How to Hire a Virtual Assistant: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Outsourcing & Hiring Virtual Staff

Hiring a Virtual Assistant is one of the first, yet most important hires that you can make as an entrepreneur. Until you have someone on your team that you can delegate specific tasks to, you will continue to waste valuable time and energy on activities that don’t actually contribute to the growth of your business.

One of the key differences between a “solopreneur” (someone who is the only person in their business) and a business owner is a team. A business owner doesn’t do everything themselves. They build systems and hire people to do things for them. These are necessary steps to building a scalable business that continues to grow, even when they’re not working.

Hiring a team member is a critical step in making the shift from a solopreneur to a business owner – or as Michael E. Gerber, author of the best-selling business book The E-Myth would say: from working in your business to working on your business. Having other people on your team helps to free up your time so you can focus on activities that have the greatest impact on your business and income.

In this guide, I’m going to walk you through the steps involved in hiring a Virtual Assistant and share some specific tips and tools to help you manage virtual staff effectively.

Once you hire your first Virtual Assistant, you can follow these same steps to identify even more tasks to delegate, create new roles in your business, and hire more team members until you eventually occupy only one role in your business: the role of CEO.

But for now, let’s tackle hiring your first Virtual Assistant.

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How to Hire a Virtual Assistant: An Entrepreneur’s Guide to Outsourcing & Hiring Virtual Staff #outsourcing @TylerBasu
Benefits of hiring virtual staff
Whether you hire a single Virtual Assistant or you build an entire team of virtual staff, outsourcing to remote team members can have a significant impact on your productivity and the growth of your business.

Here are some of the main benefits of hiring a Virtual Assistant:

You don’t need a physical office
Depending on where you live, renting a physical office space can be quite expensive. Hiring a Virtual Assistant enables you to start building your team while keeping your expenses low. With the exception of a few software tools for communicating with and managing your virtual staff, the primary cost of hiring virtual staff is the amount you pay for their time.

Virtual Assistants are inexpensive
Virtual Assistants are an affordable alternative to hiring regular employees. Most Virtual Assistants operate as independent contractors and depending on where they live, their hourly rate may be significantly lower than what a local employee would cost you. A Virtual Assistant in the Philippines, for example, will typically cost less than half of what a Virtual Assistant in North America costs for the same tasks and responsibilities.

You’re not limited by local talent (hire the best of the best)
Not every entrepreneur has access to a local talent pool of qualified candidates for a specific role. A Virtual Assistant can technically work from anywhere in the world as long as they have an internet connection. Not having to hire someone locally increases your number of potential candidates for specific roles significantly.

Virtual Assistants are not the only people that use remote work tools and can work from anywhere. Our friends at ConvertKit (an email marketing software company), for example, currently have 34 highly skilled team members spread across 26 different cities.

ConvertKit Remote Team

Delegation helps prevent burnout
Delegating specific tasks and responsibilities to other people is a huge step towards preventing burnout. Unfortunately, there are a lot of entrepreneurs that think they need to do everything themselves, and that’s exactly what they end up doing. This leads to very long work days, lack of focus, feeling overwhelmed, and having little time for other areas of their life such as exercise, hobbies, and family.

Spend more time in your areas of strength
You can’t be a master of everything, nor should you try to be. For every task and process that is required to run your business (including the ones you don’t like or are terrible at doing!), there are other people who specialize in those tasks and actually enjoy them. Hiring people to delegate tasks to frees up your time to focus on activities that you enjoy and you’re good at.

Focus on high-value and income generating activities
Lastly, when you hire a Virtual Assistant, you free up more time to focus on activities that add significantly more value to your business than the ones you delegated to your Virtual Assistant. In other words, you free up more time to focus on activities that have a direct impact on your income.

“Your most precious resource as a human being (not just a business owner) is TIME. The less you commit to, the greater your focus. The greater your focus, the more impact you can have with the time you’re given. For this reason alone, everyone should hire at least one Virtual Assistant.”

– Matthew Turner

Types of Virtual Assistants
One of the main questions you’re probably asking yourself as you consider hiring a Virtual Assistant is what can they do for you?

The answer is almost anything.

As long as they have the right training, skills, and tools, a Virtual Assistant can technically do anything that does not require their physical presence, which, if you think about, is actually a lot.

That being said, there are different types of Virtual Assistants, and it’s important to know which type of Virtual Assistant is best suited for the tasks you plan to outsource.

