As you grow your Virtual Assistant business you will begin to understand that you can’t do everything – heck you might even realise this now when you’re not at full capacity! I always teach my mentorees that ultimately your role as a 100KVA is to create valuable content (aka education marketing) and having sales conversations.
We treat sales here as an opportunity to help someone with a problem. So the more people you can design a plan and then organise plan to be implemented the better. BUT that doesn’t mean you have to do the hard yards.
You don’t have to do the all the work for all the clients. As long as the agreed deliverables are being well, delivered then there is nothing stopping you from spending most of your time growing your practice rather than doing the “dirty work” – unless of course you want to do it!
So yes eventually you will need to grow your team by at least one person – so here are my top 3 tips to adding subcontractors in your Virtual Assistant business.
Tip Number 1: DO Not Pay Your Team Member Hourly.
This is important for a number of reasons. First off congruency. If you don’t want your clients to pay you per hour than you can’t expect to pay your team members per hour, asking for timesheet and similar. There is so much disconnect in this process that it will cause moral havoc! I actually discuss this a bit in my video about “be the change” too!
Secondly you are opening yourself up to a tiny or NO profit situation. If you’re going to be charging your client set fee for a service with no time linked to it (aka packages) and then you are paying a team member hourly to complete the task the chance of you getting your profit margin eaten away (from mistakes, redoing work, slow paced team members etc) is VERY likely. Always set out a set fee for the work (with no time constraint on them except due date).
Tip Number 2: Pick Non Virtual Assistants
Now hear me out on this one! I know it seems crazy but I’ve been in biz for over 12 years and I have hired and fired lots of people in my world and the biggest lesson I had is this. Virtual Assistants who are keen to start and grow their own VA business are a short term solution who put you at the bottom of their to do list because 99% of the time you’re paying them a lower rate than their standard (being a subcontractor).
They always would rather work for their higher rate of clients than subby work – as you would expect! Even if someone touts that this is not true that all their clients are equal etc etc – trust me – even on a subconscience level, they would rather work for more money. It’s only normal.
This is why I prefer to work with Stay At Home Mums/Moms who are not keen on building a business. They usually have fantastic skills from previous work experience, are dedicated to your business and have a lot of gratitude for helping them financially by giving them flexible work options. They are not going to leave you for bigger and better things if their goals are just to work a small number of hours.
I love working with these women and I find they are the best solution to my Virtual Assistant businses growth!
Tip Number 3: Reward & Gratitude!
Nothing beats financial reward, small gifts, public posts of gratitude or similar in building loyalty, trust and motivation to be the best. These people are helping YOU build a profitable Virtual Assistant business so make sure they know how much they are valued and appreciated.
You know exactly what it feels like when a client sings your praises vs those that rarely give you feedback and you don’t know whether you’re doing a good job or not. Create and foster the experience you desire and it will come back to you – trust me!
So there you go – my top 3 tips! Let me know if you need any helping implementing new team members into your business.
Personally I think there are some obvious things that all Virtual Assistants need to outsource as soon as possible, so if you want to check out my list – you can get it below!
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Cheers
