What Can a VA Do For You
Virtual assistant duties include the same duties as an administrative assistant but they also act as a gatekeeper, making decisions about who gets access to their executive and what information they receive. This means that VAs must thoroughly understand their employer’s work. As a result, these workers can also act as a liaison between the executive and the rest of the clerical staff.
Using a virtual assistant can shave hours from your workweek, but knowing which tasks to delegate can be tricky, whether you’re starting or growing a business. Most virtual assistants are contract or freelance workers who do their jobs from home and focus on administrative tasks that are similar to those of an executive assistant or secretary. Business owners can use virtual assistants for everything from making customer service calls to sending out thank you cards to prospective clients. It’s important to build trust, just as you would with a permanent employee.
What Tasks Can I Delegate to a VA
- Email Management – duties include running email marketing campaigns end-to-end, managing email databases and creating marketing campaigns and newsletters.
- Booking appointments – contacts potential customers and arrange sales calls.
- Lead management – set up appointments and find potential clients for the sales team.
- General administration – general clerical tasks, such as drafting documents and answering telephones, as well as administrative jobs, including calendaring, scheduling and project management.
- Database management – provide database applications by developing architecture, programming, troubleshooting, and security.
- Personal errands – help with time and daily management, Hotel and Flight Booking, shopping, correspondence, creating reports, preparing presentations, transcription and note-taking.
- Liaison between team members
- Project management and recruitment
- Social Media Management
- Content and Blog Management
What Do You Need To Prepare For Before Hiring Your First VA
Hiring a VA can seem like an intimidating idea when you’re used to operating alone. You’re by no means guaranteed to perfect it the first time around, but these will give you an exceptional chance of striking gold early on.
- Openly map out and document the tasks you actually need help with.
- Expand your search to online portals.
- Be prepared to pay for value, but screen candidates rigorously.
- Always go with a sample project prior to hiring.
- Don’t expect miracles post-hire. You’ll need to work at the relationship to really dial it in.
If you have limited experience hiring virtual staff, here are some things to keep in mind as you learn to outsource.
Let go of the reins a little.
If we want to learn how to delegate we must first learn to let go. The world is not going to explode, no one is going to die and your business isn’t going to implode on itself if you just loosen your grip on the reins.
Figure out what makes money and what doesn’t. Leave the latter to your VA.
Oftentimes we don’t know how to delegate because we have no idea what we would actually hand off to another person.
If you’re not even sure what goes on in your business each day track it for a couple of weeks. Then, take a highlighter and mark everything that could easily be handed off if and when you hire your first virtual assistant. You can start with the stuff you hate to do.
Become aware of when you are trying to do everything yourself.
Set an alarm each hour. When the alarm goes off scan any activities you did within that hour that you could have delegated. Eventually, you won’t really need the alarm and you’ll start catching yourself in the act. At that point just stop what you’re doing and delegate it to someone else.
