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Richard Phu Follow

I helps business owners who are trapped in their business to systemise and scale their business to
work without them >>>Learn more over at www.RichardPhu.com<<
Oct 13, 2017 · 11 min read

How to Train and Use a Virtual Assistant to

Multiply Your Time

1 2 3 Your hrst three are on the house. Details

source: unsplash

Modern-day productivity is more than just getting a lot done. You also want to
create more time to do what you love.

Yet many of us nd ourselves trapped doing tasks and activities that leave us
drained of energy. The worst is when you’re so overwhelmed and so drained
that you can’t even work up enthusiasm for the parts of your job that you do
love.

I fell into this trap when I was rst doing my podcast show. I’d line up the
amazing guests and have them spill their secrets on the recording. This is the
part I loved doing the most.

After that, I had to go through cleaning the audio le, adding the intro and
outro, writing the show notes, creating the album art cover, uploading to
iTunes, and sharing the show on social media and email.

The post-production was overwhelming. The post-production sucked up all

my time. And, because I didn’t love doing that work, it also sucked up my
energy and morale.

Eventually, I got fed up and hit on the idea that I only wanted to work in what
I considered my “Genius Zone” and that I wanted to outsource everything
else. That’s how I ended up getting started with—and then getting really
e cient at—managing virtual assistants.

Your Genius Zone

The ‘Genius Zone’ comes from the book by Gary Keller called ‘The One Thing’,
which talks about focusing on the one thing you’re great at (or a genius at). It
doesn’t mean no one else is better than you at that one thing. Rather, it means
that you’re better at your one thing than a majority of the population.

Take the podcast example: I gured I could get someone else to run the entire
show for me. Yet I found that my favorite part of the whole process was doing
the interviews. Even my guests were telling me I was a great interviewer. (And
nobody ever told me I was great at adding intros and outros.)

So I wanted to nd out what would happen if I focused on what I might be a

‘genius’ at (interviewing) rather than working on improving my weaknesses
(post-production). What if I just went all-in on creating a team who loved
doing the other parts that I didn’t?

Understanding what work you want to do yourself and what work you want
other people to do is the rst step in employing a Virtual Assistant.

This is the key to multiplying your time. It’s all about guring out the few
tasks you’re the ‘genius’ at and accepting that you’re not so good at the others.

If you hesitate to call yourself a genius at anything, then focus instead on what
you are most passionate about.

If you’re a creative genius, then perhaps you struggle to manage project

timelines. Or if you’re a coding genius, you might not have the salesmanship
skills to close more projects. The beautiful part about today’s world is that it’s
now easier than ever before to nd and connect with people who are fantastic
at the tasks you struggle with.

Checklist before hiring your rst VA

Before you hire a VA you need to ask yourself if you’re are even ready for
another person to come into your life.

VA’s bring many amazing options for getting more done and creating more
time for yourself. Yet hiring a VA only works if you are prepared to provide the
structure and guidance they need to be successful.

It begins with a series of questions to ask yourself starting with:

1. How would hiring a VA add more to my life/business?

2. What would my VA be doing for me?

3. What would I be spending my freed-up time on?

4. Do I have the funds to hire a VA?

5. Am I willing to let go of control of some details?

These are some of the most important questions you need to consider when it
comes to making a decision that involves another human in your life. There’s
no point bringing in someone to simplify your life if you don’t know how
they’ll do it.

This is a crucial point: Virtual Assistant’s follow systems that you create — they
do not create the systems for you.

Examples of types of work for Virtual Assistants

If you have never worked with a virtual assistant, then it may help to consider
some examples of what they can do.

I tend to think in terms of three categories.

1. Task —A discrete task taken to completion (could be audio processing,

video editing or email handling)

2. Project — A group of tasks that are linked together to accomplish a goal

(e.g. scheduling a trip often requires nding hotels, ights, rental cars,
getting your feedback, then making the bookings)

3. Role — Collective tasks that need to be completed day-to-day on a

recurring basis (e.g general administration, customer support or social
media scheduling)

Start by identifying your repetitive tasks

Usually most people start with a general VA role to handle mundane and
repetitive tasks like travel arrangements, social media scheduling, and email
management.

You should know and de ne these tasks before you hire your VA.

To get a good list of these tasks, go through your average week and identify
tasks that repeat. If they are in your Genius Zone, then keep those tasks for
yourself. If they aren’t, then they’re tasks you can train a VA to do.

The key here is to have tasks that are occurring regularly, so your VA can free
up that time and also give them regular hours.

This is important because it’ll bring some stability for your VA to know the
type of work they’re expected to perform. Regular hours also sets expectations
for your working relationship about when they need to be ‘on’ for work and
when they can be o .

Training requires being able to give step-by-step

instructions
It’s important to capture every step of a task, no matter how small. Write
down all the decisions, actions and thought patterns behind why this step is
needed.

Most VAs are generalists and so they aren’t coming to your company with
domain-speci c knowledge. It’s always better to be speci c about each step
rather than assume that something is common knowledge.

If you’re struggling to break down your task into bite-sized steps, it either
means the task requires too much brain power or experience to train someone
in and shouldn’t be done (yet!), or you’re just overthinking the process.

Once you’ve written down the steps, do an editing pass. You’ll be surprised
how many of the steps aren’t actually necessary.

Ask yourself:

• Is this critical to achieving the end result or the task?

• Can I/the business live without this action?

• How can I do this in fewer steps?

In addition to being clear, I also like to give context to each task. My

assumption is that my VA won’t know anything about my business and so this
context (even if it feels basic to me) helps put them in a position to succeed:

• Why am I doing this?

• What am I doing?

