Today’s Guest
Table of Contents
About Charlotte Wibberley & Amanda Slack
Amanda Slack is a former music industry legal PA turned creative and techie VA specializing in brand and online marketing support for entrepreneurs and small business owners. Amanda took the plunge and launched her business in 2014 and hasn’t looked back since. Amanda is fiercely passionate about brand consistency and making automation simple for business owners. The mechanic in your business keeping the systems and cogs turning.
Amanda is also an Infusionsoft whizz (or guru according to Charlotte!) and excels at building campaigns to support her clients in their quest to monetisze their businesses.
Outside of business, Amanda is a busy mum to 12 year old Jake and 3 year old Lola, loves getting creative with Playdoh, kitchen discos and gigs, theatre and fine dining with her scientist/part time thespian husband Ian.
Charlotte Wibberley is an Online Business Manager enabling entrepreneurs and business owners to have the freedom to do what they do best and follow their passion.
2012 saw Charlotte leap into self-employment starting her first online business, a multi- award winning VA business. This success enabled her to find her passion in supporting successful women juggling family and business as their OBM. Charlotte is the extra pair of hands, the like-minded buddy and chief cheerleader for businesses goals and ambitions. She loves helping clients achieve their goals they secretly dared to desire but feared to hope and aim for!
Charlotte also coaches and mentors VAs looking to build their businesses, grow their teams and achieve their dreams. Seeing people grow and build successful businesses around their lifestyles is close to Charlotte’s heart: it is one of her passions and key purposes.
Outside of work Charlotte is mum to Alex, 3 and Evie, 1 who keep her busy and out of trouble! She also enjoys going to the gym and the rare date night with her fellow entrepreneurial husband, Andrew.
Listen to this episode
What You’ll Learn
- What you need to consider when asking a friend to recommend a VA
- The important things you need to consider in addition to a VA’s skill set
- The specific mindset you need to have when hiring a VA
- Why you need to be asking the right questions when interviewing a VA, and what those questions are
- When to start creating an operations manual for your business, and why you absolutely need one
Connect with Charlotte Wibberley & Amanda Slack
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Related episodes
- 247: Holly Worton ~ What, When, Why, and How to Outsource
- [R2B 80] How to Clone Yourself In Your Business, with Amber McCue
- [SHP 61] How to Hire your First Project Manager (And Why You Need One), with Laura Roeder
- [SHP 37] How to Effectively Manage Your Team, with Alison Green of Ask a Manager
Transcript
The transcript for this episode can also be downloaded here (no opt-in required).
How to Hire the Right VA for your Business
00:26
HW: Hello, and welcome to the Business Mindset Podcast Episode 150, this is your host Holly Worton and I am here with two special guests today. I have got Amanda Slack, a former music industry legal PA, turned creative and techie VA specialising in brand and online marketing support for entrepreneurs and small business owners. And we have also got Charlotte Wibberley who is an Online Business Manager enabling entrepreneurs and business owners to have the freedom to do what they do best and follow their passion. And, together they have created VIP VA, which links high performing business owners with VAs or virtual assistants. So, welcome Charlotte and Amanda!
CW/AS:
Hi Holly, lovely to be here.
Hi Holly!
HW: So, why don’t we get a started, you can decide who wants to go first here, telling us a little bit about your background and your business journey and how you got to where you are today working together with VIP VA.
AS: Ok, do you want to start Charlotte?
CW: Sure, ok. So, thanks Holly. So, I started my first VA business Blossom Executive Support back in 2013, after I had had my first child, my son. And really my driver for that was that return to work options weren’t quite what I wanted, so, I had been working for years as a PA and project manager in the City and going back there with a young baby wasn’t really appealing and so, I took the leap and never looked back and started up my own VA business. I ran that for a couple of years before falling pregnant with my daughter, which at the time seemed like a bit of a nightmare because I had just won lots of clients and things were going really well, but it actually was the best thing ever, because it forced me to, well, practice what I preach really and to outsource my own clients to fabulous VAs and build it again that way.
