After reading our last blog on how to find the right Virtual Assistant, you’ve welcomed a new team member to your most trusted circle but what happens next?
The ball should be in the court of the VA which is good news for you – you’ve done the hard work up until this point. Most importantly, they should send you a contract before anything else happens. Ensure that this contains clauses including confidentiality, GDPR, data and IP.
Every VA has a different onboarding process where they’ll send you a contract, T&C’s, perhaps an onboarding form and a boundaries document.
Ideally, you’ll want to set up your VA with their own email address. This is really important for your VA to feel inclusive to your business and part of your team. It will also show your clients that you are expanding your business and they won’t be confused if they receive emails from a random email address saying they are part of your team.
You’ll be asked to share your logins and passwords for the various programmes you use e.g. Mailchimp, Hootsuite etc. Most VA’s use Lastpass for this as it’s safe and secure and you don’t actually give your passwords away.
Don’t expect a miracle overnight. We normally advise our new clients that it takes a good 2-3 months to really get into a rhythm with your VA and understand each other and for the VA to understand your business. Of course, nobody will ever understand your business as much as you! Remember that the VA might be able learning new software systems to if there is any training they can do, that will really help them.
It won’t be long until you’re passing more and more tasks over to your VA as their understanding and confidence grows. You could feasibly save 5 – 30 hours a month if you really think about what you need to delegate.
A couple of secret tips:
- Communication is key when you work with a VA.
- Be sure to give as much detail as possible, especially in the early days.
- If there is a deadline on a task, let your VA know!
- You might want to set up Trello or Asana so that all the tasks are in one place.
- Try not to micro manage. Again, this is harder to master in the early days; your business is your pride and joy but once you’ve built up trust you’ll soon be able to let your VA crack on
Congratulations on finding a new addition to your team – we’re sure you’ll feel like a weight has been lifted and the opportunity to get some valuable time back to allow you to focus on client work, growing your business and getting new client work in will be amazing!
