knew it was time and what I did to get started. So stick around.
Hi, I'm Nerin from Positively Sorted and I help small businesses to grow by simplifying their workload. Admin, websites, email marketing, the technical spreadsheety stuff, all of that sort of too hard, techy, fiddly, complex stuff. My team and I can help with that. I also help people that aren't sure about getting started with virtual assistants and to tell you a bit more about how to do it.
So how do you know when it's time to get help in your business?
For me, I knew it was time when a few things happened. This was about 18 months ago, so things have changed a bit, or a lot since then. But at the time, I was running out of hours in the day and still had potential new clients coming to me that I really wanted to help. I would hear the things that they wanted help with and go, "Ooh, I could do that!" But I did not have enough hours in the day. I was getting pretty stressed and at risk of burning out.
I wasn't really keeping up very well with marketing and the admin behind the scenes stuff for my own business. All the client work took priority and my stuff was just falling way behind. If some of those clients dropped off, because I wasn't doing any more marketing there wasn't necessarily any potential new clients in the pipeline sort of thing.
The only way I could really create more hours in the day that would work for me (I'm not one that works till midnight or weekends and things like that), the only way that I could do it was to actually find someone to help me. Plus, with the full roster of clients, I had the income then at that stage to pay for somebody to help. Which in the past, even though I'd love the idea of having a VA or someone to help, I really didn't have an income to cover that. So now I did and I knew that that person coming onboard to help would actually be able to help me increase my income again.
So I thought, "right, it's time."
So then where do you start?
I definitely wasn't ready to actually hire an employee full time, or even part time, and while I did have systems and tools in place that I used for myself to stay on top of things and keep organised, I didn't have a lot of it documented. To get somebody else on board and to know what happens when and how and in the way I like things done, I didn't have any of that set up so it would be crazy busy just to start! I knew I wasn't going to have a heap of time to train somebody.
In case you didn't know, a lot of people do know now, but you don't have to hire an actual employee and hire actual staff. With a virtual assistant, and there's many different forms of virtual assistants - I've covered that in a different video - you can hire a virtual assistant full time or part time for a set number of hours but you can also just get them to do an hour here or there or just a certain task you need doing. I've got one client that I do her email out to her list once a month approximately. That's all I do for her. That's all she needs right now. It can be as little or as much as you want. Especially when you're first getting started with getting that help.
It can actually be really handy to start with just one little thing. Take that off your plate, get that going and then add more. Especially when you've been slogging away at everything all by yourself, it can sometimes be hard to imagine letting someone else do some of this stuff so it definitely makes sense to start with small steps.
What I did was I actually started out through another local small business who had an assistant that was helping her, that she was like, "Hey, she can help you too." I'd worked with her a little bit before so I trusted her and they were able to jump straight in.
The biggest thing that she probably helped with to start with was actually getting some of those processes documented. I would explain, "Hey, this is what I want to do. This is how I need it done". She would do the task and at the same time document the steps that she was doing so that we'd have that for next time. If it's something that happens repeatedly but maybe not necessarily every day, it's very handy to have those steps documented to look back at to remember how do it.
So that got me started and gave me a good feel for having somebody to help.
We did have a little hiccup at the start and it was a great lesson for me. Starting with small tasks was a benefit, in that it didn't have a huge dramatic effect when we did have a hiccup. Basically, I learnt how important communication is, both with your clients and with your team members. I was like, "Why isn't she coming back to me? Why isn't this getting done?" And she was over there thinking, "I don't know when she wants it done." It was a good wake up call for me to go, "right, this is what I would like, if I give you a task, let me know if you can do it and if you can do it by this date." Setting those expectations and boundaries, once we got that going, everything ran like clockwork. That was one of those things that you have to learn the hard way to make it stick.
I got more comfortable with delegating. To start with it was probably only a couple of hours a week. Then as I got comfortable delegating more work and had more work coming in, we actually found that this particular assistant and that business didn't really have the hours available to help me as much as I wanted. So we were like, "Yep, cool, that's all good, I'll find someone else that has more hours," and they were happy with that too.
Then it was a bit more of a process of figuring out how many hours I needed. Whether I wanted to have somebody help out for a set amount of hours, or someone local or overseas. There are pros and cons for all of those and I'm going to talk about them in another video because I think there is definite ins and outs of all of those different parts of the decision making. Then some of the resources I used to help me make those decisions and help me interview potential assistants. I'm going to talk about those very soon, so keep an eye out!
I'd love to hear from you.
Where you are at on the scale of needing help? Have you hired a VA before and how did it go? Did you have any hiccups like I did? Or are you not quite sure where to start and have more questions? Let me know in the comments below!
