What is a Virtual Assistant & Do I Need One?
Is your business growing, but you’re not sure if you need additional on-site staff? Is your valuable time as an owner or manager being swallowed up by administrative or other tasks that you’d love to hand off? Is your work-life balance suffering but you’re not sure what to do. A virtual assistant could be the answer!
Dog Handler Academy’s Eve Molzohn and her Virtual Assistant (VA) Team recently hosted a webinar highlighting the transformative power of virtual assistants in streamlining business operations and how to know if a VA (or several) is right for you.
Here, we address some considerations about virtual assistants, finding and hiring the right person for you, and more. Then learn how to learn even more from Eve and the Dog Handler Academy Virtual Assistant Team
How Do I Know if I Need a Virtual Assistant?
According to Molzohn, the best starting point is an honest conversation with yourself — with a solid dose of self-care.
“I was absolutely drowning — a single mom, one business and two nonprofits and wanting to launch another business and just realizing that I couldn’t do it all,” Molzohn says. “Staying up till midnight and then getting up at 5:30 AM was not good for my health. I wasn’t showing up 100 hundred percent for my people. So maybe you are feeling helpless, overwhelmed or burned out. You are staying up way too late and the bags under your eyes look like they’re going to become more permanent.
“You employ others to help you with other things you don’t have time or skills to do yourself — mow or shovel, fix plumbing or electrical, car maintenance or repair — so it only makes sense to hire skilled and reliable people to handle the same in your businesses,” she adds. “And be honest with yourself. You may enjoy marketing or writing emails or working with clients. But if that is keeping you from showing up for your employees or getting to the tasks that only you as the business owner can do, is it really benefitting your business?”
Determining What You Need A Virtual Assistant to Do
Make a list of everything that you currently do. Then break it down further.
- What do you do on a yearly basis?
- What do you do on a quarterly basis?
- What do you do on a daily or weekly basis?
- What are things that you feel only you can do to make sure your business is running well?
- What do you do on a yearly basis?
Then break out easier items for which you or your managers do not need to be responsible. Tasks such as approving people who want to book services with you. Answering simple emails. Following up on insurance or a product that you ordered. Ordering supplies. Creating and editing blog or social posts, and/or creating photos and graphics for your social accounts. Checking after-hours reservations or other minor admin tasks.
Hiring a VA can free you to run your business and your managers to truly manage your staff, work on new projects or brainstorm new revenue streams. It can also help you retain motivated staff by giving them the time and empowerment to excel at their jobs and find new ways to grow their skills and your business.
Potential Virtual Assistant Tasks
Depending on the size of your business, you may only need help with daily or weekly administrative tasks that clear your plate to handle the big stuff such as employee hiring and training, growing and promoting your business and managing crises. If that list is lengthy, you might also consider hiring multiple virtual assistants assigned to specific tasks such personal assisting, administrative duties, customer relationship management, marketing and communications, and/or supply management
While this is just a partial list, some administrative tasks you might hand off to a virtual assistant include:
- Personal assistant duties, such as managing your personal and business calendars and answering general email and voicemail
- Monitor, review, and approve boarding and daycare reservations
- Review and approve dog training, reservation requests
- Help with updating pricing and details for any new services, both on the website and within the booking reservation software for her businesses
- Make updates and additions to operations manuals
- Invoice clients for any services at your businesses
- Pull end-of-month data reports, and import clients from the booking software into your CRM so we can send them marketing emails
- Order supplies and price shop for best prices on those supplies
- Reach out to clients who’ve created a profile on your booking software but haven’t booked yet. There’s a dollar amount here that businesses miss out on!
- Monitor and verify vaccination records and make phone calls for updates
- Send out report cards
- Personal assistant duties, such as managing your personal and business calendars and answering general email and voicemail
If your VA has additional schooling, training or specialty skills, they can also:
- Scout human resources such as property lawyers, facility repairmen or contractors, etc.
- Protect the businesses and brand by monitoring and responding negative social media comments, be that reaching out for a personal discussion or seeking legal advice
- Respond to other social media messages and requests, such as “I have a reservation on Saturday and I need to change the times,” or “My flight is delayed, so we’re not going to get in on time to pick up Fluffy. Can I extend my reservation?”
