Early Exit #34: Hiring A Virtual Assistant (Part 1)
How I found my 'Aha' moment and sourced a virtual assistant.
You’re reading Early Exit Club — a newsletter about leaving the 9-5 workforce to build a $20k/month solo business by Nick Lafferty.
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I recently posted on LinkedIn asking if people have used a virtual assistant(VA) before, and if so what was their experience?
This question was prompted after I had two separate networking calls where people mentioned using a VA to help manage repeatable parts of their business.
I’ve thought about hiring a VA in the past but I struggled to figure out exactly how they would help me. I thought all VA’s did was manage your email inbox and schedule appointments for you.
Until I had my aha moment, one Monday morning.
This is part one in a series on finding, hiring, and managing a virtual assistant.
My Aha Moment
My Monday mornings are exactly the same:
Look through every ad account I manage to find anomalies to further investigate
Build and update reports on my client’s ad performance
Build an action plan for my week on where I should focus, based on #1 and #2.
What if every Monday I woke up to an email from my VA with those first two items already done?
I could get right into where I add the most value to my clients: building and executing a plan to improve their ad performance.
This not only saves me time, but will lead to a better client experience.
But there’s no way that happens overnight. Finding and training a new person takes time, and I needed to be patient. More importantly: I want to find someone who is driven to learn more about digital marketing.
I’m betting that a highly motivated person will have the soft skills to help make this partnership a success for both of us.
But how do you even find a VA?
How to find & vet a virtual assistant
I tried finding a VA three ways:
Asking publicly on LinkedIn
Asking privately for referrals
Sourcing one myself from a marketplace
As expected, asking on LinkedIn brought with it a flood of messages and connection requests from VAs offering their services. I had a few conversations but didn’t pursue anything due to timing.
Asking for referrals introduced me to WingAssistant, a $600/month subscription VA service with questionable reddit reviews from the actual VA’s who work there.
I thought I could do better.
Finally, I found OnlineJobs.ph which is a marketplace for Filipinos to list their services.
I liked this option the best because I could take my time and look for VAs who had what I was looking for: digital marketing experience.
Here’s an example from a profile I found (although this is not who I ended up hiring).
This website is free for anyone to use, but you have to pay $69 for a 1-month subscription before you’re allowed to contact anyone.
I spent a few hours one night going through the website and building a short list of VAs to reach out to. I then pulled out the credit card, paid my $69, and fired off some messages.
Setting them up for success
Before I sent my first message, I spent some time building a Notion hub that detailed the initial tasks I needed help with.
It starts by defining two short-term goals I want to focus on. For me, these goals center around exposing my VA to a core part of my demand generation consulting business. I’ve allocated some billable hours to have them go through free LinkedIn Ads courses so we can start to speak the same language before I start throwing acronyms like CTR at them.
The document also includes more information about me and my business, with links to my website, social media, and newsletter.
This is a lot of work, but I think it’ll be worth it. The more time I put into this in the beginning the more successful this person will be at helping me.
I’m treating this like I would any business partnership: I want to set us both up for success.
And by communicating my expectations up front, I’m treating them like I’d want to be treated.
Want a copy of my Notion template? Just hit reply and let me know, I’ll send it to you for free.
Now the work starts
This is an experiment! I’m betting that a little time investment in the beginning will payoff in time savings down the road.
I’ve spent probably 10 hours on all the work you’ve seen so far and some things I haven’t talked about like figuring out how to pay them (Payoneer is very popular).
By the time you receive this email my VA will have officially started working for me. We were communicating via email before moving over to WhatsApp on their request.
If done right, this will make my consulting business better because it frees myself up from tedious tasks so I can focus more on big picture, higher impact work.
Have you hired a VA before? Send me your tips!
I promise to keep you all updated on how this goes.
See you next week,
Nick
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