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How to Increase Your Profits by Hiring a Virtual Assistant If you’ve been running a business for any time at all online then you’ve likely heard of virtual assistants. Perhaps you’ve gotten help from a virtual assistant with a small project but you don’t have a permanent virtual assistant on your team because it seems like a luxury expense. Would you do it if you knew that it would actually increase your profits? Smart business owners will do what it takes to increase profits but often don’t take their lessons from their larger counterparts very well. If you truly want a six-figure plus business, you can’t do it all alone, at least not if you want to have any quality of life, spend time with your family, and get any sleep. Hiring one or more virtual assistants to handle specific tasks to free up your time is one way to increase your profit, but you can do even better than that.

10 Reasons You Need to Hire a Virtual Assistant Now

If earning more profits in less time isn’t enough reason for you to take that step, there are many more reasons to hire a virtual assistant.

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1. To Perform Non Money Making Tasks – Every business has tasks that they must do day in and day out that do not generate money but are necessary to stay in business. Tasks such as bookkeeping, data entry, uploading blog posts, distributing press releases and so forth are all necessities.

2. To Rid Your Life of Overwhelm – You are trying to be everything to everyone. You

want to be the best parent, spouse, sister, daughter and friend, but your business eats up so much of your free time that you are starting to feel overwhelmed. You’re starting to think it would be easier to get a regular job. You find yourself looking at the want ads instead of doing the things you need to do for your business. The joy is gone.

3. To Catch Up on Administrative Tasks – Perhaps you have just let all the admin stuff

go, your books are out of order, you have no idea what your daily expenses are, or what you’re earning, or what to do next to make more money. You have a pile (literally or figuratively) of undone tasks. Sometimes, with the advent of technology you will not see a pile of unprocessed paper on a desk to show how out of control everything is, but you know whether you have stuff undone or not and are behind or not.

4. To Move Your Business to the Next Level – This is true of most small businesses.

You get to a point in your business where you are truly tapped out in terms of time. Even if you are super organized, and are not actually behind, you’ve maxed out what you can produce alone. This places a cap on your earnings. If you want to move to the next level and get rid of that ceiling, the only way is to hire help.

5. To Quit Your Job – If you are doing all the tasks yourself, what you’ve done is create a

job for yourself. Having a VA can make you the manager and creative director of your business. This enables you to focus on promotions, connections, and building your business instead of personally handling all of the business tasks. This job description change for you finally allows you to claim the freedom that ownership should provide and the freedom you dreamed of in the beginning.

6. To Improve Products and Services – Gathering data, analyzing data, and then using it

to implement changes, upgrades, improvements or brand-new products is very time consuming. But, a VA can do all that for you. You’ll only need to see the final report to make business decisions.

7. To Provide Better Client Services – You’ve built your business to the point that it’s

become impossible for you to follow up with clients on your own. No amount of automation can keep systems updated, newsletter content written, or provide follow-up care to clients. You need real people to do and oversee these tasks.

8. To Get Back Your Free Time -- You started your business so that you can enjoy dinner

every night with your family, or go on fun trips around the world. Whatever reasons you started your business it wasn’t because you wanted to work 24/7 without a break. You did it so that you could write your own future and have freedom in life.

9. You Have a 24/7 Business – Most businesses today aren’t in business just 8 hours a

day, and your online business is no different. People are ordering your products from you 24/7. Even if you sell services, the fact is, people are looking at your website, signing up for your email list, and connecting with you 24/7. Working with virtual

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assistants can help you deal with this fact. Someone else can be writing blog posts, while you’re working on long-term product ideas, and organizing the tasks that need to be done for these products.

10. To Increase Your Revenue – Many people think of hiring a VA as an expense, but the

truth is, when you hire strategically, your income will actually go up. However, the benefits are not limited to your income. Your profit margins and your actual bottom line will increase as well. That makes hiring virtual assistants a way to increase your profits, not your expenses.

If any of these reasons resonate with you, then keep on reading. Hiring a VA or a team of virtual assistants is truly one of the best things you can ever do for your business. You will be able to expand your business beyond your dreams and truly build something that can be passed down to your family members, sold to someone else, or practically run without you whenever you want it to.

Hiring a VA Helps You Become the CEO of Your Business Before going any further let’s talk about the idea of you being the CEO of your business. No chief executive officer of any business does everything on their own. In fact, often if you ask the employees they’ll say that the CEO doesn’t do anything. Of course, we all know that the CEO does quite a bit, but what they do best is delegate. Smart CEOs surround themselves with highly qualified and capable people that will make them look good -- people who love their jobs, and want to perform at the highest level the thing that they consider themselves experts in. As an entrepreneur you can do that too. You don’t have to be the CEO of a multibillion dollar corporation to take some lessons from people who do. How do you think the Donald Trump’s and Oprah’s of the world manage to do so much? They have help, and a lot of it.