So, my next business, my online business manager company, Charlotte Wibberley, which kind of supported female business owners from a strategic point of view, from running their teams as well, from helping them kind of manage things at a higher level; that was born really from being off on maternity leave, and probably having a bit too much time to think and wanting to follow my own passions and that’s what I was loving doing. So, um, that’s really where I got the inspiration for that, and that’s where I have arrived at today.
HW: Great, excellent. I want to hear from your side, Amanda, about what your background is like?
AS: Sure, so, I was working in the legal industry, specifically around the music industry for 20 years and I loved it, I have always been quite creative and quite technical within my employment roles, I was always the go-to person to sort out boring things like formatting and “help my computer has gone wrong” and all of those types of things. My role within the legal industry just grew and grew and grew; I loved it, it was really fun; I have had some really amazing times, but when I had my daughter at the age of 40, I did not want to commute anymore, and I really looked for some other options. It was actually my sister who introduced me to the world of VA, because she is an entrepreneur in her own right, and um, I started exploring the options and, basically, I made a decision in February 2014 to give up my job by July 2014, which I did, and I left with my employer as my first client. And it escalated from there really, and I have again, like Charlotte said, never looked back.
HW: Excellent!
AS: My business has evolved throughout my journey, because, you know, you quickly learn what you learn what you love doing and what you don’t like doing, and there is no point in running your own business if you end up doing things for clients that you don’t love. So my, what’s the word I am looking for, so the tasks that I absolutely love have come to the forefront and I started not doing very much PA work but really assisting business owners with their automation, online automation. I am an InfusionSoft trained VA, so I am really passionate about helping people automate their business so that they can be in their flow and things are working and running in the backend for them.
04:58
HW: Excellent. So, before we go on a little bit more I am conscious of the fact that it surprises me how many business owners don’t know what a VA is. So, before we go on, can we get just a quick definition of what is a VA, and what an OBM is, so that people who are listening and may not know, can understand what we are talking about as we go on with this episode?
CW: Do you want me to take this Amanda?
AS: Yeah go for it!
Both: {laughing}
CW: Ok, so, a VA is a virtual assistant, but Amanda and I are currently working on other definitions than the acronym VA, because it has got little bit of a bad rep in the UK industry and we will talk about that later. So, Virtual Assistant, so it could be an administrative professional that’s working virtually from home, or it could be someone who is building WordPress websites. The term VA can really mean anyone that is administratively supporting businesses, online businesses usually, but not always, from their own working environment and they are business owners in their own right, so they don’t generally work as employees of companies, they are freelancers, I guess. So, an online business manager is the same, so someone who works virtually and supports businesses that way. The difference between them I would say is that a VA is generally task driven, so as a business owner to your VA, you might ask them to book your travel, you might ask them to go and fix something in your InfusionSoft system (Amanda, I know it is much more complex than that).
HW: laughing
CW: Generalising here, before she kicks me… An OBM [online business manager] would really work with a business owner to map out an online course strategy, or what their marketing funnel would look like, or to work with, or to manage their team of freelancers. It is at a higher level, probably more proactive and probably more in the know with the business owner about their vision as a whole. It is working really on the bigger picture rather than the individual tasks.
HW: So, it is more strategy driven rather than task driven.
CW: Yeah, exactly.
HW: Ok, perfect, great. So, at what point in a person’s business do you think they need to start considering either a VA or an OBM? Amanda, do you want to take this one?
07:15
AS: So, at what point, I think for any business owner it can be overwhelming when you first start out, and budget is not always…usually budget is not always there, so at the beginning you need to work out what your business strategy is and map out what that looks like and quite often we have an idea, we jump right into the business, start it up and you know and start doing what we absolutely love and then all of a sudden the admin tasks just build up. Um, it can be really overwhelming, really overwhelming. Um I think it is important that you know your business inside out before you outsource, because to know what to outsource you have to know how you are going to run it.
HW: Um, and what needs to be done?
AS: And what needs to be done. I think at the beginning nobody would really know what they can outsource but actually you can outsource pretty much anything as long as you have got an operations manual of your business. And those are the things which get pushed to the bottom of the list because you are doing what you are doing and getting clients, and busy creating your own online reputation and that sort of thing and all the admin… you know it is important to remember that once you are running your own business you are wearing all the hats. You are the marketing manager, you are the accountant, the bookkeeper, the web designer, the graphic designer sometimes, you are the strategist as well as doing the actual thing that you love. So, those things get pushed to the side sometime and it is overwhelming. So, I think the minute you find a task that you don’t love, is taking up way too much of your time and taking you out of your flow, those are the things that you should be considering to outsource.
