My Secret: Virtual Assistants Run My Business

Is busywork bogging down your business?

It’s time to delegate and free up your team’s time for high-value tasks. This lets you and your senior team members focus on the high-value tasks that truly drive your business forward.

Plus, with the help of well-documented processes and a little bit of training, your admin assistants will be able to take on more and more tasks over time. If you manage to get this right, it’ll be a total game-changer.

In this video, David Jenyns shares a pro tip on how you can hire offshore virtual assistants to support your team and make your most expensive labor more effective.

Timestamps:

0:18 – ID and delegate repetitive and essential tasks
0:58 – Do NOT give your assistants this type of work
1:06 – The mistake most business owners make with offshore assistants.
2:00 – Start off with one, then build out admin assistants for each department.
2:46 –Make your most expensive labor more effective.

Transcription:

As you build out your Critical Client Flow and your Minimum Viable Systems, you’ll probably start to identify these recurring repeatable tasks that are essential and delegatable. Essential and delegatable. This is one of the powerful insights that come out of these beginning stages of systemising. If you can master the skill and art of getting admin assistants, or virtual assistants (VAs), to plug into your business to take care of some of those recurring tasks and leave your highest-value tasks to your more senior team members

This is a game changer.

What most people get wrong about hiring a VA

 Now, most people when hiring offshore, where go wrong if they try and find that person busywork. They go, “oh well, it’s cheaper than if I was recruiting locally, and I’m just going to give them work just to keep them busy.” But they’re not really working on anything that’s essential, it’s just busy work that’s not really adding anything to the business. Not only that, they’ve usually got a big long to-do list and they get through the do list, which means they have to custom assign every single task and define and outline what needs to be done for the outsourcer every single time because it’s a new task.

You’re being very task driven when you’re thinking like that, which then you either get through your to-do list or you get frustrated because the new assistant seems to need constant feedback and training; they’re “just not getting it”. I have to keep training them and giving them feedback. All this offshoring thing doesn’t work. There’s no point in doing it. It takes more trouble than it’s worth. I might as well just do it myself because I spend half the time giving them feedback.”

The Secret: Give your assistant these tasks

The bit that they miss is if you have found essential, delegatable,  repeatable tasks that are well documented and you identify what they are and you train up your Admin Assistant on those, once they’re trained, they keep doing it.

What most people get wrong about hiring a VA

You start off with one first, and then over time you build more Admin Assistants out. One Admin Assistant then trains the person behind them because you’re constantly delegating down to lower-cost labor. So, you may start off with one for your sales department. Then, over time you’ll have one for marketing, and one for operations. Where they support all of the team members in their respective departments. So that your highest-cost team members are working on the highest-value tasks.

Then you might even plug one in for your CEO. You plug one in for yourself. If you can master this, this has always been my competitive advantage. Because usually your two biggest costs, if you’ve got a retail shop or something, is the rent and the overheads of that, plus your staff. Now, in a COVID world where everybody’s working from home, where you might not even have a shop anymore, your biggest expense is your staff. If you can dramatically reduce your staff, and make your most expensive labor more effective, you give yourself a margin for error. You change the mechanics of your business.

Wrap-up

Now, I’ve been offshoring for more than 20 years and this is the missing piece. I don’t know why so many people have trouble with it, and I don’t know why they resist it. Some people get it, some people don’t. But mastering this as a business owner is well worth your time. I think it’s never been easier now with COVID because you’ve had to start to get comfortable with people working from home anyway. You’ve had to figure out how to manage virtual work. You’ve got a project management platform. And so on. So, this step is really about being intentional about how you organize your team in the most efficient and effective way possible. This is it.