Honestly, the right time to hire a virtual assistant is before you think you need one. All too often, business owners or executives put off hiring someone until they’re completely buried, and by then, your customer experience has started to decline and it’s impacting your business. We recommend looking ahead and budgeting for a virtual assistant sooner than you think so you have time to complete the onboarding process and transition tasks to your VA.

If you’re thinking about hiring a VA but aren’t sure if you’re ready quite yet, check out our free guide, 5 Steps to Take Before Hiring a Virtual Assistant. This downloadable resource will help you be better prepared to take that important step!

A virtual assistant is different from a receptionist, so if your primary need is for someone to answer the phones, a VA isn’t a good fit. We’re also not social media managers, though many of our VAs can help with the basics of writing or scheduling your social media content.

When you schedule a free consultation, we’ll talk through your business needs and all the possibilities for how a VA can help keep your business running smoothly and ensure high-quality customer care.

For maximum benefit to your business and your customer experience, we recommend starting with a minimum engagement of 20 hours per month. While most of our clients are looking for a long-term partner to help their business run efficiently, we also offer short-term engagements to help with special projects like a course or product launch or simply a busy season in your business.

The full onboarding process takes an average of 90 days, and we have an email series that walks you through each phase of the onboarding process to set your engagement up for success. They’ll certainly be able to help with tasks during that first 90 days, but it’s important to build a solid foundation for your VA so they know your business and systems and can continue to support you long-term. It also requires a time commitment from you as the business owner to hold weekly meetings with your VA and train them on necessary systems and tasks.

A virtual assistant provides consistent, professional support to your business at a much lower cost (and greater flexibility) than hiring a full-time employee. You get high-quality support at a level that fits the current needs of your business, plus the flexibility to scale up as your business grows. In our placement process, we talk about the specific skills you need in a VA and then carefully match you with someone from our team so you can target key areas of support.

Plus, we’ve done the time-intensive work of reviewing applications, interviewing, and checking references for our VAs so you don’t have to. Once we recommend a VA for you, you’ll have a final interview with them before we finalize the placement.

It’s ultimately up to you as the business owner, but we have some recommendations based on our years of experience in the virtual assistant industry. First, we recommend scheduling weekly meetings with your VA to check in on tasks, expectations, and any upcoming projects.

We also recommend keeping communication with your VA out of your inbox (there’s already enough clutter there, right?) and instead using a tool like Slack to communicate as needed. If you have a project management system in place, you can also use that to assign tasks to your VA. We cover this topic in more detail in our onboarding series for new clients, so don’t worry about having to figure it all out alone.

Our entire team uses Toggl for time tracking, and we set up a Toggl workspace for each client so you always have visibility into where your monthly hours are being used. If there are specific tasks you want your VA to track separately, just ask! They can make changes to their Toggl projects to ensure you have the time tracking data you need.

Our VAs are generally available between 9 am and 5 pm in their local time zone. Your VA may be supporting more than one client, so be sure to discuss expectations for any daily tasks or weekly tasks so they can schedule those accordingly to meet deadlines. If an emergency issue arises, reach out to your VA by phone to talk it through.

We interview all of our VAs, and each client interviews the recommended VA before we finalize the placement. However, if you get through the onboarding process and realize it’s not the right fit, let us know and we can match you with a different virtual assistant. If your business needs change and you no longer need a VA, you can cancel services with a 30-day written notice.

We have virtual assistants with a variety of specialitiest that include but are not limited to administrative support, project management, customer service, sales, marketing coordinators, system and process implementation, controller services, social media management and more! We will help you identify what tasks you need support in and will take you through our placement process to help you find the best fit for your needs.