Are you drowning in administrative tasks and struggling to grow your business? Do you find yourself missing out on opportunities because you're too busy with day-to-day operations? In this episode, we dive into how to decide if your business is ready for a virtual assistant. Learn the signs that indicate you need help, common misconceptions about VAs, and practical steps to prepare for hiring one.

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Download your free Virtual Assistant Roadmap workbook: https://laurenglynn.com/resources

Threads: @LaurenGconsulting

Show Notes: https://laurenglynn.com/11

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11 - VA Series - 01 - How to Decide

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Lauren: Hey, everyone. Welcome to today's episode. Today, we're going to be talking about, today we're going to be starting our VA series. And the VA series is going to be all about how you figure out if you need a VA, how you actually get ready for one, how you find one, how you hire one, and then how you work with them ongoing.

So it's going to be six or seven episodes, and we're going to dive deep into the process of starting with a VA in your business. Today, we're going to be talking about how to decide if you actually even need a VA in your business. So we're going to be talking about how you get your business ready for a VA, how you decide what the VA might be doing for you, or what you could potentially look for a VA to do. And we're going to dive deep into all of that. So let's go ahead and get started.

Okay, so first let's talk about some common misconceptions around VAs, because there's a lot of things floating around on the internet. So let's talk a little bit about that. The first common misconception is that a VA is only for someone who's already making a lot of money. Now, if you have a lot of money, hiring a VA will be easier.

However, even if you're making just a little bit of money, and I do recommend waiting until you're making Some money before hiring a VA, but it doesn't have to be six figures. It doesn't have to be some crazy amount of money, but you should be making some money before you're hiring a VA.

And what that threshold is is really up to you. It depends on your business. It depends on how much you're working. If you already have other sources of income, but I do recommend making a little bit of money before you start hiring a VA. The second misconception is that they can only do specific tasks, that you can only hire a VA to do certain things.

Now, there are specialized VAs that are generally hired for specific things, but you can hire a VA to do pretty much anything in your business. As long as it's not some sort of strategic thing, then they could be doing all of the podcast tasks that you have to do, like uploading and, um, creating graphics and things like that.

The second misconception is that VAs can only do specific things. Now, I want to be clear about this. VAs are usually hired to do specific things. However, you can hire them to do a variety of things within your business. So what I mean by that is you could hire a VA to do a wide variety of tasks as opposed to hiring someone that's just specialized in one thing.

Now you're probably going to get better quality from someone who is hired to do specifically one thing, but if you need a more general VA, a more support VA, then there are definitely people that do that as well. So don't think that, oh, well, I only have. So don't think that, Oh, well, I need them to do a lot of different things.

So I need to hire a lot of different VAs. No, there are VAs out there that are general VAs that can do a wide variety of tasks. You just have to balance out how specialized you need them to be for the specific tasks versus how much of that task you have. And how much other work that you might need them to do.

My first VA that I hired was originally hired just to do a lot of admin tasks. She was hired to post things and, um, like post my blog posts. She was hired to upload things onto YouTube, things that I had already created. I created the thumbnails, I created the text, I created the content, and all she was doing was uploading it and scheduling it and then scheduling the newsletters around it and things like that.

As we worked together, I was able to give her more tasks. She was able to write the descriptions for YouTube. She was able to create the YouTube thumbnails because she started to understand my business. She started to understand my style and what I wanted.

Lauren: And even though those, those, And even though those weren't things that she specialized in, I was able to teach her how to do it, how I wanted it done, and what I wanted things to look like. So, you can hire VAs, uh, that are more general, that can do a wide variety of things, or you can hire VAs that are trained in doing specific tasks.

And then the final misconception is that you can use a VA to replace more high level strategic role. And VAs are generally the doers. They're not usually the people thinking about strategy. They're not, you know, doing that high level planning. They're just someone that you go to and say, generally, I don't want to say all VAs, but generally they're just someone that you go to and say, I need this thing done.

Here's the exact way to do it. Here's Here's the text. Here's the graphic. Whatever the case may be. And then they go off and they execute it. They're not someone that's coming back to you with things like a social media strategy or a YouTube strategy or a general marketing strategy. Like that's not their role.

Their role is much more of the execution and not so much the planning and the overall strategy.

So let's talk about some signs that you might need a VA in your business. If you're constantly feeling overwhelmed, you're spending a lot of time on administrative tasks, things like posting to social media, things like uploading all of your podcast pieces, things like adding your blogs to your website, those are all administrative tasks that don't necessarily require your zone of genius.