HW: Hmm excellent. And you brought up an operations manual. Now I think that is something that a lot of solopreneurs might not think they need? So, at what point should they start thinking about creating an operations manual.
AS: From the start actually! It would be really, helpful for their own business strategy to have an operations manual. Knowing how you are going to operate, what your message is, your brand guidelines, your processes, so your front processes for marketing, your processes for onboarding clients, what happens with your…how do you nurture your clients. All of those things if they are documented you can very easily hand that over to somebody to run certain aspects of your business knowing that your brand message is not going to be lost along the way.
HW: Excellent.
CW: Just to add to that Holly. That’s absolutely right from the beginning is the right answer and um not only does it help you to outsource to your first VA, but it also helps when you undoubtedly will end up transitioning from VA to VA because I am yet to meet someone who has only worked with one person, one VA and they have generally worked with a few. Or are looking for their next one, because by definition the VAs are fluid, they are virtual, they kind of do things they are own way because it is their business. So, they might be off on maternity leave, or they might change their focus like I have done. Change their business and things move, things are fluid. So, when transitioning between VAs that is such an important thing to have and certainly back in the day when I was doing that kind of work and they had an operations manual, I kind of jumped in the air and did a fist pump, because I was like “yes it is going to be much easier to hit the ground running with this” rather than start again hassling them for stuff.
HW: Excellent.
11:19
AS: The other thing, sorry to interrupt Holly, the other thing is that it also gives you as an entrepreneur a really good start for an exit strategy, because if you wanted to sell your business or take a step back and have somebody take over your business, then everything is there to enable you to do that.
HW: I agree that makes it a lot easier and I think that is something business owners don’t think about, because they consider themselves to be such an integral part of their businesses. But, of course, selling or passing it on to someone is always an option.
CW: Yes, absolutely.
11:50
HW: Great so as you said, lots of people tend to, or most people, tend to work with more than one VA, because of course people move on, people change their focus. And I have seen a lot of business owners really, really, struggle to find the best person at each stage of their business to work with. I have heard of a lot of people make bad hires, waste lots of money not realising they had hired the wrong person, who just wasn’t a good fit for their business. It is not like they were a bad VA but they just weren’t a good fit for this particular business, the person wasn’t skilled at managing people, it ended up blowing up in disaster. I have seen this more than once. So, what are your top tips on how people can hire the right VA or OBM for their business and manage this person effectively and know that this person is a good fit and perhaps won’t be working with them for all time and all eternity but be the right person for this right stage of their business.
AS: So, the thing to remember when you are looking for a VA is, a good place to start is a recommendation. But you have to remember that not every business is the same. So, somebody who is a great VA for your friend who is running a coaching business or whatever and is only outsourcing her technical stuff, and you want someone to inbox manage and run your client management system and things like that, probably is not the right person. So, it is important to look at skillsets as well and the tasks that you are outsourcing as well as looking at recommendations.
HW: Hmm that’s a really good point because I think there are so many different kinds of things that you can outsource and you are not necessarily probably going to find one person to do every single thing, are you?
AS: Absolutely not; I think it is important to remember that. Somebody who is InfusionSoft trained is not going to be running your inbox and vice versa. You know it is important to hire the right person for the right role. If you were in an employee situation, or an employment situation, you wouldn’t hire an administrator to do your marketing, and you wouldn’t hire a marketing person to do your IT, so it is really important that you should go to the right people for the specific tasks that you want them to do.
HW: Hmm.
CW: Can I just add to that as well, that’s important but, also, I think I would encourage all business owners to think about the personality piece as well. Even in employment, a PA relationship with their boss, with their director or whoever they are supporting is quite a unique one and is based on a lot of trust and a lot of confidence and people share stuff with their PAs that, you know, they wouldn’t share with anybody else, and it is a bit like that with your VA or your OBM. It is the relationship has got to work as well. So, not only should you be asking people about their skills and what they do, but you need to also be considering how they are responding to the questions on whether their personality would be a good fit for you, because I think that is sometimes where it falls down. In that somebody looks good on paper, but, actually, when you talk with them something doesn’t quite fit about their personality and their approach and their values. So, that’s got to be aligned with your business as well.
