The Ultimate Guide to Hiring Your First Virtual Assistant

To date, I have taken the most people off of the gym floor or out of their corporate jobs and fully online than any other mentorship that I'm aware of. And I hate bragging, but I've also turned over 11.5 million pounds over the past few years, as well as taking three of my students from zero to over a million pounds each in their own coaching businesses as well of course as having lots of coaches doing sort of 5k months, 10k, 15, 20, 30, 40k months and so on. Now this is all well and good, but how does it help you? You. You see, there's one thing that we all have in common and if the growth in your business has been slow or even maybe flatlined recently, then it could be the single missing piece that could just change the game completely and get you growing again. So what is it? It's having an assistant. My one, Sheena, has been with me for over four and a half years now and is easily one of the best hires that I have ever made in the business and I thank my lucky stars every day that I managed to find her. So in this video I'm going to run you through when you should hire one, how you should hire one, and then what you should have them help you with. Let's kick off with the when. So I have a general rule of thumb that if your coaching business is doing around, let's call it say 3k per month, then you should 100% be bringing on either a VA or an EA. So let's kick off with the when. Now, if you were doing around 3k per month, this is sort of the number that I tell most of my coaches that when they hit around that 3k, that's when they should look to bring on a virtual assistant. But, but sometimes you might have, you know, some funds you're able to reinvest in the business and ultimately you've just got to the point where there are certain things that need to get done in the business that aren't being done consistently and that's where you need somebody to roll up their sleeves and help you get the work done. This could be things that you know you should be doing every day, like welcoming your new followers, running through the DM script with people, replying to polls and stuff that people have opted into engaging with other accounts, stuff that you know day by day will help you get into more conversations and grow your coaching business. But at a certain point you're either too busy, you know, focusing on deliver with the coaching or you just don't really enjoy that side of it. And ultimately bringing somebody on to help take that workload off can help you fast track everything. Next up would be how do you hire somebody and how do you bring them on? Firstly, you're going to go to online jobs. Ph this is a website which is where I found video editors, assistants, amazing, amazing people that help me in my business. This website is based in the Philippines and the benefit to this is that you'll be able to recruit people from overseas that maybe don't have quality. Quite the high sort of tax level or cost of living that hiring somebody within the UK might come with. For example, let's say you're trying to hire the traditional sort of like personal assistant, the PA that you see in movies. You know, if you're in London or somewhere like that and your PA also lives in London, just their rent alone is eye watering and you would need to obviously pay them enough to be able to cover their rent plus, you know, the cost of living, being able to have meals out and so on. Whereas by hiring overseas we can help mitigate against that. We genuinely pay them something, something that can help change their life when they get a great opportunity. But for us as a small business, it becomes very, very cost effective. So now that we've signed up to onlinejobs ph, we now want to put out an advert explaining exactly what we're after. Like, hey, I'm looking for an amazing assistant that's going to help me grow my coaching business. You're going to need to be proficient in English, in written English and so on, and be able to be responsive and work around a UK time zone. You will get a lot of responses. You can get upwards of 100, 200, 300 applicants, which is overwhelming. So it's really important that we have some criteria in there that has candidates jump through a couple of hoops so that you can easily filter who's serious and who's not. Two things that I would do. Number one, I would tell them to go find me on Instagram and of course give you an Instagram handle and tell them to send you a direct message on there and give you a summary as to what they think of your Instagram profile. The second thing that I would have them do is then email you and explain why they think that they would be good for the role. Just be warned that a lot of candidates now are using ChatGPT to write these emails. So just pay attention. If it looks too formal, too well polished, I would look at that as a bit of a Red flag. And then I would do a bit of back, back and forth over the Instagram DMs to see what their written English is really like. Things that we're looking for here is proactivity, speed of reply, comprehension of what you're saying back to them, you know, grammar, spelling, all of that good stuff. Your goal now out of all of the applicants you've got is to try and whittle it down to about maybe five to seven applicants and then invite them to simple screening interviews. These