They do require you to maybe write. the captions or write the blog post itself or write out your newsletters, but you don't necessarily have to be the one to send out all that information to post that information. So if you're spending a lot of time on those surrounding administrative tasks, that's a good sign that you could potentially hire a VA.

A couple other signs you're missing out on opportunities because you just don't have the time to take advantage of them. For example, you're invited to speak at an event, but you are spending all of your time posting on social media and writing up your blog posts and posting those to your, your website.

I'm repurposing a lot of content from my podcast and posting it on the social medias and writing all the captions and everything, which takes a lot of time. It's like four or five reels a week, and you have to write all the captions and you have to do it for all the different networks. And it takes a lot of time.

So if you're finding yourself drowning in a lot of those tasks, and then you cannot take advantage of other opportunities that come your way because you're spending so much time doing these things. That's a really good sign that a VA could help.

And then a really great sign is that you're struggling to grow your business. You're like I said, drowning in all these administrative tasks, but you're still not really seeing results. You're not really getting clients. You don't have time to sit and think about the overall strategy. You don't have time to think of new projects.

You don't have time to think of other things that you want to be doing in your business, maybe new products.

And so your business is struggling to grow because you don't have that space to think more strategically within your business. I was struggling with this at the beginning of this year when I first started. I was struggling with this at the beginning of this year when I started working with a marketing coach.

And she had a lot of different ways to do outreach and collaborations and things like that. But finding all those opportunities was really taking a lot of my time. It was like two or three hours a day for me.

And so I found that I was spending all my time finding these opportunities and not enough time taking advantage of the ones that I could find, not enough time actually doing other things in my business because these were not the only ways of finding clients. So I ended up hiring a VA to Uh, outsource my lead generation.

And he actually goes out and finds with directions that I give him, um, he goes out and finds opportunities for people for me to collaborate with, or maybe bundles I can participate in, or places that need a speaker or places that are looking for training, you know, Or places that are looking for external trainers to come in.

So he does all of that for me every week to free up my time, to think more strategically about the business and to work on all of the things that he finds for me to work with. So I was able to free up a lot of my time by hiring a VA to do all of those sort of all of the legwork of finding those opportunities.

I also want to let you know that I have a specialized custom workbook just for this series. So that you can follow along and get yourself ready to hire a VA. That is going to be at laurenglynn.com/resources. You're going to look for the VA Roadmap. And the VA Roadmap will walk you through all these exercises that I'm going to talk about during these episodes. So now that we understand why you might need a virtual assistant, let's talk about how we go about figuring out what they could actually do for you in your business.

Remember that specialized workbook I talked about? If you haven't downloaded it yet, go ahead and get it.

Pause the episode and come back to me. You're going to go to laurenglynn.com/resources, and you're going to look for the virtual assistant roadmap. And the first exercise in there is going to be walking you through how to actually write down all the tasks that it takes to run your business. And I talk about this a lot on this podcast because it's so important for people to understand all the work that it goes in to running your business.

Because you can't improve things, you can't hire people, you can't delegate if you don't know what the work actually is that you're looking for them to help you with. So the first task in your workbook is going to be to list out all of the tasks that it takes to run your business. I want it to be as detailed as possible.

You can do this over a few days for a few minutes each day. You can set aside a time block on like a Friday afternoon. That's the last thing I would want to do on a Friday afternoon, but you know, set aside a couple of hours on one afternoon to just write through all of the tasks that it takes to run your business, big or small, whatever that may be.

Then you're going to categorize your tasks between operational and strategic. And I want you to do this for every single task. Is it strategic? Does it look at the bigger picture? Is it more of a planning thing? Is it something that requires your zone of genius? Or is it more operational and administrative so that you are just doing something.

You're just posting to social media, but you're not writing the captions. You're just creating a graphic, but you're not designing the template for the graphic. Things like that. Then I want you to take that whole list again, and I want you to identify which of these tasks are repetitive and time consuming.

For example, for me with this podcast, Posting things to Spotify, posting things to YouTube, that is very repetitive and very time consuming. The writing of the actual captions is something that I prefer to do. And the editing is something that I potentially could delegate, but posting it to actual YouTube and Spotify are repetitive, time consuming tasks.

Those would be good examples of things that I could potentially delegate to a virtual assistant.

