The Virtual Assistant Adventure

Does anyone else have a hard time handing over the reins to someone when it comes to your business? Even though we get overwhelmed with mundane daily tasks and they distract us from our true zones of genius, it still feels a little foreign to let someone else in on your process of how you run your business. Enter: the virtual assistant (VA). Hiring a VA is all the rage right now with many of us running our own businesses (hooray from women running the world!). Virtual assistants can take a lot off our overfilled plates;  that is, if we let them. Jill recently broke down what it’s like to hire a VA on the Why Are We Shouting? podcast.

So, What The Heck Is A VA And Why Do I Need One?

Simply put, a virtual assistant (or as the cool kids call ‘em, a “VA”) helps business owners and entrepreneurs hand off tasks they don’t enjoy to have more time to focus on growing their business. This sounds amazing, but if you’re like Jill and many other empire-running folks, it also seems a little scary and overwhelming to let a stranger in on the inner workings of your business.

I wasn’t going to let some assistant person come into my private ways of doing business and mess things up. I wanted full control over all moving parts. I was a well-oiled machine, a woman who interpreted entrepreneur to mean one who grows a business all by herself. – Jill Salzman on the Why Are We Shouting? podcast.

How Does It Work?

Once you’ve decided if hiring a VA is right for you, you’ll need to figure out exactly what tasks you want to hand off. What do you hate doing? What do you love doing? Figuring this out ( as Jill discovered the hard way) before you hire your assistant will save you both time and frustration.

When I hired my first VA. It was awful. She kept asking me for work and I didn’t know what to hand over. I wasn’t organized. What could I give her and tell her to do? If I didn’t know how to do that part yet, she got frustrated. I got frustrated. -Jill Salzman on the Why Are We Shouting? podcast

When you get into the groove of handing over your have-to’s, it starts to feel more natural and less stressful. Promise.

Why It’s An Investment, Not An Expense

Making the decision to add a new team member to your organization can be daunting. As entrepreneurs, we are often conditioned to believe that we have to wear all the hats, stacked precariously as we move about our daily lives. Sometimes those hats feel too heavy and need to be placed back into their pretty little box and handed off to a wonderful assistant. Having help isn’t a sign of failure or weakness, it gives you the freedom to enjoy your business again. Imagine no more crunching numbers. Or, no more scouring the internet for the perfect stock photo of a business meeting. Sounds amazing, right?

Hiring someone to lift some of the weight off your shoulders (or head if we are going back to the hat metaphor), is a reward for your hard work. You’ve grown your business to a level where you can remove some of the burden and focus on what you love to do.

If you’re interested in more info or you’d like to meet your new business BFF, head over to our Virtual Help program here. Or, check out the Why Are We Shouting? podcast anywhere that you listen to podcasts. You can also tune in here: