Why a VA is essential to get you to 1m+ transcript

Greg Wilkes (00:01):

The construction industry can be a tough business to crack from cashflow problems. Struggling to find skilled labor and not making enough money for your efforts leaves many business owners feeling frustrated and burnt out. But when you get the business strategy right, it’s an industry that can be highly satisfying and financially rewarding. I’m here to give you the resources to be able to create a construction business that gives you more time, more freedom, and more money. This is the Develop Your Construction Business podcast, and I’m your host, Greg Wilkes.

 

 

Greg Wilkes (00:43):

So if you’ve been listening to this podcast for a while, you know that I’m always talking about the three big principles of what I try to get you back as a business owner. And that’s more time, more freedom, and more money. They’re the big three and it’s usually in that order. Now, in today’s podcast, we’re going to be discussing the first two, mainly how we get you time back as a business owner and how that then leads to freedom to work on the things that you really enjoy not doing, the things that you don’t enjoy. And today’s topic we’re talking about virtual assistance or VAs. Should you be hiring a VA for your construction business? So maybe you ask the question, well, what is a va? How is a VA going to help me in my business? Well, simply put a va, a virtual assistant is someone who will work remotely for you.

 

 

(01:34)
So they may be in a completely different country, they may be in your own country. I’ve personally got a va. I live in Sydney, she lives in the Philippines and I’ve also got a VA that lives in the UK too, so they don’t necessarily have to be in the same country at all. But generally speaking, a VA won’t be sitting there right next to you in an office and a VA will do a wide variety of works. It’s generally admin type works, maybe social media. We’ll come onto an exact role of a VA as we go on, but we’re talking about someone who just does general administrative tasks for you and your business. Now, VAs are getting really popular after covid, everyone went to work from home and it’s quite common now that people are used to that and they want to continue this working from home strategy.

 

 

(02:23)
And maybe you as a business owner realize that actually it works quite well for me. I enjoy working from home and I don’t enjoy having people around me while I’m working. I find that I had a company, we had a huge office, 12 to 15 people in the office when we were running a large construction business. And now as you can see with my background, I work from home and I’ve got a team that works around me all around the world, a number of different individuals, but I actually prefer it. I quite like being on my own. I can get my head down and just focus on work when I need to, but at the same time, I can still leverage other people’s time and make more money because I’ve got a full team still around me and most importantly, I’m not paying that huge expense of an office overhead.

 

 

(03:08)
So, VAs can be great because they can keep your business really lean, which is what we want. We don’t want to be overspending if we don’t need to. Now, one of the benefits of hiring a virtual assistant, or let’s just call them VAs throughout this podcast, is often the cost that they come at, especially if you’re going to outsource this to another country. So because you haven’t got someone that’s having to commute to your office, they’re not having to pay travel time. And if you are in the UK or wherever you are, sometimes it can be quite expensive. When we had an office, we were near London, so that adds a cost straight away to how much you’re going to be paying for your admin staff. But with VAs that might live in another part of the world or they’re not having to travel often, you can get a VA at a really reasonable rate, and that’s going to vary around the world depending on their skill level, between $8 to $25 an hour depending on how good they are and what their experience is and what responsibilities you want to give them.

 

 

(04:11)
And why you really need to consider getting a VA is because what we really want to do for you is outsource tasks. All those admin tasks that you shouldn’t be doing in your business. As we said, we want to give you more time back and if you are finding as a construction business owner that you are just flat out with time, but often if you actually analyzed your time, you’re probably spending it doing things that you shouldn’t really be doing in your email inbox and answering emails or paying suppliers or all those adminy type stuff that you know that can hand off deep down, but you hold onto it because you can’t be bothered to train anyone and you haven’t got anyone to necessarily give it to at this time. So if you’re in that position and you’re finding that there’s no time in your business, maybe the first hire for you, and in fact I recommend everyone’s first hire is an assistant, a VA.