Make a List The first thing you need to do is sit down and make a list of all the things you do in your business. Track your work for a month to have a good picture of what a day in the life of your business looks like. If you realize that you are leaving things out due to being so swamped, add those things in.

Organize the List Once you have a list, separate the tasks into two groups. Group one are things you seriously hate doing, and often do at the last minute because you hate them so much. These are things that must be done, or should be done. In the second group are all the tasks that you know that need to be done but you’re not an expert in, and while you can learn them, you’re slow at them or maybe you are horrible at them and you know deep down that someone else should be doing them. When you’ve done this take it one step further and create another list, which is kind of a wish list. List all the things you do now, that aren’t on the above lists, that you shouldn’t necessary have to do if you were the CEO of your business. Ask yourself, “If I was Oprah, would I do this,

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or would I get someone else to do it?” This is how you’re going to organize the tasks that need to be done and select the different roles in which you need Virtual Assistant help.

Tasks a VA Can Do For Your Business

If you’re not sure what type of tasks a VA can do for your business let’s further define what a VA is. A VA is really any type of contractor or outsourcer who can perform tasks and functions for you virtually using technology to accomplish them without having to be in your office. There are four main business functions that all businesses share that can be divided up into supporting functions such as:

1. Marketing – Market research, such as keyword research, social media profile management, social media commenting, social media sharing, and more.

2. Product Creation – Researching product feasibility, testing products, designing products, and so forth.

3. Product Development – Taking the research and putting it all together into a cohesive product that answers the problems of the audience.

4. Customer Service – Client follow up, email management, autoresponder management, gathering testimonials, interviewing clients, creating FAQs, and so forth.

These can also be divided up into five roles: creative, technical, administrative, marketing and finance.

1. Creative – Web site design, logo design, form design, infographic design, video creation.

2. Technical – Programming, website admin, app development, back up services. 3. Administrative – Scheduling, data entry, research, organization, uploading blog posts,

uploading videos, monitoring social media, email filtering, uploading products into shopping carts.

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4. Marketing – Press release creation, distribution, ad idea creation, SEO, product and sales funnel development, online marketing plans.

5. Finance – Budgeting, bookkeeping, receipt organizing. However you choose to look at the core functions of your business, it’s up to you, but the important factor is to understand what elements your business has, which things you do, which things you don’t want to do, and who can do it for you and why they should do it for you. Consider the different roles and categories as you make your lists.

How to Hire a VA

Once you have the lists made its time to start actively looking for a VA or several virtual assistants to hire. Thankfully, hiring a VA isn’t as difficult as narrowing down the tasks that you want your VA to perform. But, once you do that you’ll need to do the work necessary to hire a VA.

Where to Find a VA You can find virtual assistants in a variety of ways from job boards, to master mind groups, to polling your friends and colleagues. Boards like Elance.com, Guru.com, Craigslist.com, VANetworking.com and Virtualstafffinder.com are great places to post a job description for your projects or long term VA needs. You can also put the description on your website and then share it through social media and your connections. Often people you know will recommend virtual assistants that fit your description. Most of the time, you can trust recommendations from people that you know because they have used the person before or know the person. Even so, it’s important to screen any VA to ensure that they’ll be a good fit for you. What works for someone else might not work for you. Send out your announcement via Twitter, Facebook, Linkedin.com, and even Pinterest.com to get more responses to your job announcement. It’s important that your job announcement has a good description so that you can properly prescreen applicants.

How to Write an Effective Job Description Every job description needs to go over the details of the position, the duties of the job, how you expect them to do it, and other factors that make up the job. First, create a title for your job announcement. Then, be clear about what you expect. Since you are hiring a contractor position and not an employee it’s important that you spell out those details too.

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Job Title – General Virtual Administrative Assistant This type of working title helps anyone looking for a position know that this is a contractor position that will perform general admin tasks virtually. Then you want to include a job summary. Job Summary – Need a self-starter who has exceptional communication and organization skills to perform general administrative tasks, marketing tasks, and other tasks as directed between the hours of 8 and 5 PM Central Standard Time, Monday through Friday for about 10 hours a week. The job summary should include any type of responsibilities, skills, functions and duties and other expectations. Make it from 1 to 3 paragraphs to include as much information as you can in regards to the job. Job Duties – Compile customer feedback into monthly reports, coordinate travel arrangements, and monitor social media accounts. Include who the VA will be accountable to regarding these actions. List all the duties and the main responsibilities and how much time you expect the VA to spend on each and the importance of each. Requirements – Two years of college preferred, VA certification considered, three years relevant experience corroborated by three references. Experience with Aweber, QuickBooks and 1 Shopping Cart required. Must be willing to work with and answer directly to the project manager.

