Do you know that when it comes to investing in a virtual assistant, part of the problem is knowing what it is you can expect. Often, we have no idea what we want. We know we need help; we can’t build our business when we spend 25 hours a week on business admin.

At this stage, small business owners generally reach out to us, asking for help. Often, though, they don’t know where they want the help, only that they need it.

You can do several things as a small business owner to work out what type of help you need.

  1. Analyze your pain points – write down what is giving you the most grief and sapping your time. Then, group them into categories.
  2. What are your goals? – where do you want to be in 12 months (not doing 25 hours a week business admin, that’s one…)
  3. What is your budget? – Your time on business admin is costing you money. If you spend 25 hours a week in the back end and charge 180 per hour. Do the math; it’s not pretty. That’s $4,500 worth of lost revenue.
  4. What can you outsource? – Now that you know what’s causing you pain, where you want to be, and how much money you’ve been wasting. It’s time for you to take action.
  5. Know your options – you can contract a virtual assistant, reach out to a Small Business Solutions Architect (that would be me), or bring on an employee. No matter which option you choose, it will cost money.
  6. Your expectations – The answer to question 5 will be the result of points 1 – 4. My mother always used to say you can’t make a silk purse out of a pig’s ear. But we continue to try and get something for nothing because we haven’t worked out what we want to begin with.

Whether you contract help or hire an employee. The one person fits all doesn’t exist anymore. In corporate, your EA is the Commander in Chief of the Admin. They delegate the work while they focus solely on their line manager. They have an HR department, Payroll, IT, and Marketing; you get the picture.

Finding that one virtual assistant that does everything is rare, and I would question if they are doing everything, then there is something they are not doing well because there simply are not enough hours in the day to do it all.