 

 

(05:02)
The other good thing about VAs too is that when you max out one VA, you can always go and get another one, and that’s the beauty of it. So you might get a VA that’s only working part-time for you and you maximum out the tasks, go and get another one. There are so many out there to choose from that it’s really good in that regard. So it can actually help you scale really quickly, again without bringing in all those overheads of having so many people in the office. Now, sometimes there are some misconceptions about VAs, and this generally comes from if we are outsourcing it to another country. The misconception is that there’s going to be a language barrier. They’re not going to do it the right way. They’re not going to be able to write English very well, all these sorts of things. We have all these misconceptions about what they may or may not be able to do for us, and that can sometimes hold us back because we hear these things and we hear the horror stories of where it might have went wrong.

 

 

(05:57)
So we hold back in outsourcing to VAs and some of these misconceptions, they might not necessarily be misconceptions. Some of these might be valid because you can get the wrong type of person, just like any hire, if you brought ’em into your office, you can still get the wrong type of person. So you still need to manage VAs just like you would any other staff member, and you need to control what they’re doing with their time and monitoring them and giving them appraisals and all that sort of thing. But if you run it like you would any other employee and you are closely monitoring what they’re doing, then you can start trusting them, giving them more responsibility, and often the other misconceptions, you don’t have to worry about too much. And if you’re worried about communication and language barriers, you’re going to be able to deal with all of that at the interview.

 

 

(06:42)
If you feel straight away that there’s a language barrier, then obviously that’s not going to work for your business. So you wouldn’t hire someone if you think that there could potentially be a language barrier, but the person that’s great in everything else, then maybe you could just use them just for the administrative type task, but they wouldn’t have client communication or things like that. So you need to manage your VA in the right way and select the right one for your business at the time. So one of the big questions is do you need a VA at this time? Well, what I would say to you is if you are running a business that may be up to say 500K up to somewhere like three, four million, somewhere along the line, you are going to need someone to do some of these admin tasks for you.

 

 

(07:24)
And as we said, it’s normally this is the first hire that you get in because what we want to do is hand off all those 10 GBP, $10 an hour works that you shouldn’t be doing in your business. So if you are finding that your time is being taken up by those tasks, the reality is you’re not going to be able to scale. Or if you do scale, you’re going to cap yourself out and you may get to a certain level and then all of a sudden you become the bottleneck in the business because you’ve just got so much on your plate and you can’t hand things off. So if you’re feeling like that at the moment, and you’ll know when it’s happening, you’ll get a gut feeling that you’re just working all the hours, but just feel like you’re treading water and you’re not actually getting anywhere, then that’s probably the time to assess do I need a VA or not?

 

 

(08:08)
One other thing that you could do, which we highly recommend is doing a little bit of a time audit of your week. So I’m currently doing this right now actually. So interestingly, as you go through different growth phases in your business, you have to keep going back and doing these time audits because things creep in. So what I would be doing is getting an app like Clockify, that’s pretty good, a free app and you just track every single thing that you do. So you push the play button on it and then it’ll say, what are you working on at the moment? You say, right, I’m working on emails, and you’ll work on your emails for 20 minutes, half an hour, push the stop button, it’ll log that, and then you push play again and say, what are you working on now? Now I’m going to visit my sites, do that and push the stop button.

 

 

(08:52)
It’s a little bit arduous, a little bit painful sometimes, but if you did this for a week or two, that’s going to give you really valuable data about where you are spending your time. And if you start looking at that and thinking, actually, wow, I can’t believe that 50% of my time is being taken up by doing admin tasks at the moment, then you know that imagine you’ve got 50% of your time back and that’s the reality that people don’t realize. You don’t realize how much time you’re spending on doing mundane tasks. So we want to be handing these things off to individuals that are capable of doing this because our time is worth so much more, we should be focusing on our high value tasks. So I guess one of the questions is what sort of tasks can we hand off to a VA?

