How To Hire A Virtual Assistant (Fast!)
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Do you feel overwhelmed when you look at your daily to-do list?
Do the projects that you’re actually excited to work on keep getting delayed because you’re constantly caught up in the tedious day-to-day tasks of running a business?
I’ve been there. 🙋♀️
When I start to feel this way, I know it might be time to consider adding a new team member. Today is an exciting day for my business because we’re doing exactly that!
I’ve hired at least twenty individuals over the years and have learned countless lessons along the way. Today I will share my top tips as well as my business’s current approach to hiring - it might not be what you expect!
You might be surprised to hear this… I still don’t know anything about our current applicants! Yep, you heard me. On top of that, today I will choose our fabulous new team member without ever having met them!
But I’m getting ahead of myself. Let’s start from the beginning.
Why am I hiring a new team member?
The role that I’m hiring for is Virtual Assistant (VA). At the moment, the main tasks of this role will include content management and customer service. This might expand to other areas in the future.
Truth bomb Alert 🚨
Okay, I don't know who needs to hear this… it IS possible for a VA to take over the little tasks that are currently cluttering your to-do list.
The result?
You’ll have more time and energy to focus on the work that you love AND the work that really moves the needle in your business.
I definitely used to be skeptical about handing tasks over to other people. I didn’t believe that they would get the job done to my standard. Turns out…I was wrong! and I'm thrilled about it!
Okay, I’ll admit, it does not always go perfectly. That’s why hiring intelligently is super key. It’s what makes the difference between hiring someone who’s a blessing to your life versus hiring someone whose work you have to redo & correct every step of the way. So here are my 5 steps for hiring intelligently so that you can find the perfect fit for the position.
👀Psst…make sure to subscribe to the email list to be the first to know next time we’re adding to the team!
Step #1 Track your Time
When it comes to hiring, the first question to ask yourself is:
WHAT exactly should this person do?
A very common mistake is hiring for the wrong task. Say you’re a booked-out web designer who doesn’t have time for new clients or projects. You might think the solution would be hiring a fellow web designer to help you take on the workload. Although this might seem like the logical course of action, it’s a huge blunder. I would know…I’ve done this! Such mistakes can cost your business BIG TIME so we definitely want to think ahead and avoid this. This is where time tracking comes in.
Time tracking is the most accurate method to find out what tasks you are currently spending time on. For this to be effective, it’s important to be as exact and specific as possible.
and when I say specific, I mean it.
Stepping away from the computer for a few minutes to sign off a package delivery?
Taking a quick break because your husband walked in the room?
Just got off a 3-minute phone call with a team member?
Yup! All of these should go in the time tracking sheet. That way you’re left with a truly accurate overview of how you spent your time.
Here’s what the result might look like. 👇
As you can see, it’s down to the minute. Another great benefit of doing this is that I find out what types of things are distracting me from my work.
not only does this allow me to create a system and environment through which I get as much work done as possible, it also helps me determine what types of work I should be spending my time on.
Step#2 Determine the Hourly Rate of the Tasks
Okay, so I’ve tracked my time and have a clear overview of how much time tasks like writing emails and finding receipts for the bookkeeper take. Now it’s time to estimate the dollar-per-hour rate for someone doing these tasks. Is this a $20/hour task? or more like a $50 or even $100/hour task?
Storytime 📖
There was once a law firm where four lawyers worked. All four lawyers were booked out with clients so the manager considered hiring another lawyer. However, before doing so, he had the four lawyers track their time for a one week period. When the manager looked at the results, he saw that each of the laywers was spending ten hours every week on general office tasks: fixing the printer, sending emails etc. So instead of hiring another lawyer (for $100K per year), the manager hired one assistant (for $40K per year). This assistant took over the general office tasks and freed the lawyers of all their random activities. As a result, they had more time to focus on serving clients which effectively generated more revenue for the law office. 💰
The moral of the story? track your time (down to the last detail). Then find the lowest dollar-per-hour tasks that you are currently spending time on. These are the tasks you should start outsourcing first.
