10 Steps to Prepare for Hiring a Virtual Assistant or Freelancer for the First Time

So you finally arrived. You are at that point in your business where you recognize that hiring a virtual assistant to get a few tasks off of your plate would free up your time to grow your business even further. If that is true, I just want to say congratulations. This is a huge milestone for you and if you're like myself when I was first in this position, you're probably feeling a mix of nerves and excitement. My goal today is to give you the stick steps that you need to take to prepare for that virtual assistant so you can walk into that engagement with confidence and excitement and not be paralyzed by the nerves that inevitably come up when you're hiring for the first time. Before we dive into that though, welcome to the Channel. If we haven't met before, my name is Laila. I'm a process consultant. Beyond just working with 1200 plus teams teams to systemize their operations by defining their processes, I've also hired and fired my fair share of virtual assistants. I have had some nightmare scenarios, I've had some grand successes that have had VAs that became full time employees and I've had just about everything in between. Step one is a scary one, but also the most important. Check the rules. What this looks like is quite, quite literally googling your state, your country and the name of the person you are looking to hire and research all that you can. Ooh, and a quick disclaimer. I am sharing things based on my experience here. This is not business or legal or HR advice. Please. If you want to dive into any of this stuff, talk with an HR professional in your region. Talk with your accountant, your lawyer. Get their input on things. Everything I'm sharing in this video is just my own structure, stories and my own opinions. This could take anywhere from 20 minutes to an hour depending on your familiarity in this area already. For example, here in the US I would probably want to look up the worker classifications for employee versus independent contractor. Those are the two big categories here in the states and you're going to want to know the difference between them both for the overall country that you are in and for the region or state that you are working from. The reason I want you to look at this is to make sure that you know what you can and cannot do with a free freelance worker who's collaborating with your company. For example, in the US here you want to keep in mind whether you are training your employee or providing equipment to your employee. That usually means you've got an employee. And if you're trying to hire a virtual assistant as a freelancer, you probably don't want to have them be an employee. So make sure you are mindful of where that line in the sand is so you can decide which side of it you want to be on. If you'd rather have an employee and you want all of the control that comes with that, then by all means. But just understand that's going to change the next few steps in this process. I know this might feel a little boring to focus on, and a lot of great virtual assistants will make sure that you're following the rules. They'll educate you as you go. But because virtual assistant is a space where there's a lot of Turnover, the best VAs usually don't stay VAS for long. It's always good to know enough to be dangerous so you and your company are protected. This doesn't have to be scary, but but you do want to know what you're getting into. Once you feel confident that you know what the major classifications are in your region, we are ready to get started on the sexy stuff. Well, sexy ish stuff. Step two of our journey is to define your processes. Your goal here is to write a list of the recurring things that you have happening inside your business that you would like a virtual assistant to help on this, our virtual assistant is going to need. Next up we have step four and this is where we're going to create an onboarding list. If you followed me along so far, you probably have a piece of paper where you've written out the key steps that we've defined together in step three and step two. Well, now let's put it somewhere that your new virtual assistant, whenever they come into the story, they can find it. If you use a work management platform like ClickUp or SmartSuite, you can do this by creating a new record or new tasks inside a list or a solution inside your account. If you do not use a fancy task management software, that's okay too. Maybe this could just be a Google Doc or a spreadsheet that you whip up and have ready so you can share it with your new virtual assistant once they come into the picture. If you're finding this whole setup piece a little time consuming, just remember that everything that you're creating here can and should be reused. One easy way to go about doing this would be to actually use a tool like textexpander, which the sponsor of today's video. If you find yourself retyping information or having templates across a ton of different software that you use, you might want to check out textexpander, both for yourself and for your team. For example, here I've defined an example email to kick off a client engagement inside my textexpander account. I've defined variables that are fill in the blank here, dropdown fields, and even optional sections that I include or not include based on my preferences. This is like a separate super sized template creation thing and it follows me everywhere whether I'm inside my work management software or inside my email or just in a notepad. If I type the command in this case example right here you can see that defined if I hit a spacebar after this bam. A pop up appears, prompting me to fill in the customized information in this case John Doe's name, which service it is, and whether or not I want to add that reminder. And then we'll have that added right into