Episode Summary

In this episode of the Make Space for More podcast, Melissa Swink discusses the seven signs that hint at the fact that you might not be ready to work with a virtual assistant or build a team. She emphasizes the importance of recognizing personal readiness, overcoming cashflow challenges, prioritizing relationships, and establishing clear goals. The conversation also touches on the need for organization and trust in hiring processes, providing you with actionable insights to prepare for successful team building!

Key Highlights:

• Building a team can make your business more enjoyable and manageable.
• There are stages to hiring; you don't have to jump in fully.
• You need to be ready to embrace a new role in your business.
• Trust issues with delegation can stem from past experiences that need to be addressed.
• Start where you are and take steps to prepare for hiring.

About Melissa:

Melissa Swink, Founder & CEO of Melissa Swink & Co., has a team of virtual assistants who provide administrative and marketing support for small businesses and non-profits.

Since 2012, Melissa and her team have helped more than 100 businesses grow through the services they offer, and she is dedicated to helping entrepreneurs create profitable, scalable businesses they love.

Her work is all about doing what works (and eliminating what doesn’t) and driving real, measurable results. Visit www.melissaswink.com to learn more! 

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Hi everyone, welcome to the Make Space for More podcast where we talk strategies for growing and scaling your business in a way that's authentic and aligned for you. I'm your host, Melissa Swink, and In today's episode, we're gonna talk about seven signs that you might not be ready to work with a virtual assistant. And I would even expand virtual assistant to hire an employee or to build a team, whatever.

stage that you're at in your business or organization, if you're starting to look at getting help from others in moving that business forward, pay attention to today's episode because you may be able to pick up on some things that would be helpful for you to work through ahead of bringing on another team member. As I was reflecting and doing some research for today's episode, it occurred to me that my business has become so much more fun.

And of course, I was also working on the business and managing the business and all those things. And I can tell you it is so much better now because I have invested and got over that fear and really let go of the objections that I had to building a team. so again, if you've been following me for any period of time, you know that I'm a big believer in hiring help and outsourcing so that you can do more of the things that you love and less of the things that you don't.

Also, the struggle gets so much easier as well because you're not forcing yourself to learn all these different things. You don't have to be an expert in all subjects, which let's face it, we're not. You can focus on what you're best at and have other people who have complementary skill sets and are able to do things that you are not sure how to do yourself. I could go on and on and on about why having a virtual assistant, building a team is a game changer, but

I also want to acknowledge that there might be some reasons that you're not truly ready to take this step yet. Now, there's a difference between actually being ready and feeling ready. I never felt ready. So many of my clients, when we start working with them, they're like, this feels like a big step for me. I don't know if I'm ready for this. And we can, I reassure them, you know, and I'm reassuring you that you don't have to go from being a solo preneur or,

running a nonprofit like nearly on your own to jumping into hiring like a full-time assistant or a full-time employee, there are stages of this. You can start small and continue to build as time goes on. That is where I highly recommend starting no matter where you're at in business. But again, there's a difference between feeling ready and having some of those nerves to actually being ready. And you might also be thinking, well, what if it doesn't work out or

Maybe you've hired a VA in the past and things just didn't quite work out the way that you had anticipated. So I'm gonna acknowledge those things today. And I think I've narrowed down about seven common things. This is certainly not an all inclusive list, but I've narrowed down to about seven things that really stood out to me when I was reflecting on maybe work that we've done with clients in the past that ultimately have determined that they weren't quite at a point where

They were ready to continue working with us or maybe they just wanted to take a pause and work on some things before continuing to work with our team. Now I can say that this doesn't happen often, but it does happen. And so I reflected and kind of made a list of here are some of the things that we have noticed as a team, myself included, over the years of maybe clients that just never quite got off the ground with working with us like we would have liked to have seen.

