Does Your Small Business Really Need A Virtual Assistant?
Have you ever been told you need a VA? The first time I was told that, I thought they said I needed a v8 (the vegetable juice. Ew, David). I had no idea what a “VeeAyyy” was, but I soon got quite the education. Fast forward many years, and I co-own, Sparent, LLC with Meredith.
As a business owner, you’ve probably shared various challenges with your business network. Inevitably, someone has given you similar advice that sounds something like, “You need a VA. I don’t know what I would do without my VA—she is amazing! You can’t have mine, but you definitely need one to take your business to the next level!”. You nod politely because you have a vague idea about what a virtual assistant is, but you aren’t sure how you would use a VA in your business.
You may have questions like these and I am here to answer them:
What exactly is a virtual assistant?
Do I really need a VA?
How do I know if the timing is right for me to take this step in my business?
What sorts of things can a virtual assistant do?
What do I look for in a virtual assistant to ensure a good fit?
What Is A Virtual Assistant?
A virtual assistant, or VA for short, is a person, typically an independent contractor, who works remotely to complete tasks relevant to a business’s day-to-day operations. Virtual assistants can have generalized and specialized skill sets and can work collaboratively as well as creatively to implement a plan or strategy, but are not responsible for creating the strategy. There are even VAs that only work in specific industries.
As you can see, the term virtual assistant has become a catchall for a broad and diverse set of skills and experiences. In fact, we prefer to use the term “virtual talent” because people often associate virtual assistants with “cheap labor” (in quotes because it is a deplorable term that we do not use) and justify low VA wages by describing their efforts as “just admin work”. Yes, we’ve heard that justification time and time again, usually by 1st world entrepreneurs happy to pay exploitive wages to be more profitable. The fact is, administrative support today requires a high degree of technical savvy and skill and is often the backbone of business operations.
“Most of us spend too much time on what is urgent, and not enough time on what is important.”
Why Do I Need One?
Because I don’t want you to bang your head on the Solopreneur Ceiling! I hit it that ceiling hard in my first business. So hard it almost knocked me out of business! My pet care company grew very quickly in the 90s, way faster than my business acumen. I found myself working 80+ hour weeks , exhausted, and underpaid for the hours I was working. To make matters worse, as a one-woman-show, I was absolutely at client capacity. In other words, I had maxed out my growth and I had no ability to scale. I thought I had circumvented the glass ceiling by starting my own business only to create a different kind of ceiling. Drats!
That experience is one of the many reasons "Always be delegating" is one of our mottoes at Sparent.
Why? Because building a business that aligns with your values, income goals, and provides time-freedom requires continuous delegation. That is how I turned my pet care company from a very bad DIY job into a seven-figure asset that I was able to later sell.
And the stats back me up on this.
89% of women-owned businesses make less than $100K in annual revenue.
Interestingly enough, 90% of women-owned businesses do not have employees.
And it gets even better..
2% of women-owned businesses make over $500K on annual revenue.
2% of women-owned businesses have ten or more employees.
Women owned businesses make up 39% of U.S. businesses, yet only employ 8% of the workforce.
Women own 39% of US businesses and generate only 4% of the revenue.
Do you see a pattern here?
We call it the "Solopreneur Ceiling"-- when you inhibit your business growth by not hiring and delegating.
Business owners with growing businesses need to systematically fire themselves from day-to-day operations so they can focus on the growth and development of their company.
Instead of treating your business like a DIY career, what if you treated your business like an asset?
A Solopreneur's Path To Delegating:
1. Delegate to technology. You don’t always need to delegate to people. Today, we are fortunate to have access to incredible and inexpensive technology to help our business systems run more efficiently through automation. This helps your contractors and employees to do more meaningful, productive work.
