H.Y.V.A. and Save Time™

Hiring a Virtual Assistant (VA) for your business is ONLY the first step in the process of leveraging your talent and your time. Ensuring you get the expected results from your VA, as well as setting up the working relationship between you and your virtual assistant is the main goal of the whole process.

Allow me to walk you through the details of managing your Virtual Assistant. The process is seemingly straight forward; just be aware that you also need to constantly adjust to the situation. Working with anyone – real or virtual – is a dynamic situation where adjustments need to be made at all times, every time. The key word here is resiliency.

Interacting with your Virtual Assistant is done by means of various new technologies and the internet. Setting up a virtual workspace for communicating with your VA is essential.  The tools needed are readily available and cost anything from free ($free.99) to a fraction of what it would have cost to implement 4 to 5 years ago. I am going to cover some of the basic tools that your VA needs to have set up.

Here are 3 important basic tools to set up (and how to use them):

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Hiring your own Virtual Assistant (VA) needs proper preparation and candidate selection. Making the decision to hire a VA and posting the job position online are the easiest parts of the process. The crucial parts are; choosing the right candidate, and managing the Virtual Assistant that you eventually hire. In this post, I will present to you the first part – Choosing the right candidate.

What job or tasks do you need the VA to do?

Before posting the job online, it is wise to determine the specific tasks the VA will be doing on your behalf. Knowing what task you will be asking the VA to be responsible for will give you a clear idea on the specific skill sets the job requires. List the task and the skills needed to carry out the task, and then ask yourself how many hours will be needed to carry out the task, and how much you are willing to pay for the number of hours that the job will require.

You then will have to determine if this task is a one time task, such that once the job is done, then there will be no need to repeat the job, in the future. If this is the case, then this job can be posted as a fixed price job. But if this task is part of a repetitive process within your business, then this job is classified as a weekly task that will need a fixed amount of time each week. Jobs of this type will require you to set a budget on a weekly basis to compensate the VA for doing the job.

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Earning a profit is your main business goal; your profits depend on your earnings, continuous promotion of services, network building, and deal closing.

When your business starts to grow, daily activity in running the business gets spent answering phone calls, booking orders, filling up invoices, filing all types of information and all other related paper work. Hence, keeping track of marketing strategies, business development and earnings gets out of your focus and attention. You will end up with a pile of tasks and details that just brings everything else in your life to a stand still.

Using the traditional approach

As a response to this pile up of tasks important to keep your business going, at first you might decide to use the traditional solution of hiring employees to do all the paper work and customer support. The employee you hire then reports to work 8 hours a day, Monday to Friday; you must first have in place all the necessary office equipment and furniture– which becomes an expense on your part. At the end of the day, the employee stops working, and your office closes for the night. All the needed work is restarted on the next business day.

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