How Much Training Does a VA Actually Need?

Do you have to train a virtual assistant? What it really comes down to is, are you hiring someone who is young and hungry or someone who's experienced? And you're going to have a really different experience in hiring these two types of people, and one of them is not better than the other. Even though you might think, yeah, I definitely want to hire someone experienced. Someone who's young and hungry has some real distinct advantages over someone who's experienced. And not just in the amount of training you have to do, but maybe in the effort level they're going to put forth and in the quality of work you're going to get back. Welcome to the Secret Sauce of Outsourcing podcast that's dedicated to making you better at outsourcing to the Philippines. So today we're going to talk about training, training virtual assistants. Do you have to train someone? How much do you have to train? How do you train? What's the best way? Are there things that work and things that won't work? Yes, there are. So let's get into it. So the first question in this is, do we hire someone who's already trained, someone who's an expert or someone that we have to train? There's a really big difference in hiring someone who's experienced versus someone who is not. I have a good friend, Evan Carmichael, he likes to call this experience versus young and hungry. And typically he and I. And he has like 65 people on his team and I have around 50 people on my team in the Philippines. And typically we're both hiring people who are young and hungry. Now, there's definitely a situation in which experience matters. Often that's a programmer or someone who's technical, but in most other situations, someone who is young and hungry, someone who wants to learn, someone who wants to try, someone who wants to try new things, that's a better situation for me and for him than someone who's experienced, someone who's already been through this with other employers. They've already seen how this works with an employer they've maybe gotten comfortable in. Like, oh, I can do this many things this often, and I only have to work this much to do it. And then I can hold two jobs and I can get both things done. And it's just a different experience when you're hiring someone who is far along in their career versus someone who's new and someone who you can, like, mold into how you want. You can set expectations for your company, and you can set the expectations for how much work is being done when they're new. Versus an experienced person, you're not going to do that. They already have these expectations, they already have the lifestyle, They've already set themselves up in a certain way. And so, yep, you can do less training that way. You're going to experience a different level of work from that person versus someone who's young and hungry, where you have to train them a bit more, but you also get to train them a bit more. You get to train them on your way and on your company and your culture, and you get to create that culture there versus someone who's experienced and they're already bringing with them culture and lots of years of, well, here's how we do this and here's how this should be done. And you're like, well, you know, we actually think this should be done differently. And they may have objections to that. So anyway, you will have a different experience in hiring someone who is young and hungry or someone who is experienced and set in their ways. And again, one of them is not necessarily better than the other. They're just two different sides. I'm just offering the perspective that very often people come into hiring a virtual assistant saying, oh, I need someone who's really, really experienced because I can't deal with training someone, when the reality is that most of the time you'll probably have a better experience hiring someone who's young and hungry, who doesn't know that you do get to train. And then you bring them up in your ways and you allow them to learn the way that you want things done. And then things are done your way, the way that you know works in your business. So now here's another side of this. No matter what you do, no matter who you hire, there's always going to be some amount of training that you have to do. Even if you hire someone who's super experienced, you still have to train them on your specific in your business. And there always are these things, like, here's our design styling. If you're hiring a designer or an editor or something like that, or here's how we want to write our content. Our content is very friendly and informal, or our content is very formal and business and professional. You still have to provide some of that. Here is our internal knowledge to our company. Like, you still have to have this understanding when you come into the company. So regardless of young and hungry or experienced, there's still things that you have to do to bring that person into your company. In addition, experienced or not, oftentimes you're going to have specific processes and steps that will be required for doing this thing. We bring a programmer into our company and we have to give them GitHub instructions and Docker instructions and whatever other tools we're using. Our framework, all of that stuff that still has to be communicated to this person. Whether they are new and inexperienced or young and hungry, or whether they are super experienced, there's still a lot that we have to do to bring them in. So now let me shift gears a second and let's actually talk about how I train people. So if I'm bringing a programmer into my company, which I am right now, I'm actually bringing two. I'm bringing someone who's very experienced, a senior level programmer and a kind of junior level programmer, there's going to be certain trainings that I have to do regardless. And then there are extra things that I'm going to do now for a programmer or for someone technical. So like, I don't want to teach a designer how to design. I don't want to teach a user interface designer. I don't want to teach a programmer how to design. I don't want to teach a content writer English. There's a bunch of things that you don't want to teach, but then there's the other side of it where like, oh, social media. Yeah. I want to teach you our style. Here's how we want to do this, right? How do you do that? How do I do it? What are the effective ways versus not effective ways of training? Let's get into this. For me and what I have seen over the years, the number one best way to train people is through video. And that video is not a video of them seeing my face, although that is also helpful. Typically it is a screen capture video where I am recording my screen, recording my voice, recording my mouse and I'm talking through the process, showing them exactly what's going on. So for example, the very first time I built a website with someone in the Philippines, I opened up like six or eight different websites that I liked and I started recording and talking and I said, hey, look