(09:37)
Well, if you’re watching this on video, I’m just going to share my screen now and show you some of the tasks that can be handed off to a VA. So, if you’re subscribed to me on YouTube, you’ll see this if you’re not, just listening out to some of these things that you can be doing. So one of the things you could look at is your calendar management. Could your VA help you arrange meetings with clients? Could they arrange travel and parking to these meetings? That could be quite useful. Obviously when there are changes and cancellations, they can go in and update them nice and easy for you. So a VA could be awesome for calendar management. Maybe it’s more of the admin tasks that you’re looking at. So it could be, as we said, the emails responding and filing emails away to be dealt with.

(10:24)
Ones specifically by you, maybe ones by your team members or accounts, can they file away your paperwork? So what some people do is if they do have a VA that’s in the country, they can actually get all their paperwork together in their receipts and they just post them all to the VA, and the VA can electronically file all this paperwork away. So you can become a paperless office. I’d highly encourage you just to become a paperless office anyway. You shouldn’t be having paper files in a business that’s no longer needed. And they can help you look at the mail. You could get your mail redirected to them if they’re in the same country and they could file that away and scan that and send it to you. They can prepare reports, they can schedule team meetings and certain events they can help you with your office supplies, things like that, order, those sort of things.

(11:14)
So these are some of the admin tasks that you could potentially be getting your VA to do. What about customer service? If they do speak good English and you find that language isn’t a problem, then can they respond to emails and phone calls to your customers? Can they give them updates? Can they help resolve any complaints or escalate complaints? If they can’t deal with them, can they help you process orders? Can they help you update your CRM system or your customer relationship management system? They can help with surveys to see if clients are satisfied, gifts or hampers that might need to be sent to clients when they sign up with you. So this could be a ton of things that they might do as part of customer service. What about sales support? There’s loads of things they could do in sales. They can help assist sales, organize meetings with clients, sending proposals and quotes and estimates, scheduling the sales meetings and calls.

(12:15)
They can report on your sales figures, how you are faring with your metrics on your sales, so lots of stuff there in the sales. They could also help you respond to social media and sales and leads that come through social media. That could be useful too. Project management support, helping with scheduling and project planning, tracking project progress and milestones, reporting back to you on how this is going. Communicating with team members, budgeting, financial reporting. So lots of things there. And again, if they were involved in the project management side, you would need to be paying a much more experienced VA to do this for you. So this might be maybe not the first hire that you get, but maybe a second hire. What about website? Well, if they’ve got skills in website, they can update your blogs, they can make sure the website links are correct and working well.

(13:11)
SEO, update the SEO and do keyword research. They can do regular website audits and identify areas for improvement. They can create landing pages for your marketing campaigns. We talked about the CRM earlier, so obviously the CRM system, your sales system is going to involve a lot of data entry. So that’s going to need an admin assistant to upload estimates and quotes to it and keep clients’ telephone numbers and emails up to date. So they can do all of that and help you set up campaigns within the CRM system. Again, with email marketing, they can help you prepare content if they’re good at content on email marketing, help you with your nurture campaigns so that you’ve got constant emails going out to prospective clients. They can send you reports on the analysis of those campaigns. So again, we’re talking about more advanced strategies here that qualified VA would have to do.

(14:06)
Are they good at content creation? Can they help you with your videos and podcasts? If you’re doing that, can they help you with your content creation? So can they give you suggestions on what videos and reels you need to be putting out there? Can they distribute your content across all your social media channels? Can they put out daily or weekly posts for you? Maybe you want them to connect with architects and main contractors. They could send messages out to prospective targets that you are going for or gather an email database up of contact lists of people that you want to target. If they’re good at design, they could help you prepare brochures and sales presentations and your estimates. They help you with the graphics again on your social media to make sure that all looks good. What about with HR? When you onboard a new employee, can they help train them up?

(15:00)
They can track sickness and holiday pay. Of course in construction, we have to think about health and safety and sometimes health and safety is a massive problem trying to keep up with all that paperwork. So could they be trained up in the health and safety side so that they can prepare risk assessments and method statements and all those reports that need to be provided for health and safety. So lots and lots of things that they can do. If you’re looking at this on a video and watching this on YouTube, there’s actually 180 VA tasks there. And if you send us an email over and ask for our VA checklist, or you may be able to find it on some of our social media posts that we put out, send us a message and we’re more than happy to send that over to you so you’ve got a full list of 180 potential tasks that you could get your VA to do.

