Transcript

SUMMARY KEYWORDS

freelancer, work, virtual assistant, Kathy, tasks, questions, bookkeeping, business, delegate, hire, clients, Fiverr, contract, people, cathy, goals, columns, helped, talk, zone

00:00

Welcome today. Yeah, we're really happy to have Cathy here, she's going to talk to us about what it's like to work and expand your business with a virtual assistant. Like I said, we, me and Kathy been work together for over a year. It's been wonderful. Having her helped me grow my business, especially in my marketing strategy side of the business. And, you know, one of the things that she's helped me learn how to do is use this really great tool called click out. I definitely have some resistance to it in the past, and definitely was a little intimidated by it, but she's helped me kind of ease into it. And now I'm starting to use it to help me track my goals and my achievements. And it just feels like a really great collaboration in there together, which is so wonderful. So I think it's really eye opening once you realize what you can do with someone with Kathy's skill, set and knowledge. All right, well, I'm gonna turn this over Kathy. She's going to do a presentation and then we'll have a q&a after that. Take it over, Kathy.

00:56

Awesome. Thank you so much, everybody for joining us today. I am getting my screen setup. So here we go.

01:13

Okay, can everybody see that? Yeah. Great. Awesome. Okay, so this is talk about expanding your business with a virtual assistant. There's a lot of information in here. So I'm gonna go quickly, but there will be time in at the end to ask questions. So who am I, I have 27 years in the executive assistant realm and as an administrative professional, I love giving back to my community. My dream is to have a horse I my minor in college was equine studies with my major being secretarial studies. So I love I love horses. I have a dream of having a red Corvette. Anybody else have that dream? That's awesome. I have been on a town board, I was elected twice to the town board in my local local region. My goal for to 2022 is to go to Scotland, which is has always been my goal. I love Harry Potter. And I'm a single mom of three wonderful boys that has taught me dependability and how to get up and try again after failing. So that's me in a nutshell. Today we're going to talk about these things, what is outsourcing, what to delegate finding freelancer and how to work with a freelancer, which a freelancer is a virtual assistant basically. So outsourcing is the practice of having certain job functions done outside of company instead of an in house department or employee. And a virtual assistant can be either it the industry itself is mainly a freelance industry, but you can hire virtual assistants as employees, we're talking about the freelance portion today. So the downsides, and the benefits of hiring a freelancer downsides is there's no micromanaging to actually tell somebody what to do, how to do it, when to work, that becomes an employee, a freelancer, they set their own schedule, they decide how they're going to do something, you give them the task and the goal, or the objective to achieve. They figure out how to get there. And there's unpredictability, of course, that's how the Freelancer determines when they're working. And undependable loyalty because they have moat, they could have multiple clients, they're not necessarily going to be totally loyal to you. But the benefits are lower costs and lower financial risks. You don't have to pay for benefits or insurance or handle the taxes. You get the expertise of that, that Freelancer because they're working for other clients. They could be in different industries, the what they do for other people, they can't help but learn and what they learn could benefit your business. So that's the expertise. Increased efficiency, because you're you pay for only what they do, the time that they're working for you. You're not paying for them to take coffee breaks or lunch breaks or any talking with coworkers at the water cooler, something like that. So there's increased efficiency, and it saves you time. They take things off your plate, too. So you find out, you know, you want to delegate, you've decided that you want to hire a freelancer, a virtual assistant. So what do you delegate, these are some of the tasks that freelancers can do for you. And all of these are within the realm of a virtual assistant. There are direct management specialists, bookkeeping, email management, or email marketing specialists. And this is just a very short list, this is not all of them. To figure out what you want to delegate, or you can delegate from your business, I have a task or I have an exercise for you, you could take out a piece of paper and have, like, make to sort columns on the left hand side, and then the rest of the paper, you start writing down every task that you do, on that piece of paper,

