When you start to outsource your business, you’ll no doubt have reservations about who you can trust. You’ve spent years building your business and you don’t want someone coming in and destroying your reputation by making a silly mistake. It’s a little bit like someone looking after your baby – you want to be 100% certain you trust them!
In order to facilitate growth, you need to let go of certain tasks so that you can focus on the client attraction and fee earning tasks as CEO of your business.
We saw this quote from Stephen R. Covey and thought it summed up trust quite neatly – “In a high-trust relationship, you can say the wrong thing, and people will still get your meaning. In a low-trust relationship, you can be very measured, even precise, and they’ll still misinterpret you.”
Finding the right VA for you
There’s something to be said for trusting your gut when you’re making some initial tentative steps in finding some help. Ask your fellow business owners if they can recommend someone. Referrals are always a great place to start.
Conduct some zoom interviews – or face to face if the VA is local to you. We always find that we can tell within the first 2-3 minutes of talking to someone if they’ll make a good fit as an associate to Boatman Admin Services.
Read more about finding the right VA for you in this blog.
Access to your systems
Passwords should be shared using a password manager system such as LastPass. This means that you’re not sharing the actual password but it gives access to your systems by a simple click.
Should you and your VA part ways, you won’t have to worry about changing passwords on your systems.
Start small
Building trust, in any relationship needs to developed slowly. You need to ensure that the contract between you and your VA has a confidentiality clause in it. This means that any information shared between both parties is kept behind closed doors.
We always suggest to our new clients that we start with one or two tasks. Once your confident that we are handling this with no input from you, you can then think about other tasks to hand over. This means your to do list will start to decrease – and that’s got to be a good thing!
Make expectations clear
Your clients may not know that you have started to outsource some areas of your business so you want to ensure that tasks are done on time, in line with the brief and in a professional manner.
Be sure communicate any key elements to your VA – we’re not mind readers and we need to juggle work with other clients to ensure multiple deadlines are met.
Good communication is key!
Great communication is going to be key to making sure your outsourcing journey really works. Ensure that you have the right communication tools in place that work for you and your VA and set out clear expectations on all tasks. Effective communication is going to help your relationship and ensure that all your tasks are completed on time and without mindless error.
Ensure you have set up the right communication tools be that Slack, a project management system such as Trello or Asana or simply by email. Your Virtual Assistant might also have some boundaries in place for sending work to them. For example, we ask our clients not to send work through on Whatsapp, or social media DM’s as it can easily get missed.
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