The General Virtual Assistant:

The most common type of Virtual Assistant is known as a General Virtual Assistant (aka a General VA). A General VA is someone who can take on the daily tasks and processes that are important for running your business but not necessarily focused on growing it.

The tasks that you would delegate to a General VA tend to be technical and repetitive in nature, such as managing your emails or travel schedule, scheduling your appointments, data entry, research, scheduling posts on social media, and so on.

The Specialized Virtual Assistant:

A Specialized Virtual Assistant is someone that has a very specific skill set and is better suited for owning and/or overseeing a very specific process in your business. They tend to be more expensive than General VAs because they already have a specialized skill set and will require minimal additional training from you.

Tasks such as customer service, bookkeeping, video editing, and project management, for example, are better suited for a Specialized VA.

Outsourcing tasks vs. outcomes:

With a General VA, it’s best to outsource specific tasks and processes, and you should provide them with training on how to do those tasks and processes properly.

With a Specialized VA, it’s best to outsource specific outcomes. A Specialized VA should be more skilled than you are (that’s why you hire them!) at the specific tasks and processes that are a part of their role. Since you’re counting on their knowledge and expertise, it’s best to tell them what do to, not how to do it.

Increasing Twitter followers by 10% per month, for example, is an outcome. Importing a blog post from Google Drive to WordPress, for example, is a task. See the difference?

“Outsourcing repetitive tasks has a significant impact on your schedule. You can explain something once, and save huge chunks of time by delegating those tasks to others! When you delegate a repetitive task, provide instructions in writing or record a screencast to demonstrate how to complete the task successfully. These instructions will come handy when you change assistants or scale your team.”
– Boris Goncharov
When working with virtual staff, make sure you know the difference between outsourcing tasks and outsourcing outcomes. #outsourcing @TylerBasu
How to become the CEO of your own business
Unless you immediately hired a team as soon as you launched your business, you’re probably assuming the responsibility for many different roles. In other words, you’re wearing many different hats, and consequently, your time is spread across many different tasks and responsibilities.

To become the CEO of your business, and to spend your time only on activities that a CEO should spend their time on, you need to delegate specific tasks and responsibilities to others.

It comes down to simple math.

If your goal is to generate over $100,000 in annual revenue, for example, you can’t expect to accomplish this goal by spending your time on tasks that are worth $20 per hour. Unless you can work 5,000 hours in a 12 month period (unlikely), the math just doesn’t add up. You need to spend your time on activities that have a higher hourly rate.

One of the reasons why entrepreneurs resist hiring help is because they view hiring other people as an expense and not as an investment. If you’ve ever felt this way about hiring, the following exercise should be helpful for you.

Calculate your Target Hourly Rate:

Your Target Hourly Rate is the rate that your time, as the CEO of your business, needs to be worth in order for you to achieve your income goals.

To calculate your Target Hourly Rate, take your monthly (or annual) income goal and divide it by the number of hours you intend to work during that period of time.

For example: $250,000 (annual income goal) divided by 2,000 (# of work hours) equals $125 per hour

“Personally, I hired way before I thought I was ready for an assistant, and encourage others to do the same. Most people wait until they are at a specific revenue, or have been in business a set time period. There is no “magic” time that hiring support makes sense, other than: If it will allow you to focus on what you do best, you aren’t going into debt to do it, and the time you’ll save frees you up to focus on revenue-generating activities, then it’s time.”

– Trivinia Barber

Every task in your business has an approximate dollar value

As an entrepreneur, it’s your job to identify activities that contribute the most value to your business, and spend the majority of your time on those activities. Any tasks or activities that fall below your Target Hourly Rate should be delegated to someone else.

If you’re not achieving your income goals, and I can almost guarantee that it’s because you’re not spending enough time on high-value activities.

Low-value tasks are tasks that are necessary to running your business but do not directly contribute to increasing revenue. Examples of low-value tasks are bookkeeping, customer support, project management, graphic design, editing, etc.

High-value tasks are tasks that directly contribute to increasing revenue. Examples of high-value tasks are marketing and lead generation, selling, launching new products or services, and creating strategic partnerships and joint ventures.

The quickest way to increase your income as an entrepreneur is to delegate more low-value tasks to others and fill your calendar with as many high-value tasks as possible. Use the income that you generate from high-value tasks to pay for the outsourcing of the low-value tasks.