Ep64: My Step-by-Step System for Hiring and Managing VAs

What's going on? Team Matt here from the PT Profit, Leverage and Lifestyle show. Hope you guys are having an amazing day. I look super baby faced today. Just trimmed the old beard and washed my hair as well. So I look super, super young. Not that I'm not young already. I'm only 31 years old, but yeah, super pumped. To get into today's episode, we're going to talk about virtual assistants and how to actually hire a virtual assistant and also the basics of one of the spreadsheets that I, that I use to track all of our data, which I can share with you guys as well. But the episode today is mainly going to be about how to actually hire your own virtual assistant. So there's a lot of companies out there that, you know, do all this hiring and training up a VA and all this type of stuff and, you know, charging thousands of thousands of dollars. It's simply not required. It's so, so easy to get a virtual assistant. And, you know, I mean, I'm sure there's a place for it in terms of, you know, training up a VA as a company, which I get it. Like, I might do it for my clients as well. Like a couple of my clients have VAs, but I've just showed them how I've done it and they've just replicated that process and it's worked out very, very well for them and for me as well. So let's get into today's episode, but first let me just explain what a VA can actually do for you and I'll tell you what my VA does for me as well. So for me, I've got two virtual assistants, both based in the Philippines. One does social media and graphic design and the other one does lead generation. Today we're going to focus mainly on the social media side of things and my VA will listen to this episode as well because she always does. So shout out you la. Hope you're having an amazing day. So, but let's get into some other things. Other things that virtual assistants can do for you. General admin tasks, social media, scheduling posts, lead generation, researching other competitors of yours, researching where your clients hang out, finding Facebook groups to go into. Using ChatGPT to brainstorm ideas on behalf of you. Takes a bit of time to do that, but basically anything that's taking that you can delegate or it's, or things that you can't automate, you can probably get a virtual assistant to do. Now you can go down the route of getting a virtual assistant to do like ads, you know, email, Copy all that type of stuff as well as appointment setting, sales as well you can get them to do. But I'm not going to go down that rabbit hole. Me personally, I just use them for lead generation, a little bit of admin, but mainly social media. So let's get into how I actually found both my VAs who have been absolutely amazing and a big asset to my, my team. I'm going to show you exactly how I found them. So you guys in Australia will obviously know we have sick when people are wanting to like apply for jobs. They got the same thing over there except it's called online jobs Ph, which is for the Philippines. Now it's a little bit, it's very similar in terms of how it, how it works. Like the employer can post a job and people can't apply for that job. Now the difference is that a phone call just then. Okay, so let's get back into it. I'm going to share my screen and I'm going to literally show you the site that I've used to hire my VAs. So this is going to save you thousands and thousands of dollars for other people trying to get you to pay for them to basically use this, use this website. So this is how it works for these guys. So basically, because there's obviously a lot of virtual assistants, they can't just bombard like they kind of bombard applying for jobs. They can't do that. So they actually get a certain amount of credits per month that they can use to apply for jobs. So if they specifically want a your job compared to another job, they can actually use more credits. Okay, for example, they might, I don't, I don't even know how much they get. But for example, they might get 100 credits. If someone gives you 10 credits rather than one, you can tell that person is specifically wanting your position. So that's who you're looking for. Now I'm going to log in and I'm going to show you how it actually works. Now, full disclaimer here. There is a free version, but I personally used the paid version. The reason why is because you don't have a limit of how many people can apply plus you get the ad up and running straight away as well. So I'm going to literally show you my posts to give you context. Now I've done two of these and as you can see, the results are right here on my screen. So I've got a social media officer that was in September last year, so it's currently closed. I had 1059 hits, which means people clicked on the the ad and I got 204 people apply for the position. Now if you're in the free version, you can only get 15. I believe personally the reason why I've got such a good team is because I filter out, I get a large amount of volume and I filter to the best person. Okay, so my VA, who's watching, you're number one out of 204 people. So and all this is, all this is, you're just filling up a big funnel and you just pre qualifying people all the way down until you get to the gold. It's exactly the same with marketing. You flip the funnel and you qualify and qualify and qualify until you get the best person for the job. Okay, so what you need to do, and by the way, I'll tell you how the pricing works before we get into it. The pro account is 69 us now you pay it monthly but basically once you've actually hired someone, you just cancel it because there's no lock in just pay monthly. So It'll be about 100 Australian. 