By now, I certainly hope you’re beginning to see that using virtual assistants (VAs) is about more than finding someone to e-mail tasks to. It’s about establishing clarity in your business, understanding your needs, and developing a unique way of doing things that you can use to train others.
Success requires more than just adding a virtual assistant to your team. If that is all you do, it will leave you frustrated and thinking something is wrong with the Virtual Assistants you chose. You need to also have:
- clearly defined needs and goals
- training
- focus on high-level priorities
Without taking these things into consideration, you may end up frustrated and thinking, “You see? It’s best if I do these things myself.”
Let’s examine each of the Success components:
- Clearly Defined Needs and Goals: Without clearly defined needs and goals, a virtual assistants will only be viewed as a cost to your business—and he or she will trigger the micromanaging vulture in you to come out. Create a goal to rid yourself of the work that you shouldn’t be doing. Remember, your time and attention are needed elsewhere.
- Training: By now, you should be starting to understand that training your virtual assistants is one of the major keys to success in this whole game. Yes, your virtual assistant is already skilled and has had basic training – but it takes time to incorporate him or her into your workflow, and it’s impossible to do that without your personalized training.
- Focus on High-Level Priorities: A lot of people are attracted to the idea of having more time. However, unless they know what they plan to do with that time, it’s going to be wasted once it arrives. The best use of extra time is to focus on high-level priorities – but do you know what they are? If you were given an extra two hours today to invest in your business, do you know in which projects or tasks you would invest those hours?
In Summary:
The lack of training your staff (virtual or not!) is one of the biggest mistakes business owners make, over and over again. So many brilliant employees have slipped through the ‘long-term net’, because their boss was either too lazy, or didn’t put enough focus on training – both at the beginning of the relationship, and in an on-going fashion.
At Global Office Works we provide you a complete support staff to assist you with training and managing your virtual assistants. Please reach out to us at any time and let us help you! It is all part of our service.
