Why Should You Hire a Virtual Assistant?
Enjoy this question and answer discussion about why you should hire a virtual assistant, and how do you go about doing it?
Why should you hire a VA?
I think the purpose of outsourcing is so that you yourself can spend more time in your dollar productive tasks than doing the menial tasks like opening the mail or scanning documents or even if you’re doing something like bookkeeping, posting blog posts, approving comments on your blog, things that you don’t necessarily have to do yourself to get them done.
How do you know when you need to hire a VA so you can grow?
Usually, the best sign is that you get frustrated. You either have more client inquiries than you can handle, or you are just so frustrated on the day to day because you are not moving at the pace you need to be to be successful in your business.
For example, have you had a time when you get to 10 o’clock at night and you still have emails to respond to, you still have five or six things on your to-do list that you never got around to? If you ever get to the end of the day and you know that you were busy all day but you can’t tell me one solid productive thing or one important thing you did that day then it’s time to start outsourcing. You want your things like, a lot of times you’ll end up putting out fires and you’ll be putting out fires in another people’s businesses rather than your own.
What do you do if you’re feeling overwhelmed? How do you declutter your brain so you can take the task of outsourcing on?
I had an interesting conversation with a client this week. She’s always been one of those people with a natural knack for organization—spreadsheets, lists, calendar blocks, the whole thing. But since adding things to her personal and professional life she is overwhelmed, like her mind was cluttered. And she's the type of person who hates clutter.
Her mental load had started to spill over into her work and her life in a way that felt unfamiliar and a little frustrating.
Listening to her, I couldn’t help but remember when I was in the same place. I’ve always considered myself a pretty organized person, too. My mom once joked that I should write a book about organization. But there was a point where my schedule was so packed, and my brain so full, that even small tasks felt like mountains and lots of them fell by the wayside. I was juggling way too many details and expectations, and even the smallest disruptions threw me off course.
That was when I practiced what I preached and hired a VA to help me create better systems, fill holes in the organization that I had missed, and give me back some of the mental space I was missing. I needed to be able to focus on the important stuff, but my focus was everywhere.
Hiring a VA can feel like giving yourself permission to let go of some of the weight you’re carrying. For my client, the choice was clear. She needed someone she trusted to handle the repetitive tasks, the scheduling, the follow-ups—things she used to manage herself but just couldn’t anymore without sacrificing focus and energy on what really mattered.
She didn't have the time or capacity for a hiring and vetting process. Let alone time to do it again if something happened to that VA. She just needed a professional, trustworthy VA who could start ASAP.
And it’s not just about having someone “do tasks” for her. It’s about freeing up that part of her mind that’s always calculating the next thing, giving her room to think creatively and clearly.
That’s something I’ve learned firsthand. Since bringing on my VA, I feel more in control of my day-to-day—not because I’m handling every single detail, but because I don’t have to. I can show up for my work and my family without my mind still thinking about the background tasks that used to weigh me down.
For me, and for my client, reaching that point wasn’t about dropping our standards of organization; it was about understanding that sometimes, being organized isn’t enough. It’s about letting someone else help carry the details so you can actually focus, breathe, and feel present in what you’re doing.
So if you’re feeling that mental clutter creeping in, even though you’re usually the one who has it together, maybe it’s time to consider a VA. It’s not about needing help; it’s about choosing to protect your time, your energy, and that clear headspace we all need to do our best work and be our best selves.
How do you start outsourcing when you’re not really making a lot of money. It seems like you’ll be spending money, but not necessarily making money.
That’s really a misconception of outsourcing. When you start outsourcing the menial tasks, you should be replacing those tasks in your time vacuum with tasks that make you money. Coaching calls, corporate consulting, creating products so that you’re not spending every hour of the day in your office. And so when you start outsourcing, if you are not producing money from the things that you’re replacing it with, either you’re filling your time with the wrong items or you’re not outsourcing the right items.
Hiring somebody is not the hard part. Paying them isn’t the hard part. Knowing what you need is the hard part. And a lot of times, people are not specific enough. When you are hiring someone, you need to be very, very specific.
Here’s an example. You decide that you need somebody to help you with WordPress and you have figured out that approving comments takes you some time. You want comments approved every week but you don’t want that task to take more than two hours. You need to tell them that beforehand.