And so I've kind of distilled that down into seven specific examples or areas. Now, I also share that these things are coming from the perspective of what we can do as the leaders of our businesses and organizations. Now, certainly there is not taking away responsibility for maybe anybody that you've worked with in the past where maybe truly you've made a bad hire. I know I've made bad hires in my business and

You know, we've learned from those mistakes and we continue to refine and move on in our processes. But there are also our things that, gee, what could I have done differently? Or how did I not see that coming? So this is also to be reflective for you because at the end of the day, we can only maintain control of ourselves. So of course then the good news is, is that as I'm sharing some of these seven things that...

might indicate that you're not ready to work with a virtual assistant or hire an employee or build a team, we're also going to talk about some strategies for how to overcome them. So without further ado, the first thing is having a feast and famine cycle in your business when it comes to sales or cashflow issues. And sometimes these can go hand in hand. Now I will say this, and you may have heard me say this on

previous episodes of the podcast if you've been following for a long time. But a virtual assistant and building a team can certainly help you overcome the feast and famine cycle in your business. Let me give you an example of this. So back when I was operating solo, I would grow my business to the point where I was maxed out on capacity. So I had a full client base and I spent

99.9 % of my working hours serving those clients, which of course then the back end of the business starts to be neglected. And then for whatever reason, if a client would, maybe a project would wrap up or maybe a client would discontinue working with me because they ultimately hired a employee for their company or they went in a different direction.

whatever the reason might be. we're talking, know, fortunately I've had very good endings with clients for the most part. But for whatever reason, if a project wrapped up or a working relationship wrapped up and a client moved on, then I had this block of time and frankly, lack of money in my schedule where all of a sudden I'm like, I need to go and find another client.

And so my income would be down and I would be out there doing sales and marketing and then bring in another client to replace that. So it's that feast and famine cycle. Now I will say that having a team has helped me maintain a consistent level of income over time because I was able to consistently do more marketing and keep my sales pipeline full so that as we had openings,

we could enroll clients to fill those spots quickly. So I will say that if you have a feast and famine cycle in your business, a VA or a team member might be a really good way to solve that problem. However, we need to have a plan to resolve that problem. And I also want to acknowledge that the feast and famine sales cycle or cashflow issues in your business, that is a little bit different than a sudden downturn. You know, sometimes those things happen or the economy takes a turn or all of a sudden,

The industry that you've been serving, that industry slows down and you need to figure out, if I've maybe been working with automotive clients and automotive industry has been slow, okay, maybe I need to take a look at another industry that I can serve for the time being instead. So we're talking about downturns, maybe not necessarily something that you have control over. But we're talking about cashflow issues. Another example what I mean by cashflow issues,

is we've worked with clients in the past who have businesses where they have very long projects with clients. These are often one-time clients and they do a project with that client for maybe three to six months and then that project ends. And sometimes if the client does not structure their contract and their payment structure appropriately for a long period of time, sometimes they can wait a really long time to get paid.

So for example, if they take a small down payment and then they get paid at the end of the project, that's a small amount of money to last them for the extended period of time of that project. I'm just pointing out a couple of practical real world examples for you to kind of grasp where I'm coming from here. And so if you're realizing like, yeah, one of the things that has held me back from hiring a VA or...

adding an employee to my team is because, you know, my income is just so up and down. These are some of the things that I highly recommend resolving prior to beginning that work. So maybe consider how you're packaging your services. One example is maybe you do more monthly and ongoing types of work with your clients versus one time projects.

or maybe it looks like structuring your payment terms a little bit differently. So again, in that example where we got a long range project, maybe rather than asking for a down payment, maybe it's half upfront and then 25 % when the physical work begins, like maybe when the website starts being built and then 25 % upon completion or something like that to help kind of balance out that cash and give you runway that you need to continue running your company.

and have your team helping out on that project for that period of time. Also, highly recommend if you're struggling with cashflow in your business to consider talking to an accountant, not necessarily a tax accountant, but an accountant that can help you with budgeting and forecasting and help you understand how your money is coming and going and make some adjustments so that your cashflow can improve. A CFO might also be a great

individual to talk to. There are plenty of great fractional CFOs out there who work with small businesses and nonprofits who could be amazing at helping you solve this problem. Okay. Second sign that I see that somebody might not be ready to work with a VA is that they are unable or frankly unwilling to prioritize that working relationship. So this can look like people who have

the candle lit at both ends and in the middle, they're very, very busy. They are overcommitted. And of course, when you start working with anybody else in your business, a virtual assistant, an employee, another contractor of some kind, it does require ongoing communication. And I would even argue more communication from you in that beginning stage of getting up and running with your work together.

