The success of your new VA will rely heavily on the input and communication from you in the initial set up phase. How much time you dedicate will depend on the nature and volume of tasks you delegate.
Welcome to Savvy Sessions #18.
Today we have a question from Neil Berryman, and he asks "How much time would you expect to commit to training before they become productive?"
Essentially, when you do start up you have to have a handover, like a training session. Generally, you can allow up to two hours for that. That's when we need to get as much information off you as possible, with regards to what you want achieved, the types of tasks your virtual assistant can undertake, we get logins, and we set up all the processes and procedures for tasks we're going to do. So there'll be some quick wins, things that you'll actually see immediately, things taken off your plate. After that it is just a matter of ongoing communication and feedback. You can't just have the handover and then expect it to be just like magic, everything is sorted. You will need to commit time regularly. You do that via either a phone call every week, or a couple times a week, as much communication as you can feedback to your virtual assistant. It all helps with the timeline for you seeing the results. But generally speaking, within the first one to two months you'll notice a significant decrease in your admin time, you'll reap some rewards then, whether it's financial, or just having time back in your own day, but it is an ongoing thing, and you do need to be able to dedicate some time to it initially, getting someone up and running, just like an employee.
This can be one of the differences between having an offshore virtual assistant, and then a local virtual assistant. With an offshore virtual assistant, you'll have to spend a lot more time upfront training, creating videos, writing down the processes, and being really, really specific about what you want and how you want it done, whereas with a local virtual assistant, especially how we deal with our clients, and undertake the work for our clients here at Strictly Savvy, we do that in a really proactive way. Often clients will come to us, they say, "I just want to be able to achieve this". So they say what they want, but then we do the "How it's going to happen", and that can be the difference between having someone who's already pre-trained, already knows the tools, already knows the systems, already knows the type of work that you're needing them to do, and is really specialised in that. You don't have to train them on how to do it, you're just letting them know what you want. And so that can really speed up the payback for seeing the results, and having the time freed up, and having them take over, so yeah. We say allow around a month to be able to really see some awesome gains, and to really feel like you don't have to spend so much time training them or teaching that.
We document everything at our end as well. That means that you only teach us or train us once. If your virtual assistant is away sick, then a back-up stands in. If they leave, then, again, they are replaced but you've already done the training, and then it's our job to then teach the next person how to do it. Your investment of time will generally be one-off, when you initially get things going, and then just maintaining that, and we just take over.
It all depends on which type of virtual assistant you hire, and what their skills and experience already is.
Thanks for watching. That was Savvy Sessions #18.
We'll see you next time!
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