2. Delegate 1-3 of your most soul & time sucking tasks to a Virtual Assistant 5 hours a week. Delegation can be overwhelming, but by prioritizing your tasking and delegating just 1-3 things at a time, you will experience the benefits without sabotaging your delegation efforts. Delegating daily operations and fully stepping into your role as CEO is a process that can take months and even years.
3. You can’t clone yourself, but you can do this. As your business hits another growth point, increase their hours and tasking. Consider hiring them as your first employee, or bring on another virtual assistant to take on different tasking that they oversee. Hiring people with your expertise is a way of exponentially increasing your impact.
It seems counterintuitive, but business owners actually need to do less to achieve more. — Jennifer Crawford, co-founder, Sparent, LLC
This Is When You Need A VA
There are several scenarios that make a virtual assistant an ideal solution for a business’s needs.
Your business is growing along with your TO DO list. Bootstrapping business owners wearing all the hats (and shoes) in their business eventually find themselves overwhelmed and overworked as their business grows. If your revenue resource has consistently increased for six months, this is a financial indicator that it is time to bring on your first team member. If you are spending all your time running the business and little time on CEO Tasks such as business development, strategic planning, and creating new revenue streams, then this is an indicator that your time needs to be invested better.
A virtual assistant can start relieving you of tasks in your daily operations, giving you back valuable time to for business development or gasp, time for yourself.
7 Signs you need a virtual assistant:
Your business is at its capacity
You are starting to drop balls
Your customer experience is suffering
You have incredible ideas for growth but you don’t have time to implement them
You are perpetually overwhelmed, stressed, and overworked
Your enthusiasm for your business is gone
Your income is not aligned with your working hours
Your current VA is maxed out or lacking a specialized skill. As you virtual assistant has earned your trust and learned your business, you will find yourself delegating more and more to them. Consider adding another virtual team member to take on additional tasking. Eventually, you will need to delegate something that is outside of your virtual assistant’s skill set. In that case, you may need to bring on a VA with specialized expertise.
You have an existing team that is overwhelmed due to understaffing. If your team of employees have adopted additional responsibilities and are feeling overwhelmed, a virtual assistant can shoulder administrative burdens and offer much needed relief to a stressed team.
You have a developing position that isn’t full-time yet. Growing businesses have evolving staffing needs. Often a customer success, sales, or marketing role starts off as part-time. A virtual assistant with relevant experience can fulfill those needs and as that role expands, your virtual assistant becomes an ideal candidate to be hired on as an employee. Our VA-To-Hire service was born from this exact business need.
This Is When You DON’T Need A VA
When your business is struggling. During this stage of your business, your revenue resource is low so you leverage your time resource to troubleshoot the issues causing your business to struggle. Virtual assistants should not be enlisted to fix poor sales—those problems are complex and need your attention and potentially advice from a business coach, mentor, or business strategist.
When you are a steamy hot mess. Most business owners, me included, have hot mess moments. But if you have delayed delegating too long and you find your business in a constant state of chaos, you will need to slow down and do some Delegation Diligence before bringing on a virtual assistant.
Delegation Diligence is the pre-work necessary to delegate and lead a virtual assistant or any other team member. This work sets the stage for a successful outcome. Without it, your delegated hours will be less productive and more frustrating for both you and your new team member.
Delegation Due Diligence:
Categorize and prioritize everything in granular detail that needs to get done to run your business.
Track your time spent on administrative and repetitive tasks for one week.
Track your time spent on CEO Tasks for one week.
Determine your three most time-consuming or soul sucking tasks.
Get those three tasks delegation-ready by writing or screen recording SOPs for each task.
When you don’t have good systems or SOPs in place. A system is simply a repeatable process. A great system is efficient and all, or partially automated. SOPs, or standard operating procedures are the step-by-step documentation of every system and procedure in your business.