my email or notepad or wherever else I'm normally typing. If you want to spend less time typing and more time actually getting things done, check out the link in the description below for more information about textexpander. With that, back to the video so now that we've gone ahead and defined what we want our virtual assistant to be working on, what skills they're going to need, let's do the reverse. Once your virtual assistant is here, for better or worse than there is also going to be a few tasks that are added on to your plate. I know, right? That stinks. But unfortunately management is necessary. Whether you have someone you're working with for just one hour a week or 20 hours a week, you still need to set aside some time to tell them what to do, to communicate when they have questions, and to coach them into optimal performance. For a contractor, this might just be saying, hey, I need this by Friday. You it could be that simple. But for a employee, it could be a lot more involved. We need to plan for this so we don't just have this false expectation that we can give a hundred tasks to a virtual assistant, tell them nothing, and expect perfect results. That's just not how delegation works. So let's plan ahead, plan for the worst case, and plan in some management tasks onto your own to do list. If you use a task management tool, this might look like just adding some recurring tasks onto your to do list. Or if you do not use a task tool, maybe you could just add some time blocks on your calendar. What you want to define here are times for reviewing the virtual assistant's work, communicating priorities, and a time block for you to actually give work. Because even if you define clear priorities and clear tasks, eventually your virtual assistant might have extra time or finish things more quickly or more slowly than you expect. And you're going to need to have an eye on that person's workload as you're getting to know them to make sure you right size their workload to so it's appropriate for what they can actually do. That is our fifth and not so sexy step in this whole process. Prepare for your additional workload. Next number six, reallocate your time. Here is kind of the opposite. We have now planned on getting rid of a ton of work off of our plate. We've also planned for adding a bit of work to our plate. But if we're playing our cards right, we should still have net more time than we had before. We should be giving away more than we are getting. And so that difference, that extra time, that extra capacity you will have when you have that virtual assistant, that's what we want to plan for next. This is important because it'll help us understand where we want our focus to go and help us in the next step where we determine our budget. Basically what I want you to do is review the difference, the extra capacity you're going to have and decide how you are going to spend that. Are you going to use that extra time you free up to enjoy your life a little more? If so, more power to you. I love that. Or are you going to use that extra time to focus more on marketing and sales or are you going to focus that on fulfillment? What are you going to do with that extra time? This is really important because most of the time virtual assistants help us with back end back office tasks. Those tasks themselves do not make us money directly. It's how you use your time that you get back that generally is what drives revenue for the business. So keep that in mind when looking at this. If you are looking to relax, fabulous. Plan on that. If you're looking to double down in an area, awesome. Plan on that. But before we move on to step number seven, I want you to have a clear idea of where your time needs to go when this virtual assistant is into the business. Next up, we're at step seven. Here is where we want to define our contract terms. Before we go out and start talking to a bunch of virtual assistants, we want to have some expectations on our end to know what we want to negotiate for. What we want to focus on here is our budget, our turnaround time, our time zones and our cancellation notices. Those are the main areas we want to pay attention to. My recommendation for most folks when hiring a virtual assistant is to not focus so much on the hourly rate of the assistant, but focus on total packages of work and if at all possible, hire based on fixed scope projects. So for example, if you want someone to write four blog posts a month, figure out how much that is worth to you and make that your budget. I would really encourage you to avoid hourly agreements because you have no idea how fast that this person works and you will not know until often it's too late. So that's your first piece. Decide your budget criteria taking into account what you want them to do and what them doing that would free you up to do. For me, my requirements for virtual assistants have always been either a very clear scoped hourly agreement or preferably project pricing located within my country and within a few hours of my time zone and native speaker in the language that I am working in. Those are my three non negotiables. I also look for work for hire terms, non disclosure agreements and a cancellation notice that is very quick. I want to be able to tell my virtual assistant, hey, we are not a good fit without having to wait 30 or 45 days to have that cancellation go into effect. Next up, we are at step eight and at this point we're ready to take our shopping list and our list of tasks and go out to the market and see who we can find. The way I would suggest doing that is to take your list of recurring tasks and one off tasks and pick something that equals about two to three hours, whatever that looks like. Maybe it's one task around writing blog posts, maybe it's one task around creating social media graphics. Pick something small and self contained that