(15:50)
So I hope that’s helpful and maybe that’s just opened your mind a little bit about what a VA could potentially do. And as we said, it does depend on how well they’re trained and their level of experience. So what’s the steps to finding a good VA for your business? Well, the first step is identifying what tasks you actually need carried out. And one of the dangers of this is sometimes we can amalgamate a huge amount of tasks together, like I just have on that VA checklist. And you might think, yeah, I want to do the calendar, I want to do social media, the website, project manage, talk to clients, and you give them a huge list that no one can fulfill and you’ll really narrow in the pool of who’s going to be able to do that. So sometimes it’s better just to hire a VA for a specific task.

(16:38)
So if you want a VA just to do social media, then you just get them to do that. There’s some that will have crossovers and they’ll be able to do admin and social media, but generally speaking, if you can bulk these tasks together, you’re going to find it much easier to get someone who’s highly skilled in one specific area. So initially, write down all the tasks that you want done and then write that out into a job role. We’ve spoken previously how you can use ChatGPT to help you in your business, and ChatGPT is awesome at generating job descriptions. So if you punched in a load of those tasks and said, right now give me a full job description for a VA for this type of role, it’ll list it all out for you, which can be really useful going forward.

(17:23)
Now, once you’ve got that job role, you then need to find a prospective VA, and there are many websites out there where you can find them, and it does depend on where you are looking. So for example, I was looking in the Philippines for VAs and I was looking on one called Onlinejobs.ph, which is a Filipino website, and it had a ton of Philippine VAs and all sorts in there. I mean, there was some highly skilled people on this website. It wasn’t just VAs. So I went on there, but there’s tons just searching to Google, find a VA, and then you need to put the country that you’re going to be potentially looking in. So it wants to match the time zones that you are going to be working in. So there’s VAs in, as we said, the Philippines, South America, South Africa, India, all these different places, potential candidates if you don’t want to be spending a huge amount.

(18:13)
But at the same time, if you’re in the UK or the US, you will find VAs that are highly skilled in those countries too, and they will cost a lot less than someone who’s got to travel all the way into your business. So you really need to work out what’s more important to you in that regard. One thing that is really crucial to do with your VA to make sure that it’s success is ensure that there is regular communication with the VA. So just because they’re working remotely, you still need to be, and maybe this is even more important because they’re working remotely, you need to be talking to them as much as possible. So scheduling a regular meeting, whether that’s at the beginning of the week to set out the task for the week, you want to be using tools to monitor those tasks.

(18:57)
So I would be scheduling meetings on Zoom. Say you could have Slack potentially for your communication or email. You want to be monitoring their tasks. So potential apps like Asana to assign a task list and monitor their progress on those tasks and timelines. So you want to be using good tools and setting those all up before you bring your VA on board. Because if you just leave them to it and you stay silent, you’re going to get a little bit frustrated. You won’t know what’s going on. So it’s so crucial that you communicate regularly with your VAs. If there’s a problem, don’t just sack them immediately. Have a look internally at why there’s a problem. Is it because you haven’t trained them well enough? Is it because you haven’t explained the task clearly enough? Can you put a process or a system in place to make it easier for that individual to complete their work?

(19:48)
So look internally first before you go and blame, because usually there’s something wrong with what we are doing, and oftentimes you can fix it with your procedures internally. Now, if you go and put those procedures in place and you train the VA on how to follow those procedures and then they’re still not following them and they’re making mistakes and just making a mess of things, even though you’ve done all of that, then yeah, maybe it’s the time to get rid of them, but don’t be too hasty in that regard and make them feel part of the team too. You share wins with them. If you’ve got a full team and you’re sharing wins with people in person, try and get the VA involved too. Make sure they’re there on the meeting in the background or have a phone there. So really help them feel part of a team rather than being isolated and not involved.

