How do you use your virtual assistant?

Question

Hi everyone.

We just hired our first virtual assistant and I have to say it's going great.  First of all it has forced us to systemetize our business, which was quite a process.  (And is still ongoing.)

My wife and I run our small portfolio of STRs and we flip 3-5 properties per year, doing much of our own contracting work.  Our virtual assistant was hired through Scale Virtually, whom we met up with at BPCon down in Cancun.  She is slowly taking over administrative tasks such as calendar and email management, contractor coordination, product research for flips, and many other things I'm not thinking of.  She's only been with us for a couple of weeks and I've been really happy with her skill set.

What I am asking for is ideas for how to use her time as wisely as possible.  For those of you with virtuals, would you be willing to share some of the non-obvious ways they help you get through your work?  I'd like to build a list of things she can do when she has completed her daily tasks.

Thanks as always for your thoughtful responses!

Max Emory · Answer

Hey @Matt Ridenour, I'll speak to the specific task of bookkeeping.

If you're going to consider having your VA take over bookkeeping tasks, ensure they're a trained bookkeeper, have experience with REI, or you have the time and skillset to teach them proper accounting practices.

I've seen having general VAs conduct bookkeeping go poorly more than I've seen it work.

Bookkeeping for REI companies is super nuanced and more complicated than other businesses so that adds to this situation.

Just my 2 cents. Glad it's going well for you guys so far and your business is becoming better as a result!

Matt Ridenour · Answer

That's more valuable than 2 cents Max, don't sell yourself short!  :-)

Thanks for the input.  I definitely can see that we will need to work through that part, or diversify.  So far she's working on general budgeting spreadsheets and order lists.  We have an in person bookkeeper that is managing the day to day receipts.  I'd love to hand that off to a virtual, but I feel like that in itself is almost a full time job at this point.

Appreciate the value.  Have a great day!

Chris Seveney · Answer

oh yeah the weekly sync on mondays is huge. we have ours keep an excel document of KPIs for the week and on mondays we go through the goals for the week on what we need done/want accomplished - if you get someone who is not afraid to ask questions and is a doer that is awesome - many people will be "Yes" people where you ask them if thyey understand and they say yes but do it wrong - which ends up having you spend 2x as much time on it.

Matt Ridenour · Answer

Excellent thoughts thank you so much!

Max Emory · Answer

Sure thing, @Matt Ridenour! Yes, virtual receipt management requires a purely digital workflow, and some of that workflow would still be on your in-house team.

The client portal (Keeper) we use for our bookkeeping clients has a receipt snap feature. So, our clients snap the receipt in real time (if they remember) and it shoots it over to us for our team to process.

It's a minimal impact on our clients but it only works if receipts are being snapped so that's another challenge.

Best of luck!

Ryan Irwin · Answer

Much like @Chris Seveney said, mine helps me manage all of my businesses.  Sounds like you're off to a great start.  Mine does the things Chris mentioned, plus she helps me with booking travel, doing property research, book appointments, manage my calendar.  I have another VA that does my bookkeeping as well.  One thing that has been helpful is we have a weekly "sync" meeting on Monday mornings to review items from the prior week, along with for the upcoming week, communicate priorities, responsibilities, projects and priorities.  Often times on these sync meetings, ideas come up and it becomes a collaboration on how my VA can assist or gives me an idea I hadn't thought of before.  Then throughout the week, we both refer back to the sync notes.

Adam Corrigan · Answer

Highly recommend the book “Buy Back Your Time” by Dan Martell, lots of great ideas on how to decide which tasks to delegate and how to structure your SOPS (he calls them playbooks)

Ryan Irwin · Answer

They are different companies.  I don't have a weekly sync meeting with my bookkeeping VA, however, regular communication.  When it comes to specialized tasks, I have found it makes sense to have more than one.  Can hire/pay less for a VA to do basic level tasks, vs more skills required for higher end tasks.

Matt Ridenour · Answer

That weekly meeting is a good way to get the team in the same head space.  Do your VAs come from the same company/time zone?  I can see how 1 could grow into 2 pretty easily at even a little more scale.

Chris Seveney · Answer

I would give it a bit longer than a few weeks - but we continue to have ours increase their responsibility - they manage our social media accounts, assist with putting documents in docusign/digital signature, they prepare spreadsheets for us to acquire assets, create presentations. We have a standard tasks each day that must be done then for filler work we have lots of other tasks for them from research, to marketing to data entry.

How do you use your virtual assistant?

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