at this website. This is the general framework of like how I want our site to work. I like this and I like this and I like this. I like how this menu is structured, I like how these pages are structured. I like the layout. What I don't like is this and this and this. Then I would go to the next website, like, look at this piece. I really like this specific piece of this website. I want to integrate it right here into our design. Here's another website I Like this page of their site. I want to integrate it into this page of our website. So that's how I have made trainings like this. And I found it super effective. In fact, whenever I have asked my team what do I do well and what do I not do well, Their number one answer to what I do well is I make lots of video training. They love that they get to hear my voice, they love they get to see my screen, they love that it's cool, clear what I'm looking for. They love that they can see it, but also they can see it again and again. I tend to talk really fast and so they'll watch it and then they'll watch it again and then they'll try it and then they'll watch it again as they're trying it and they say this is super helpful. So how do you do this? Well, I do this with Snagit. I've been using snagit for probably 15 years. Snagit is made by the makers of Camtasia, which used to be a really big screen recording software. They also used to make Jing, which was a free version of Snagit. They don't do Jing really anymore, but snagit is like $50. It's super affordable for a one time payment and it has all kinds of editing options. It's really great. So like you record a video, it'll upload to their servers. You can also upload it to your own servers and all you have to do is click upload and it puts the URL on your clipboard and you click paste and that's it, you're done. For images, it's super easy to capture an image of your screen and then annotate that image, draw on it, circle something, draw an arrow to it, type on the image and then you send it and they get exact instructions of what you're looking for. Snagit is my go to for this. I use it every day. I use it multiple times every day. There are a bunch of other ways of doing this. Some other popular ones include Loom or Screencast. O Matic. Another one that we like, my team uses because it's free, is Tiny Take. I think there are other enterprise versions of these softwares. You don't really need something enterprise. It's super easy to just record your screen, record your voice, record your mouse and show exact instructions. Now you also don't have to spend an hour doing this very often. What I will do when I bring someone in, I'm going to give them their first Instructions, their first task. And that first instruction is going to be, let's say, five minutes, maybe eight minutes, maybe 11 minutes of me talking through and showing them exactly what I'm looking for. And then I send that to them and I'm going to let them try it. Here's where the real key comes into this in my experience. So I'm going to let them try it and they're going to figure out, oh, I left out this instruction, I left out that instruction. And where I thought I was doing it really well when I do it myself. That's because I have some preconceived notions and assumptions because I've already done it before or I already understand something and then I'm sending it to them where they don't have these preconceived notions. They don't have this understanding where maybe what they're seeing on their screen looks different than what I'm seeing on my screen. And because they're seeing a video they can see well, that's not what it looks like for me. So something is wrong. And that gives them the confidence to say, sir, I followed your instructions, but something isn't working right. So the other side of this would be written instructions, which has all kinds of shortcomings. And this is where the typical advice of standard operating procedures for training just falls really, really short. For example, they don't get to see your screen. You spend a whole bunch of time writing, which the amount of stuff that I can talk through and show is in a 5 minute video or a 10 minute video is probably equivalent to an hour of writing and taking screenshots and inserting into a document only to find out that actually that's not what it looks like for them. And now you have to go back and modify it and change it where if it's not what it looks like for them, then I just go through and I'm like, well, I'm not sure why this doesn't look the same as you. And I'm recording at the same time, I'm just recording and I'm clicking things and finally I'll figure it out and that's it, I'm just done and send and done. Where if you've written it, now you have to go back and figure it out and then you have to explain it again. Even though you just explained it to yourself, now you have to explain to them again, well, I just explained at one time while figuring out I explained it. The other side of the written thing is it just takes so much more Effort to describe something that they're seeing versus seeing what you're seeing is so much easier. So while yes, written thing is much easier to edit long term, very often find that editing it long term is just unnecessary. And recording another video is just as easy as editing something long term. So for me, and frankly for most people that I see doing this, recording video training is so much more effective than writing out an sop. So now that you understand how I create my own trainings, let's talk about other ways to get training. So I'll give you one right away. @vasmadeeasy.com we have created dozens, I think we're approaching a hundred trainings that you can just hand off to people in the Philippines. They are created by people who are experts in the subject matter. They are designed specifically to be given to VAs in the Philippines. Now here's why we do this. So you can also go out and give them access to YouTube trainings or other paid trainings. And both of these are completely valid. You can do either one of them. The one thing that we were really careful to do, which is really important, is we made sure that when we created a training, it was not aimed at the decision maker to say, here's how you do this and you're going to also make these whole bunch of decisions while you're doing it. Somebody new on your team is not the decision maker, despite how much you want them to be right up front. They do not want to be the decision maker long term, Absolutely no problem. But in the very beginning, if you give them a training where they're expected to be the decision maker and you don't make the decisions for them, you're very likely to cause them to disappear. And that's like worst case scenario where you spent a bunch of time and effort recruiting someone and then you caused them to disappear because you made mistakes in training them. So can you have them watch YouTube videos? Yes, absolutely. In fact, one of the responsibilities of my team is every week they're supposed to watch at