Virtual Assistants can help your business, or ruin it.

Virtual Assistants can help your business, or ruin it.

When it comes to running a business, you might need to bring in a virtual assistant to help you out with various things.  The beauty of a VA is that you can write up a set of tasks that they need to do on a daily basis, and they will do them (usually).  I like to use popular job platforms such as Seocheckout to find my VA's because I can sift through all of their reviews from previous clients and see what they have to say.  Obviously not everyone will be happy with the work that was done, but that could be due to miscommunication or the VA simply not doing the work that was suppose to be done.  I always take the bad reviews with a grain of salt, because not every person hiring a VA knows what they're doing and has unreal expectations.

Now we all know that not everyone who works online is created equal, and the same goes for virtual assistants.  You will likely go through a few bad VA's before you find the holy grail VA who does everything you need and then some   Because of this, you will need to go into a weekly agreement for work with new VA's and only pay based on performance.  After they prove themselves you can put them on a sort of payroll and they will be very grateful, which usually increases their efforts to please you.

When it comes to the bad VA's who can ruin your website.... I never hire any virtual assistants to handle my emails or chat system because I don't know how they're going to react to a disgruntled client.  I don't know if they're just going to start swearing at the client if they don't agree with them or if they're just going to avoid talking to them all together.  Having a VA handle client interactions is probably one of the worst things you can do because you don't have full control over what they're doing.  And if your clients are the ones paying you, then YOU should be the one talking to them.  At the very least you should have a dedicated account manager working with all the clients in order to keep them happy.

Virtual assistants usually list their skills and strengths on any profile they make, so be sure to sift through them in order to find someone that is a perfect match.  When I'm looking for a VA to do something like data entry, I will usually hire one that knows how to work with WordPress, is a good content writer, knows HTML or knows PHP.  I do this because I can go to them later on if I need additional work done on different parts of my website.  Hiring a VA for my online marketing company with the skills of data entry, knitting and cross county skipping won't do me much benefit if I need something else done on my website(s).  I will then have to hire a second VA to get the work done and that will cost me even more money.   So by stacking their skills, even if I don't need them right away, I'll save money in the long run

VA's can make or break a business because of how they do the jobs you task them with.  You may need a VA to move a website, write up a bunch of content or make some shirt designs for you.  If they are slacking with their work, you won't get the results you expected and now you're going to be arguing with a VA who expects to be paid in full.  I recently hired a VA for 1 week of work and was going to pay them $150.  All I needed them to do was deleted some imported descriptions from a 3rd party website, and they did about 35 of the 400 descriptions.  I mean, it's not that hard to open a page, copy the content and then press backspace lol.  After the first week the VA demanded that I pay the $150 for the work that was done.  I then recorded my screen and deleted 35 descriptions in about an hour and then asked the VA why I should pay them $150 for an hour of work.  They then claimed that all the descriptions had been deleted and that I was just trying to avoid payment, even though I could see all the descriptions lol.

You'll run into some shady VA's who don't really plan on doing the work, but expect payment.  I've noticed that this is a pretty common thing when it comes to 3rd world countries, and it's sad because it makes someone like myself more weary to hire from certain countries and that means legitimate service providers are just losing money because of the actions taken by someone in their country.  One failed attempt at gaining a VA from a specific country doesn't deter me from looking for more, but when it happens 5, 6, 7 or even 10 times, I cut that country out completely lol.

Some VA's will take up multiple jobs with the intention of doing all of them at the same time.  The downside to this is that they overextend themselves and then ask for an extension of the work, which will never get done.  I know that everyone wants to make money online, but biting off more than you can chew will never end well.


In Conclusion:
If you do plan on hiring a VA you will need to tell them exactly what they'll need to be doing, give them a time frame and give them a price for the week.  You'll then tell them that if the work isn't completed within the time frame, they do not get paid.  You can't be lenient on this, if you say the job should take 5 days and they agree to the time frame, they need to get the work done in that time.  I've had plenty of VA's try to stretch a 1 week job into a month and then complain when I cancel the job lol.


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Thanks!

Razzy