05:59

in your business, going from emails to bookkeeping, to, you know, writing content, everything that you do in your business, for you and your clients. And then from there, you rank them in the two columns on the left, you rank each task according to your passion. And according to your proficiency, how passionate are you to do each task? And how proficient Are you? How good do you do those tasks. From there, you go to create another page with like these four quadrants. And this is the four zones of productivity from the free to focus by Michael Hyatt, you can get a lot more information from that book. But this is my, how I determine what to delegate from the list that you created of your tasks, you take the list the tasks that have the lowest numbers in both columns, both of the smaller columns, and those go into your drudgery zone. Those are tasks that you have have absolutely no passion for and are not good at doing. And then from there, you go along again, take the rest of the class and you have that disinterested zone, where you're, you're really good at, but you have very little passion, or the distraction zone you have a lot of passion for but you know, you're really not that good at. And then you have your desire zone, which are those tasks that have the highest numbers in both the passion and the proficiency columns, and are usually the reason why you started your business to begin with those of you in your desire zone, or also called your zone of genius. So you have everything, you have everything put into these four quadrants. The items that are in your drudgery zone, your Desinger zone and your distraction zone are those that you can delegate to other people. That makes sense. Awesome. Okay. So you find out, you figured out what you want to delegate, you know, what you are not passionate about you're not good at. Those are the first things that you should delegate to somebody else. Finding a freelancer, virtual assistant is the next step. So there are a number of job boards, such as Fiverr, Upwork, LinkedIn Profinder, which is a new feature that LinkedIn has started just a couple of years ago, that is getting some traction, actually, they go in and they LinkedIn will vet these professionals. And if they're not up to date, or they don't have any recent recommendations, they don't allow that professional in. So they're already vetted. They know LinkedIn knows that they are the real professionals, they know what they're doing. There's also social media groups. If you are looking for a virtual assistant, just a general virtual assistant, there are a number of virtual assistant Facebook groups. And I can give you a list of them if you'd like. But you go into those groups and you post what you're looking for, and you'll get tons of responses. You could also get referrals from strategic partners or past or current clients. And there are networking groups such as BNI or success champions networking, which you know, they have meetings on a periodic basis and you get to know people on a personal level to build those relationships. And they usually will say In job referrals as well. One good tip that I can provide is to when you do put out a job posting, make sure you put instructions for the applicant to complete in your job posting. Now, profit factory is a really good example of what to do in profit factory is a job board. Basically, they send out job listings for virtual positions on a every other week or so. And in every job, every posting, they have something like what you see on the screen, they have specific instructions about what to put in the subject line, what to put in the first paragraph, all the way down to how to close your your email. And if a virtual assistant or a freelancer doesn't follow any of these instructions, they're automatically

11:02

eliminated. So that helps you narrow down your pool of applicants that you're actually going to interview. So I highly recommend you you put in a lot of some instructions in your job postings. Here is a list of some questions to ask. There's only eight here but I have a full list of 27 interview questions for Freelancer that you can get at the end of the top talk today. It is quite extensive. And it really they really help you. Come bring some details out when you're talking to freelancers. I also have a list of questions for you to be ready to be to answer as you're interviewing virtual assistants and other freelancers. Because they are a freelancer, they're going to be interviewing you as well as you interviewing them. So they will ask you some questions, and I recommend you be ready to answer some of these questions. tips for choosing the right hire is do their values match yours? Are their strengths, your weaknesses? And do you like your person, their personality? Can you work with this person, these are the main considerations to think about when you're interviewing and determining if the person is good to work with if you want to hire a person. So working with a freelancer, here are some tips always have a contract. Contracts can be a pain, but they are very, very much a vital portion of a successful business. They clarify your communication styles, they clear they set clear expectations, they spell out all responsibilities for everybody involved, and they minimize the risk of the Freelancer disappearing. There has been a point in my life where I didn't have a contract when I was working with a a, an artist. And if he had not, I had to send him like emails for two months after our project was completed. And because we didn't have a contract, there was no recourse for me. If he didn't pay, he did. But if he hadn't, I wouldn't have been able to do anything about it. And it's the same thing with for a an employer. With a freelancer, a lot of freelancers will ask for partial or full payment upfront. And then I've heard stories where that Freelancer just disappears and goes to that person. So having a contract is is good to have. Communication is key, be open. Let the Freelancer know your big picture goals because they have a lot of experience. They can help you reach those goals. And sometimes they can even give you some ideas or suggestions as to better ways to be more efficient to be more productive to reach your goals in a better or faster way. Start with a trial project. A lot of freelancers will start a contract with a three month contract or start working with somebody with a three month contract. That's one of my requirements is we have a three month contract. It's my onboarding period. We get to know each other and at the end of the trial period. If it's not working out, it's not working out no hard feelings we just cancel or terminate the contract and move on. Or we can renegotiate the contract to different terms and work even longer together. It makes everything a lot easier. Always set deadlines, projects and tasks get done on time. If you have a deadline, if you just tell or have somebody, here's a project, go do it, and not give the Freelancer a more more clear deadlines and expectations. It could take anywhere from a day or you know, a year to get that project done, you set deadlines, and it's a lot easier, more efficient for you as well. Meeting with your Freelancer on a regular basis, my requirement when I work with clients is that we meet meet on our on a weekly basis, either 30 or 60 minutes. That provides accountability for you and me. And it increases communication. If you have questions, you don't have to wait three or four weeks before you see your Freelancer again, or send an email, craft an email that may or may not be

