Have you Hired a Virtual Assistant?

Question

Thinking of hiring a virtual assistant to help with recordkeeping of my husband's home building business and my rental property. Who has utilized a VA before and where/how did you find the VA? Any tips as far as successfully onboarding the VA? Separate but related note-- do you have your mail scanned and if so, which company do you use to do this? Looking at working smarter not harder!!

Peter Tverdov · Answer

I have one full time VA that started off part time. She answers all of our office phone calls, prepares lease renewals, coordinates all lease showings, enters vendor bills on our software and also does some monthly reviews of insurance and COs. Lives in Mexico. Best move I ever made.

Jonathan Greene · Answer

VAs can be great for your business, but you have to be very specific about exactly what you want and then look for those skills on Upwork. You also have to train them to do exactly what you want and review their work every day to start. Half of the VA failures (or more) or because of lack of training, not bad VAs.

Scott M. · Answer

Yes.  Like hiring locally you will find great amazing folks and terrible ones too.  You need to be set up for it as well with cloud based documents and processes and of course just like local training is key.  Must have detailed instructions as you are not going to be there to talk with them....working remotely as a lot of people have learned in the last 2 years is great, but it does have its challenges.

Train train train and know if you first few are terrible, move on and find the rock star, they are out there.

Charles Carillo · Answer

@Ashley Allen

We have been utilizing VAs in our business for 10+ years. You can use websites like UpWork.com to find VAs to outsource these and other tasks to. Start off with a couple outsourced tasks and then keep adding to them.

Bob Lachance · Answer

Hey @Ashley Allen I have experience using VAs in my business, will send you a pm regarding this!