And so what I find is sometimes a client will hire a VA because they're just so desperate to get help in their business, which hello, we've all been there. We can all feel that, right? But the problem is, that they then don't have the time to communicate with that virtual assistant on a regular basis, or they don't make that time. And so I would say that when, before working with a virtual assistant or hiring a

an employee or somehow adding another member to your team, I highly recommend committing to a regular standing check-in call or meeting or one-on-one with that team member and also blocking off time every day, either at the start or end of the day, to respond to written messages from them or voice messages from them, whether that be email or a Slack channel or

text messages or voice memos on WhatsApp, whatever that might look like, whatever you guys have determined is going to be your method of communication in between meetings and live phone calls, you need to commit that time in order to keep that conversation moving forward and your work together moving forward. And so yes, that might mean sacrificing on the front end, but again, the overall goal is to free up your time.

But if you're not willing to invest that time in connecting with your team member on a regular basis, especially in the beginning, that relationship really is not being set up for success in the long term. I hope that makes sense. This has also looked like I had a conversation with a client a couple of years ago that I was consulting with and she had made the comment to me like, every time I add a team member, it takes...

more of my time in terms of meetings and answering questions and things like that. So that is something that you do need to keep in mind and anticipate before you hire is that yes, in the beginning, it will require more of an investment of your time. And again, the goal, and you should be strategic with the people that you're hiring, should ultimately be to free up your time and energy.

once that person gets comfortable in their role and has been fully cross-trained to take over those responsibilities for you. But know before you go in that you need to commit that time and even block it on your calendar and protect that time because it's an investment in your future. Okay, the third sign that you might not be ready to work with a virtual assistant is that you're just not ready to move into a new role in your business or organization.

And so this looks like a couple of different things. And it might sound really silly, like, well, but I'm still the owner of my company, so I'm not getting a new role. Like, nobody's promoting me, nobody's demoting me, like, what are you talking about here? But I think where I'm headed with this, and I hope that this makes sense to you, is that you are ultimately, the work that you're going to be doing is ultimately going to be changing, at least to a certain extent. And so you may be holding on to,

tasks that you've done just as routine habits. You could be holding on to the idea that you are the magic in your company and your clients only want to work with you and you have all of these things where you're kind of holding on to responsibilities. You're holding on to an identity that you've created for yourself within your company in the way that others see you within your company.

And so that does require some letting go. So I would ask yourself, what do you really want? Like you may have been working in this industry for a long time. You may have a steady client base. They're used to working with you a certain way, or maybe you are used to, you know, every Thursday I go in and I pay all of my, my vendors and I go in and I send all my invoices like

You just kind of get into a mode. get into a routine. You get into what is familiar. And then when you bring on a big hire, that could be a strategic hire, that could be a virtual assistant to take over that billing for you, as an example here, then all of a sudden, that habit or that thing goes away and you're like, wait a second, what should I be doing? So again, tuning into what you really want. Why are you?

hiring a virtual assistant in the first place to take some of these things off your plate. Is it so that you'll be able to write your first book? Is it freeing up that time and energy for you to be able to do that? Is it to launch a new program that's been on your heart and on your mind for a very long time and you just need to make the space happen in order to do that? Like, what do you really want? Another way to think about this too is,

What are some of the things that you really love doing in your business? What is some of the work that you really love doing with your customers? And also what are you releasing in order to make space for more of that? So, did you like what I did there? Make space for more process. We talk about the key steps in creating more space for your business and for your life and that overall expansion, which can look like getting really clear on what you need to be doing and what you wanna be doing. That can look like,

What do you need to be letting go of or releasing in order to free up time and space for those things? What could you maybe systematize or automate or use some type of tool or app or software to make your time and your work more efficient? And of course, the last step of that process is what can be delegated. So revisiting that process to figure out, okay, my role is no longer bookkeeper for my business.

my role, need to do more of that CEO, business development, strategic partnerships. I need to do more. I need to have better conversations with strategic partners. I do not need to be entering bills and paying my vendors, things like that. So it's just a whole mindset shift of what your role needs to look like moving forward. And if you're not ready to let go of some of those things, it can be really hard to get your work with others off the ground.

