You and your business are absolutely flying at the moment which is incredible. However, are you finding that it’s coming at a price? Are you working all the hours, not knowing which way to turn, and drowning in an ever-growing to do list? It’s probably time you thought about hiring a Virtual Assistant but how do you know where to start in preparing your business for working with a VA?
To start with, you could download my free Delegation Workbook which has been super helpful for some people who have enquired about how to work with me. You can download that guide here (add link)
Communication
First up, you’ll need to agree on a way to communicate with your VA. You might already be a pro at using Asana or Trello or you might want to send work through email. Your VA will help you decide the right way of communication as they might have a few ideas up their sleeves themselves. For us at Boatman Admin Services, we ask our clients not to send through work via Whatsapp or social media instant messages. This is exactly where work can get missed and that’s no good to anyone!
You can read more about how best to communicate with your VA in this blog post (add link).
Password sharing
You may want your VA to set up accounts with their login details for some of your systems however you might want to give your VA your own user name and log in. sharing passwords through emails is not recommended so think about setting up LastPass. You can set it through this system so that your VA can see the password…or not. It allows you to set up your logins and then the VA just hits a button and it does it all for you like magic!
Start to Delegate
If you’ve never worked with a VA before, you might be nervous about handing over lots of tasks straight away…and that’s fine! You’ll want to be 100% certain you can trust your VA with taking on some of your business tasks. You’ll probably have an idea of what you want to hand over already so perhaps you start with one or two tasks to delegate and once you’re confident your VA knows how to handle these, you can start to hand over more.
Know your budget
Once you start to delegate, you’ll find more and more tasks that you can discuss handing over to your VA. Be mindful however that the clock is ticking and that whilst you only pay for the hours in which the VA works, the more tasks you hand over, the quicker that clock ticks! Agree on a retainer with your VA or ask for a cap to be put on hours. A good VA will let you know how many hours you have used at the end of each week so that there are no nasty big invoices landing with you at the end of each month!
You might also find the blog on how to find the right VA for you helpful as well!
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