16:05

as detailed or as clear as you hoped it would be. But being able to see the Freelancer on a weekly or bi weekly basis is helps increase communication. It's a great time to ask questions and be responsive when when employers don't respond to questions that freelancers have, or virtual assistants, how it holds up projects. And also knowing the expected response times if you have questions is also helpful. Like if you are working a like on your business eight to five and you're freelance, sir is doing the virtual assistant services after like before work and after school gets out or something. They're not working during your times of work. So knowing when they're working is also helpful and will increase your your efficiency. A bonus tip that I have is that to remember that you are not their only client. Freelancers have many clients and they knowing again, knowing their expected response times will help just be patient. Oh, yeah. So we talked about what is outsourcing figuring out what to delegate finding freelancers, and tips for working with freelancers. So now, I'll open it up to questions.

17:53

Oh, that was great. Kathy, I love that you covered so many things. And one of the things that, you know, I've seen you do this talk before, but so the things that stood out this time, I think we're you know, running that you can do a trial run and setting deadlines. I think those are just things that, you know, it's like, well done, but no, it's not. It's one of those things that really resonates and talks about success. And I think you know, you and I have had a lot of success, because we've had a chance to have a weekly check. And I think those are also pretty valuable when it comes to working with ongoing freelancers like yourself where, you know, things can get lost in the shuffle of of like a project management tool or messaging, like we use Slack to talk but it's nice Bill talk real time. So I think that's also a really good thing to throw in there, too, is like that, that can really add to success of completing projects and making sure there's not miscommunication.

18:47

Yes. And that that has been a secret to my success, as well as a virtual executive system is, you know, making or having weekly meetings with my clients. I know some people don't require a lot of accountability, but I'm not one of them. Talking making having those meetings helped me make sure things get done as well. Any other questions? I do have a list of of tools and things that we could maybe in the future have another talk on. There are 1000s of tools out there that could be used in a virtual situation. I have my favorites. But it's always helpful. Pamela, did you have a question?

19:42

Oh, I'm thinking I'm thinking about my list of things I should probably pass off to a virtual assistant bookkeeping being the biggest one. Because it's probably in my drudgery zone. I suck at it and I'm not passionate about it.

19:56

Yeah, yeah. Oh, Um, yeah. So that's actually one of the first things that I I outsourced was my bookkeeping. It's one of the only outsourced so far. I know I'm a virtual assistant, but bookkeeping is not in my realm of expertise. So I kind of refer people to others for that, but usually, I would appreciate some referrals. So referrals for bookkeeping, for bookkeeping, my bookkeeper is actually Aaron Harris, from the financial remedy.com. Financial. Yeah, she's author I met with her today. She's really sweet. And and knows her stuff she does. She's a QuickBooks Online expert, and is awesome to work with.

20:58

Okay, perfect. I'll check her out. Awesome. Yeah, especially coming up at the end of the year here. There's so much work that I need to do that I'm not looking forward to Like, I literally need to put probably a week aside and get it done. But if I can pass that off to somebody, that would be awesome.

21:15

Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Excellent. Do you have any questions?

21:23

Um, I was probably looking more for someone who can help me on a kind of day to day basis, where I kind of employ him for a few hours a day or a certain amount of hours a week. A lot of the tasks we've got kind of customer service and things like that. Yes, we do a lot of kind of service accommodation, Airbnb booking.com. We do a lot of that kind of stuff. So yeah, and I quite like the idea of the different time zones, because, you know, where's evening for us? And we don't want to be dealing with kind of customers in the evening for someone else's kind of during the day. So. So yeah, that's kind of my my thought process.

22:01

Well, there are a number of Facebook groups out there and LinkedIn groups for you here.

22:06

Yeah, no, absolutely. Yeah. No, I thought the Facebook group idea was really good. So that's my main thing, really kind of struggling where to find people. So I know, I know, Fiverr, and things like that for kind of building websites and whatnot, and kind of more of the kind of project things that you're saying about. But trying to find someone for a kind of day to day, kind of, you know, hiring process, I've been struggling to find where I would go for that.

22:31

Well, I can come up with some suggestions for you.

22:34

Oh, that'd be great.

22:37

I know, there was a really big, I found a website, I don't remember off the top of my head, I'll have to do some digging. But there is a very popular website for virtual assistants from the UK, and they have a lot of great information on there. I'm sure they can help you find somebody that is suitable and a freelancer doesn't have to work full time for you. Like I said, they they work for multiple clients. I work like six to eight hours a month for one of my clients and up to 20 a month for another client. So you know, there's a whole range of people that will do

23:18

Yeah, for sure. Things.