I also want you to identify which tasks require your zone of genius and which tasks don't. Because you are probably the face of your business, unless you're running some sort of faceless business, which is possible. But you are probably the face of your business. You are probably the person making all of those decisions.

You are probably the person out front that everyone sees. So you want to make sure that you're identifying those tasks that have to be done by you because it requires either your knowledge or your face or your voice or something. Then take all the things that don't require you, identify the ones that are super time consuming and repetitive and that they are operational and those are good candidates for you to potentially start with for things that you could delegate to a VA.

And remember the workbook will walk you through this whole process. So if you're not quite following, make sure that you are looking it up in your workbook and following along there.

So not only do we want to understand the tasks that it takes to run our business, we also want to understand the processes. And it's really important that you have a clear documentation and understanding of the processes in your business because

And it's really important that you have a clear understanding and documentation of the processes in your business because that will make it much easier to hand it off to someone else. If you don't have it documented, if you don't have step by step, if you don't have clear detailed instructions, then it's really hard to give it to someone else because they can't read your mind.

They cannot see what is in your brain. They are only doing what it is that you tell them to do and may not do it correctly, may not do it the way that you want them to do it if they don't have all of that information. So you want to make sure that you are documenting all of your processes and making sure that they are clear step by step what is required.

I what did this activity when I first started my podcast because I knew that I was going to want a VA to help me with these tasks, but I wanted to do them all first so that I could create clear processes. I could understand what the standards are. And I can understand what was required for each step, what sort of information they would need in order to do the process the way that I needed it to be done.

So as I've been building this podcast, I've been documenting all of the processes that I've created, all of the different steps that it takes, all of the tools that it takes, so that when I am ready to hire a VA to take over all of that for me, it's going to be a lot easier to hand it off rather than, Now I've hired someone and I have to figure it out and I have to document everything.

No, it's all going to be ready to go for that person when I'm ready to hire them.

So to document your processes, the first thing you want to do is perform the task yourself. And there's a lot of different ways that you can do this. I think one good way of doing this is actually to record yourself doing this. You can use like a screen recording. You can use your phone and camera or something, but record yourself doing it and narrate it as you go, narrate it step by step.

This is step one. This is step two. Now I'm going over here to do this thing. And the reason that I suggest this is because now you can take this video, get the transcript from it. You can use, you know, if you're using Zoom to record yourself, then Zoom Cloud will automatically give you a transcript. Or you can upload it into a tool like Descript and get a transcript.

And then you can feed it into AI, into Cloud, or ChatGPT, and it will actually, you know, tell it, I want you to write an SOP from the transcript of my, of me recording myself doing this process. process, and it will create a transcript. It created an, uh, and it will create an SOP for you of the step by step process to actually do this process for you so that you don't have to sit there and like, do something and then write it down and record it and make sure that you're following and make sure you didn't miss any steps.

Now you do have to narrate yourself pretty clearly and be really specific and really clear about any details or any actions that you're taking, because It won't be able to see the screen, but it's a good first step for actually documenting a process. If you want to take it a step further, then you could do a more fancy screen recording with you actually doing the task and then share that to the person that's going to be doing the task in the future.

So, um, you can use something like, I use QuickTime on my computer to record my desktop. You can also use something like OBS. to record your desktop and your face at the same time. If you want to go real fancy, you can use something like Loom, which will do all of this for you. And you can actually record yourself doing the process and also talking through it.

And then you get that added bonus of having the transcript that you can upload to AI for it to write the SOP for you. And then you would go in and make corrections and add detail and things like that. But it's a really good first step for creating that SOP.

And then after you've documented the whole process, and I want you to do the end to end process, not just the pieces that you might hand off to someone else. Once you've done that whole process, then you can go back and identify, okay, where could a VA potentially step in for me? Where, what are the things that I don't personally need to be doing?

Once you have a clear understanding of all the processes in your business, now you can go back and create a job description. You can go back and create standard operating procedures, like I said, and you can be much more targeted in your application process because you know what the tools are that you're looking for people to be well versed in.

You understand sort of the skills that you're looking for. You understand the processes that they're going to be doing. So now you can be much more clear in how you're finding and hiring your future VA. All of which we're gonna talk about in future episodes of this series.

I do want to take a minute to talk about the financial considerations of hiring a va. You want to consider if it's worth the cost, and this is gonna be different for everyone, but here are some guidelines that you can sort of take into account when you're considering this. First, calculate the cost of your time if you make an hourly rate when you work with clients.