100 bucks. And yeah, you'll be able to hire someone within a couple of weeks. So let's go back to my job posts and I'll see if I can give you the exact ad. We're seeking a motivated and detail orientated virtual assistant to support a personal training mentor, personal trainer, business mentor. This role is part time with the potential to go full time hours as the business grows. The virtual assistant will be responsible for creating and editing social media content, podcast episode editing and performing admin tasks such as data entry. Now you can see in here, I'll just go back out of that for a second. I advertise for 20 hours a week and just 250amonth Australian. So most virtual assistants are anywhere between three and five dollars per hour. So anyone that's trying to charge you like nine, ten dollars an hour, it's, it's a bit of rip off to be honest. In my opinion. So this is literally the website that I used to do this. Now when you actually post it, there's a very. You, you just saw the ad that I actually put up. So what you do when you get the, the ad up, you're going to get bombarded with people. Right now I'm just sharing my inbox for a second, just let you know what it kind of looks like. But see these things? So you got 1 AP, 1 AP 1, 3. 3, 10. Basically what that tells you is how many points or how many credits they're using to apply for your specific role. So anyone that actually only has one ap, which or one credit, you do not engage. I don't even waste my time talking to them because they're not that serious. Anyone that's over three or more, I will have a conversation with. Now I'll tell you what I do for the conversation. Now, they'll usually send you like a intro video or they'll send you what else? I mean your, the portfolio. They'll send you some examples of their portfolio for you to have a look at and like, like a Google Drive, for example, for some context. That's all well and good, I love it. You can check out their portfolio, what they've done previously, but what I like to do, because that also helps you in data, run down what I actually want you to do and I'll see if I can get an example here. Here we go. This is the exact process that I do. So I'll narrow it down. Like if 200 people have applied, I'll narrow it down to just the people that have done more than one credit, which is going to be probably 40 to 50, maybe 30. 30 to 40. And I'm gonna send this copy and paste message and it says congratulations on making it to the next stage of our interview process. Find the right person to come on board with us. Long term, we will need you to record a personalized video answering the below five questions. You'll need to send us a my email and you'll have five days to send this before the application closes. First question, what are your strengths and weaknesses? Number two, name three of your hobbies. Number three, describe a situation where you could not solve a problem. Number four, describe a situation where you had to think outside the box. And number five, what are your problems? Five core values and why? And just leave it at that. Once you send that, that's going to drop it down to like if, if you send that to 40 people, you're probably only going to get 10 to 15 videos. Okay, this is on purpose. You want to find someone that goes above and beyond now because they're going to go above and beyond in your business, which is what you want. Okay? Now you do not follow up people, okay? If they want the job, they'll do it. Do not be desperate. There's plenty of people out there. Now, the things that you're looking for in the video, the main question that you want to make sure that you're paying really close attention to is the five core values. You need to make sure your core Values are aligned because otherwise it's not going to work long term. There's a reason why. And fingers crossed, both my VAs have not left in a pretty common, common industry where virtual assistants, you'd move around a little bit. So yeah, again my VA is listening. Thank you so much for your all your hard work. But you want to find a virtual assistant that's going to go above and beyond and are genuinely interested in, in your specific offer for your ad. Now once you've gone through all the videos and you want to make sure you watch all the videos, you want to also then take into consideration their portfolio and then you can also look at their profile. So once you go to their profile it'll tell you what they're looking for, a brief description of their profile and go through their top skills. So with that taken into account, you narrow down to five. So you've gone from like 200 people applying down to five people now. Now from those five people you're going to get them in for a 15 minute interview. So basically you just said you can make a calendar invite or calendar link and you can send it to them to book in for a 15 minute interview. And you want to say this interview, you will be preparing a presentation for me on what you would do on my social media to increase engagement and growth, like audience growth. And literally you are going to get very hyper specific strategies and what this particular VA will do for your business and a lot of time they'll explain why they're doing it. So not only are you going to get educated from a professional, but you're also going to get super clear on what they think your social media needs to grow. Now don't underestimate how valuable this stuff is to you. If you had five separate graphic designers looking at your social media and saying, look, this is what we need to do, this is what I think we should do, this is what's worked in the past. So other jobs, et cetera, you're going to get a very good understanding of what you need to do. And like I say this to people all the time. They'll, you just, you just click with someone once you have a conversation with them, you've watched their video. Like the video that my current VA set was 15 minutes long. Most other people do it for two minutes but you can straightaway see how much more invested someone is if they put more effort into it. So this is why you, you start with a big funnel and