Best Practices for Hiring a Virtual or Executive Assistant

When is it time to hire a VA? Or some people call them EA’s, executive assistant or virtual assistant and when is it time? I would ask you, how busy are you? Do you get done at the end of the day and think, “I can’t get it all done, can’t do it, or how am I going to,” – or you’re thinking, “How am I going to improve this part of my business or that part? When am I going to have time to work on those things?” I would say, “Well, you need a VA.” Probably needed one a long time ago and I would say, throughout your day, write down the things that you find that somebody else could do. Just as you're doing tasks, there are so many things that other people could be doing for you or somebody else that’s qualified. There’s probably many tasks that someone else could do a lot better than you that you're trying to get done every day. They’ll have a specific skill possibly that they can complete a task a lot faster than you and make it a lot better and so that’s something I want you to be thinking about throughout your day, what are you working on, what are you doing that you could hand of to somebody else? Write those things down, at least be thinking about that throughout your day.

Listen to full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/09/ws330-best-practices-for-hiring-a-virtual-or-executive-assistant-with-whitney-sewell/

Another one, how do I know what task to give them? How do I know what they can do? Well, you can find VA’s to do almost anything that can be done on a computer. They’re working from all over the world. You can hire people in the country or internationally as well and they can be anywhere, if it can be done on the computer then they could be doing this task for you, for the most part. I’m sure there’s certain sensitive things that can’t be done or hired out that you as the executive or CEO or what have you, the owner probably need to have eyes on or to handle personally. But there’s many tasks that you can start to hand off to somebody else. I’ve seen a post this past week where people are even handing off doing their laundry or hiring people to go get their groceries and that’s not a virtual assistant, but it’s still hiring out tasks. I hadn’t even thought about those things until I read this post. Still hiring out things to get time back. That’s what’s so important to us is getting that time back and handing these things of so we can spend our time on the most valuable tasks. Or either the most valuable things that are so important to us like spending time with our family or kids. That’s why this VA is going to help you so much and help you to be more organized.

How long should it take for them to complete a task? I wanted to go back to how do I know what tasks to give them and I said that so many things that you can hand of other than sensitive things and you’re going to figure that out as you go through the day and even as you grow in your business, you’re going to find other things. How long should it take them to do those tasks? Well, most tasks are going to have a variety of time amounts that it’s going to take, but you have to decide what the priority tasks are. You know, how long should they spend on something and how good does something need to be? We have certain specific tasks that are top priority and these need to be done the best that we can possibly do them. My VA’s know that okay, these are very important, these need to get done right away, these are top priority, anytime we see this task, or something like this — they know, something we’re always improving. You know, there’s new task that come along as your business grows and as you’re going through your daily routines, there’s different tasks that come up and that’s how you get better and that’s how your VA’s get better as well. But there’s new things that they have to learn and there’s new things you’re going to make sure that they know how to do. You have to decide how long should the spend on this task? Is this something that as long as it’s getting done, it’s going to push us forward. Is it going to make a difference that, you know, on a scale from one to 10 that it’s a 10 every time or if it’s a seven over time, we’re still going to get just as far? There’s specific things that are okay not to be a 10 every time. It’s not worth me paying that assistant to make it a 10.

Listen to full episode: https://lifebridgecapital.com/2019/09/ws330-best-practices-for-hiring-a-virtual-or-executive-assistant-with-whitney-sewell/