You don’t want to wait and at the end of the week and see they worked all the hours allotted but didn’t get the main things done. You have to say “I don’t want you to do more than two hours worth of work on this project every week”. That’s how you can save money. It’s in being specific with the hours you want worked and with what you want accomplished.
You don’t want to just tell them, “Go, handle my WordPress blog.” There are any number of things that someone can do to a WordPress blog. You have to specific in the tasks that you asked for.
Are there resources where you can find just people who do WordPress-type stuff or how do you go about finding these people you’re going to hire?
That’s the value of using a group like Alpine Virtual. You have an account manager who will help you optimize your business. They’ll not only listen to your needs and find the perfect virtual assistant for you, but when something comes up you just reach out. Need more people for the holidays? Just ask them. It’s your job to tell them what you need, it’s their job to get you the right person.
And then the next concern I had was, “How do you manage them, how do you make them do what they’re supposed to do on time and all of that.”
A lot of times people will get into a situation where they’re working virtually with others. And they up working on task lists without really talking to the person. You need to have open communication and talk through deadlines and possible conflicts.
And you need to know the timelines and expectations on your side of the business as well.
If you need something back in three days because you’re producing something for a client, you need your VA to know that you need it back from them shorter than that. Always pad your deadlines if you’re working with client work.
What are the kinds of things you could be doing when you finally outsource some of these tasks that are holding you back?
For some people knowing what the income producing tasks are is very simple. For new entrepreneurs who have been doing everything on their own, it might not seem as straight forward.
For instance sometimes social media IS the income producing task, and other times it isn’t.
Well, you definitely want to have at least one passive income product. People want to work with you on some level, if they can’t afford to pay your hourly rates it’s good to have something smaller to keep them in your sphere of influence and allow you to monetize the relationship.
It’s good to have a copy of a report, or a book, or whatever you’ve gotten finished, and it may be as simple as a recording. A lot of one hour Zoom recordings you have done, have a lot of content in them.
You want to create at least one of those passive income products. That’s a great use of time because you spend time making it once, and then can monetize it forever.
There are people who still will say they want to outsource, but they won’t. They won’t take the next step. What is the trigger when it finally hits them that they should outsource? What occurs in their mind?
I think they get tired of doing those tasks they hate. And normally that’s one of the hesitations people have before they start outsourcing, they just simply don’t know what to outsource.
They think, “Oh, I’ll hire a VA.” Well, that’s all well and good, but what’s that VA going to do? You know, do you want a virtual assistant that you forward your mail to? Do you want them to open your mail and scan it and send it back to you? I mean, there’s any number of things that you can have a VA do, and normally it’s going to be the things that you sit in your office and think, “Oh, my gosh, this is taking me forever.”
Whatever task it is.
And so, you look at the parts of your business that you hate, because there’s no one that can ever tell me that they love every part of their business. Whether it’s making sales calls, or making appointments.
And so, when you’re getting into that mindset it’s usually really good to keep a notepad on your desk specifically for those tasks. And over the course of a week or two weeks, write down those specific tasks that you know that you want to outsource.
Because when it comes to sitting down and getting ready to talk to your person at Alpine, it can very intimidating, especially if it’s the first time. And so, if you have your little list made up of the tasks that you need done, that are taking up hours and hours and hours of your time, and you know someone else could do it more efficiently, or cheaper, then that’s a good start.
You can never be the CEO of the company and be the bookkeeper.
You have to pull yourself back, and pull yourself back a little bit farther and a little bit farther. There’s always things that you can do that are more important.
And even after you say that, you’re thinking on a very, very big level of your forward thinking and it may be a five or a ten year goal. When you very first start out you don’t want to get overwhelmed by the thought of, “Oh, I want to step out of everything.” It’s definitely on the same level of working in goals. You want to create baby steps. You want to step out of this task, and then once that task is done, then I want to step out of this task.
You want to create that list and stair step your way out of the tasks. Have you goal, have your big picture idea, but then create your baby steps to get there.
If you are ready to take that step and outsource so you can grow, we’d love to chat with you. Learn a little bit more about us and what we do, then set an appointment to chat.