• What would happen if I don’t do this?

The last question is critical because if you don’t lay out the consequence of
inaction or poor delivery, people will not truly grasp the magnitude and the
impact of their work. This is really to piece the whole picture together for your
VA, and to help them understand the importance of their work and how it ts
into the company.

Now you can hire your VA

Hiring could be its own lengthy tutorial, where here I’m trying to focus on
how to train.

But simply, the rst place to look is with your friends. Some VAs are better
than others, so often one of your friends will have a recommendation about a
speci c VA.

After that, there are a number of services you can try. Use the instructions
you’ve created for your rst task as a sample project. This is why I always
recommend people de ne the rst project for their VA before they even try to
hire one.

One of the top tactics for nding the best VA for yourself is to give the same
task to multiple VAs and then compare the results. Sure, that might cost you
an extra $100, but it’s the fastest and most e cient way to evaluate a VA.

If your friends don’t have strong recommendations for you, you can start by
looking on Upwork. This is an excellent service and starting point.

I also recommend trying FreeEup, simply because I appreciate their chart

listing expected hourly price ranges for virtual support:

Applying the 30x rule for training

Often the biggest mistake when hiring a VA is that you don’t spend enough
time investing in training.

Training is the most crucial part to outsourcing because the more you prepare
at the start, the more time you’ll save from having to retrain them. Training
someone to completely take over any task from you takes time.

In Rory Vaden’s Procrastinate on Purpose: 5 Permissions to Multiply Your Time,

he talks about how multipliers use the 30x Rule.

The 30x rule is that you should invest 30 times more on training than it takes Top highlight

you to do the task one time. So if it takes a task 5 minutes to complete, it

should cost you 150 minutes (2.5 hours) to train someone to take that task
over.

This probably sounds crazy. And yes, it’s possible to spend less time. But I nd
this rule of thumb inspires me to create the best possible training. Then when
I lose a VA (this happens), I have training that’s good enough to reuse with the
next VA.

Training comes down to more than just a set of instructions emailed to your
VA. Training involves being there to support your VA when they encounter
di culties/challenges or when they come up against something you’ve left o
your original instructions. Training time includes time to review their work
and then provide feedback.

Using video to get training leverage

The best change I made to my training was document all of it onto video and
then put that video into a training portal. This has made it much easier to
bring on new VAs.

I’ve personally used this to train up VA’s who had no idea what podcasts were
to be able to do basic podcast post-production within weeks of hiring.

Example of our Online Training Portal

Now in these training websites, I’ve personally found long boring SOP’s
(Standard Operating Procedure) documents do not help at the start. It’s kind
of like walking into a new o ce and getting told to read the encyclopedia rst.
I’ll go out on a limb and generalize by saying no one wants to do that!

So the keys to engaging training that is e ective and easily digestible is to

create short (3–7min) video tutorials. You can do this very easily with
applications like Jing, Camtasia and Screen ow, or even just QuickTime if you
are on a Mac.

Why do short videos?

Think of your own video watching habits: anything longer than 10 minutes
and you’ll most likely not want to watch it. It’s the same for your VA: you want
to make it easily digestible and reduce the barriers as much as possible.

As much as it is their role to make your life easier, it’s your responsibility to
make it as easy as possible for them to complete their work. So go above and
beyond and make it as simple and easy as possible for them to support you.

We do this by augmenting the videos with the appropriate templates of

scripts, emails, message responses and checklists relating to the process. Go
further by even providing them links to access the tools they need easily!

This training portal serves as a great base for learning, but also simpli es your
VA’s work and empowers them with all the resources they need.

Project managing your VA

Sometimes you’ll need to track where your VA is on a project.

I use Trello, partly because Trello makes it easy to create checklist templates.
This is also a place where you can place resources (links, les, logos) that your
VA will use every day. This project management system is separate from your
training library. Your VA uses your training library to get up to speed and then
uses your project management portal on a day-to-day basis.

Our Team Assets Trello Board

It is critical is to manage checklists. Let me show you how detail oriented I get
in my checklists:

Example of our Podcast Production Checklist in Trello

Having this sort of checklist helps make sure your VA is following every detail.
Most VAs are detail-oriented by nature — and so these checklists play to their
strength.

Checklists also make it easy to improve or adjust your processes over time.

Creating this much training is a lot of work. Frankly, it is a more work than
most people are willing to do. Yet, doing it is why you’ll nd yourself with
more time on your hands—because you’re guiding, empowering and
providing the platform for your virtual team to succeed without you!

That’s the whole point. You make a big investment up front so that your time
is freed up to do other things.

As you start to tap into the multiplier within you, you’ll be shifting away from
putting out res and start to gure other tasks that cause noise, pressure and
repetition in your life. You can eliminate them or pass those also along to a
VA. Your VA will be part of a system that removes your ‘non-genius’ tasks from
your life.

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Responses

Write a response…

Conversation with Richard Phu.

Mickey Hadick
Oct 14, 2017

I especially like your checklist to evaluate your need for a VA, and the process
re nement as you prepare to train the VA.

2 1 response

Richard Phu
Oct 15, 2017

Thanks!
Exactly that, it’s a constant process of re nement to make your relationship
with your VA a success

Conversation with Richard Phu.

Piers
Oct 14, 2017

The rst thing that came to mind when I read “virtual assistant” was a digital
assistant – I believe many of the same principles apply. Instead of training you
have programming, instead of training you have testing. The greatest
distinction I see is that some people prefer talking to people instead of with
machines 😉

1 response

Richard Phu
Oct 15, 2017

Very much so!

It’s probably going to be the next step in this space with AI improving at the
rate of knots!

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