How to work with a virtual assistant
Kathy Soulsby has run her Virtual Assistant business, Personally Virtual, since 2014. The company consists of a team of over thirty VAs supporting businesses. As the business has grown, Kathy has focused her attention to finding and recruiting VAs for the company and matching them with the right clients. In her new book, Kathy explores why people should seek to outsource everything but their own brilliance and how VAs can support them doing that.
How to work with a virtual assistant divulges into finding the right virtual assistant to suit your needs, discussing questions like ‘what should you be looking for in terms of skill’ or ‘what safeguards should you be working with to protect your business’. All can be found in this book, which is a must read for any entrepreneur and business leader looking to hire a Virtual Assistant.
Here is an excerpt from How to work with a virtual assistant: Outsource everything but your brilliance by Kathy Soulsby.
Maybe you’re barely keeping your head above water getting the work done for your business. Bits are creeping into evenings and weekends, and your family, friends, and energy levels are starting to complain. You absolutely know that your business could run less chaotically if you only had an extra pair of hands.
Maybe you have a looming sense of dread, convinced there are lurking areas of the business that will one day—not today, not tomorrow, but one day—cause you terrible stress because you simply don’t have the time now to look at them properly. You’re sticking a plaster on an open wound and hoping it won’t bleed out before you have the time to do a proper job with some stitches. But that spare time to sit down and look at the issue properly just hasn’t materialised.
Maybe you work in a bigger business, but you don’t see daylight outside of meetings. You have no time to do any actual work because your time is booked back-to-back, and you haven’t found a way to unravel that.
Or maybe your business is poised to grow. It’s an exciting time, but with growth comes extra work that you aren’t sure you have the bandwidth for.
You need help, you need time, and you need a solution.
So, you’re wondering: Could a Virtual Assistant be the right solution for you and your business?
In a nutshell, a Virtual Assistant, or VA, is a freelance resource that supports multiple companies. Their skills vary, but most are extremely organised and flexible and will help you with such tasks as inbox management, diary management, client booking, researching, invoicing and general administration. They typically bill by time, so you only pay for hours used. They only work for you for a certain amount of time in any given week or month.
A good VA can work alongside you and take your business from frantic to thriving. No small claim, I know, but I’ve seen it happen over and over again. They can give you time back to do the vital things in your business that you and only you can do. They’ll skim off your task list everything that you don’t need to be involved with and probably even help you create and manage that task list so that everyone knows what they are doing and when. As well as doing tasks, the right VA can work alongside you and learn your business, helping you to meet your goals and suggesting ways to make things run more smoothly.
A VA can free up your time and energy, allowing you to focus on the work in the business that you are critical for. You can get off the hamster wheel of constant doing and have more space and time to think.
And you might well find that you can balance work and life better once you have another pair of hands helping. Expense receipts won’t be a Saturday morning chore when you can send them on for your VA to do.
Buy Now
