One of the most popular topics that comes up with intermediate and advanced freelancers pertains to hiring a Virtual Assistant. These freelancers are curious and want to know when should they hire a VA? They are also curious about how do they know it’s time to bring a VA into their business? Another piece of the puzzle is knowing how any freelancer can properly leverage this person.
I have lots of different things to say about hiring a VA. There’s no way I can cover it all in one brief podcast episode. So this episode is going to be focused mostly on when it is time to hire a virtual assistant in your freelance business. We are not going to dive too much into the process of doing it. So this is really designed for you if you don’t have a virtual assistant yet in your freelance business. It’s also for you if you may have hired one in the past and didn’t have a good experience. This episode is also for you if you’ve never worked with a virtual assistant before to get those creative juices flowing about the different types of things that you might be able to use a virtual assistant for.
The first sign that now is the time to bring in that VA to help leverage some of your time is when you are fully booked. Now being fully booked is also a sign that your rates are too low and that they need to be increased. But when you’re fully booked and your plate cannot handle any more projects on it, you have officially capped out your revenue. At this point in your business, you cannot take on any other projects and you cannot realistically expect your business to grow.
When you have filled every single hour of every day and you’re racing against the clock it is time to hire a VA. You may even be finding at the end of the day that you’re barely getting your deadlines done. You might even be even falling a little bit behind. So when you are fully booked, you can’t afford to be spending time on tasks like:
• Doing administrative work
• Social media
• Invoicing
These tasks are taking up valuable space in your calendar. It’s also draining your energy and pulling you away from those processes in your business where it could be handled by somebody else. It’s also unlikely that these kinds of tasks you’d outsource to a virtual assistant are in your own zone of genius.
A virtual assistant is a lot like an administrative assistant that you might see working in an office. But this person handles tasks digitally and does them for you either by when they’re being paid by the hour, being paid by retainer, or per project. You don’t have to start in a big way to bring in a virtual assistant . You can start with just a couple of hours per week with inexperienced VA, even a new VA if you’re willing to train them on the process. But being fully booked is that first key sign that you have too much going on and you’re actually at risk of dropping one of the balls in your business and starting to make mistakes or miss deadlines.
Deciding what to outsource to your VA is important- learn about the risks of overloading your VA in this blog post.
The second thing to consider is that you have to think about how much time you’re dedicating to administrative work in a week. A lot of us don’t really know and tend to underestimate how much time we are dedicating to administrative tasks. So what I encourage you to do is to track your time for a full week. You can do it loosely in a notebook or you can use a tool like toggle that’s toggle.com which will help you set up different categories and labels for your tasks. And then you can figure out what you’re spending your time on. There’s also another great tool called rescue time, which will essentially analyze what you’re doing on a weekly basis and send you reports as well as red flags of key issues.
So one of the things that really opened my eyes to needing to delegate and outsource more was when rescue time sent me a report about spending 12 hours a week in my email inbox. That’s not something that I want to do. I don’t think that’s something that anyone wants to do. But it was my first real wake up call that I was going to have to do things differently. To find a way to get on top of my inbox management,I had to hire somebody to help me with it and implement some different systems and tools.
So if you’ve tracked your time using toggle or some other way and you’re finding that you’re spending more than five hours a week in administrative tasks, you are doing too much of those tasks. You are limiting your revenue and your business growth potential. So if more than five hours as being dedicated to that, it’s time to take a step back and say, “What of these things can I outsource to someone else?”
If you’re hesitant about handing over financial information to someone on your team, I completely understand that. A lot of people and freelancers are nervous about passing that on to someone else in their business. That’s probably the last thing you’ll outsource to somebody that