least one YouTube video that is relevant to their role and try and improve what they're doing. So yeah, we use YouTube videos all the time. Can you buy trainings like here's a full on social media training. Here's how you do this? Yes, you can. And you can give that to someone in the Philippines as long as you create the understanding that when they come to a decision, they're going to come to you for that decision. When they come to something that requires direction, then you're going to provide them that direction. How much of this do they need to decide what you're going to provide and what they should do on their own? Well, that's. That kind of depends on the person. That's a really hard thing for me to tell you an answer to. So now in all of this, I will tell you that I have done all of these things. I've bought trainings and given them to my people. And then I found that I had to go back through that training and like, separate things. Okay, I really want you to do these things. This thing is not relevant to our business because often in a training, they'll cover every single, every little thing. And I was like, oh, yeah, you're wasting a whole bunch of time trying to figure this thing out. That's completely irrelevant to our business. And I haven't given you the instructions or decisions because it doesn't pertain to us, but you don't know that it doesn't pertain to us. And so you're spending a bunch of time. And so I've gone down that route of buying trainings from like, Udemy or other places from gurus before. I don't really do that anymore because I just find it is less effective than creating my own training or than using YouTube or than using my training plus VA's made easy plus YouTube. So let me give you another example of how I've done this recently with SEO. So I've been putting together an SEO team over the last couple years, and I've hired people who are good at SEO, but they still need my understanding in it. Now, I haven't done any actual SEO in 10 years, but I still understand the basic principles of it, which is we create content. And that content is really great. You publish content all over the place and you get people to link to your content and you create links for your content. And so I had my team start creating content. And these are all really talented people, good writers. They understand SEO, and what they were creating just wasn't really what I was looking for. And so I had to provide a bunch of training to them on it, like, okay, here's what you did. Now, I like this and this and this, but I don't like this and this and this. Let's change this. I don't like the way you did these links. Here's the reasons why. Here's what I think. No, not that I'm an SEO expert, but I still have some understanding of my business and my industry that maybe they didn't have and so over the last couple years, I've hired more and more people and I've created these trainings and I just give them the old trainings that I've created. They now have this combined understanding and they're working together. And yep, I've guided the way that these experts are doing their work. They're watching YouTube videos. They have also gone through some other trainings on their own. And then they're coming to me with ideas of, hey, sir, we can or should be doing this thing and this thing and this thing. And I'm like, great, great. I really love two of those things. The third one I don't really like because of this and this and this. But now we're working together to create training where I showed them that I was willing to train them. Now, here's the real value in training. Because in training, yes, there is a value in giving someone knowledge. Here's the piece that you don't know until you've done it. In the Philippines, especially, training builds trust. And working with someone in the Philippines, it's really about trust. It's about them trusting you. So I know you go into this thinking, I don't know if I can trust this person. If I provide them a bunch of training, are they going to quit on me or are they going to disappear or am I going to waste my time? The reality is they don't trust you. And if you don't do things to gain their trust, they're unlikely to do good work. Now, one of the magic pieces about training is it gains their trust. When you provide training to someone, it tells them you care about them, you care about their success, you care about their success in your company, you care about them doing good work with you. It shows them that you care and you're willing to invest in them and their success. That right there is a really big deal for them towards them being willing to go through the training, to try things, to make decisions to fail where otherwise they really don't want to. So now, just by providing training, you're giving yourself a much higher likelihood that you're going to succeed with this, because you're giving them a higher likelihood that they'll succeed and you're giving them the confidence to do other things that they wouldn't otherwise do. So the real value is training is building their trust in you as a boss, that you care, that you want them to succeed, that you're trustworthy for them, that you're going to help them grow in their career. Because all of this really matters to this person that you just hired. So whether you hired a newbie or someone who's young and hungry or you hired someone experienced, this principle still applies of having to gain their trust. And. And this is another reason why usually I hire someone who's young and hungry rather than someone who is very experienced and set in their ways. So now the last thing I want to talk about is how much training. Well, when I started, I was giving training every single day. It was all the time, constantly. And over the years, that has lessened and lessened. And actually today it's very, very little. Do I train people. I give role direction, I give company direction. But usually the people that I've hired, I've learned more and more that not only are they capable of doing a lot of training on their own, where you can learn almost anything from YouTube, and as long as I'm willing to provide them direction and decisions, then they're willing to try really amazing stuff. And the more I let them try amazing stuff, the more they're willing to make decisions. And so I've learned over the years that if I let them try things, even if those things fail, it allows them confidence to want to try more in the future, to want to do great work in the future. So I end up actually having to train very little. And that's really a result of me being willing to train in the first place. I don't actually work very much in general. I only work 15 to 17 hours a week. Most of that time is spent communicating with my team on things that we're working on, thinking through problems and solutions and providing them the means of solving their own problems and doing good work on their own. And that's where training comes in. If you provide them the means, then they want to do good work for you.