23:24

I'm gonna stop sharing. Okay, cool. Any other questions? Jennifer, do you have any questions? You're on mute? I'm sorry, you're on mute?

23:40

What is the typical range that someone should expect to pay for a virtual assistant? I know there's probably a broad one, but I don't know.

23:51

Okay, so if you go out to, like, hire somebody from abroad, from the US abroad, such as Philippines or Dominican Republican or India or something like that, it would be, you can expect to pay anywhere from five to $10 an hour in the US, depending on the specialty, but a general VA can be anywhere from 15 to $35 an hour. If you want to have somebody like an an operation specialist, somebody that is specialized in a specific area. It could be anywhere from 25 to 65 to $105 an hour. So it really depends on what you're looking for. But General General VAs what most people start with, and that's somewhere between, you know, 15 to $25 an hour. Okay. Thank you. You're welcome. That's what

24:56

yeah, that's, you know, it's a question I get asked a lot um, So how much? How much should you know to expect to invest in a virtual assistant? I think, again, like you talked about Kathy depends on what their specialty is and what they do. You know, and what you're and then, you know, I think there's also these myths, I think you broke down today of like, how, you know, especially like, a lot of my clients, I can I, can I hire someone for a few hours a month? And what yeah, there's all kinds of possibilities, it doesn't have to be all or nothing. I think a lot of people, at least the ones I've talked to, in the last year or two, thought it had to be like, you know, this very narrow window of opportunity of like, an or maybe just, you know, there's the famous Four Hour Workweek book that, you know, came out years ago, and you know, that that whole scene with the VA, so is there's different, there's different abilities out there, right, Kathy, so it's not all or nothing.

25:45

And along the same lines is that that topic, there are VAs that will, will sell you like a package of hours per month, or they will charge you hourly, however many hours, they work for you one month, though, they'll bill you the following month, or or following week or whatever. And then there are some people that have actual packages of deliverables. So there's no set number of hours, but you they know what they are supposed to deliver for you during the month, or week or whatever timeframe. So they're, and they're those that work on specific projects. So if you have one project, you want help on you, they can charge you just for that project. So there's a range of different ways to to handle that.

26:39

And you said, is it is there like a good website for like, finding pas for like, as you said, in like the Philippines or like kind of India and based like that is like,

26:48

usually the Upwork and Fiverr, that that's the best place to go for? Yeah, for those for that region, for US based and I mean, there are others in not just in the US, but there is a Facebook group called the Virtual savvy. And that is a really good, very popular virtual assistant group.

27:19

Thanks.

27:20

And the website is the virtual savvy.com. So awesome. Any other questions or comments?

27:32

I'd like to say, you know how I met you Kathy was through like a online networking group. It was like the LinkedIn local of New York I think was how we met. So you know, I'm on I'm in Portland, Oregon. Cathy's in upstate New York. So it's, you know, we're very, we made this work. No problem with our differences never never been an issue at all. In fact, it's probably been, I think you might have mentioned this, David, like, it's actually you know, Kathy is ahead of the game. She's already, you know, hit Craig and stuff out and I'm starting to start my day. She's already you know, like, hey, Nedra, what's going on? We I got this done for you. I'm like, Oh, this is wonderful. Like, I can now get my work done. Cuz it's kind of a toggle. A little bit of ping pong, we play sometimes, but it works out great. And so my experience is I've hired many virtual assistants over the years is, I usually get I get word of mouth. It's like recommendations. Like, before Kathy, I had a virtual assistant named Mindy and she I met her through another online networking group, as well. And it's nice to have someone that vouches for someone you know, like he just or like common people, you know, some people you have in common when you want to hire someone, especially if it's more intimate, I think that can really play and, and then it just also helps with longevity of the relationship and building trust. And then you know, what I even did to this to talk on my own experiences, I, my first start out actually had an intern. So the very first VA was an intern from the same college I went to here in Portland, and then she became more of an admin. And so that was a really fun way to like, try to try someone out and get used to having an admin because part of it too, is I had to get ready for her. Like it was a really interesting ritual, like we'd meet every Monday at this coffee shop, but I had to get all my my ducks in a row so I could give her work. And that was a really good kick in the pants to get me in order and get my give myself an order so I could help her so she could help me. So that's another thing that I think was a ritual that I needed to figure out for myself. And it worked really well. And so there's, there's just so many possibilities of how to get work out there. It's this. It's really endless. And I think it's great if you can find recommendations so you can build that trust quickly.

29:33

Yes, absolutely. Well, it's been awesome. Thanks so much for coming. And I really, I wish you all the best of luck, and if I can ever help you with anything, I'm very willing to do that. So reach out, please. Alright,

29:56

thank you very much.