- Scout human resources such as property lawyers, facility repairmen or contractors, etc.
- Help with creating and updating business websites
- Marketing and content creation. This includes writing and sending out monthly marketing emails, writing blogs, creating and scheduling social media posts and more.
- Event planning, whether that is a special event for the pets at your business or something larger such as conference planning, participation in other business and organizations’ events, and local, dog or pet-friendly events.
- Help with creating and updating business websites
How to Find a Quality Virtual Assistant
- Consider previous coworkers or others in your local network that you know have the needed skillsets such as flexibility, honesty, the ability to multitask and learn quickly, and excellent and wide-ranging communication skills.
- Think outside box and consider the skills you need most over specific work experiences. For example, two of Eve’s best VAs were found via a local Facebook mom’s group. Most moms are expert time managers and multitaskers, skilled in communication and diplomacy, and often looking for part-time, flexible, remote work that they can do while the kids are in school.
- Nonetheless, ask for a resume, references and examples of previous projects they’ve worked on, so you can see such things as whether they are prone to job-hopping, whether they are effective and enthusiastic team players, and how they were perceived in previous workplaces. You’re going to have to trust this person to get tasks done, handle sensitive and protected information and represent your business right out of the gate, so stack the odds in your favor.
- If they are new to you, meet your prospective VA in person or at least via Zoom, so you have a whole-cloth picture of how they present and express themselves, their comfort level when communicating with people they don’t know well.
- Consider a small, paid project with clear instructions and a timeframe, to “try before you buy.”
- Be careful when considering hiring friends or family members, unless you are absolutely certain they have the same skills as anyone else you’d consider a great candidate and can function as your employee in this setting.
- Be careful when hiring a past employee, even if they left on good terms. A former employee may require less training to get up to speed with the industry, your business and its operations. But personal connection or past experience may also have a negative impact on their work or work ethic.
- Consider previous coworkers or others in your local network that you know have the needed skillsets such as flexibility, honesty, the ability to multitask and learn quickly, and excellent and wide-ranging communication skills.
What to Look For in a Great Virtual Assistant
- Excellent communication skills are top priority. The ability to communicate clearly, maturely and effectively with you, other VAs, business staff members, clients and potential clients, community members is critical to your success.
- Honesty. Contrary to what you may think, a yes-person is not a good fit. Because you are not physically with that person, you need someone who can be honest about the timeframe in which they will complete tasks, any impediments they may have (sickness, sick family member, unexpected appointments, etc.), unfamiliarity with apps and/or software, and the like. You also want them to be honest if they think an idea may not be workable or beneficial, so no time is wasted fleshing out something that ultimately is not used or does not work.
- Proven flexibility. Our businesses are generally not 9-5, Monday through Friday businesses, so your VAs’ schedules won’t be either. Also because of the nature of the business, priorities can change quickly. Your VAs need to be available, able to work on multiple projects and “change horse” quickly and effectively.
- An entrepreneurial spirit. Beyond helping you with daily tasks, your ideal VA will also want to help you grow your business. They should be able to offer ideas without prompting and/or help you see problems, possibilities and other facets of your business and ideas that you may not see.
- Excellent communication skills are top priority. The ability to communicate clearly, maturely and effectively with you, other VAs, business staff members, clients and potential clients, community members is critical to your success.
Find Out More From Eve and Her Team!
To find out more about the transformative power of virtual assistants in streamlining your business operations, check out this informative Dog Handler Academy webinar. Eve and her team dive deeper into the art and science of delegation, showing you how to maximize your time, save money and focus on what truly matters. You’ll learn practical tips to identify tasks to delegate, select the right virtual assistant for you and your business, and build effective communication and workflows.
Whether you’re a solo entrepreneur or a leader scaling your business, this session will equip you with strategies to optimize productivity and achieve greater balance, all while driving growth and profitability.
Looking for sample job descriptions and job listings for Eve’s VA and personal assistant positions? View and download them here:
If you’re interested in printing a handout of the PowerPoint presentation from the webinar, you can view and download that here:
Have questions OR suggestions for a future webinar topic or guest? Please feel free to reach out to us anytime!