you narrow it down until you get the gold, which is what I've got right now. Okay, now that is essentially how to hire a va. Let me just go through one of the spreadsheets that we use to I suppose analyze performance or analyze the social media content to make sure it's obviously doing well. So I'm just going to briefly summarize this. If you want a full version of it, just, just let me know. But this is actually my actual statistics. So you can see in here, I'm just going to go through these last couple of months. We haven't done the March one just yet, but we've got December, January, February, we've got the actual views, profile, activity, profile visits, reach, engagement post reach, etc. Etc. Etc. Pretty much every single metric you can think of to track. We've got a KPI for an increase, we've got the what we did the previous month and then a KPI target and then we build like an increase and decrease from previous month and then the reason why that happened. So even like for example, you can see in here from January and February got 130, 137,000 views on Instagram alone. Facebook page got 85 and a half thousand. So over 200,000 people viewing my stuff each month. February tiger was 150,000. On Instagram we got 129,000. So yes, that was a decrease, but still pretty consistent. That's still a really good result. But you can see in here pretty much all the other ones have increased. Facebook increased, Facebook pages increased, Spotify has increased, YouTube and TikTok are slightly down. But we've got a couple of reasons for this. So then we can analyze it and move forward. So let me go into the specifics. For February, for example, so we do a super easy to understand spreadsheet which by the way my VA made. I did not make this. And this is why you hire them because they're an expert in their field. So you can straightaway see all the metrics. All the metrics. If I scroll across and if you're just listening to this, I highly recommend to watch it if you can because this will give you a good, a good insight into what it's actually going to be like. So we've got Instagram, Facebook, Spotify, YouTube, TikTok. So you can see the trends, you can see your top performing posts as well. So you can make more of that type of content. But the key here is you need to analyze the data. There's no point getting or even posting on social media and not analyzing the data. You're never going to be able to, you know, continuously grow your audience or grow the business if you're not analyzing the numbers. Okay, so I wanted to give you guys some insights into what it's actually like to have a VA in terms of the communication we communicate on Slack. Now I'm not going to go into too much detail on Slack. It's just the communication software. I just have the free version. You don't need anything crazy with that. We just have different channels that we communicate for different things. That's pretty much it. So in summary, Zane, a VA should really only cost you between three to five dollars an hour. Actually, I'll quickly touch on this as well. In terms of the training, yes, it takes a little bit of time to train them up. However, if you pick the right person, you want them to be pretty self reliant as well. Now with my current vas it only took me a couple of, a couple of catch ups to make sure everything was going to plan and we were improving. But these days I didn't catch up with my VA once a month just to go over what the plan is for the next month. That's the example. And now that I think of it, we've got to catch up for the month from the month of March to make a plan for April. But in terms of the training, a lot of it can be taught via you making videos. You don't need to do any a lot of one on one time. So you make the video. So you do it, you do it, you film it, you film how you do it like a loom video or a zoom recording like this. And basically you're going to send it to them and say hey, I want you to watch this video and tell me any questions that you've got and then we're going to jump on a zoom call and we're going to go through any questions that you've got to make sure you understand. Perfect. Sweet. Now let them do that task the following week and then catch up at the end of the week and say cool, tell me what you did here and let's go through any questions or concerns that you had. Cool. That one's ticked. Boom. Move on to the next one and then gradually. It should even take you a month to get your VA fully trained in your specific systems, sometimes faster. But it gives you a bit of an insight into what it's like to actually have a virtual assistant, what they're doing, how to actually hire one. So as I said, the website is onlinejobs.ph personally I recommend doing the paid version Once you hire someone, just cancel it and you won't get charged anymore. And just make sure you only message people that are spending more than one credit to apply for the job. And as they have about three or four different qualifier qualifiers to narrow down to the best candidate, interview five and then pick one. And by the way, get them to send you through the presentation as well because then you can review it afterwards and say cool. Once you've interviewed everyone, cool. I'm going to spend 24 hours reviewing all the presentations and I'll come back to everyone in 24 hours. Tick, tick, tick. Happy Days Team Hope that was valuable and I think that was a pretty juicy episode. Super keen to hear your feedback as always. Have an awesome day. And if you guys do want actually help with the va, my VA can do some stuff for you as well. By the way, if you want to test the waters to see what it would be like, you can't have it, but you can, you can test the waters to see what it would be like to have one and then I can show you how to actually hire one. Or if you want help doing that, I can do it for you as well. Anyway, have an awesome day. I'll talk to you guys later on.