MBA2040 Q&A Wednesday: Do I need a virtual assistant if I am just getting started?

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Visit Dell.com deals. Hey oh welcome to the Hundred Dollar MBA Show. Because a better business begins with you. That's why we deliver daily 10 minute business lessons for the real world. I'm your host, your coach, your teacher Omar Zenholm. I'm also the co founder of Webinar Ninja, an independent software company I started with my co founder back in 2014 and today's episode is Q and A Wednesday. On Q and A Wednesdays we answer a question from one of you, one of our listeners. If you got a question you want to ask, just go ahead and email me over@omar100mba.net Today's question is from Brenda and Brenda asks. Hey Omar, love the podcast. Quick Question. I just started my online business a few weeks ago and I'm wondering do I need to hire a virtual assistant? I heard you once say it's one of the first hires I should make. The only thing is is that I'm not really sure why. What I would give this person to do would love any advice you could offer. Thanks Brenda. Well first of all congratulations Brenda on starting your business. I'm sure it's an exciting time and yes that is true. I have recommended and still recommend hiring a virtual assistant as your first hire and I'll explain why in today's episode. But when you make that first hire is actually quite pivotal. Brenda expressed something that a lot of people feel in the beginning when they're trying to make their first hire, they're not really sure how or what to give them. They're worried they're going to hire somebody and have them twiddling their thumbs, not having enough work to do. And as a new business, you want to be as efficient and as lean as possible. So I'm going to show you how to balance that, how to make sure you know it's time to make that hire and how to make use of that hire from day one so that you are actually getting a return on your investment. Also, a few tips on how to find a virtual assistant that can help you, how to assess and know that you found a good one. So let's get into it. Let's get down to business.

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Business and she's wondering, should she hire a virtual assistant? She's not really sure what she would give this person, what kind of tasks will do and if she has enough for them to do to make that hire. I want to start by saying why I recommend hiring a virtual assistant as your first hire. As an independent business owner, especially when you're in the first year or so, your most valuable asset is your time. You need to make the most out of your time as much as possible. Because basically you're doing everything in the beginning. You're creating the product, you're marketing it, you're selling it, you're servicing it. You're doing everything pretty much as the founder, as the owner of the business. And the thing you learn very quickly is that not all tasks are created equal, meaning there are certain tasks you do throughout the day that take up a lot of your time. They don't really get you a huge return on investment. Your time is probably best suited or best used on tasks to actually grow the business that bring in clients, that get you customers, that bring in revenue. I call these $10,000 tasks, right? Big, big things that move the needle. The problem is that a lot of Us, especially in the beginning, are spending most of our day doing $10 tasks. This is like replying to emails, scheduling calls, doing admin work, maybe publishing things on the website, meaning actually doing the admin of and scheduling, maybe tinkering with some graphic design. Maybe it's customer service. These are very time consuming activities that don't really generate revenue. What generates revenue is really creating a superior product, is selling their product, running webinars, building your brand, creating partnerships and relationships with people so that you can expand your business beyond yourself. And this is why I recommend a virtual assistant. Because they can take off your plate all these $10 tasks that are so time consuming. And frankly, a lot of the times it's the stuff that we do to procrastinate. A lot of the times it's the stuff that we do to make us feel like we're busy and they don't really move the needle. So my advice to Brenda and anybody who's starting a business looking to hire their first virtual assistant is to literally look at what you do every day. Write down what are the tasks that you feel you are best at? Like you are the person that brings in the dough when it comes to this. Are you great at doing webinars? Are you great at creating the product itself? Maybe you're the content creator, that's awesome on the mic, on a podcast, or writing blog posts. Maybe that's your specialty. What if you just focused on those things? What if you just did your secret sauce, your special talent full time and produced incredible meaningful results in those areas and let all the other admin tasks that take all your time or take you away from those things and have somebody else do them. So basically, you want to separate all the things you do every day from things that move the needle, things that you're really great at, your special thing, and don't say everything is something that you're great at. Okay, you need to be specific. You need to be picky, really, on what you're best at. And then all the other things that you do that you can basically get anybody else to do. Most of the things, this is the secret here, most of the things you do can be outsourced. You are not the expert at answering emails. You're not the expert at scheduling your calls. Right? You can hire anybody and train them to do it. They can learn how to do it. Scheduling blog posts is a step by step process. You can teach anybody and take a look at that list of things that you're going to outsource. Now, I want to say, you don't need to hire somebody full time to get started. You want to start with 20 hours a week, go ahead and do that. But at least you have somebody working for you five days a week, doing these tasks, taking them off your plate. I also want to say this is actually a really good exercise and a good habit to get into because you're learning to delegate. You're learning to be really an entrepreneur, somebody who orchestrates a business and doesn't do the actual work. I remember even in the early days when we had a virtual assistant, our first virtual assistant, it was just good to have somebody who was on top of all my communications, my business, so that I can go away, I can go on a vacation, and that person can just take care of my inbox, answer on my behalf. Say, omer's not available, but I'm going to put this in his, you know, on top of his inbox. Or delete the things that don't need to reply to. Schedule meetings that needs to be scheduled. Reschedule meetings that don't need to be on my calendar because I'm going away. I might batch a bunch of blog posts where I wrote them beforehand and then they can schedule them for me. And basically that person can just reach out to you if there's an emergency. That way you don't have to check anything. Don't check emails or Basecamp or, you know, Slack or any of your communication tools. They can literally just give you a call if there's an issue. And that's what we did when we first got started. And it's so relieving to have somebody take care of things while you're gone. And this is just the first step of many of delegating your tasks, your duties, the things that you need to get done to grow your business. It starts with these tasks, but then you're going to make another hire, whether it's in marketing, whether it's in customer support, maybe it's content writing, whatever it is. The point here is, is that the business should not stop when you. Right when you stop working, the business should keep on going. That's a real business, a business that keeps growing, that keeps moving forward, even when you're sleeping, when you're on vacation, when you have an emergency and you can't go to work. That's the difference between running a business and being self employed. Being self employed means that you need to do the work in order for things to happen. Now the virtual assistant step is one step in that direction of completely having your business run without you. And often in the beginning you're still going to be doing some of the major work, whether it's the client work or creating the product or whatever it is. But at least you're outsourcing all the stuff that you don't need to do and that you frankly maybe don't enjoy doing. Hiring a virtual assistant is one of the easiest and most low cost ways for you to enjoy your business. Meaning do only the things you enjoy. Get somebody else to do all the admin work. Now I mentioned low cost. How do you find a virtual assistant a good one? Well, there's lots of ways. There's so many job boards out there, from upwork to freelancer to fiverr to a whole bunch of things. And I've tried a lot of different ones. The one that I have found that has given us the best results is onlinejobs ph. It's a website and a job board that is based in the Philippines. And yes, you're going to have to go through some CVs and do some interviews and they're all not gonna be superstars, but you can filter out easily by just creating an application form. And we literally create this in Google. And you just create a form asking the questions that would make sure you're finding the right people. And you only interview people that fill this form to the level that you're expecting. Questions we ask are actual questions that we would ask in an interview. We ask them to give them examples of the work they've done before, the type of tasks they've done as an assistant before. We even ask at the end to submit a video talking a little bit about themselves or we give them a couple questions, depending on the job that we're hiring for, that they can answer on video. I want to make sure they can communicate with me verbally because we'll probably have meetings, we'll probably have video meetings. Maybe they'll take calls for clients. Whatever it is, I need somebody who is comfortable communicating face to face. You can then ask them to submit their LinkedIn or their CV at the end. This is a great filter and in my experience, every time we hire for an example, a virtual assistant, we literally get hundreds of applications. Okay? And in those hundreds of applications, like, I mean last time I did this we had like over 200 applications. But amongst those applications you'll probably be able to shortlist the top five. And from those top five you can conduct some interviews. Now in my experience, if you want to save time, save headaches, and in the Long term, save money, you get what you pay for. Yes, you can find a full time virtual assistant that will work for $400 US a month, but they won't be as experienced, as responsible as on the ball. A great communicator, as you might expect. By paying a little bit more, 600, 650, 700amonth, you can get really highly talented people that can really help you grow your business and take a lot off your plate that have done this before, have worked for other clients, have worked even maybe for some businesses you respect and admire. Now if you're looking for a part time hire, this is definitely a good stepping stone. But understand that if you're going to hire somebody part time, it's only fair that they're going to be working for you part time but also working somewhere else. There might be working full time or part time somewhere else and kind of bridging the gap financially. So you may not have their full focus and commitment. Understand that you're going to get more commitment with a full time hire, but only pay for it if you have enough work for them. Now if you're wondering how do I know if I have enough work for them? Well, look at the tasks you want them to do and ask yourself, how much time does it take me to do these tasks every week and then triple it because you know this task inside and out. You're efficient, you're fast, you know your stuff, you're a taskmaster, you're, you're amazing, right? But not everybody's you and you can't clone yourself. So just triple the time because that's really the reality. A good estimate. So if you do your calculation and you estimate, okay, the tasks I do take me about 10, 12 hours, times that by three, that's about 36 hours. That's about 40 hours. I think I'm ready for a full time hire.