Step #3 Find the Tasks That Bring You Joy
Ask yourself the following questions:
which tasks do I enjoy the most?
which tasks would I be happy to give to someone else?
I learned the importance of this question the hard way…
The things I enjoy doing most for my business are all forms of content creation:
Courses
Content/Videos
Website design
What I don't enjoy doing are the admin and management parts of the business. So you might be surprised to hear that there was a time when the majority of my hours were spent managing people. How did this happen? Well, since hiring managers can be costly, I decided to just do the tasks myself. However, that meant I had to outsource the other area I spent time on: content creation. I figured this would be easier and more affordable since content creation is a lower dollar-per-hour task.
So here’s how it worked: I had a team member write blog posts for me. These blogs were then used as scripts for the YouTube videos that I would record. All of these early videos on my YouTube channel, were written and scripted by someone else. 👇
All that I did was sit in front of the camera and read the scripts from my teleprompter. So I was pretty much a show pony. As you may have already guessed, I was not happy with this solution. Mainly for the following reasons:
I love creating my own content.
Even though it was technically my YouTube channel, it was run by someone else. They came up with the ideas and scripts. They also oversaw the video post-production. The only part I had in it was recording the videos.
Even though this setup technically worked, it left me in the role of managing projects and teams which was ultimately not the work that I enjoyed. During that time, just looking at my list of tasks for the day left me feeling drained.
I found myself dreading the workday. I even started to wonder “why am I running this business if I don't actually like working at it?”
So as you can see, while it’s important to take the dollar-per-hour amount for tasks into consideration, it shouldn't be the only factor.
Prioritizing that you as the entreprenuer enjoy your work is super key to running a business long run.
Step #4 Define the New Team Member’s Role
Once you’ve figured out which of your current tasks you enjoy most and which you enjoy least, it’s time for step four: create a list of the roles, responsibilities, to-do's and tasks that you want to hand over to a new team member.
As I hinted at earlier, we entrepreneurs often think we can’t trust someone else to manage projects in our business. We assume that team members can only handle certain tasks within a project and that we need to be the ones managing the whole project.
This is a limiting belief that needs to be broken.
Here’s a list of roles that my team members have held in my business:
customer service:
This is the first position I ever hired someone for. Believe it or not… even here I had my doubts. I thought that in order to give customers the best possible experience, I had to personally respond to all their emails.
Flash forward: turns out I’m actually not that great at customer service and that other people can do it way better!
I also had to accept that if I wanted to prioritize creating content, I would not have time to run customer service. My audience is certainly better served by more content than they would be by me individually answering their emails.
⭐️BONUS: staying clear of the inbox means I completely miss out on negative emails (although I have to say, as far as PB customers go, these cases are VERY rare). Since I built this business from the ground up, I'm very emotionally attached to it and can take such emails quite personally.
So it’s better for everyone if I steer clear of the inbox.
Tech & Running Launch:
This is a larger project so that’s probably the reason it took some time before I gave it up.However, my team now has a detailed template for running it, and the tasks just repeat with each launch. Of course, there are occasional tweaks but for the most part, the process stays the same.
It involves scheduling emails, testing purchase links, setting up the software used for affiliate tracking and live streams, and updating price changes.
All of these tasks can be done by a team member.
Website page redesign
This one pains me a bit because it does fall into the category of tasks that bring me joy. However, I’ve accepted that I don’t have time to do all the redesigns.
I now have a team member who is incredible at design so she is responsible for this area. I do still like to find ways to contribute.
Example: we're currently doing a complete rebrand of the business including a website overhaul. I ofcourse want to be involved in the process but also have to accept that I do not have time to do it all.
Copywriting
Although I run the content creation and write the scripts for my channel’s videos, I do have team members who help with recording and updating things like the email welcome sequence, sales pages, and website copy.
