Ep39 Transcript: How to Leverage Your Time with Virtual Assistants – Quick Fix Friday

Andrea Vahl: How do you get more done in today? You have someone else do it. In today’s quick fix Friday, I’m going to talk about how to leverage your time using virtual assistants.

Hello dreamers. Welcome to the Late Starters Club, giving you the inspiration mindset and tools you need to start something midlife and beyond. Remember, it’s never too late to follow your dreams.

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In episode 37, Dennis Yu was on a mission to create 1 million jobs, mostly by training virtual assistants in different areas of the world like Pakistan, Kosovo, and the Philippines. Now, I want to just touch on a couple of things for you, late starters in life. I definitely suggest that becoming a virtual assistant, is a great business to start if you are interested in doing something new and aren’t sure what to do, you’ve got some skills, maybe some digital marketing skills, some online skills, maybe writing skills, other types of things like that, because virtual assistants are needed in all different areas. People sometimes prefer to work with someone local so that they can talk to them in person. People could also prefer to work with someone overseas because they can get things done in the nighttime hours. So they wake up and everything is finished for them. So if you are thinking of starting something new and aren’t sure what to do, I think a virtual assistant is a great option.

But I also want to dive into how to leverage virtual assistance because I think as late starters, you might have some disposable income and you want to go a little bit faster with your new business and hiring other people is a great option. You don’t have to hire someone full-time. They could just work for you 5 or 10 hours a week or on a project basis and you can get things done faster.

So I’m going to give some tips based on my 13 years of working with virtual assistants and team members on how to best leverage those virtual assistants to get you more time.

The first tip is to have a repeatable task, something that you’re doing in your business all the time that you can then hand off to someone else.

This can sometimes be a challenge if your business is just getting off the ground and maybe you don’t have a system in place for doing certain things, but you’re certainly doing things like maybe blog posting, or maybe you’re editing videos, or maybe you’re creating images and you’re not as good at creation as someone else might be or as fast as someone else might be. That might be a perfect task to give to someone else. That was one of the first things I hired out was creating images cuz I’m not a great designer.

Another great task I hired out was accounting. Cause I definitely don’t do that.

Your step number two is to document that system you have. This is a really important step because this document that you create for this system is going to be a living and breathing document as you find little hiccups that come up in the road.

So for example, I have this podcast and my team member Sarah is really helping me get this all systematized. So I create the content and she does all the things like load the podcast up, create the images for the podcast, edit the show notes, and send out the reels and post for the podcasts.

And as we go along, we find maybe a little tweak that needs to be made. Maybe something gets through that is a mistake and we want to make sure to add that into the system to check the image, check the name on the image, something like that. And the beautiful thing about this is that I’m freed up to just create the content and everything else is taken care of. So now I can do the other tasks in my business such. Connecting with the guest, doing the actual interviews and creating these little follow up videos while wearing wigs.

I do love to wear wigs, but you have to be on the YouTube channel to see it.

Step number three is to use a tool to communicate your tasks. I definitely don’t like email for communicating because the thred of that conversation is not always easy to follow up on, and it allows you to see a little bit more progress if you’re using a tool. So I like the tools, Asana or Slack or Trello, one of those, even just a Google Chat can be helpful so that you’re not doing everything through email.

Step number four is to evaluate and give feedback. I think this is really important and critical so that your assistant or your team member knows what types of things you like, don’t like, the way you like to work,things like that. And it allows you and your teammate to get better and better with that system.

So now let’s talk about the types of things you can outsource that you may not have thought about. Things like video editing and social media posts are some of the top things that I like to outsource, cuz those can be very time consuming.

But you can also outsource things like blog post writing. Your email marketing, maybe sales follow ups, or maybe even getting systems in place to make everything easier. For example, I have a podcast intake form that allows people to schedule their own podcast time. It allows me to control when people can schedule their time. And then I also have questions that people can review and that is all systematized, so it requires as little back and forth communication and makes the whole process easier.

Another thing I have a team member for is help with monitoring and creating ad campaigns. So one of my businesses is to manage ad campaigns for clients. I manage Facebook, Instagram, Google, YouTube, and other types of campaigns. And what I’ve done is create a system around that. So when the client comes in, we get the information from them, we’re able to design the campaign in a Google Doc, then we know that we need to create the images and the text. And another, Sarah on my team I have, I like Sarah’s I guess, also does that work.

So she is monitoring the campaigns each day. She’s creating reports for me. She’s helping to load the campaigns up into Facebook, Google, Instagram, wherever it needs to be. And it’s really helpful so that I can be freed up to connect a little bit more with the clients and potential clients.

So anytime you have some sort of system that can make your business easier, that allows you to outsource that system to team members and grow even more.

Hope that was helpful, and make sure you grab the free guide. Top Tools for Late Starters on the website at latestartersclub.com and let’s turn dreaming into doing.