Finding the perfect virtual assistant for your business needs can be daunting. Even more so when you are choosing to go the way of hiring an offshore virtual assistant. This is one area in which it pays to do your research and to spend time on working out exactly what you need:
The hours you require,
the budget you have to spend,
the tasks that you need actioned by the virtual assistant,
what skills they would need to have to be able to complete your tasks etc.
Once you have a clear outline of you budget, hours and tasks, you are then faced with diving into the many, many virtual assistant options available to you. In the below video I share my experience in searching for an offshore virtual assistant, to help clarify some of the options out there. I share the different options I looked at, the pros and cons for each, and which path I ultimately chose and why. Learn from my experience so you can find your perfect offshore virtual assistant for YOUR business!
For those who prefer to read, below is the transcript of the video:
Hey, it's Nerin here from Positively Sorted. We help busy small businesses to simplify their digital and admin workloads so they can outsource the tricky stuff, whether it's to us or someone else, and do more of what they love!
Recently I did a video about local versus overseas virtual assistants. If you go back and have a look at that video, I talk about how I think there's a time and place for both. So while at the moment I'm all for local VAs because it's something that I'm doing and am able to do, when you're first starting out I think there's a time and a place for using cheaper overseas virtual assistants just to get you up and running. You might be thinking about that going, "Oh God, where do I start? How do I find an offshore virtual assistant?" Well, there's a few ways you can do it.
I'll tell you a bit about what I saw when I was looking for my offshore virtual assistant. The pros and cons of some of the different options.
What I saw as my two main, overall options were:
Looking on sites like Upwork, which is kind of like a job board.
You can search and there are thousands of options of different types of virtual assistants. Different expertise's, different levels, different costs. You can find a pretty cheap assistant on there but for me it was kind of like a needle in a haystack. It was just too many options with no real way of knowing how good they were going to be without a bit of trial and error. There is going to be trial and error anyway, but it was all a bit daunting! It was a bit more direct to that person that you were going to be working with also.The other option, that I went for for a number of reasons, is a virtual assistant agency.
There are actually a lot of virtual assistant agencies around now. They often have an office in Australia so it's someone local that you can talk to and it's that local Australian company that's invoicing you. You're not having to worry about exchange rates or how to transfer money to somebody overseas. They handle all of that for you. They also handle all of the HR stuff. For me that was a huge pro. All I had to do was give the virtual assistant agency a list of the types of tasks that I wanted help with. That's obviously the number one thing you need to know before you start - what you need help with and about how many hours you think you need.
A VA agency was the main option that I was looking at when I was looking to hire a regular offshore virtual assistant. Once you narrow that down there are a few main options within an agency.
There are different types of agencies that do things differently. The three main, how I sort of broke it down, was there are some that will set you up with:
a full time assistant,
ad-hoc, flexible hours
a part time assistant.
Full Time Assistant
So 40 hours a week. It's the same amount each month but you need to have that volume of work to give to them. So with that option it was a really good hourly rate.
The other thing you'll find with agencies is that the hourly rate sort of starts slightly higher than if you were to go direct because they're taking their little cut out of it. They're managing a heap in between yourself and your virtual assistant though so it's worthwhile.
The pros of having a full time 40 hour a week assistant are that you build a working relationship, working with them that amount of time. They become a proper team member and they're 100% working for you so they're always available to you.
You can set up routines and get more into a bit of a flow, whereas if they were working partly for you and partly for somebody else you've sort of got to manage when they're available to you.
The cons on the other side of having a full time assistant is the cost. And for me the stress of finding enough work for them at that stage that I was at wasn't worthwhile. It was a good option if you do have enough work. The hourly rate is pretty good.
Ad-Hoc Assistant
Another agency I found was a lot more flexible with what hours you could work with them. I call this sort of the ad hoc. They did like you to specify how many hours a week you wanted. But it could've been five hours a week or it could've been more. They had a sliding scale of the more hours, the cheaper the hourly rate. The less hours, it costs a bit more per hour. If that's all you needed, that was a nice flexible option.
The pros for that ad hoc option, is that it is more flexible and easier to start small especially when you're just getting started. It also wasn't a huge investment of dollars or time for that matter.
The cons for that were more that they were juggling work for other people as well, so you sort of had to give them stuff with enough time that they could fit it into their schedule. Also, it's a bit harder to get into a a routine with working with somebody if it's less hours and the hourly rate was higher for that.
Part Time Assistant
Then the third option for agency offshore virtual assistants was a part-time setup. It may have been 20 hours a week or 10 hours a week. The guys I worked with at least were ideally 20 hours a week and this is that good in-between option. This is where I ended up because it fit what I needed.
The pros for the part-time agency option were that you didn't have to have 40 hours of worth of work for somebody to do each week. It wasn't as big a time investment and it wasn't as big a dollar investment as far as price. The price per hour was as you'd expect. A bit more than if you were going with a full time but less than if you were just going with the flexible sort of five, ten hours a week. It was actually every day for four hours a day that I ended up working with my assistant.
With the part-time virtual assistant agency option, you can get into a routine and you build that relationship working with the same person every day. I didn't need to stress about the money as much. She was always, always available in the mornings if something came up that day that needed to be done. I could say, "here, can you do this right now?" That was a great advantage for me. The part-time agency offshore virtual assistant option is what I ended up going with.
If you're interested in who these companies were that I was talking to, because I spoke to at least one company in each of these categories, if you're interested in who they were give me a shout in the comments and I'll share them with you.
They would invoice me each month. If I had any questions about the HR side of things, there was somebody specific that I could talk to. I didn't necessarily have to have uncomfortable conversations with my assistant straight up, especially being new to it all. Communication is very important though!
The other thing an agency sometimes gives you is a bit more of an eye on what somebody's doing.
If you're new to working with an assistant, sometimes you might be worried about "Oh are they doing what they say they are doing?" They're in a whole other country. It's a bit daunting!
The full time offshore virtual assistant agencies that I spoke to actually had an office that all the VAs go to that office and work for the day. So there's a manager there keeping an eye on them. They clock in and clock out. So it's kind of like a job for them. They're just in another country.
Some also have an app that they use that takes screenshots of their computer every however often, I can't remember. I had access to this app and I could actually go in and have a look at those screenshots to see what was on their screen (I didn't do it very often!) to see what they were working on. They had a like a time tracking thing. They had to put what they were working on, when, and clock in and clock out still but it was just remote.
My VA worked from her home but she still was logged into the agencies' software so you could still keep an eye on what she was doing. That's another benefit if you're worried about that.
Hopefully that gives you an idea of some of the different options that are out there for working with an offshore virtual assistant. There's probably heaps more options out there now. It was about 12 to 18 months ago as I'm filming this, that I was looking into it. There's probably even more options and different ways of doing it now. That was a fair range of options at the time still.
So have a look. It is a bit of a task weighing up what's going to work for you. I don't say "this is the best way to do it", because it totally depends what's going to suit you, your situation, your budget, how much work you've got, the type of work you've got.
I'd love to hear from you.
If you have questions definitely stick them in the comments below and I'll answer them as best that I can from my experience. Or do you have some tips of your own that you could share with us? If you have had any other experiences or found your offshore virtual assistant in a different way, please, I would love to hear about that too. Everybody else would be keen to get any extra input I'm sure! Let us know in the comments below!
