How To Find, Hire and Train Virtual Assistants - Grow Your Business By Outsourcing and Hiring VAs 💻

So we've got a question from Derek also in the same vein, about this whole business business growth. So I'm thinking about hiring a VA to do my social media marketing, book my prospecting appointments and grow my email list. I'm outsourcing these crucial tasks to get more free time. Do you have any advice on vetting VA's? So I'm going to be definitely in listen only mode right now. Brooks, how do you like, what's your. I know it's really hard to break down super quick. You only have a couple minutes but like, what's your hiring process look like? And then Saba, you too. You building all those teams and everything. You've definitely dealt with a ton of people. So Brooks, what's your first?

And then VAs are really easy to find on upwork. Go based on their reputation, who they've worked with before. You give them a couple of simple assignments, see how they perform with that. I'd also organize your task by the highest leverage. Most important, see how they communicate. Set those communication standards very strictly because it's difficult, right. If you hire someone in like I love hiring from the Philippines, but you're on completely opposite schedules. So when you've built that sort of trust and you know that you can wake up and the tasks that you asked the day before are going to be done, it's pretty cool. But at the same time it takes a while for that to be done. So I'd say prioritize your tasks, be very clear about how you want to communicate. Otherwise both you are going to get frustrated. Look at upwork ads, look at their reputation and their work samples, things that they've done before. Oh, and small and small. Don't, don't just go all in with. I'd have, I don't know, maybe about three to five and then pick maybe your top three, give them small tasks, who did the best, Go with the best one and trust your intuition.

Cool.

Fantastic. Saba, what do you think? How do you go about vetting and hiring a VA?

The VA's are definitely. You want to test them. You know, if you can come up with sort of like a test project or give them test scenarios and ask them how they would solve it, that would give you a good idea of their thinking process and ability to solve problems because that's essentially what you want a VA for. You know, you don't want to have to give them SOPs for everything. You want them to be able to figure out a few things themselves or even create SOPs for themselves. Right. So trying to figure out, trying to gauge their level of initiative and being able to take a project and not ask too many questions. Those are definitely key things. But then again, it depends on the tasks too. If you really just want them to follow an sop, then see how well they can follow a few test SOPs.

Yeah, awesome. Yeah, totally. And then something like. Yeah, with the Philippines thing or whatever, I actually got really lucky. I went, I did a volunteer program in the Dominican Republic. I lived in the mountains for like five weeks or so and the only dude in the village who spoke English is now my va. So sometimes you just get lucky. But I also, if time zone thing is an issue, check out South America. There's tons of like native speakers who went back home that can do everything, like get on the phone to even qualify an appointment all the way through. Really boring like data entry type stuff too. So yeah, definitely give South America a shout. They're. Yeah, like I said, tons and tons of native speakers. They're only depending on the where you live in. If you're in the U.S. they're only either the same time. Like me, I'm on east coast time, so they're either the same time as me or one hour ahead. So they'd be, they function essentially the same. If you're on Pacific time, then a lot of South America is on Atlantic time, which is an hour further than Eastern standard Time. But it's also, that's only when we do daylight saving. So for half the year you're on the same exact time, half the year there, an hour ahead.

Only other thing I'd say is ask in the RNBC group or Justin and Stefan Talk Copy. Does anyone have a virtual assistant that they recommend that they've enjoyed, that they work with?

Yeah, definitely. If you can get someone that's been vetted already, that's going to help you save a lot of headaches. You know there are going to be business owners who have people that they know or teams that they recommend. That would be a better way to start.

Yep.

Good recommendation folks.

Great making notes on all that stuff. I'll be doing the same thing. So following up on that. So last question.