screening interviews are around 15, 20 minutes long and it's the classic sort of like what's their experience? Why do they think they'd be good for the role? What do they know about your business? Strengths, weaknesses, hours, that sort of thing. Thing. If you want a complete template to the script that I give my students, just go find me on Instagram. Adam Haley1 send me a DM reference this episode and I'll send you over the script that I use. So you've now run your screening interviews and you should hopefully have a solid gut feeling of one to two of the candidates that you feel could be the right assistant for you. The final piece of the puzzle is to invite them into a final sort of like job offer interview, which is where you'll make the offer. Let them know what you're going to pay them, which I'll cover in a second, and then should they accept, you'll let them know how the onboarding process works in terms of pay. The typical pay right now is probably somewhere between like 4 and 6 pounds per hour. It used to be much cheaper but you know, times have moved on. Competition is quite fierce in this industry so I think around four to six pounds per hour. And I would look to hire them for a minimum of probably like 4 hours per day initially. And then if they prove themselves and they make a positive return on investment, you can increase that and offer them a full time role. So quick recap number one is when to hire them. So if you're around 3k per month or you've got some funds to reinvest back into the business and you just know that there are things that you don't want to do or that you keep dropping the ball on, now will be the time to bring somebody in to take that off of your plate. And number two is how to hire them. So you're going to head to onlinejobs ph you're going to put a job advert up, give them a couple of hoops to jump through, ie find you on instagram and critique your account, find you on email or send you an email and justify why they'd be great. Then going to take them to a screening interview and then make a final offer for the one to two candidates you that you think could be a good fit. Congratulations. At this point you've hired your assistant. So what do you get them to do? This is the framework that I like to use where basically on the left hand side when somebody is starting the position, I want to give them tasks that are very low in complexity but offer the highest return in terms of them being able to get me calls booked and basically self liquidate what I'm paying them. The right hand side of it is once an assistant is fully ramped up and then they can start to take on more complex tasks that don't necessarily give you calls on the calendar and make you direct money, but help overall within the business. And I'm going to give you some examples now. So of course this is just like a 30000 foot view, but it gives you roughly five or six tasks that you could start and then progress an assistant onto. So we're going to start on the left hand side and again going from like the least complex but gives you the highest return and then moving over to the opposite side. So we would begin with having them take over your welcome dms. What this means is that their job will be to sit in your Instagram account and every time you get a new follower the goal is for the Assistant to within 10 minutes reach out to them with whatever your choice of welcome DM script is. Now I have shot a previous video that runs through the entire Instagram DM process. If you want to check it out, it will be linked below. The reason that I would start an assistant on this is because it's a very low bandwidth task. They're not having to use, you know, much thinking or creativity or anything. It's really just getting a sense check on like can they follow instructions and can they be really prompt to people? The other benefit is that by opening all of these conversations on your behalf, they can then let you know when somebody that is serious is in the DMs and you can take over at that point and get the call booked. Meaning it's a really low bandwidth task, but it has an opportunity to pay for themselves very quickly. Next up would be opens in general. So the assistant's first few days on board was simply just to send welcome DMs to new followers, but now we actually want them to go and make Proactive opens to your current followers. So this could be doing ghost follower messages, it could be doing story reply messages, it could be responding to polls, kill shots, all of these sorts of messages that we teach our students and that I've done on previous videos. You're going to basically offload this to the VA to go and just get you into lots of conversations each day and you're probably going to want to give them a bit of a target of an amount of opens to start with. Around like 25 per day will be a good start. So the first few days they've done welcome dms, the next few days they've taken over your openers and next up is to get them trained on the full conversation and ultimately getting you calls booked from end to end. So over the previous week, whilst they've been doing opens and welcome dms, they should have then been keeping an eye and watching you do the correct DM flow and getting calls booked. So throughout this process they might have only been taking action on the welcome DMs and openers, but