HW: I think that is a really good point, I think that is perhaps something a lot of people don’t consider, because especially if you have got this person managing your inbox and being the main contact with your client before they start working with you, if their energy and their personality and their style isn’t aligned with yours, or at least kind of similar to yours, it is going to be a weird disconnect of kind of points of communication within your business for your clients, because they are going to be like, “well, I talked to this person and she was this way and then I talked to the business owner and she was that way” and it is just a weird kind of connection there.
CW: Yeah, absolutely.
AS: Yeah, I would agree.
15:35
HW: So, what other top tips do you have around finding the right person for your business?
CW: I think you need to make sure that you are asking the right questions, I mean in the end, it can be a mine-field, because, and I feel business owners pain at the moment, because finding the right VA can be quite hard, um, there is no… Amanda and I were talking about this earlier, but there is no governing body or anything out there, or standards, official standards, that spell out what a VA should have or should have in place to run their business and service their clients.
So actually, anyone can set themselves up with a computer and say “hey, I am a VA you should outsource all your business stuff to me” um, and you think about the kind of information that you are actually handing over to those people, I think about some of the things that I handled for my clients, their passports, their credit card details, their bank accounts, their websites, their zero financial accounts, everything. It can be such a mine-field, I think you need to ask people about their business set up, what they have got in place, do they have contracts, how do they work with people, how does the onboarding process take place? Do they have review meetings with their clients? Do they have testimonials they can provide? I think that the more questions you can ask the better. And any VA that has kind of set up, and worth their salt, will have answers to those questions. So, I think, people just need to remember that because, it is a bit like putting money on a credit card, isn’t it? Because you can’t see it you think, “oh it will probably be ok”, and I do think that with the VA industry it is a little bit like that as well. You kind of think, “well I can’t see them”, so something in your mind almost thinks that it is not real and passing those details isn’t really passing it over to somebody. I think that you just need to be realistic. Your business is one of the most important things that you have got, and it is important, you have taken time to build it up, so you need to be extra vigilant when looking for that person to support you.
HW: Hmm and also asking about how they manage data, you know, for people in your business and in the UK, we have got Data Protection laws but every country is different, so if you are working with a VA in another country they might not be away of how they need to be handling people’s personal information.
CW: Yeah, absolutely, and at VIP VA we champion UK businesses working with UK VAs and so data protection is one of our prerequisites, none of our VAs in our community will be accepted until they have got Data Protection Cover. It is one of the top things that they need to have for that reason exactly.
HW: Excellent. So, what kind of mindset do you think entrepreneurs need to be in when they are hiring a VA? Because as we have said, it takes a while to be running your business before you can get to that point when you know you need to be outsourcing. What mindset do entrepreneurs need to have when they are making this hire?
AS: Yeah, well, it is a tricky one because nobody thinks that anybody else can do the job just as good as they can, so you have to be willing to let go. But I would say that at the beginning, if you are trying to dip your toe in, you should be outsourcing very small amounts and testing the water, because it can be really hard for somebody to let go of that, you know their baby.
HW: Yes. However, as you have said a lot of us think that no one else can do it as good as we can, but a VA is someone who is a specialist in these types of admin tasks and certainly someone who does InfusionSoft is going to be way better than the average entrepreneur at InfusionSoft, and perhaps customer service and things like that, so, I think that’s also a big shift for people, that entrepreneurs need to make. They are used to doing these tasks, they know how well they can do them, but there are other people who do this all the time and are perhaps more skilled than they are at doing these admin type tasks.
