It’s a familiar story with entrepreneurs and small business owners: they spend so much time working, they don’t have time to grow their business. Without growth your business will stagnate. This makes hiring a virtual assistant (or VA) a critical step to moving your business forward. But it isn’t always easy to think about relinquishing parts of your precious business to someone else.

In this module you’ll examine common concerns that stop people from recruiting a VA and challenge your mindset about outsourcing, so that you’ll be in the right frame of mind to proceed with recruitment.

Why Use a Virtual Assistant?

Having a VA will free up your valuable time and eliminate the routine, daily tasks so you can focus on business growth activities like marketing, developing new products and services, and so on. By reallocating your time in this way, you can boost your business to another level.

But having a VA isn’t just about saving time. Even though you’ve probably been doing pretty much everything in your business yourself up to this point, you can’t excel in all tasks. There may be skill areas you simply don’t have (and don’t have time to acquire), so hiring a VA with those skills will fill an important gap.

And because your VA will be working remotely, it doesn’t matter where they live. This means you’ll have access to talent around the world and can choose the complete range of skill sets you need from experienced, enthusiastic freelancers.

If you want to build a successful business, you will need to hire people. A virtual assistant is a great first employee for your company.

Are You Ready for a VA?

If you’re overwhelmed by an endless to-do list of business tasks, then chances are you’re struggling to get everything done. You’re probably spending too much time on repetitive admin tasks and not enough on launching a new product or service. Or you’re burning the midnight oil to get it all done, and facing exhaustion and potential burnout as a result.

The idea of having someone to take those routine tasks away may sound like heaven. But even so, some entrepreneurs don’t go ahead with recruiting a VA.

There are a number of reasons for this – some of them you may find familiar:

• Fear of loss of control – It’s my business
  • This is a very common objection to hiring a virtual assistant. You’ve built your business yourself. You know it inside out. You don’t want to let go of part of it to someone else. But having a VA doesn’t mean you hand over the control of your business to them. They are there to work for you and help you develop your business, and you’re still very much in charge of that.
• Concern about finding the right person – No one will do it like I do
  • You’ve done everything up to now. You’ve developed your ways of doing things that you’re happy with. But maybe a VA with additional skills and experience could do the job too. They might even do it better than you.
• Financial investment – I can’t afford to pay someone to do something I do myself for free
  • Hiring someone means paying them. Up to this point you haven’t had to pay out money regularly to anyone else. But just because you’re doing a task yourself doesn’t mean it’s free. It just means that you haven’t counted your own time as a business expense.
• Time taken to train – It’s quicker to do it myself
  • You already know what you’re doing. You’ve done it a million times before. If you hire a VA, you’ll have to train them and that will take longer than doing the task yourself. This may well be true in the short term, but if you’re prepared to invest time in training someone who can then take routine tasks off your shoulders, this will save you much more time in the long term.
• Horror stories from others or bad past experiences – I can’t go through that again!
  • It’s possible that you tried outsourcing to someone in the past and it went disastrously wrong. Or you have business colleagues who have shared their VA nightmare stories with you. But maybe you, or they, weren’t prepared sufficiently or didn’t spend enough time on the hiring process. There could be a multitude of reasons, but none them justifies giving up on the VA idea if you want to have a successful business.

These concerns are partially based on fact. Yes, you are giving up some of your total control to gain growth, but you will have checks and performance measures in place as safeguards.  It’s important that your VA assists you, not hinders you – your hiring process will see to this.

But the less logical, deeper-rooted messages mean that you might sabotage yourself with a reluctance to release control. There’s no point pretending that these messages aren’t playing inside your head. You need to confront the gremlins and work with them so that you get your mindset in the right place before you are truly ready for a VA.

You want to develop a mindset that is open to the possibility of finding the right person who is a good fit for your business. Your mindset also needs to be accepting of the fact that this process will take some work, but at the end of the day this work will pay off if you have a VA who makes your life much easier.

Reframe your mindset by using a set of questions that focus on the outcome you want – in this case, to delegate tasks to someone else to free you up to grow your business:

• What am I trying to achieve?
• What outcome do I want?
• What resources might I need to get there?
• Is this decision to hire a VA getting me closer to my outcome? Or is it pulling me away?
• If it isn’t then what’s a better decision I could make? Why is this better?
• How will I know when I have achieved my desired outcome? What will I see, hear, feel, or experience?

Cost of VAs

Cost is going to be at the top of your list for your first employee. Rates vary dramatically depending on who, where, and what they do. You can expect to pay more for an experienced person than a newbie.

To give you a guideline, average US rates are $35 to $70+ per hour, UK rates £20 to £40+ per hour for a good virtual assistant.  

You can spend considerably less if you go to countries where the cost of living is lower than in US/Europe. For example, the rate in the Philippines is $6 to $14 per hour and India is much the same.

We’ll be looking in a later module at budgeting for your VA, so that’s just a taster to get you started thinking about cost.

It isn’t just what you spend that enters the calculation, but what you save by employing a remote worker. You won’t be offering a benefits package covering medical benefits, paid vacation, etc. if you hire freelancers or use a VA agency. You don’t need to provide office space for them to work in or equipment for them to work on.

All importantly, focus on how much they will save you of your own time plus the amount of new business you can bring in because they have taken tasks off your plate.

If you’re still concerned about costs, do a simple calculation to work out your own hourly rate:

1. What revenue can you bring in annually (if you have help)? Add on 30% for expenses, taxes etc.

Example: 60000+30% =78000

2. Hours you want to work each week x number of weeks you want to work in a year minus 25% non-billable hours (marketing etc.)

Example: 28 hours a week – 25% = 21 hours x (52-10 weeks=) 42weeks/year = 882 hours/year

3. Divide your answer to #1 by the answer in #2

Example: 78000 / 882= 85 per hour

With an hourly rate of 85 this is much more than most VAs would earn. If you’re doing a basic admin task for 85/hour when you could hire someone for around 20 to do the same job, then you need a VA!