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This is your chance to include the requirements for the position, including education, experience required, and a request for references. It’s important to make your job description and advertisement focus on the skills and experience needed to complete the position.

Mistakes to Avoid When Hiring a VA The first time you hire a VA is the most trying time of all. Once you go through it a few times you’ll improve your process but it’s important to try to avoid the most common mistakes when hiring a VA. When you do it right the first time you can avoid having too many costly do-overs.

• Not Setting a Realistic Budget – Know how much you can afford to pay someone on your current budget. It’s really important to understand how much you can afford to outsource right now without boosting your profit margin.

• Expecting One Person to Do it All – There is no one VA or even one VA team who can do everything for your business. It is likely that you will need to hire, over the course of your business, several VAs and even more than one team for different functions.

• Not Checking References – Even when someone recommends a person to you, it’s imperative that you actually call on their references to ensure that this is someone you want to work with.

• Hiring Non-Fluent Persons – It’s tempting to outsource to someone who is not fluent in your language, due to the initial cost savings, but it can be a huge mistake. Tread carefully if you choose to do that.

• Not Speaking to Them Before – Using Skype, or Google Hangout, or telephone speak to the person applying for the position before locking in a contract with them. The best is using a way to communicate face-to-face because you’ll be able to determine a lot by body language that you cannot determine in other ways.

• Starting with too Large a Project – Even when you are hiring someone for general administrative tasks, start smaller and build bigger to avoid issues that can be avoided.

• Not Having a Contract – Always sign a contract of some kind that spells out job duties and expectations on both parties behalf including methods of payment and when, where and how work will be done and paid for.

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You can avoid these mistakes so that your experience with hiring a VA goes smoothly. You can learn from other people so that you have a successful experience. This will help you avoid wasting time so that you can increase your profits faster.

Mistakes to Avoid When Working with a VA Just like you can make mistakes before you even hire someone, you can make mistakes after hiring them that can form road blocks to a successful, long term relationship with the VA. The most profitable VA relationships are long-term relationships. You want to avoid turn over, and you want to avoid having to re-teach others your business vision as much as possible.

• Being too difficult to Work With – If you really want a VA to be on time, care about your time, and so forth, then you must do the same for them. Turn in work requests as soon as possible and give reasonable time limits, milestones and due dates for everything.

• Not Giving Your Assistant Enough Work – If your ad stated that you were going to use them for 10 hours a week but it’s more like 10 hours a month you’re going to run into problems with the VA. They earn their money by filling their roster with a certain number of time or projects and monthly income. You’re a big part of that, to remain a big part, provide what you promised.

• Not Giving Positive and Negative Feedback – This is especially true in the beginning of the relationships but never really changes. You should be giving a lot more feedback in the beginning than later. It can be really hard to give feedback but if you stick with the formula of telling them something good, telling them something to work on, and then telling them something good again you’ll get really good results.

• Setting Expectations too Low or too High – It’s important to know what you want and how to explain it to your VA. You don’t want expectations to be impossible but you also don’t want them to be so low that work quality suffers. Your VA should be able to, within a short period of time, do at least as well as you did on the same task.

• Not Having Systems in Place – You really need a project management system in place that everyone uses to keep your team together. If you don’t have systems in place and a description of what a successful deliverable is, you won’t be able to adequately set standards and assess success.

• Not Ending the Relationship – You should know within a month or two whether or not your relationship will work out. If your VA has been on time, done everything you said, and performed to standards then you’re golden. If not, you may want to look for someone else. Don’t let a bad situation fester.

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• Not Providing Training – While a VA already is trained in the tasks you hired them to do such as uploading an email series to Aweber.com, you may need to provide training on your systems and guidelines. Training should only be related to your own requirements with your products and not to do with the systems you expected competency on.

• Not Giving Explicit and Clear Instructions – People think in different ways, so you may need to provide instructions in different ways. If you think in terms of what role your VA fills rather than just tasks, you should be able to provide much clearer instructions for them, leaving out the things they should already know, and only including things relevant to your own business.

• Micromanaging Your VA – You don’t need to know what they are doing every second of every day. Systems that photo a VAs desktop, and require copious amounts of record keeping are not going to make for a profitable, long-term relationship. Give a good description of what you expect the end product to look like, milestones, and set due dates, and then let them do it.

It’s easy to get in your own way when it comes to hiring a VA. If you don’t organize your business so that you can give other people work to do, and only do things at the last minute, it’s going to be difficult to work with a VA in a profitable manner. No one likes getting email at 2 am asking them to do something due at 8am.

