Want to Hire a Virtual Assistant?
You want to take advantage of internet marketing to grow your business, but you don’t have the time to do it yourself?
A virtual assistant can be a great way to run a content marketing strategy for your business, but only if you manage the process well.
Let’s start with reasons why most bosses don’t want a VA:
You can’t watch your VA work.
You can’t easily meet in person.
Micromanaging a VA doesn’t work well.
Your VA has other clients and is not on-demand at your beck and call.
Your VA cannot fetch you coffee or run errands for you.
Your VA will not be an expert who knows how to run your business.
Bottom line, most bosses don’t REALLY want a VA… because their expectations are off, and they won’t manage that person
well… so they’ll end up with terrible results.
There are two big mistakes commonly made when hiring virtual assistants (then I’ll get to how to avoid them).
The most common error is thinking of a virtual assistant as a substitute for an employee who will do anything asked by the boss.
The second most common error is thinking of a virtual assistant as an expert who will “take care of everything” and run the company.
The truth is that a VA is a freelance contractor – and frankly, most bosses don’t know how to manage contractors well.
If you want to get the best results from hiring a virtual assistant, you first have to know how to structure your business so you can get the best use from freelancers.
Here are 4 questions you should ask yourself before hiring a virtual assistant (or anyone):
- Are the tasks I expect this person to perform established and repeatable?
- How much does each task earn/cost me today?
- What ROI (return on investment) do I expect from this hire?
- Are my business systems ready to support this person, or do I need help establishing systems?
If you need someone to help you refine the strategy of your business so that you’ll reach your goals, you’re not quite ready for a virtual assistant.
First you should find a coach, consultant or mentor who has already grown a business like the one you want to own. Sometimes those folks are willing to take a cut of your business to help you grow so that you can pay them out of future earnings instead of today’s cash.
Once your business strategy is crystal clear, you can break that strategy into the action items that must be done on a regular basis to accomplish your goals.
Your lowest cost hire is for the tasks that are most repeatable – stuff that requires zero thought or judgment, just repeat performance on a regular basis.
Remember, there is a BIG reason that McDonald’s took numbers off of their cash registers and replaced them with pictures. They know they’re not paying squat for those jobs, and they expect very low literacy rates.
For most real estate investors, routine activities like posting on Craiglist, sending out emails to lists, and creating profiles on other sites can all be done for pretty cheap, IF you’ve already got the content written and have listed out where you want each post created.
There’s nothing wrong (and a lot right!) about hiring a couple virtual assistants at different rates.
It’s really important – like with every hire – that you take the time to interview your VA, check references, and get to know that person well before you commit money.
You have to first be a great manager of people before you can get great results from others.
Also, it helps if you give your virtual assistant great tools to use to help your business grow… like InvestorCarrot.
Lots of smart investors are choosing InvestorCarrot because their lead generation technology makes it super easy for virtual assistants to accomplish a dynamite marketing strategy for real estate investors in less than 10 hours a week.
Plus, InvestorCarrot has a TON of trainings on SEO, content marketing and more all ready to go… and some high-achieving investors have taken the simple step of sending their virtual assistant the links to all that training and telling them to implement it.
You can get great results from your virtual assistant too – just head on over and check out everything that InvestorCarrot can do to help your business grow.
You’ll be glad you did. ?
Watch the demo video here: OnCarrot.com/demo
