Hungry For Help
How to Find the Best VA for You
By: Dale Noles

If you have ever heard of a Virtual Assistant (VA) you might be inclined to think that they are an obscure way to build your business. You pay them for the work that they do for you. You pay them for the work that you can do yourself. How can that benefit a startup business or even a thriving business, like yours?

Eat In or Sub-Out

A large number of VAs are able to provide your basic administrative needs. Most, can type documents, transcribe, do data entry and a variety of tasks that chew up a good portion of your time, if you are doing it all yourself. VAs can be a gigantic asset to any business. Their prices may seem high, but there is savings in utilizing one. Some examples are, no overhead, no extra office equipment, no taxes, etc. In addition, they take the time that you were spending on the daily tasks of running your business and give that time back to you, which is an extremely valuable asset to your business.

Ultimately, you have to decide what the trade off is. Do you continue to do the tasks yourself and waste valuable time that you could be spending on getting new clients and building up your current clients? Or, do you retain a VA who can do those tasks for much less per hour and give you your time back, so that you can focus on your business?

Feed Your Needs

When selecting a VA for your business, you will want to consider some very important variables. What kind of work do you do? Does the work that you need done require a certain amount of expertise? Are you looking for the right kind of VA? Is the VA that you are considering familiar with what your type of business requires (law office, coaching practice, real estate, etc.)?

Standardize or Super Size

One of the core benefits of identifying the right VA for your business is eliminating the learning curve. Assume that you have a coaching practice. In your practice you not only coach your clients but you also are a speaker and an author. If you use a general VA who does just the basic administrative work, you will have to teach them how to handle other aspects of your practice. They will have to learn how to handle your monthly newsletter, market you for speaking engagements and research the best publishers for the coaching industry before they can actually start to work on getting these results for you.

While, some of those things may seem like standard requests of a VA’s time, it is wasting your money if you have to teach them how to assist you. If you can identify a VA that has those specific talents/experience then you do not have to pay for or wait on their learning curve to catch up to where you need them in order to work with you efficiently.

The Top Five Questions to ask a VA

1. Who is your target market?
   If a VA cannot answer this question, I would recommend moving on to the next candidate. If they do answer the question and you cannot relate your tasks to their target market, you may want to keep looking.
2. Of your target market, how many clients do you have?
   This will give you an idea of their experience in dealing with your specific market. If they indicate less than two in their target market, they may just be starting out in that market and might not have the experience that you require.
3. How many years experience do you have working within your target market?
   If they have less than two clients but have been working with them for six months or more, you might have a winner on your hands.
4. What are the two most common tasks that you do for your clients?
   This question will give you an idea of where their strengths lie. For example, (continuing on the coach angle) if they say, “The two most common tasks that I do for my clients are handling their newsletters and marketing their e-books.” You can determine if these are needs that you have and are looking to have a VA fulfill for you. These answers imply that they also handle their client’s web site and are familiar enough with their client’s practice to be able to market their services, which relates to revenues for their clients.
5. What can you do to help my business?
   This question can help to weed out any untruthful responses from any of the previous questions. If they are familiar with your target market, this question will not be a difficult question for the VA to answer. This should also open the door for the VA to tell you how they can either save and/or make you revenue.

You have just gotten the answers to all of your questions. Now what? Indicate your interest in retaining this particular VA or VA firm and snatch them up. If you do not, someone else will come along and see their value and take them right out of your pocket. The good news is, most VAs do not have a full practice. Every VA wants to fill their practice and they are looking for their perfect client. The question is, will it be you?

About the Author:
Dale Noles is the President of Virtual Accuracy "Assistance For Coaches". He also coaches and mentors Virtual Assistants through VA Training.

Copyright Virtual Accuracy 2004

Reprints of this article only at the express permission of Virtual Accuracy. Email VA@VirtualAccuracy.com for more details.