For you to run a successful coaching business and grow as a coach, it’s going to take a team of qualified and reliable people to help you.
One such person you’ll need on your team is a Virtual Assistant. Finding and hiring a qualified VA isn’t hard, but there are some things you need to consider before you jump in with both feet.
First, let’s cover the basic what a virtual assistant actually is (and does) before getting into the details about hiring, training, and working with a VA.
What Is a Virtual Assistant and Why Do You Need One?
According to Wikipedia: A virtual assistant (typically abbreviated to VA, also called a virtual office assistant) is generally self-employed and provides professional administrative, technical, or creative (social) assistance to clients remotely from a home office.
In other words, a virtual assistant is just that – an assistant who works virtually. That means she could be working out of a home office, from a hotel room, in a coffee shop – literally anywhere that has WIFI, a VA can work from. She can provide services like email management, customer support/help desk, web design, transcription, graphic work, calendar management, data entry and more.
The great thing about a VA is that she is an independent contractor so you don’t have to pay for office space for her, employee taxes and all those other things that come with having a ‘real’ in-office assistant.
Here’s some other expenses you don’t have to worry about when you hire a contractor: hardware (she’ll buy her own computer, printer, and anything else she needs), health insurance, vacation days, sick days, and wasted time while she chats with your other employees.
You can see that there are some pretty big benefits to outsourcing virtually. But what sorts of tasks can you entrust to someone who isn’t working with you right in your office?
What a Virtual Assistant Can Do for You and Your Coaching Business
There are a lot of different things a VA can do for you and your business. But before we look at some sample tasks you can hand over, you need to realize the importance of hiring a VA.
The main thing to think about is that with their help, you’ll be able to stop spending so much time on projects that are time consuming and zap your energy, and instead focus on those things you enjoy doing.
You’ll probably even find that once you hand over those tasks you don’t like and which you found so time consuming, your VA will probably not spend as much time as you did on them!
Here are some of the basic things a virtual assistant can do for you:
- Customer support
- Email management
- Schedule coaching calls
- Maintain database of coaching clients to keep track of how many coaching sessions they’ve used/have left
- Send invoices to your coaching clients
- Email marketing – setting up/sending mailings for you through software like Aweber
- Content management
- Social media management
- Internet research
- Travel planning (reserving flights, booking hotels, etc)
This is just a small list of some basic tasks a VA can do for you in you. Of course there are things that require more skill that you can also hand over to a VA, such as:
- Web & graphic design
- Website updates
- Technical support
- Kindle book publishing
- Set up and manage webinars
- Create lead pages
- Set up funnels
- Repurpose your content from livestreams, blog posts, sales pages, and more.
- Manage your Facebook group
- Create and post content to social media
- Write sales copy
- Project management
- Bookkeeping
- Audio/Video help (editing, creating, etc)
- PowerPoint
- Transcription
Again, this is just a small list of some of the tasks that require more of a skill set, but that can also be handed off to a trusted VA. This list is definitely not exhaustive and there are a lot of other jobs that can be outsourced as well.
By now, you should have a great starting point for brainstorming some of the ways that a Virtual Assistant can help you build and grow a successful coaching business. Probably one of the easiest ways to get started with outsourcing to a VA is by making a list of the top three things you know need to get done in your business, but that you don’t like doing.
You know that list of tasks that you never seem to find time to do? Those are the perfect projects to get started with!
