3 Tips to Building Your Virtual Team

Three tips to building your virtual team. So I get a lot of questions around how do you, James, how do you build your virtual team? So whether it's virtual assistants out in another country and how do you manage them, how do you bring them on board, how do you get them to do the tasks that you want them to do? So I thought I would record a quick video and give you some insight and three key tips that you can take away and implement in your agency today. So the first tip would be communication. So communication is keys, particularly with virtual assistants where English is not their first language. It's very, very important what you and I think to communicate and to explain things once. Sometimes you need to explain things a little bit more detail using video as well, which I'll come on to in a second. So in terms of communication, we use a tool called Slack. Slack is used by a lot of growing tech companies now and a lot of companies in turn are starting to move towards Slack. So we moved towards Slack, I think about three years ago and we've continued to do that. So our internal team and our agency, we all communicate. We have different channels, different ways to communicate. We can share files, videos, ask questions to talk through meetings, etc. And what we did was put our virtual assistants in that Slack communication. And we had created different channels depending on the agenda. So whether that was marketing operations, client leads, client funnels, website stuff, jobs, there's different ways that you can actually automate your business so your virtual team can take care of a lot of things. So the first thing you need to have is a way how am I going to communicate with my va? So maybe you might hire one VA to start and then you can grow them out from there. For me, that's how we started. So we started with one VA hide the second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth. I mean we grew that to I think around 12, 14 VAs. We've actually diluted that down now to I think we're at 6 or 7 now in our team, all full time and we've managed our systems and processes for everything that they do. And the best way to do that is to communicate via Slack. So everyone's online on Slack, so we can ask questions, we talk to each other, we have meetings through the communication tool called Zoom. So another tool that you could use is zoom us. It's a free tool, 45 minute free call. So you can have group calls with your full team of ears. You can have one on one calls to make sure that you're talking around, you're getting Them started for the day and you're having meetings around what they need to improve, what they need to do for that day. So that's the first step I would give for your virtual team is you need to have the correct communication channels to make sure that works. Because a lot of businesses fail and a lot of virtual teams fail by communication. I think that's the most important thing. And when I say communication, you need to literally drill down into recording videos about what each task needs to be and step by step. So actually bullet points of what they need to do, how they need to log in, how they need to do that task, what looks good for a task, what looks bad, how they can improve, and they're constantly learning all of the time. It's something that I teach in my program as well of how you build a virtual team, which I've into a lot more in depth. I give you workbooks, templates, step by step, how you do that. But the first tip that we give is communication is key. Second tip is you need a way to track their work and their time. So the best tool I would use would be a tracking tool. So that's something that would pick up when they log in. They log into this certain tool to sign in. So it's a bit like a timesheet. It's got screen recording software so you can actually see what tasks they're working on, how productive they are. For me personally, I've never checked that for the last two years or so, but it's just good to have there. Once you start trusting your team and you build a solid virtual team, you can trust them to get onto their work day to day. But you do need a way to track the time because at the end of the month or the end of the week, you obviously need to pay them as well. The tool that we use to pay our virtual staff, we use a tool called transferwise, has great conversions. The Philippines or in India, it's really easy to do that. So you can download the timesheet from your time tracking software, put it in TransferWise, works on the payments, and then it's just one click bank transfer straight into TransferWise. So that would be the next tip that I would give a bit, building your virtual team. And the third tip would be, as I mentioned before, communication is key. So what you can do, you can get these guys and girls to do a lot. So they can, they can help input data, they can help build client maps of like different data. So whether you want to build a client funnel, you can add Clients to their contact, email addresses, etc. Can all be added to that. So the final tip would be recording step by step videos is very, very important. So what I did from day one with my agency, step by step, I recorded everything that I do day to day. And then the idea was how can I get that off my plate as a business owner? Because obviously I want to grow my times more and more precious. So how can I get my virtual team to do this task? And what I would do, I'd record a video, then I would actually get the virtual assistant to watch that video come back to me and we'll have another meeting, ask any questions, do the task once and then I would investigate it to make sure it was correct. Realign any miscommunication because there will be some miscommunication in the first example of the task. And then once they've mastered that, probably two or three times, I would ask them to document every step. So literally how what the website will be or what the tool will be that they're using or what software they're using to do that process and step by step how they would upload that bit of content or how they would add the candidate or whatever it was the task that they're doing step by step, literal, with screenshots and then next step, screenshot, next step and then the full video. Now you can do that for free in Google Docs and you can use screen recording software which is for free as well. And what you're doing is building little systems and pillars so you can start automate as much as you can and get it off your plate with your virtual team to free your time up to meet as many clients as possible and candidates as possible to do as many deals as possible. So the less admin work and operational stuff you can do and the lower level tasks, the better for your business as well. So I hope you found it useful. If you are interested in finding out more, visit entrepreneurjames.com I'm doing a case study of 10 recruitment owners or people that want to start their own agency where I'm going to coach you one on one in an eight week program. So if you are interested you can apply book a strategy call. If I feel that the synergies connect and it's something that I can help you with, then I'm looking to take it from there. So hope you found this video useful and please like and subscribe to my YouTube channel and if you've got any questions drop a comment below. Cheers. Hi, thanks for watching today's. Video. If you like what you've seen, please like and subscribe the button with Entrepreneur James so you keep up to date with all of the updated videos. If you've got any questions or comment, I'd love to hear from you. So please drop a comment in Entrepreneur Gems below and we'll look to answer those on a weekly Q and A video. Keep an eye out for any future videos that we'll be posting. I'll be popping the video in here probably every one to two days. Thank you.