What is that costing you to then do all of those administrative tasks? If you get paid 50 an hour by clients, or if you have, you know, more project based work, then obviously you don't have hourly work, but you can kind of ballpark what your normal hourly rate might be, And then figure out if it's taking you an hour to post things to social media, you know, just in the scheduler, then that's 50 that you're missing out on.

So if you could hire a VA at 20 or 25 an hour, then you're saving yourself 25, 30, where you could be potentially making money working with a client as opposed to doing those administrative tasks. So that's one part of the thing, of the, so that's one part of the financial consideration.

You also want to consider different pricing models. Some VAs will do project based, some VAs will do a retainer, some VAs will do hourly. So you just need to figure out what makes sense for you, what you can afford reasonably within a time period. Usually, like if it's a retainer, then it would be for like a monthly set number of hours and it's a set amount of money.

And then sometimes the hours roll over and sometimes they don't, it just depends on the VA. So figure out sort of what's in your budget and what you could potentially get for that budget. And we're going to talk about actual costs and hiring in a future episode. But I just want to make sure that when you're considering if you need a VA, that you have all of the information when you're, you know, considering all the financial implications.

And just as another reminder, VAs aren't only for high earning businesses. Even if you're just making a little bit of money every month, you could potentially benefit from a VA because they can take a lot of that admin work off your plate so that you can focus on that higher level strategic work, maybe take on more clients and potentially make more because you have a VA helping you in the background.

So to recap, let's do a readiness check to see if you are ready for a VA in your business. First, do you have clear processes and systems in place? Do you have them all documented? Do you know what the end to end processes look like? Do you have, like I said, documentation of those things? Make sure that you have all of that in place.

Then, are you prepared to actually delegate and let go of control? As business owners, sometimes letting go of control can be the hardest part of hiring someone to help you in your business. So you have to mentally be ready to actually hand over this control, and you can do it pretty easily. piece by piece.

You can do it, you know, little by little until you are more comfortable with your VA. You know, maybe they're not making any sort of content decisions. Maybe they're just executing. Maybe they are, you know, running a lot of things by you as they work, as opposed to working more independently when they first start.

So it's a great way to start, but you have to be ready mentally to start handing over some of these tasks and understand that they may not do it exactly the way that you would do it. They may have a better way of doing it. They may make suggestions on the process. They may have experience in it that you don't and may have ideas for improvement.

So you wanna make sure that you are mentally ready to delegate these tasks and to start having conversations around potentially if there are better way of doing things.

You also want to make sure that you are making time for finding and hiring and onboarding a VA because the initial, you know, finding and hiring can be pretty time consuming depending on what it is that you're looking for and how you're looking for them, which we're going to get into in the future episodes, but it does take time.

So you want to make sure that you are planning for that time, that you're not doing it in the middle of a big launch, that you're not doing it, you know, over the holidays, that you are making a plan for how much time it's going to take to find, hire, onboard, train them, everything like that.

And finally, you can actually use the readiness checklist in your workbook. Again, you can get that at laurenglynn.com/resources. Look for your virtual assistant roadmap,

Lauren: there'll be a checklist in there for you to make sure that you are ready to start looking for your VA.

So that's it for today's episode. Next week, we're going to be talking about how you actually go about finding your VA. Now that you understand sort of what it is they're going to be working on, what you're looking for. So. Now we're going to talk about where you actually go to find a VA to work with. So make sure you tune in next week.

And then we have a couple more episodes after that. So make sure you tune in next week. And then after that, we're going to be talking about how you actually hire them, how you onboard a VA in your business, how you effectively delegate to them so that they are as productive as possible and working as well with you as they possibly can.

And then finally, how you actually work with them. And then we're going to talk about how you work with them longterm. How does your relationship evolve as they stay with your business for a long time? And what does that look like when you start having more than one VA and how they all work. Make sure that you're subscribed.

If you enjoyed this episode, please leave me a review or a comment. I would love to hear from you. I would also love to hear from you on threads. That's where I am most active. I'm @laurengconsulting. Let me know if you're considering hiring a VA, if this was helpful for you, figuring out if you're ready for a VA, I want to hear how it's all going for you.

And again, you can get your free resource. And again, you can get your free workbook at LaurenGlenn. com slash resources. Look for your VA or virtual assistant roadmap, and it will help you through all of the rest of these episodes as well. Once again, I'd like to remind you that your systems are the backbone of your business.

I hope that you have a wonderful rest of your week and I will talk to you again soon. Bye.