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To wrap up today's Q and A Wednesday's question from Brenda. Brilliant question about hiring a VA when she's just getting started. My answer to Brenda and everybody else is make a solid list of all the things you do as well as what you have to do. When you're just getting started in your business, you probably have a laundry list of to dos that you need to have. Some of this could just be research. You're not sure, for example, which website provider you want to use or what kind of tools you want to start paying for so you can scale your business and you can get them to do the research for you. Hey, I'm looking for these tools. These are the ones I kind of like. If you can explore if there are other tools that are just as effective and they can present to you with a slideshow, hey, and they can even record a video for you. This is what I found. This is what I think. This is the differences between these things. These are the prices. They could do all the research for you so you don't have to. Now I want to just pause for a moment and shift gears. Some people hire a virtual assistant to take off their plate. Life, not business. So if you feel like maybe you got the business under control and you don't really need a virtual assistant for your business, some people just hire a virtual assistant to take care of all their life duties. Scheduling appointments, ordering gifts, you know, organizing holidays, little menial tasks like, you know, maybe claiming something on insurance, registering your car online, all that kind of stuff. You know, the things that really just take time for no reason and you don't want to do it. A lot of people say, hey, my life is consumed with my business. I got very limited time. I don't want to spend my time doing all these little kind of admin y chores for my life. And people hire assistants for that. Something to consider. Thanks so much for listening to the $100 MBA show. If you got a question you want to ask here on Q and A Wednesday, just go ahead and email me over@omar100mba.net Before I go, I want to leave you with this. One of the things that we recommend is that when you hire a virtual assistant to do a task, the first task is actually to document that task. It's called a standard operating procedure, an sop. So there's literally a manual on how to do every task because you want to have documentation. You want to have a way that you can hand over these tasks to anybody just in case the person that you're working with today no longer works for you in the future. And that first hire can really be able to catalog all the tasks, the steps involved, so they can easily just go to the document and follow the steps. Thanks again for listening and I'll check you in tomorrow's episode. I'll see you then. Take care.

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