This works surprisingly well because over the years I’ve developed a strong brand voice. After having observed my content for long enough, team members are truly able to speak like me.
🙈 One team member even told me that her husband said “you're starting to sound like paige in your personal life”. So she really got into the voice! 😂
Markeing Strategies
It brings me joy to come up with ideas as well as to write, and shoot the content. However, it does not bring me joy to edit the videos, design the thumbnails, and format the accompanying blog post. All of these tasks are done by two of my team members.
I’ve also had team members take over entire marketing strategy projects. For example, the affiliate program for our courses has been run by one of my team members since day one. In this case, I decided what marketing strategy we should do, found the course that we should take to learn more about it, and then spoke with my team member about how to design the program.
After the initial prepping, the actual implementation itself was fully on this team member from start to finish.
As you can see, team members can handle WAY more than you might first imagine. Ultimately, hiring is going to challenge a lot of those “only I can do it” beliefs.
Step #5 Find your New Team Member
You have defined what you need and now it’s time to find the right person for the job. There are various ways for going about this:
Ask your own audience
I’m really lucky in that my audience happens to also be the perfect hiring pool for my business. If that's not the case for you, don’t sweat it - I’ve got some other recommendations up my sleeve!
ask Entrepreneurial friends
They just might have the perfect audience of candidates for your role. Even though we have our own audience, I still like to share the job posting with a few friends. The benefit of this is once the hiring round is finished, we can pass over curated lists of the top candidates (who we didn't take) in case our friends would like to hire them for their own business (and they do the same for us).
post in Facebook Groups
Facebook can also be a very effective route! In addition to posting on my personal page, we posted in the following groups:
Pro Tip: if your VA position involves web design, you can always reach out to my team. We’re happy to pass on aligned jobs to our student community. So if you’re looking for someone who’s super savvy with Squarespace, our community is an absolute goldmine. Just send an email to hello@paigebrunton.com 💌
Looking for ways to grow your audience? Try this free guide! 👇
Our hiring process
So I bet you are just dying to know how it’s possible for me to hire someone I’ve never actually spoken to.
Up until this point, the entire hiring process has been run by my team member Helen. Let me catch you up on what her hiring process was:
Shared job listing with email list, Facebook groups & business friends.
Narrowed down 400 applications to 25.
Ran twenty-five 15 -minute interviews.
conducted a test project with the remaining candidates (the purpose of this was to give applicants a preview of what their work would be like).
Held 8 full-length interviews (and recorded them for me).
Narrowed it down to 3 final applicants.
At this point, I come into the picture.
Today Helen sent me the list of her top 3 picks along with some notes and the interview recordings. All that’s left for me to do is to watch the three interviews and decide who my top pick is. After a chat with her to see if our favorite applicant is the same person (it was!), Helen takes care of organizing the contracts and the onboarding process,
once we hire the team member, I really do like to meet them and get to know them. when we bring new team members on, we like to host a Team Social. Since our team is spread out over the globe, We do online socials. I definitely prefer doing activities vs. just chatting. Our favorite so far have been virtual cooking classes that you can book through airbnb experiences. 👩🍳
So that’s it! now you have all the tools you need to find your dream VA.
A word about our affiliate program…
If you have people in your audience who would be interested in learning about web design, you might just be our next affiliate! Many of our affiliates are companies who teach accompanying & complimentary skills (copywriting, brand design, VA, CSS).
You might also just be a student who loves our courses and thinks that your audience would love them too. We want to hear from you!
Please do send us an email, hello@ paigebrunton.com to let us know. We're always looking to add to our family of really fabulous affiliates. We love to organize really fun affiliate prizes (like ski trips in Switzerland ⛷️) and it's an amazing revenue stream for both sides.
Speaking of revenue streams… I know we talk a lot about how to build online businesses, but we don’t often talk about what to do with the money once we’ve made it. I’m passionate about helping more women having wealth. A key factor in this is managing your money well. So I created an entire video on what steps to take when money arrives in your account.