When outsourcing to a licensed or trained professional is a better choice. We have a saying at Sparent “Let experts be experts”. Although we have an incredible talent pool of virtual assistants at our disposal, there are times we need to outsource to licensed and trained professionals. For example, we recently outsourced our sales calls to The Ventas Group because we needed a professionally trained sales team focused on reaching our ideal client in ways we were not. We also outsourced our web design to Design Powers and Michelle Mercurio was the brand voice expert we hired to help us express our brand identity and core values in a more impactful way. And when we needed to update our client services agreement to include our VA-To-Hire terms, we hired The Wright Firm.
When you actually need an employee. As your business matures, you will most likely need to hire an employee. Keep in mind that the IRS has very strict rules on classifying contractors and employees and it is important to know those rules to avoid steep penalties and potential back taxes. We recommend consulting a tax professional and/or an employment attorney for advice on classification if you are unsure.
Here are a few indicators that you may need an employee, not a VA:
You need someone to work specific hours on a schedule that you dictate.
You need someone that only works for you and sees a long-term future with a specific position in your company.
You do not want to work with a VA agency like Sparent, and you require training, need someone to work with specific tools, and you need to specify how the work is completed.
What Can A Virtual Assistant Do?
Virtually anything! That pun was intended. Sorry, not sorry.
I recently delegated the following to one of our talented Sparent VAs:
Transcribe one of our Business Learning Lab YouTube Videos
Paste the transcription into a Google Doc to be repurposed into a blog post.
Create social media graphics in Canva from quotes pulled from the transcription.
And that is just one example of delegating a task to a VA that not only saved me hours of time, but was also done faster and better than I could do it myself.
Virtual assistants can do almost anything as long as it can be done remotely and doesn’t require a professional license or specialized degree. Although the vast majority of VA work is done online, virtual assistants can make and return calls, take care of mailings, and other tasks that aren’t strictly online, but can be done remotely. Virtual assistants handle tasks such as content creation, social media management, research, inbox management, customer service, tech hosting virtual events, onboarding, reference checks, file organization, bookkeeping, writing SOPs, client communication, podcast management, and the list goes on. Check out our list of 101 Things A Virtual Assistant Can Do For Your Business.
What Can A Virtual Assistant NOT Do?
They can not read your mind. For example, telling your virtual assistant what you DON’T want is not the same as explaining what you DO want.
They can not improve their work without kind, constructive feedback.
They can not save a failing business.
They can not work for you and only you forever and ever.
What Should I Look For In A Virtual Assistant?
Finding the right virtual assistant is a lot harder than you might think. This is because as we mentioned earlier, “virtual assistant” is an umbrella term that includes individuals with a vast variety of skills, backgrounds, specialized expertise, and passions. There is no “unicorn va” with all the skills so you need to take time to develop a candidate profile that includes more than a long list of required skills.
Here are some of the criteria we consider when hand-selecting a Sparent VA for a client:
Desired hard skills relevant to tasking
Soft skills that would be an asset to the team
Work cadence
Tech stack
Communication style
Core Values
Culture Fit
Aligned interests, passions, and industry experience
Personality traits
Non-negotiables
Future Needs
Because hard skills can be trained, we look at a cluster of criteria to determine a holistic fit for each of our clients. We find that a candidates Soft Skills, also called Core Skills, tend to be the biggest indicator of a successful placement. These are the qualities that come naturally to a person and are almost impossible to train. These skills are incredibly valuable because they can be applied in any work environment. Soft skills include skills such as problem solving, resourcefulness, great written and verbal communication, positivity, and organizational prowess.
In addition to hard and soft skills, we want our Sparent VAs to be enthusiastic about their work. We believe that work can and should bring us joy so we do our best to place them on assignments that they feel a connection to based on mission, culture, core values, tasking needs, and work cadence. By making sure an assignment is an equally good fit for our Sparent team member, we have a much better chance of a long-term client relationship.
If you are an overworked business owner with a growing business, the right virtual assistant can propel your business to the next level of growth. If you are considering a virtual assistant to help relieve you of the burdens of your day-to-day operations, we’d love to chat with you!