Okay, number, let's see, we're on number four here. Not ready to take control of your business or organization, or maybe even your life. And this one is a little bit out of the scope of some of the things that I personally teach on, but this is something that I have seen happen with clients time and time again. And this can look like living in a state of total chaos.

This can look like external forces completely ruling the roost of your day. There are a variety of reasons that this might be. And so briefly here with this, I would highly recommend looking into some resources and learning maybe about self-sabotage. Maybe there are habits or there are some...

limiting beliefs, there's something below the surface where every time that you reach a new exciting level of success in your business or you take a step to hire a team member or you commit to that marketing program, whatever that might be, then it seems like something always gets in the way. Self-sabotage is real. Sometimes it's conscious, sometimes it's not. And having other professionals who can help you or other resources.

Even books can be super eye-opening, know, podcasts and gosh, there's just so many different ways that you can start learning and overcoming these things. But boundaries might be another one. Not knowing how to set boundaries around, maybe it's your working hours where I'm going to be working on my business from 9 a.m. after I get the kids off to school to, you know, 3 p.m.

before they come home from school from nine until 3 p.m. That is when I am focused on my business. That is not the time that we are solving an emergency for somebody else or your sister calls with some crisis that she wants to tell you all about. You sometimes it's a matter of protecting your time and your energy for those working hours. And boundaries, of course, I haven't scratched the surface on this. Also could be

learning more about personal responsibility, not only yours, what is truly something that you are responsible for and what is truly the responsibilities of others. It could also be, for lack of better terms, and I mean this kind of as a broad example, spirituality, really tuning into and getting clear on what are your intentions? What is important to you? How are you, are you afraid to say no?

You know, when somebody needs somebody, somebody calls you because they're in need of a volunteer for the fundraiser this Saturday. And then that means that you've got all of this work to do in order to get ready for Saturday. All of a sudden this comes, this lands in your lap. And you know, again, we're not moving forward with the business and what we need to be doing and things are always getting in the way. These are things that you need to take a serious look at.

And again, I can't tell you how often we have seen this come up with clients where they might want to grow their business, they might truly want the help of a team, but there's just so many things happening in their world that they just cannot take the time to really dedicate their attention to working with the team. And this is a little bit different than the example that I gave before about blocking the time in the calendar. This is more mental.

and more situational and more external than it is control of schedule and things like that. I hope that makes sense. But if you do feel like you often take two steps forward and then something else causes you to take a step back, highly recommend to looking into some of these areas of self-sabotage, boundaries, things like that.

A great book on this could be The Let Them Theory by Mel Robbins. That was something that I just recommended to our email list. Really, really love that one. It breaks down, okay, let them do, you know, insert the link here and then let me. So you need to put responsibility back on those who need to be responsible and you also need to take responsibility for your own life. And when things get chaotic and things get out of balance,

that can really have a negative impact on the work that you're trying to do, much less the work you're trying to do with others. example number five is the fear of trusting others. That is another sign that you might not be ready to work with a virtual assistant. And this can often happen if you've been burned before. Maybe you've made a bad hiring decision before. Maybe you hired

the wrong bookkeeper to do your books and it came tax time and your accountant found out and helped you discover that there were lots and lots of errors within your books or something like that. Maybe you have had, you know, things stolen from you or maybe you had somebody you were working closely with and they took your ideas and, you know, they went and profited on them elsewhere. You know, there are just...

There are so many things that can come up unfortunately in life and business, but if you have a deep fear of trusting others, and I'm talking about not having some general nerves or just a little bit curious of like, I hope that I'm hiring the right people and I hope that things work out or I'm a little bit nervous to take this big step, that's a little bit different than

going into it with the stronger fear or assumption that something's going to go wrong or that you're going to be cheated in some way. I do have a client that I can think of in the past where this was a really deep-seated thing for her. She came into a lot of her relationships, especially working with other team members. It wasn't just ours, it was other team members where...

