Making It Work With Your Virtual Assistant:
THE RESPONSIBILITY IS YOURS TO MAKE IT WORK:
When I first started looking for virtual assistants, I was looking for someone who had all the experiences to help me solve all the business problems I was having, especially when it came to appointment setting, and even when I could find someone who on paper seemed like they had all the experience one would need to make an amazing appointment setter, they still wouldn’t be too great when it came to doing the job.
In the first few months of looking for VAs for my appointment setting agency, I probably went through close to thousands of resumes trying to find the best VAs on the market, but I got to a point where I realized that experience didn’t mean anything, because every experienced VA that I hired was worse than someone who had never had a single job experience.
After having hired and fired over 20 virtual assistants in like 90 days, I came to realize that if I was going to build a really effective team of virtual assistants, it was my responsibility to make them Great and to make sure that the whole system worked wonderfully.
From that moment on, I started doing daily meetings with the whole team as if we were a sales team that needs a quick boost in motivation before going selling stuff through door to door.
I started scheduling some shadowing sessions with a few employees every week to make sure they were doing what needed to be done.
I started scheduling some touch bases with every single VA/employee every two weeks or at least once a month, to make sure that I knew how they felt about the job and what could be improved in order to make them enjoy what they were doing.
After having implemented those three things, we scaled our appointment setting agency near 30k per month in just 3-4 months.
All this to say that the responsibility, to make your business succeed, to turn your virtual assistant into a rockstar is yours and yours only!
No one else is responsible for your business success and it for sure won’t be a $3/h VA that you’ve never spent a single minute training or getting them to understand what you even do..
HIRE SLOW AND FIRE FAST:
The quality of your business and the transformation that you offer to your customers will be highly dependent on the type of people who make up your business.
If you have bad people on the team, don’t expect them to create amazing outcomes and experiences for your clients.
INPUT = OUTPUT
When you hire your virtual assistant(s), make sure you give them everything they need in order to perform very well, but if after 2-3 weeks you can clearly get a feel that they’re not the right fit, let them go.
Accept the sunk cost, as it’s better to lose the money invested in them than to lose time and provide your customers or yourself/your business a bad experience.
I’ve always found that when I fire an employee, the one that follows ends up being 10x better!
I recommend that you always keep looking for new and better talent because it’s important for you and me to behave like the biggest corporations if we want to sustain our growth.
Never settle for average when it comes to any area of your life, financial situation, love life, employees, health, fitness, spirituality, etc.
MISSION & VISION:
Have you taken the time to write down your company's mission/vision statement?
If not, then why would you expect quality people to join a company that has no purpose?
People will join your company at first for a salary but they will never stay because of the salary…
If you want to make people stay and want to attract the right people, create a mission statement and make it clear what it is for everyone on your team.
Your Virtual Assistant(s) should be aware that they’re contributing to a bigger goal and that they’re having a bigger impact than they think.
This is what will make them work like they own your company, work on weekends, come up with new insights to help you achieve better results.
GREAT ASSETS:
Something great happens when you have committed and well-trained virtual assistants, they literally provide you with an EDGE that not many people in your industry have.
This is because the cost to employ them is relatively low but their potential is actually limitless, just like yours and mine. ( as long as their environment isn’t limiting)
You have the opportunity to have a great employee who can literally bring you every single month a few thousand, five figures, and even multiple five figures for only $3 per hour!
The profitability and the peace of mind that come with such a situation are incomparable.
MOST COMMON REASONS WHY PEOPLE WHO HIRE VAs FAIL AND HOW TO AVOID THEM:
- They expect the virtual assistant to know everything and not need any continuous training
- They expect the virtual assistant to get the results tomorrow when they couldn’t personally get results for months, maybe years.
- They don’t keep track of the work that their virtual assistant is doing, they just assume that the job is getting done.
- They show up a month later, after literally never having been on a training call with their virtual assistant, and claim that it isn’t working.
- They assume that having a virtual assistant go through a few video training sessions will turn them into experts at what they’re doing.
- They don’t believe that virtual assistants can achieve great outcomes therefore they don’t invest much time or money in them.
- They don’t share feedback with their virtual assistant fast and continuously.
Do you want to make your Virtual assistant great and do amazing things for you? Do the opposite of everything that I just listed above.
- Lower your expectations when it comes to your virtual assistant.
- Lower your expectations with the timeline your virtual assistant is supposed to get results in.
- Every day, three times per day, you should look at what your virtual assistant is doing. Beginning of their shift, mid-day, and end of their shift.
- Never claim that an employee didn’t perform a month later when you never invested a single minute training them on how to perform.
- Never just rely on video training, make sure you get some one-on-one time with your team member, the ROI on the time spent with them is incredible!
- Believe that your virtual assistant(s) can achieve things you’ve never dreamed of with the right training and guidance.
- The fastest way to becoming great is to get fast feedback from your coach, so become a coach with your virtual assistant and never delay sharing feedback with them unless you like people to do bad things.
INCENTIVES RUN THE WORLD:
Training sessions, loom video training, shadowing sessions and one on one touch bases are great and will do a lot of the work in order to bring your virtual assistant(s) to perform BUT there is only one thing that Beats all of that and that is their incentives!
“Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives.”
— Charlie Munger
This quote from Charlie explains it very well, if you’re looking for the fastest solution to your problems with people, don’t look any further than Incentives.
I recommend that you still pay your virtual assistants $3 per hour but please add incentives, bonuses if they end up performing and getting your results!
The bigger the incentive the more they’ll be motivated to get you results!
If you currently don’t have any compensation plan designed for them, PLEASE CREATE ONE.
WHAT WILL HAPPEN IF YOUR VIRTUAL ASSISTANT(S) WANT YOUR GOALS AS MUCH AS YOU DO?
If you do the following:
- Get on daily calls with your virtual assistant
- Provide them with constant feedback and training they need to become good
- Create an exciting compensation plan for them
- Get them to understand why you’re doing what you’re doing, your vision/mission for the world and the company
- Lower your expectations in the first few weeks of having them on board.
Then you’ll end up with the most important thing any business owner desires and that is PEACE OF MIND AND GREAT EMPLOYEES THAT CAN EXECUTE, GROW THE COMPANY WITHOUT NEEDING HIM/HER HELP.
SOME OF MY HABITS WHEN IT COMES TO MANAGING AND TRAINING MY VAs:
- Daily calls at 10 am EST, no exception.
- Personal messages asking them how they’re doing
- Fast feedback when I see something that isn’t right - I normally slack them a quick message and ask them to get on a quick 5 min zoom call.
- Fast feedback when I see them doing something great - I normally send them a message to tell them how great of a job they’re doing.
- Out of nowhere, I’ll give them a bonus. A $20 bonus goes a long way for them.
- I encourage new insights, new ideas so I ask them to come up with new ideas to solve some of our current problems and I pay them for their ideas ( $20-$50)
- On our daily calls, they don’t always have to be about business, we may spend 10-20 minutes talking about any subject.
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