CW: Absolutely and I think that, in terms of mindset, don’t they need to have a business grace mindset. So, obviously, we all bootstrap it in the beginning when you start your business you do what you do, you wear all the hats in your business because you are learning and you are building up, but there is a tipping point, it will be a different point for different people, at which you start to become overwhelmed an running your business takes you away from growing your business. And so at that point that’s where you need to either of already been way ahead of the curve and got somebody on board to support you or you need to start thinking about getting someone on boar to support you, because, as Amanda said, the cost up front, people think “oh my god, I can’t afford that right now” but you can’t afford not to, because, by being in that business and running it yourself you just prevent any business growth. You won’t be able to spend any time with your clients or think about the strategy. You need somebody doing all of those admin type tasks and supporting you with your marketing and all of that so you can actually just focus on creating and doing what you got in business in to do in the first place. Otherwise it just stunts the growth. You become a limiting factor in your business.
HW: Yeah, definitely, definitely. So, can you tell us a little bit more about VIP VA, how does that service work for both entrepreneurs and VAs?
AS: Go for it Charlotte!
CW: {laughing} I knew you were going to say that.
Ok, so VIP VA really was born from both Amanda and my frustration about trying to get good people on board to support us in our own businesses. So, at the time we were looking at associate VAs to come and help us with our ever-growing workload and were frequently finding that we were taking on people that either oversold what they could do, or didn’t have contracts in place or we were both quite badly let down. We just said “there must be a better way than this, there must be somewhere where we can go where we can pick from VAs that actually, we know, are already top class and value working with their clients, and have all the correct business set up in place so that we know that we can outsource safely to them”. So, that was the kind of initial seed of the idea that we came up with.
AS: There was wine involved!
HW: {laughing}
CW: Yes, as all the best ideas start that way! And then we kind of on the back of that, thought well actually if we as VAs are looking for that, we bet that our clients are looking for that as well. I mean, I could…, I have given up counting the number of people that I speak to that say, “oh, I have had a really bad experience with a VA”, so I think it has kind of turned into a bit more a mission about trying to change the UK VA industry really, it has got a bit of a bad rep. But I guess the nuts and bolts of it is that is, VIP VA is a membership site for high performing UK-based VAs, entry into that membership site is by application only so we rigorously vet our VAs that come on board, but once they are in they get supported through a kind of series of masterclasses and training and a support group, and bits and bobs like that, to kind of continue their development. And then on the flip side, we have also got a client matching service, which actually we only launched last week.
HW: Wow, excellent, yay!
CW: Which via a job application process links clients with those VAs, so in theory clients can come to us and we have already done all of the vetting for them so they can just interview the VAs that we have got in our membership community and hopefully find someone who is going to help them in their business.
HW: Ok great. So, do entrepreneurs just then have access to your databases or do they come to you and say “look, I need someone to do InfusionSoft, inbox, this that and the other, who do you recommend? Is this kind of a personal selection service or do they…?
CW: Yes, it is personal. So, they submit a job profile, which outlines what tasks they are after, what availability perhaps, but also around the kind of personalities and um values that the VAs has. And then we select the best match for them from within our directory. It is a totally private directory so the only people who can see the VAs in there are us and the other members, um, so then we return their match to them and they can go and interview them and see how things go from there.
HW: Excellent and how is this, I know you just launched this last week, but how is… what kind of feedback have you gotten from people? Has it been much more streamlined hiring process than people have experienced before?
CW: People have really loved it, so, as I say, we only launched it last week but we went through quite a long process of beta testing with clients coming on board and they really loved the bespoke nature of it, but also the fact that they knew that coming to us, all of the pre-work had been done, that it was a safe environment and they didn’t have to worry about whether they were going to be sharing their data with the wrong kind of people, or, whether the standard was going to be low. They knew that coming to VIP VA they were going to be getting access to excellent VAs.
HW: Excellent, I like it because it is kind of like a dating service that matches you up with your VA. {laughing}
24:25
AS: Absolutely.
CW: Amanda used to say that we were like match.com but for VAs.
HW: Exactly, MatchVA.com {laughing}. And you also have online business managers in your database that you could help match people up with? Or are you just working with VAs?
24:50
AS: Well, at the moment, most of our members are traditional VAs but we are opening up to all of the you know the freelance community because it is my belief that a VA should not be just a virtual admin assistant, they are definitely freelances in their own right and we want an array basically of, er, freelance service providers that we can match with our clients. Or a few, so, you know if a client comes and says they want a website designer and a marketing person and then just a VA, we would love to be able to match them with three people that fit that bill.