How to Ensure Working with Your VA is Successful When you decide to work with a VA it can kind of feel like standing on a ledge, blind-folded and not knowing if you’re going to fall or not. But the truth is, you can’t do everything yourself no matter how smart you are. When you think you can do everything you miss the entire point of having a business. You want to make a profit, and have a life too. If you don’t find help, your business will be stuck at a specific profit point, but if you get help, you can double, triple and even quadruple your income. Finding help that is right is only part of the issue. As you have seen, part of the issue also has to do with how you work with the VA to create success.

Make Your VAs Feel like Part of Your Team As you become surer of your VA, you’ll want to include them in other parts of your business so they feel more like a part of a team. Not just any team either – part of a winning team that makes money -- your team. Most virtual assistants are experts in their own right in what they do. If you’ve chosen well, your VA is an expert in some area and you should take advantage of their experience. This means allowing and inviting them to make suggestions for improvements in the processes and systems you now have in place.

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Systemize Your Business with Virtual Assistants in Mind

Before even hiring your first VA putting a system in place realizing that you will eventually contract with a VA is essential. Systems like Basecamp.com or Asana.com can help organize all

the activities that your VA and the rest of your team accomplish on any given day. You can even make that one of the first projects of your new VA if you’re not sure what to do. Some virtual assistants specialize in online business management, and can get your business organized and systemized quickly. Having systems in place is a large and important piece of the outsourcing puzzle.

Train Your Virtual Assistants to Become Income Generators Everyone knows that a VA helps you earn money by freeing up your time for working on money making ventures, marketing, and networking. You also probably realize that your VA can help with marketing so that you get more leads than you can do alone.

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But, in many cases, you can also give your VA other opportunities to earn more money than typical project or hourly fees. If you have an affiliate program, train and encourage them to earn passive income promoting your products and or services to others as well. Teaching your entire team to make money for you is the ultimate goal. Empower your virtual assistants to understand all the different ways in which they can help you earn money and to speak up if an idea comes to mind. It’s important that they feel safe enough to come to you with an idea whether it’s an idea for a new Kindle book, an idea for more social media updates, or an idea for an email series – it doesn’t matter – if your assistant has the idea and is too afraid to talk to you about it, you’ve lost money. Plus, train them not to wait around for instructions from you on every single project. If you normally create five different products out of one eBook, then everyone should already know this, and it should be done automatically without any input from you than the initial start of the new project.

Pay Your VAs What They are worth and On Time An important factor in keeping a good VA and generating profit is to hire someone who is worth every penny you pay them. To do that you’ll need a good idea of what you want accomplished, time to interview them properly, and check on references, but once you have them you’ll want to keep them by always paying your VA what they are worth and on time. Many virtual assistants have their own teams that they need to pay, and some are solo practitioners who rely on that monthly income to pay their bills, buy groceries and care for their family. When you contract with someone like this it’s imperative that you pay them on time each month no matter what happens. Of course, this is true for any bill that you create, but it’s especially important if you want to increase your profit by hiring a virtual assistant. Hiring new people because a VA left your team due to late payments or misunderstandings takes time away from making more money. Instead, treat the payment like you treat paying your mortgage. Pay it on time, every time. The more you do that, the more “credit” you’ll build up with the VA and the harder the VA will want to work for you to earn you even more money.

Finally, keep in mind the income formula for outsourcing. You’ve heard the saying that “time is money” and that’s true. When you outsource any task, it frees up more time for you to focus your efforts on higher money making tasks. For example, if you outsource the creation of a new information product from A to Z, you can spend your time coming up with new product

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ideas, marketing ideas, networking, and other factors that will earn you more money in the long run because you are essentially duplicating yourself by paying other people for their time while you generate the ideas. If you’ve ever seen the show Project Runway, you can learn a lot from it. Right now all these dreamy fashion designers are doing it all from A to Z themselves. They are coming up with the ideas, designing the outfits, and then actually sewing the outfits too. But, if they are to have a truly successful fashion design business, guess what, they won’t do it all alone. They can’t. No one person can physically sew enough outfits to earn a growing and sustaining income. Eventually, they will max out and top out their income. But, if they hire helpers, even other designers who can come up with ideas, and supervise people who put the product together, they can become fashion icons and moguls. You are in the same situation. You want to eventually become the idea generator who works with other idea generators, who supervises the people who do the production of all the products and services that have your name on them. That’s how you increase your profits by hiring a virtual assistant. You duplicate yourself as many times as you want to. You’re only limited now by your imagination. Time may be money, but it’s also freedom.