The assumption was they didn't know what they were doing. They were going to be overcharging. And that's the energy that she came into those working relationships with. Again, I saw it with a variety of people. It wasn't an isolated occurrence. And of course, that is something that really needs to be healed before entering into a working relationship. you know, so this can look like similar to the last example, doing some forgiveness work really

analyzing, okay, what happened the last time that I tried hiring a virtual assistant or what happened the last time that I hired the wrong bookkeeper to do my books? What was on them and what was on me? What are some of the guardrails maybe that I need to put in place moving forward so that I can begin to build trust with another person again and that I'm also not bringing in that energy of

guilty until proven innocent sort of a thing. You can definitely feel that energy when you start working with somebody who doesn't trust you. So if you feel like you have, these are some sore spots with you where you have hired the wrong person or somebody has stolen your ideas or stolen money from you for all those reasons, I would take time to again, do that forgiveness work. Also take,

your relationship with them slowly. Maybe hire them to do a couple of tasks for you. Then once you feel like you can trust them with those tasks, they did those tasks in the time that they said that it would take them or the price was within alignment of what was agreed upon. There was no surprise charge at the end. The quality of the work was good. The communication was what you needed.

then continue taking those steps and begin moving forward from that. But again, you have to do that work before you enter into another working relationship. The other thing that I wanna mention here as well is that sometimes when things go wrong with a team member or a virtual assistant or maybe some referral partnership or joint venture, sometimes we have the, I shouldn't say sometimes, we tend to have the,

tendency to assume that it was the other person's fault when things go wrong. It's really easy to say that person made a mistake or that was wrong. And you know, that might be true, but really what I have noticed in my work with clients, not only as a virtual assistant, as the leader of a virtual assistant team, but also as a consultant and helping clients work with, you know, other team members and other collaborators is that oftentimes

when mistakes happen or errors occur or there's just kind of like miscommunications, it's often a challenge with overall communication where maybe assumptions were made, things weren't clarified, or often it is process related. A lot of times there's a gap in the process or there's an open loop somewhere that it was like, duh, okay, moving forward, we know that

we need to double check this or moving forward, we know that we need to provide that, that sort of thing. So the trust thing, if you have, I'll simplify trust issues, these are some things to be aware of and to work through before you enter in a working relationship with somebody else. You wanna clear that energy, wanna reset expectations and boundaries and again, trust.

that you're hiring the right service provider this time around and give them that opportunity to start with a clean slate. Okay, number six is not having a clear goal or vision for your business or organization. Now, this is a little bit different than the role change in your business or organization. This can feel a little bit like wandering through the wilderness.

So I'll give you some examples of this from what I've seen in my work as a virtual assistant where we have clients who maybe sometimes will, they're visionaries, they have a lot of grand ideas, they want to grow their business with where it's at right now, they wanna increase their revenue, they wanna do more, but then they also want to introduce additional revenue streams, they wanna write a book, they wanna do speaking.

And by the way, if you're one of our clients and it sounds like I'm describing you, I'm not describing you. This is very, very common. So it's you and probably many, many others. But it's like one day we're focusing on this, the next day we're focusing on that. I think that it's really, really important to define what is one thing that you want to accomplish in the next six months. One thing.

Now, does that mean that that is the only thing that can get accomplished in the next six months? No, but we need to prioritize. We need to prioritize. So if it is, I have five openings for one-on-one clients, and I would like to fill those within the next six months, great. That is your number one focus, and that is the number one focus that I need you to communicate to your virtual assistant or your team.

so that everyone is on the same page. Yes, we know that there are other things that you would love to accomplish. And if you can, great, but this is our priority over here. So this can also look like, I'm sure of what direction, what you wanna take with something. So maybe you've got a successful coaching business and you're like, do I do a course or do I do a group membership? And you're kind of teetering back and forth and you're not sure.