HW: Excellent, excellent. So how can other women entrepreneurs who maybe listening work with you? I assume entrepreneurs can work with you to help find a VA, and, if any VAs are listening, they can also check out your services and sign up to be kind of part of your database. Tell us a little bit about what that process is like on both sides.
25:46
CW: In terms of the process for clients, they can submit a job profile through our website or actually they can also book a call to speak directly with Amanda or I and talk through what they are after and we can kind of create a profile for them. They then kind of get access to a kind of private client area on our site where they can keep up to date with how their match is going. Typically, we try and come back to them with a match within 72 hours of us accepting their profile, but obviously we would talk with them if that wasn’t going to be possible. And then, as said before, they receive their best match as a profile that they can then accept or take to interview. That process has been working really well for us. We don’t get involved beyond that, we don’t get involved in the hiring process at all, or any ongoing relationship, that’s actually just between the client and the VA that we have got on our books. On the VA side they come to us and fill in a, as I say, quite a lengthy application form at which point Amanda and I review them to check if they have got all of the necessary criteria in place and we may or may not do some testing on the skills that they have claimed to have. AT that point we can then, assuming goes well, we can then accept them into our community and they join our directory and our private Facebook community and then get access to all of our training materials and masterclasses and membership perks.
HW: Excellent so they have got a whole kind of database of learning that they can use to kind of upgrade their skills, it sounds like.
CW: Yeah, I mean it is early days for us, e-courses are definitely on the horizon as are networking events for VAs. At the moment we have been hosting monthly expert masterclasses with key industry experts that I guess are going to help them with their own VA business development. They get access to the library of that and also are invited to join those live calls as and when they happen.
HW: Excellent.
AS: I think the other thing to mention is that because we have got the private Facebook group, although there are lots of Facebook groups out there for other Virtual Assistants, the people that are in them are of every level, and because we have got this private community and everybody can be secure in the knowledge that all of our members are at the same level of their business it is a really safe environment for a highly skilled professional to still ask advice of their peers and know that there is sort of, no judgment and that everyone is on the same page if you like.
HW: Umm excellent so there is kind of that support group between the VAs.
AS: Yeah absolutely
HW: Great, well thank you so much for joining us today, do you have any final words of wisdom for entrepreneurs who might be looking to hire a VA and feeling a bit nervous about making that step?
CW: All I would say is that both Amanda and I really like a chat, so if people just want to phone up, if clients just want to phone up and talk with us, obviously, we have got a lot of experience of outsourcing on both sides, because I have got my own VAs as well. So if they just want to talk through what’s on their mind, or what they think they can or can’t outsource, or if they just really want to know more about the whole process, then please do get in touch and we will be very happy to talk to you about it. Additionally on our site if you go to the client’s side of our website, we do have a free eBook which is all around the key questions, the 7 key questions that you need to ask when you are hiring your VA. So that’s a good thing to hop on and get if you get the chance.
HW: Excellent and where can people find you online?
AS: So we are at: VIPVA.co.uk and our Twitter is – Charlotte?
CW: @vipva
HW: Excellent. Are you on any other social networks?
CW: So, we are on Facebook as well. So, if you put VIPVA in the search you will find us.
HW: Excellent.
AS: Also, we have got a free Facebook group called the VIP VA Hub and that’s free for any VA to join so there is a big community going on in there at the moment. There is a lot of engagement, so if you are looking for another community and you are a Virtual Assistant then please come join us.
HW: Great! It sounds fantastic. Thank you so much for joining us today, I think you have given us a lot of great tips on how entrepreneurs can either start outsourcing or outsource more of their admin stuff for people who are really, skilled at doing at and how will love it, because obviously if a VA is doing that kind of work they are probably the kind of person who loves doing those kinds of admin tasks and not the kind of person who hates them. {laughing} Like so many entrepreneurs do! So, thank you very very much.
AS & CW: Thank you Holly!
HW: And thank you for your listening and you are welcome and thank you for listening and remember to visit: hollyworton.com/150 for the show notes on this episode. Thank you.
