Tips To Manage Your VA At Best
When people say “virtual assistant,” they might mean different things. For the purpose of this article, we’re talking about remote administrative help, and assume the following three things:
- They work remotely. Your VA will not be sitting next to you in your office or someplace near. All your communication will be online or on the phone, and you may never meet your VA face-to-face even if you work with them for years. A remote working relationship has its own quirky challenges.
- They’re global. That is, they don’t live and work in the same state or country as you. The customs, laws and standard business practices they know may be different from the ones affecting you.
- They’re generalists, and not domain experts. For the purpose of this article, we’ll assume your VA is not a domain or industry expert. They provide administrative help, not specific consulting.
Now that we’re on the same page about what a VA is and isn’t, let’s get to work!
1. Establish your workflow early.
Do you expect your VA to be available at certain hours of the day, everyday? Or can they mostly work on longer tasks and just give weekly updates? Set expectations for when you want to be online and available to reduce the frustration from not being able to reach your VA when you need them the most.
Discuss your potential task list with your VA. Hopefully, you already did this during the vetting and hiring phase, but it helps to go through the list again with your VA after you’ve hired them. If you’re hiring a firm, the VA assigned to you may not be the same person you talked to while interviewing the firm. By giving your VA an idea of the work coming down the pipe, they can better prepare for it. When you’re dealing with a firm that might mean getting sub-VAs that specialize in the tasks on your list.
Ask them to send you a weekly (or daily or monthly, depending on the number of hours you’ve booked) breakdown of tasks they’ve done and how long it took each task.
Prefer communication. Your VA will be able to handle whatever communications medium you prefer. It may be by phone or IM or email. While you’re at it, tell them how you prefer to be reached, at what times and for which problems. You don’t want to have your VA sending you an email when they should have called about a question on a time-sensitive project, and conversely, you don’t want them calling you at all hours of the night for trivial questions.
2. Try different tasks in the beginning to gauge your VAs strengths and weaknesses.
During the vetting and hiring phase, hopefully you found a VA that specializes in the tasks you will be assigning. However, and this is especially true of micro businesses that have few people doing a large variety of work, you may have a range of tasks that require different skill sets. For example, sending you email and responding to responses requires people skills, whereas data entry requires being very detail oriented.
When you first start working with your VA, don’t be afraid to try different tasks. You may find that your VA can accomplish more than you hoped for. If that’s the case, you may assign this VA higher level tasks that require some thinking, and choose to hire a lower cost VA to do the data entry work.
To Be Continued…
Get More Financially Sound With VA
As a virtual assistant (VA), can be fun and useful, especially if you already have basic knowledge of administration. But we only know the limits of basic skills that provide real services to customers, and limit revenue growth. Here is the acquisition of new skills and develop useful. Skills the more you know, more the service to its customers, which probably means more money in your bank account can offer. But what is to acquire new skills, increase your income and your business? In this work, discussing what should be the ability of a virtual assistant based on the administrative responsibilities will further enhance the skills and abilities VA.
Increase your skills VA:
More and more people are looking for ways to generate additional income in exchange for some of these people are looking to start an online business. More companies are the bricks and mortar in its sphere of activity and help create an online presence, generate more revenue and growth. You see, this new online business, which correspond to the market research these companies, virtual assistants help all its activities and to date, and the results of the various services that third parties will be granted. May include some outsourcing services:
- Create a video tutorial
- Professional audio production and distribution of audio advertising survey
- Systems for video distribution
You know how for the production of commercial video or tutorial? Not necessarily, but if you want to explode your online sales and grow your business, you need to learn a new skill. Do not be surprised if one day your best customers if you know how to create video tutorials, or if you distribute videos online on sites like YouTube.com know question.
You should know, virtual assistants:
Now, after considering the ability to stimulate a virtual assistant, you should check it is time to evaluate the ability of virtual assistants clearly and learn basic management skills. These skills should know:
- Create a series of voicemail messages to the client. This may include the use of programs like Aweber
- Creation of pay per click banner advertising and online at sites like Google Adwords
- Creating reports in PDF format
- The distribution of the articles to article directories and effectively
- Added Google Analytics code to track cart
- The client returns the object at school as PayPal, 2Checkout, Authorize.net and Google Checkout
- Work on support systems such as customer service and Perl Desk
Do you know the type of skills is essential to the success of the attributes mentioned above. If you can not know, one of the skills mentioned above, do not worry because you know. It takes time to learn, but before you know it, you are professionally. Learning these new skills require that you purchase the right software. For example, if you learn to create video tutorials, you should invest in video capture software screen. You can read the manual and practice this new skill.
Of course, should not the cost of all programs, go to learn new skills. Many programs, such as PayPal and kayaks are equipped with the basis of instructions or advice that will help you work through the program. This means that you really do not need to buy a program to assist the Office of use. When reading textbooks, software programs work and to use their hands to put the new knowledge of teaching. Remember it takes time and effort to learn new skills, but in the end, you and your company will benefit from it.