The reasons (and best benefits) of hiring a Virtual Assistant in 2022

Many people miss out on all the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant because they lack guidance on how to approach the process or have misconceptions about it.

Hiring a VA can quickly help to 10x productivity gains within the first month. However, a study found that only 30% of managers believe they are effective at delegating and miss out on cashing in these productivity gains.

Here is a framework that will guarantee you lock in these productivity benefits from a VA service with minimal impact on your business.

It’s a trap! Learn to identify and get out of the day-to-day vicious cycle

It is not uncommon to get trapped in day-to-day activities. On a day packed with zoom invites, the team invites spending hours on that excel formula that you can’t figure out. Busy does not always mean being productive.

Likely, you have also been there. Whether at your job, personal goals, or business objectives, it is not uncommon. Humans can easily get trapped working in that approach which is largely fueled by:

Poor prioritization
Difficulty delegating
Procrastination
Not enough bandwidth

You read your social media and your friend is at the local club enjoying how his/her VA’s got them covered. You research all the benefits of hiring a VA and see the light in your life but 7 months have gone by and you don’t even know where to start, all while continuing in the vicious unproductive cycle and missing all the benefits of working with a virtual assistant.

The compounding interest rule applied to business and personal goals

Let’s take a step back and look at this from a different perspective. There is a compounding rule in investing which states that small consistent gains compound to massive ones. Assuming you find a way, if you take $10,000 and compound it 1% every day for a year, it will turn into $380,000.

Constant small wins compound in the long run. The rule is simple with three main principles and how the above example ties to these:

Incremental wins (1%)
Consistent performance (every day)
Persistence through the timeline (1 year)

This principle can be applied to your personal goals, whether they are health or business-related. Are you up for a challenge? Start writing a blog. Typically, blogs are recommended to be a minimum of 1250 words but best practice suggests 2000 – 3000. Don’t jump into writing 3000 words at once, write 500-word essays daily for 21 days and see how your writing skills compound!

What if we apply this same approach or principle to your virtual assistant hiring endeavors? Let’s take a look at the methodology that will allow you to build a plan focused on making small consistent incremental gains and start compounding the benefits of working with a virtual assistant. Here is how:

Not all tasks are created equal, do this and maximize your productivity

Before we get started, let’s go through a decision-making tool that will ensure we succeed. It is called the Eisenhower Matrix. The technique is based on a methodology that the 34th president of the U.S. (Dwight D. Eisenhower) took to manage his time during his presidency. In recent years, it has been widely spread since its inclusion in Stephen Coveney’s book the 7 habits of highly effective people.

The methodology is based on the premise that important and urgent are characteristics that should not be pegged together. Not all urgent tasks have the same level of importance and urgency. The tool provides a framework to categorize the different tasks into buckets that help decide what to prioritize which in the end should be important tasks that add value to your long-term objectives.

Quick tip: You can replace importance with “benefit”, “impact”, or “value”, for example. These are all characteristics that will help you prioritize urgent tasks much better.

As seen in the graphic the Y-axis has importance and the X-axis has urgency. This builds four main buckets:

Most important/Most urgent

Tasks that are the most value-adding, impactful, or beneficial. Should be associated with your long-term goals. (e.g. new client development, business strategy execution, preparing a speech for a conference). These are tasks that you should prioritize and execute.

Less important/Most urgent

Tasks that need to be done but the impact is not as high (e.g. email newsletter, schedule meetings, blog posts, etc.). Tasks that are critical for your business success, but it does not necessarily matter if these are executed by you or someone else. You should be delegating these tasks.

Most important/Less urgent

Tasks that are valuable and important but not as urgent. (e.g. new product development). This bucket can hold both business objectives and also personal objectives. For example, if one of your health objectives is to lose weight as a health risk mitigation, then you can prioritize starting to go to the gym before lunch.

Less important/Less urgent should be deleted

Tasks that are distracting and do not add any value or benefit. (e.g. promotional emails, etc). Don’t hoard these, eliminate waste! Time is the most precious asset and spending time in non-value-adding and non-urgent activities is not accepted.

Most people don’t know what their Day in the Life (DILO) looks like –avoid this mistake!

Now let’s apply the methodology to your virtual assistant hiring plan. If you don’t know where to start, you should start by understanding where your time is going and how to improve your productivity. Mapping out your day by taking a “day in the life” approach can help you with this exercise. Let’s start by listing all your tasks, duration, and category. You will finalize the exercise by attributing the urgency and importance of the task.

