How Supporting Your Virtual Assistants Can Help Your Business Grow
Do you want to spend more time doing the things that you love in your business? Do you want to skip doing the time-consuming tasks and focus on the big picture? It's time that you get a Virtual Assistant to support you. As your business grows, you'll likely need more help. Using a virtual assistant helps you to free up your time so you can focus on the core areas of your business. It allows you to spend time doing the work that you do best and love in your business.
Don't sweat the small stuff and outsource your administrative tasks to your virtual assistant so that you and your business can grow without burning out.
Here are three reasons why you should listen to the full episode:
- Know the key mistakes business owners make when working with a VA and how you can avoid them.
- Learn the magic question that helps you find out if your VA really understands what you just delegated.
- Learn the exact strategies that we use to support our VAs to show initiative and come up with really great ideas to grow the business.
LISTEN NOW:
WATCH NOW (and check out the Resources and Episode Highlights below):
Resources
- The Influence Alliance — A business-building community for changemakers who want to build a sustainable and scalable business they love.
- The Influence Alliance Free Podcast Series
- Are you struggling to be known as a trusted authority in your industry? Schedule a chat with Annemarie at help@annemariecross.com.
- Connect with Carmen: Website | Twitter| LinkedIn | EMail | Instagram
Episode Highlights
[2:34] Hiring and Managing Virtual Teams
- Running a team that you've never met before successfully requires a set of awareness, skills, and tools. Having a deep connection with your team members also makes a great impact.
- Oftentimes, as business owners or entrepreneurs, you can end up creating more challenges because you don't have the right things in place to support, onboard, and continue the relationship with your team. To prevent this key mistake, Carmen suggests that business owners should start by scoping the role.
- When hiring a team, it's important to think about what skillset you need as a business owner and how are you going to build that role to better suit one person's skill set. Skills develop and evolve especially now that we are in the digital age.
[7:11] Build a Healthy Relationship with your Virtual Assistant and Nurture it
- There is always the chance that your virtual assistant might leave especially if they found a greener pasture. This is why building a deeper connection is crucial. If they leave on good terms, they can stay around, train, and provide support for the next virtual assistant.
- Treat your virtual assistants with respect. Have an open mind that the person behind the screen is also human too can make mistakes, and allow them to fix them. Always have open and honest communication and set proper expectations.
- Small talks can make a huge difference in building the connection between you and your virtual assistant. Learn their love language. Show gratitude for a job well done.
[9:38] Set Processes and Document Everything
- Have a record of the task, especially the recurring tasks, and keep a detailed procedure or steps on how to complete it so you can guide someone through it.
- As tasks become too repetitive for your virtual assistant, they may figure out a way to make the task more effective and efficient, you can then ask them for suggestions and ideas on how you can improve the processes.
- Have an open mind and patience, especially during the training process. Be available to answer any questions and provide ongoing feedback.
[13:16] Delegating Tasks to your Virtual Assistant
- To decide which tasks to delegate to your virtual assistant, you have to know your own strengths and weaknesses. Find out what tasks take up most of your time, and what tasks you dislike doing.
- Prepare clear instructions, go into details, and think about what information your virtual might need to do what you want them to do.
- When you delegate, you can facilitate and create some more structure. Instead of asking your Virtual assistant if they understood the steps, you can ask them what they understood and ask them what they think the next steps are.
- There are lots of ways to delegate. However, Carmen encourages business owners to delegate face-to-face at the start to build a relationship with their virtual assistants.
[28:00] How a Project Manager Can Help
- A project manager is someone who can integrate between you as the owner of the business and the rest of your team. Someone who oversees the team, and the projects. You can look for someone in your team who has shown leadership potential, nurture and support them in the role.
- Having managers help team efficiency. If you have a meeting, and especially if you are making big or strategic decisions for your business, you only need your managers. It's not necessary to have all the team members present.
- It's important that all department managers talk to one another and work together. Each induvial team has to function together.
10 Powerful Quotes
[4:19] “It starts with the scoping. So often I speak to business owners who fantasize about getting support for their business for a long time, and they come to me with this massive list of all these things they want support in, which is good and well, but what really needs to happen is to scope the role well. So you wouldn't hire someone in Australia that is a unicorn and can do everything magically in your business. Like we know those people don't exist. ”
[4:58] “Most business owners, when they come to me wanting their first virtual assistant, they sometimes want this creative genius, but what they actually need is a detail-oriented, consistent person. Because if they're anything like me, I am not those things, but I get value from getting support from those sort of people in my team.”
[6:30] “Find someone who you know is really skilled but also love the work.”
[7:01] “Whenever you got people working in your business, obviously there are some times where, it doesn't work for either party. And there've been instances where some of the virtual assistants are moving on to bigger and greater things.”
[9:30] “Small business is messy. Let's just say it. We've got 200 processes within our business and, we've got hundreds and hundreds to go. So our business is not perfect either in terms of processes, but there's things you can do to get your virtual assistant up and running.”
[12:37] “Some people might be a bit embarrassed about the state of where things at. I don't expect people to be perfect. I don't need our business owners or our virtual assistance to be perfect, but I just need them to be open to improving, to doing the work, to having conversations, to tweaking how things happen to get the results.”
[18:36] “We love entrepreneurship because of the ability to create a project and then go with it. One of the areas that we struggle with is the follow through, which is why we need a strong team of wonderful VAs, who are our team members who will do the follow through with us or for us.”
[19:15] “So I really think people get a bit scared because of ‘the virtual systems from the Philippines and what about the culture it's different to here and whatever', and yeah, sure. there are differences but the variation within a culture is I think, larger than the variation between cultures.”
[21:44] “A small thing can be really impactful. Acknowledge them at the side of the day, Acknowledge them at the end of the day. And if you've got a large team already, it might not be you doing this. It might be your existing team, loving the rest of your team too.”
[22:28] ” What this really goes down to is, and it just should be something that as business owners/founders we should know, just be nice. Show compassion, be a nice person. That person on the other end of the slack channel or zoom is someone who really can support your team. Treat them with respect that you would expect for yourself too.”
About Carmen
Carmen was once a high achieving scientist who started university at 16. She gave all that up to be a semi-broke entrepreneur with big ideas but no clue about how to implement them. These days she owns a very successful VA business with a team of over 82 talented people, supporting Australian business owners to get stuff done.
You can connect with Carmen thru her Website | Twitter| LinkedIn | EMail | Instagram
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