And so what can happen is then you may ask your virtual assistant to research platforms for your course to be built on and housed on online. And then they bring that list in the next week and you're like, you know what, we're gonna pause on that. I think we need to talk about writing a email campaign to launch my group coaching program.

you just kind of go back and forth. so then, you know, three to six months go by and we have made, we've done work, we've made some progress, but it hasn't been in a clear direction. And so I highly recommend that if you're a multi-passionate entrepreneur to start with one thing that you want a virtual assistant or an employee or some other team member to help you focus on first and give the clear directive in that.

direction. Okay, lastly, signs that you may not be ready to work with a virtual assistant are that you have a significant amount of information or resources required for that person to support you that are not in some type of electronic or easy to hand off form. So this can look like

And this is certainly me and so many others when we started our businesses, it's all us, right? So so much lives up here. And there still is so much that lives up here, even for me. But when so much lives in our heads, or another simple example, we have a paper calendar, or we have handwritten files where, you know, maybe we are a business consultant and when we have check-in,

appointments with our clients and we're handwriting those notes and that lives in a notebook somewhere or a file folder in our home. Or I'll even take another simple example is maybe all of your files are saved on a local hard drive on your computer where nobody else can access them. That is something where a virtual assistant, and there are many fantastic service providers out there,

can help you get this information to a form or to a place that can be accessed and collaborated with others, but it is a stepping stone. So if you're thinking that here's how you're currently operating, and then you're gonna bring in, you're gonna hire a virtual assistant, and then all of a sudden we've taken this giant leap from like it's all me and it's all offline and it's all right here into working with somebody in a remote capacity.

understand that there's going to be some stepping stones in order for that information to become available and usable for them. So what this can look like is maybe going from having physical paper notes, paper calendars, and getting that into an electronic form. So again, this is nothing that can, this everything is figure outable, everything is doable, but just be aware that there's going to be some stepping stones

in order for that person to be able to fully leverage and do the things that you're asking them to do, the first thing might be that you are scanning these files so that they can be organized into something like a Google Drive or a Dropbox or something like that. It might be a matter of taking pictures of your calendar for the upcoming months and having that virtual assistant

enter those into an electronic calendar for you. And then also being willing, again, this is kind of where that habit comes in of switching over and then using that online calendar. Again, virtual assistant, digital organizers. know, shout out to my friend Alex Brzezowski at Be Organizing. She and her team are fantastic at helping people kind of declutter all the chaos in their work lives.

and get some good systems in place for email and files and even photos, not even on a business side of things, but how many photos do you have saved in the cloud from your phone and all these things? They're not organized by person. They're not organized by place. They're fantastic at doing that. That could also maybe a stepping stone here, another service provider to help you make this step.

could be hiring an in-home organizer to help you organize your files or having a service scan your paper files and get them to an electronic format. Again, not a deal breaker, but if that is currently how you're operating, you need to be realistic that it's going to take some effort in order to get this information into a shareable collaborative format and

then have the next person take those and take them to the next level. So maybe again, if you're looking at, want to have a booking link that people can electronically schedule meetings with me. Okay, great. If we're operating on paper calendar, first we need to take information from the paper calendar, get it into an electronic calendar, and then VA can build out your Calendly, your Acuity, your booking links for

your customers to book with you online. Just know that we're not going to get from paper calendar to booking online overnight. So I hope that that all makes sense for you. Again, if you are recognizing like, gosh, I don't feel like I'm quite ready to work with a virtual assistant or to hire that employee or to bring on that additional team member based on the conversation today, that's totally fine. Just know that there are solutions.

in order to make that leap easier for you and the other people that you're looking to collaborate with. So this isn't meant to be a doom and gloom episode, like, this is just too overwhelming. It's always just start where you are. Start where you are and heal what needs to heal, clarify what needs to clarify, dream what needs to be dreamed, organize what needs to be organized so that you are setting up yourself.

and your virtual assistant in your future team members up for success with working with you. Okay, all of that being said, if you know someone who has hired a virtual assistant or a team member in the past and it didn't work out, and you know that they're nervous to try it again or they're hesitant or maybe closed off from hiring again, consider sharing this episode with them. Again, one shift in perspective or maybe one strategy to help overcome this and move forward could be a game changer in getting them unstuck.

and closer to that fun and that freedom that comes with having a talented team behind you in order to help you grow and scale your business and really just bring more flexibility and ease to your life. So thank you so much for joining me for today's episode. I hope that you found this information encouraging and helpful wherever you're at and I look forward to having you join me for the next episode of Make Space for More. Have a wonderful day. Bye bye.