Why you should hire a Virtual Assistant with Tega Diegbe - 10 Minute Highlight

What would you say from your experience, from everybody that you've helped, the ones that have succeeded and the ones that failed, what would you say the types of Personas or the type of people that would would do best from hiring virtually?

With the exception of your specialist services like your doctors, nurses, lawyers, to some degree your bookkeeper and your accountant, those are not positions that you want to hire out virtually. But if you have a business in this day and age, and let's say 70 to 90% of your business activity is done on a computer, in my opinion, there's no reason why you cannot hand the tasks off to a virtual team member. Foreign.

Hospitality Podcast My name is Mark Simpson, I'm the founder of Boostly and we are in season seven Episode seven and today we're talking all about hiring your first virtual team member. I invited On Tayga who has been helping small business owners solopreneurs for the past few years now figure out where in their business they need help. And he helps people by then hiring team members from all over the world and then he helps manage the whole process. Him and his team do a fantastic job and I wanted to get him on this show because we wanted to scale back. What exactly is a virtual team member or virtual assistant? The pros and cons of doing it, which type of business owner should be looking to outsource and exactly what it is that short stay accommodation owners need to be looking at. We talk about social media, we talk about McDonald's, we talk about Big Mac, we talk about SOP and we've got loads of really cool tactics and tips for you in this. Before we get started I just want to thank you our podcast sponsor for this season. This is Hostfully Hostfully, a US based product company that helped design digital guidebooks for your guests for pre post stay. I have been on Hostfully for a while and the guests that we use at the Granary have commented on how good the guest guide books are not only for our own family business but Boostly Academy members such as Paula Butler use it for her business Cockington Cottages. And again their guests are commenting on the guidebooks on arrival. Really recommend that you check out Hostfully. Go to Hostfully.com if you go to Hostfully.com you can check out right now. If you go and put in Boostly 2M in the coupon code you'll get two months free of their premium service. But what I love most is you can get started today for free for one guidebook. So go and check it out before you go and Check it out. Please tune in to this Boostly podcast.

Good evening everybody in Boostly Land. Nice to speak with you guys virtually those us live and those who happen to be listening. Pleasure to be speaking in your ears. My name is Tega. As Mark pointed out, I am based in Newcastle up on Tyne in the northeast of England. So pretty pretty cold winters and it's pretty cold today which is why I'm wearing a hoodie for the those who may be watching and My business is helping self employed entrepreneurs go from being self employed to actually having businesses a business by leveraging the power of outsourcing.

And systemization from all of the self employed business owners that you chat to take. What is the one mistake that you see people make time and time again when it comes to the running of their business?

The one mistake that I noticed time and time again is the fact that people don't tend to treat their business like a business. They tend to treat their business more like a hobby than a business. If you look at someone who is successful from the outset I can almost guarantee, I can't guarantee it because obviously I wasn't there when they started their business, but from the outset I can almost guarantee they would have started and acted like they were running a business and not hobby.

Let's just delve right back to the start. And when somebody says virtual assistant, what does that mean?

When I say a virtual assistant I just, I refer to someone who is helping you run your business, but they are location independent. I tend to find that nowadays the term VA is just being used without any real consideration. Perfect example of this is they are online business managers. So these are people who traditionally in a brick and mortar business would be business managers. The only difference is they're working online. But rather than call themselves online business managers, they call themselves VAs because they call themselves VAs. And in reality they are online business managers. They charge online business manager prices. So when you say to someone you need to get a VA in the traditional sense of the virtual assistant and not an online business manager because they know so many people that are online business managers that use the term online business managers and VAS interchangeably, they're usually put off because the fees are quite high. Traditionally, whenever you say virtual assistant, people tend to associate that with low level work. But from what I've done and the people that I've helped, the key mindset shift that I tend to make people adopt is the fact that if you are running a business and you are going to get a virtual assistant, it's Better to think of them and treat them as a virtual team member than just a virtual assistant.

What would be the pro, pros and cons, in your opinion? Let's go through the pros. First, of hiring somebody that would be virtual, instead of somebody sat with you in the office right out the gate.

The pros of doing it virtually is you instantly, by doing it virtually, negate any tax responsibility that you have for that person so your business doesn't have to carry the burden of payee and health insurance and all the other things you may have to pay if they're in the uk. The other thing is, as well as reducing the tax liability, hiring, hiring someone outside of the country that you're located in is usually very, very budget friendly.

Let's just move on to the cons. So what would be a potential downfall, would you say, in your opinion, of hiring somebody virtually compared to hiring somebody?

The biggest one and the one that most people tend to hang their hat on is the fact that it's virtual. They would say that there's no way for you to monitor their output. There's no way for you to make sure that you're hiring a real person. There's no way for you to make sure you're not scammed. I have an argument against that. I'm sure we'll get to that in the call. But that would be one of the cons and then another one is because it's virtual. If you don't know how to manage people, just mere fact that they are virtual, that would actually throw a kink in your plans. Because you don't know how to manage people, because you don't know how to manage people, that then filters into everything else that's to happen in the business or about the business.

What would you say from your experience, from everybody that you've helped, to the ones that have succeeded and the ones that failed, what would you say are the types of Personas or the type of people that would do best from hiring virtually?

With the exception of your specialist services, like your doctors, nurses, lawyers, to some degree your bookkeeper and your accountant, those are not positions that you want to hire out virtually. But if you have a business in this day and age, and let's say 70 to 90% of your business activity is done on the computer, in my opinion, there's no reason why you cannot hand the tasks off to a team.

Member, what would you say would be the best way of somebody getting started in this process of looking to outsource? Now there's going to Be a lot of people listening to this who are really busy. Hospitality and short stay accommodation owners. They're trying to do everything themselves. Now, you know, we're not going to say go and outsource your ironing, you know, because there's some things that you need to do and there's some things that you don't need to do. But yeah, have you got a sort of a foolproof way. Have you got like a little checklist system that you can just sort of quickly walk people through on, on how they can go about discovering what tasks they don't need to be doing to be running their business?

I have an elaborate way and I have a not so elaborate way. Let me go over the not so elaborate way. The not so elaborate way is if there's something in your business that you're doing that you don't like doing, I can almost guarantee you again that if you go on the Internet, you'll find someone that's willing to do that for you for a price. The price depends on what your business can manage to pay that person to get that job done. And if that person can get it done to the level that you're satisfied, you're satisfied of the output. That's the not so elaborate way. The more elaborate ways. It's from a guy who I watch on YouTube called Alan. Gonna butcher his name, Alan Shielinski. If he happens to be listening to this and I've just destroyed his name, I profusely apologize. It's basically journaling your everyday. So for me, for example, using myself as a case study, today I woke up, there was a whole bunch of things that I had to do. Some of them vital in that I had to do them. No one else could do them, some of them not so vital in the days gone or in the years gone. It's been years now since I've been using virtual team members. I would have done everything myself. I would have done everything myself. So what Alan's method is is for you to make a note of everything that you do for a period of about seven to 14 days. And in those seven to 14 days, you grade things according to how essential it is. Essential being this task brings money into the business.