Everyone is looking for ways to reduce costs and increase their profits these days, which has led to a virtual workforce boom. That is why when you hire a virtual assistant, it is hard to know where to start.
Hiring a virtual assistant is just the 1st step – you have to set up your business systems so they can be carried out efficiently by the VA. Before you employ a virtual assistant, use these four Business Systems to Set Up to automate your operations to work on autopilot before you hire a virtual assistant.
Business Systems to Set Up BEFORE You Hire a Virtual Assistant
1. The Bible Document
The Bible serves as the SOP document or training manual and this is the no. 1 thing you must have in place. We like to refer to ours as “the Bible Document” at Level Up Outsourcing since it’s like a Holy document, right?
It’s like a book of books. But it is not just a piled-up document and you can embed it in your sort of twist.
We produce video walkthroughs for our VAs here at Level Up Outsourcing that are visually exciting while we work and serve as a guide through the process. Whether it’s content creation, managing your emails, managing your calendar, sending messages on Instagram, whatever it is, start a Zoom session with yourself, record yourself, and then put all of these Zoom recordings into one document that’s going to be your Bible document.
2. Email and message templates
Before you can hire a virtual assistant, you’ll need an email and message template system. What do I mean by that?
For a business owner, merely thinking of the administrative duties is time-consuming and tedious. That is why when you hire a virtual assistant saves the day but, we cannot expect a VA to manage your email inbox or help you with lead generation on Instagram LinkedIn, or Facebook to be the remedy without doing our homework.
Before you hire a virtual assistant to assist with these things, we need to make sure that we’ve established some templates or standard replies or common phrases for them if they’re going to be helping you with your customer service managing your email inbox, or doing social media outreach messages.
3. Project Management System
Next up is to make sure before you hire a Virtual Assistant that you have a project management system in place. This, believe it or not, is critical. I tell all of our clients that we need a project management system, and it surprises me how many of them don’t have one set up. We are not robots that must retain every detail of what we’ve learned in our heads.
With the project management system, you’ll be able to set up recurring or one-time tasks for your VA that happen every day once a week, or once a month so that your VA is getting notifications as to what they need to be doing.
There are a bunch of systems you can use but, our personal favorite is Asana and Monday.com It’s vibrant. It’s really simple and straightforward to utilize, and you can create an inferno of automation. I adore it. It’s incredible, and it blows my mind what you can accomplish with Monday.com under the hood.
4. Key performance indicators
Last but not least, before you hire a virtual assistant, make sure to have in place the last system: key performance indicators for your VA. Sit down with your virtual assistant and conduct a performance evaluation. Because you and your virtual assistant need to know if they’re on track, making progress, and hitting the goals.
That is why it’s critical to define their responsibilities and roles from the start in their job description. Give them simple goals to shoot for, then schedule a performance review with them four times a year. Examine whether they’re meeting their KPIs and whether anything is wrong. Is there anything they can do to improve?
Do they want you to show them a better method for doing a certain system? Or maybe they aren’t the ideal virtual assistant for you? If they’re not hitting their KPIs, but if they are hitting their KPIs, then maybe you should give them a bonus or some sort of incentive to keep the excitement and momentum going.
The bottom line when you hire a virtual assistant
I hope you had an eye-opener reading our blog and to see a full video explanation of this blog article, check out our YouTube video.
Don’t let your business fall behind! Planning, prioritizing, and executing with precision is the key to success. Hiring an expert could cost you more time than it saves! You should start early by building effective systems that will help your business be more consistent in production as well as accelerate overall growth. If this sparks your curiosity and would like to know more about the reasons to outsource basic admin tasks and how to hire a virtual assistant, email us now at hello@levelupoutsourcing.com and let us assist you in locating the ideal Virtual Assistant to help manage your systems and processes!
