VA Series 1/5: What can VAs Do in your Business in 2023

This might offend some people,

But if you are running a business in 2023 and not using virtual assistants,

You are not good at business.

You might think I’m crazy but listen to the rest of this video before making your final decision.

And make sure to stay until the end where I will explain,

Exactly where I think you should start if you are thinking about hiring your first VA.

The use of VAs or virtual assistants has been on the rise ever since the release of a book by Tim Ferris called The 4-hour work week.

In that book,

He explains how you can start and scale a virtual business by outsourcing the labor to lower-cost parts of the world and traveling, exploring, and enjoying life in the process.

Pretty easy, hire some VAs, tell them to make you money, and kick back on the beach.

It would be nice if it were that easy,

And while it’s not THAT easy,

The concept and evolution of remote work since that book was written have changed the way people can run a business.

In our company,

We have 8 VAs who do all types of work and run the business on the back end.

Of course,

It would be possible to do this with American workers but it would be way more expensive and to be honest, way more annoying.

So, In this blog,

We’re covering exactly what VAs can do in your business,

What I think they can start doing if you are a complete beginner,

And also break down how I started with VAs and scaled to grow my business

Specifically in this blog,

We are talking about virtual assistants in the Philippines making anywhere from $4-9 per hour.

Let’s jump into the potential!

Here are some of the tasks VAs either currently help us with or have helped us with in the past:

• Finding and analyzing properties for us but also for the newsletter

We send also if you aren’t subscribed yet - we send out deals our team finds for free every day.

• Property management

VAs can 100% handle guest messaging and vendor messaging and help take back the expense of 20-30% of revenue most property mgt. companies charge.

• Content creation and content management

What does this mean?

It means they can help create content across all your socials, they can edit podcasts and YouTube videos, and even ghostwrite all of your content.

• Ghostwriting

They can write your tweets, linked posts, and blogs for your website.

This includes research as well.

Pair a trained VA with Chatgpt and I can assure you, they are going to come up with something better than you most likely

Now for some of the fun but more traditional roles:

• Email management

I spent 0 minutes a week in my email. According to Statista in 2022,

The average person spends 172 minutes daily on email. Are you kidding me

• Calendar management

This is another great one, anytime you get a meeting request on any platform,

You can have your VA help schedule that appointment if you want or they can most likely even handle the request before you need to have a meeting.

• Researching and booking your travel

This takes so much time but can 100% be outsourced

Or at least the majority of the planning and research. You can jump back in at the end to pay on your credit card.

I want to show you a few examples of how it works in our business:

• Airbnb Property Mgt

VAs manage my Airbnbs.

Mainly for savings but also just because it makes us more efficient and I think we can do a better job than most big box property management companies.

For my properties, VA’s handle:

• All guest communication and inquires.

• Price management/calendar management.

• Helping with claims or guest damages.

• Working with vendors on repairs.

Yes, there will be times when I am brought in to help with things but with proper training, you can templatize and automate a lot of this.

• Email/calendar

Guys, I mentioned the stat above,

But most people spend an absurd amount of time in their email.

I heard a quote once that I think you might like if you use your inbox as a to-do list,

You are letting the entire world of strangers plan and decide what you should be doing for your life… No Bueno

Here is how we do it:

I don’t check email at all. Not 1 minute per day.

My assistant has access to my email and triages inbound emails into 4 folders for me and 1 for her:

• Jon action

• Pending

• Reference later

• Jon read later

• Her working folder

For any item that ends up in a working folder,

The task gets added to the notion so it can be worked there where we control the workflow and can get other people involved.

If it’s an item we have dealt with before,

She can just respond on my behalf.

Most emails are repetitive so once you have a template or SOP on how to handle it,

It goes on autopilot.

If this sounds crazy to you, start this way

Record loom screen share videos of you handling and sorting your own email so that you can define the process to give to someone else.

Then when they start doing it,

Instead of them sending emails on your behalf,

Have them write all their replies as drafts and then meet with that person 1x per week to review the drafts and coach them on any changes you would have made

It might sound a little annoying,

But what’s worse, spending 4 hours per day dealing with email or 30 min a week training someone else?

• Video Editing/Podcast Editing

The video you are watching on my Youtube Channel is being edited by one of our incredible team members far far away from the US

For many of you,

Content creation may fall into the bucket of things you know you should be doing but you aren’t currently

Whether you love it or hate it, content creation is the future.

And if you do not have an online presence showing your skills, past work, and reputation

It will become harder and harder to do business.

Maybe I’m crazy but I pretty much will not work with a vendor or company who doesn't have some type of online presence.

There is just too much unknown and there are so many options of people who do make content that Id rather just go with them

Starting a podcast or a YouTube channel are 2 of my favorite ways to create content right now because they are so highly leveraged.

Two Really important tips before we bounce

• If you are hiring a VA for something you have never done or don’t know how to do - buy them training.

This can be books, courses, coaches, consultants - whatever.

Have them document or outline all the learning from that so now your company owns the learning asset but now this person you hired can absorb and start doing a process that you didn’t know how to do yourself.

One of the biggest mistakes I see people making is hiring VAs who don’t have that much experience,

Not training them, and then being disappointed when the job isn’t done how they expect.

Like bro - what do you expect, you set this person up to fail.

• You will always pay more for people who have more experience and you should just accept that.

If someone has more experience,

You might need to pay them $8 per hour instead of $5 but this could save you time on training, hand-holding, and just frustration with that person if they are doing something you do not have to do.

In our company,

It’s clearly understood, if we hire someone who is inexperienced but is a lower cost,

We accept that we are going to have to spend more time on this person and develop them.

When they become a skilled person,

We will now have that person in our company at a lower cost for hopefully a long time but it will take time to get them there.

Where I think you should start if you want to hire your first VA

I hate to give this preface but it really does depend on what type of industry you are in

Okay so depending on where you are at in life here are my recommendations, and I’m going to break it down into 3 categories.

Of course, there are more but most people who follow me are interested in these 3.

• Airbnb

If you have a property already,

I would focus on hiring a VA to help with the day-to-day management and messaging for the property.

I think this is one of the most time-consuming things for an owner or the most expensive things if a property manager is involved.

• Content

This sort of goes along with what I think the best platforms to post on right now are

I would hire a ghostwriter for Twitter.

Because you can then repurpose that content onto LinkedIn and Facebook so easily at almost no additional cost.

If you want to push it a little further, you can also hire a video or audio editor to help you focus on just filming more content.

• Life Management

This should be first for most people but since we are a business channel I had to put it last.

Life management includes anything from calendar management, to email management, to booing travel or handling your DM’s.

It’s very straight forward and most general VAs have training in these topics, no matter what you hire them for.

Start here and let me know what questions you have.

Check out the video on my YouTube channel! 👇

That’s it guys!