they should have been paying attention to everything that you're saying and you should be training them on how to then run a full conversation and get calls on the calendar. At this point, not only do you want a target in place for an amount of opens each day, for example 25, but now you want to add in a target for an amount of calls booked each week, starting with perhaps two calls per week being booked. So now they're fully Autonomous in your DMs Getting calls booked and they're basically starting to pay for themselves. Next up we can add some more complex stuff in that maybe doesn't directly give you a return on investment. First up could be content scheduling. Let's say that you batch your reels, but you are a nightmare at remembering when to post them and you miss deadlines and that sort of thing. Or you create content for Instagram and you know that you should start repurposing it to TikTok or YouTube shorts and you keep forgetting to do so. Enter your assistant. They can now take that content and repurpose it to multiple platforms based on the days and the times that you tell them to do. Moving along, this timeline could now become general admin. Now this can be stuff that's sort of perhaps client facing. So for example, I teach a weekly training to my OTE students every Wednesday night. By the time that I wake up on Thursday morning, that training has already been taken and uploaded into our members portal for our students to watch. Back. If we carry on moving along the timeline, the next piece could be admins and an example of this could be perhaps client facing stuff. So I teach a training to my OTE students every Wednesday evening and what Sheena will do is she'll find out what that training is about, she'll create a separate story graphic and then she'll upload it to my Instagram stories during the day on Wednesday, teasing what's being taught and when it's going live so that we maximize the attendance of our students. The next thing that happens is by the time that I wake up on Thursday morning, that training has already been taken and uploaded into our members portal for all of my students to catch up on. This all happens in the background without me doing anything. If we take this YouTube video that you are watching, I have had no part apart from sticking the camera on and just dropping it to the editors. So you're going to want to have a think about what admin related tasks are just eating up time in the business that don't necessarily need to be me. And I would start with what are the internal processes within your delivery. Let's run through two more things, starting with editing. Now the editing could be simple graphics. So the stories that I mentioned a second ago, Sheena takes care of that. If you go on my Instagram feed and you see my success posts my students, Sheena's involved in that process as well. And if you think of this YouTube video that you're watching, my only job here is to literally shoot it, record it, and then I drop it off to a team of editors that go away, get the edit done and then get it all scheduled and uploaded into YouTube on my behalf. And the great thing is is that with software like CapCut or Submagic Co, it's very easy to train and teach your assistant on how to do basic video editing that at least matches the standard that you are going to be doing it at. The difference being is that it's not you and therefore your time can be spent in different parts of the business. And finally we come to things that aren't going to make you a direct return on investment and are a bit more complex, but things like running your email inbox, helping you schedule appointments in your own diary, onboarding of clients, all of this sort of stuff can be passed over to an assistant so that again you can remove yourself from it. Let's say that a client signs up with you and they need to be invited into your coaching app. Well, that's something that you don't need to do. Your assistant can have access to your inbox. She can see when a new client signs up and then simply invite them to the app on your behalf. If your email inbox is chaotic like mine used to be, you can have your assistant take over, get you down to inbox zero and then set up folders on your behalf. So anytime an email comes in they can just categorize it and just let you know when they're the odd important ones that you need to reply to. So hopefully this has been useful and that if you are at the level where you are ready to bring on an assistant that you can see how this will be a complete game changer for you. I promise you that bringing on Sheena four or five years ago has been one of the biggest catalysts for growth that we've ever gone through. It allows me to buy back my time and focus it on either creating content and building the personal brand, or focusing on sales processes or on delivery and new materials for our students versus so many of the admin related tasks that I can work with Sheena on getting done. And it might seem daunting, you know, making that first hire, but if you follow the interview process that I suggested earlier, I promise you you will find yourself a rock star. And remember, if you want a copy of the script that I use for the screening interviews, find me on Instagram amhaly1 drop me a DM reference this episode on YouTube and I'll pass you over the script. No problems.