isn't too confidential or too sensitive. Zoom in on that and define exactly what needs to happen in order for that project to be considered a success. Success. We're going to call this collection of really focused tasks our test project. We are going to pay virtual assistants to complete this test project and evaluate their work based on how well they do this. So my suggestion would be to take this test project which might be to write three blog posts and go give it out to your top choice virtual assistant that you have found through your local networking group, through upwork, through Fiverr, wherever you want to go and assign them this project. The work will speak volumes. Assign it out, do pay for it because these are business owners too. They deserve compensation for their work and wait to see what they give you. There is a chance that you will get that test project back. It will blow your mind with how wonderful it is and you will be able to move on in this process. But there is also a chance that that person is going to give you a work product that is not up to standards and in your view, not something that you can get up to standards by just making a few quick edits. In that instance, I would suggest you cut your losses, do what you can with what they've given you, and go ahead and do another test project with another virtual assistant that you can find. Assuming your virtual assistant has a hourly rate between 10 and $100 an hour, these test projects might cost you $200 to $300 per project. But hopefully you get some usable product out of them and they allow you to test the waters before you go ahead first into a virtual assistant who may not be the right fit for you. Finally, we are at step step nine, which is hiring. And this is one where I really don't have much to say because of the fact that your virtual assistant should already have an onboarding process in place. Please remember that virtual assistants are business owners. They are not just employees of some kind. They own their own business and they are responsible for onboarding you. While of course you want to double check their process to make sure you get those tax paperwork that you might have learned about in step one. Make sure you have a contract in place like you might have learned in step one. The hiring process is going to be primarily led by your virtual assistant. The things I always look for in a virtual assistant hiring process is clear expectations around communication, a contract, even if it just says something very casual, clear terms around when we are paying for what, and to make sure that I get any of the tax information I need around that virtual assistant before I pay them anything. Those are the big four things for me that I want to have clear. But hopefully your virtual assistant will already come prepared with that information and ready to give you a great first impression. Now you might think we are done this video because we got to the hiring process. Woohoo. But I have one more task I want you to do. I know it's a dark one, but before you just kick back and relax and enjoy your newfound free time, step 10 of hiring a virtual assistant is to write a breakup letter. Yep, I know you just found this va. She's amazing. He's amazing. You would never in a million years think that this VA wouldn't work out. But I know this might feel negative to say now that you're in the high from the hiring process, but when you hire somebody, you are also making the decision to fire that person. You have to as a business owner be willing to protect your company from people who aren't the right fit. And so before we get too wrapped up in this virtual assistant in their lives, how amazing they are as human beings, how much we love working with their personality, let's be prepared for the eventuality that maybe someday this person won't be the right fit. So step 10 I want you to write a generic letter. Keep it in your Google Drive, Private, private, private. In this email, I'd like you to write out a termination of your agreement with this virtual assistant. Make sure you're referencing whatever they have in their contract around terminations and make sure to keep this very professional. This is not a personal breakup, despite me using the term breakup letter. This is really just a letter that you can have at the ready to send off to make sure that you can end a contract relationship on a positive note without having a lot of emotions charged in it. The reason I'm having you write it now before you get invested in this virtual assistant, is so that we can write it from an objective place and not feel all that guilt that comes with working with somebody that we have to then stop working with. Once you have this breakup letter saved safely onto your hard drive, hopefully you will never have to use it. But if you do, you are prepared by but with all of that out of the way, I just want to say congratulations once again on getting to this stage in your business's growth. Go out there, find your dream va, go through these steps, get yourself ready, go through those test projects and get your new virtual assistant on your team. Because despite some of the negative things we want to keep an eye out for overwhelmingly Virtual Assistant and the hiring of help is a wonderful and exciting process. It's a great thing for your virtual assistant to get to work with someone like you. It's a great thing for you to get to work with a virtual assistant like this. It's just an awesome experience to have. So I am so excited for you as you go through this. But with that, good luck on your hiring process. If you want to connect with us in that free Facebook group. Or if you'd like to try out textexpander, the sponsor of today's video and the resource we talked about earlier on, check out the description below. But otherwise, thanks so much for watching and enjoy the process.