Quick tip: you can do this same approach from a week in the life, month in the life, or any split of your preference.

Once you are done you should end with something as follows:

Time	Duration	Core Activity	Category	Urgency (1-5)	Importance (1-5)
8:00	60 min	Read and answer emails	Admin	4	3
9:00	20 min	Publish newsletter	Marketing	4	2
9:30	10 min	Schedule team meetings	Operations	5	2
9:45	60 min	Prepare for 3 client meeting s	Commercial	5	5
11:00	60 min	Blog writing research	Marketing	4	1
12:00	60 min	Blog writing	Marketing	4	2
13:00	30 min	Lunch	N/A	4	4
13:45	60 min	Social media updates/responses	Marketing	4	2
15:00	20 min	Read and answer emails	Admin	4	3
15:30	30 min	Website updates	Admin	3	2
16:00	15 min	Report to check daily Facebook likes	Marketing	2	2
16:20	30 min	Prepare for business review	Admin	3	4

Listing out the tasks in this way will now enable us to complete the Eisenhower Matrix by using the scores to map these tasks out into the 4 different buckets. Here is how it should look:

Understanding the Eisenhower Matrix

In the above example, the top 2 quadrants of the matrix are the tasks where you as a business owner should be spending your time at. These are the most value-adding activities that will bring the most benefits to you. The important tasks. As a fun exercise – set a $ amount to your time (hourly rate) and check how much money you are wasting time/effort/money on the non-value-adding activities.

In parallel, we identify that we can eliminate at least one task from the less important ones which is not value-adding and time-consuming. You now have the last quadrant (Most urgent/Less important) tasks, being the ones that should be delegated to your virtual assistant.

Using this surgical approach, you can now start planning a ramp-up plan to hand over these time-consuming tasks one by one and start compounding productivity gains, avoiding a big bang approach of handing over the wrong or too many tasks. The following BlueWorks hiring guide provides step-by-step instructions on how to prepare for hiring a virtual assistant. Let’s review the more important steps from the guide:

Map out the urgent but low-importance tasks that will be taken by your virtual assistant

Let’s add a bit more details to the tasks that will be taken by the virtual assistant. This information will be useful to ensure the scope of these tasks is a bit clearer. Although a lot of these tasks seem standard, humans are different and work in unique ways, therefore this will guarantee a more accurate assessment of the VA profile that you need.

Scope: details about the task
Time: the amount of time required to complete on average

The following are an example of the tasks that are usually under that key bucket (urgent but not as important as others may be) and the respective average time as a guide:

Now you have a list of tasks that you can hire a virtual assistant service for along with the details that you need for a good initial discovery call with the VA service/individual/provider. Information that is guaranteed will align:

Types of tasks: VA to understand specific expertise required (e.g. marketing, real estate, e-commerce, logistics, etc.)
Execution expectations: VA to understand the requirements to execute your tasks
Time requirements: VA to understand the time requirements for these tasks. Running a report can be a task you expect. Running a report daily increases the efforts required and the VA will need to know this.
Timeline: expectations on when you plan to start with the VA service

Doing this will help you get a solution that fits what you need and are looking for when hiring a Virtual Assistant or VA. Common issues that you will avoid through doing this work are:

Underestimating headcount requirements
Unclear scope/requirements resulting in poor service
Wrong industry background/expertise

Design your ramp-up plan to maximize productivity gains and minimize business resiliency

Before scheduling your discovery call, keep in mind that this guide is best for people that want to avoid interruptions caused by large changes to their business, prioritizing business resiliency. Therefore, a basic Gantt chart with your expected migration timeline will be critical to ensure the VA service provider/employee can support your expectations and hand over task by task to cash in the productivity gains. Here is what the above scenario may look like:

As you can note in the Gantt chart, the ramp-up approach proposed will reduce the risk of business interruption since tasks will be handed over systematically in a controlled environment to minimize the transition curve impact. The approach will help you start enjoying the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant and kick off compounding productivity gains moving forward.

It is time to cash in the productivity gains and hire your virtual assistant

Thousands of people are not enjoying the benefits of hiring a VA service due to a lack of guidance on how to approach the endeavor. The above framework will make the process feel like a walk in the park and cash in these productivity gains after hiring a virtual assistant.

Are you ready to schedule a meeting?