(20:36)
That will help ’em feel that they’re included in your company culture. We do need to bear in mind too though that there can be potential challenges with VAs because of culture differences. If we are going to go to another country, like for example in the Philippines, it’s common that you pay your VA one month extra as a bonus at the end of the year. So once you get to the end of the 12 months with a VA, you’ll pay them an extra month. And that’s just the way they do it. It’s just a bonus system that they have in place. You need to be aware of these different cultural things that are going on. There’s some other things that happen with my VA, for example, sometimes where she lives, she’ll have power outages and there’ll be typhoons and things like that, and all of a sudden, she’ll just disappear, offline for a little bit and she’ll come back on and somehow get a message me saying, I’m so sorry, there’s a power outage.

(21:26)
We’re hoping it’s going to be back on at five, and then all of a sudden she’ll be back and she’ll work later and get the task done. So you need to be aware of all these sort of things that could be happening with your VAs and you’ve got to decide whether you’re going to put up with that or again, hire someone from your own country if you can’t be dealing with that. Now, lots of my clients have hired VAs with great success and they’ve used checklists like I’ve provided there and we make sure they’re onboarded and interviewed the same way that actually, that’s one thing we haven’t really touched on is the interview process. You want to interview them the same way as you would any other employee. Make sure you get references, make sure that they have multiple interviews, maybe a telephone interview and then an actual Zoom interview with them.

(22:09)
Ask them the same questions. We’ve got an actual strategy called the higher strategy where we have a complete framework on how we interview individuals. So you need to come up with your own framework of how you’re going to interview them and when you know they’re a good fit, then obviously you can bring them on board. But as just going back to what I said, we’ve had huge success with VAs, with clients who’ve interviewed them. Well check the references and then onboarded them the right way. You really want to have a good framework in place for the interview process to make sure that you are asking the right questions and that references are being checked and all those sort of things. In our program, we’ve got a framework we call HIRE, H-I-R-E, and it’s a specific framework about how you find the good cultural fit, how you interview, the questions you should ask, all those sort of things.

(23:00)
But you need to come up with your own framework, and I would suggest that just as a broad stroke, what it should look like is make sure that you have a telephone interview initially just to rule out whether the language barrier is there or wherever else. So have the telephone interview to see if they’re a good fit. Then have the formal interview, and that might be one or two interviews that are done over Zoom. You may have other team members that you want to use, like management team members that you want to also be involved in, maybe a second interview, potentially. Do all those things. Check references, you’re going to treat the VA, no difference, any other person you bring on board when you are interviewing. So do it exactly the same way. Don’t cut any corners with that and make sure the onboarding process is then strong for that VA.

(23:43)
Don’t just leave them to it and expect them to understand how you work. You want to have good training in place and good onboarding so they can come in, feel part of the team, and they’re set up nicely with all the software and systems that you use. If you get those three things right, they’re the three keys really to having a good hire or setting yourself up for success is one, write out that job description nice and clearly of what you want the role to be, and don’t put too much in there. Don’t try and amalgamate too many tasks. So job description number one. Number two, have the framework in place of how you’re going to interview and follow that framework every single time. Write down all the questions that you’re going to ask and whatever else. Don’t just wing it. And number three, have a good onboarding process.

(24:25)
If you can do all three things, you’re going to really set yourself up for success with this VA coming on board. We’ve had huge success with VAs, not just personally me. I’ve had huge success with VAs in my company, but clients have had success with VAs too. They’ve used some of these strategies that we’ve talked about today with the job descriptions, interviewing, onboarding. They’ve understood what tasks they want carried out, so we know this is the right way to go. It saves you a huge amount of money, and you can generally overcome problems, what it’s going to do if you get the right VA for your business. Can you imagine if you managed to save yourself, let’s say, eight hours a week because you’ve handed off all those mundane tasks? Imagine never having to work a Friday again. I don’t work Fridays because I’ve handed all my tasks off, but imagine you don’t have to work Fridays.

(25:13)
You can go and play golf and do whatever else because you’ve won back eight hours of your time. That’s what a VA can do for you. So I hope that helps a little bit. Let me know in the comments or send me an email on if you’ve hired a VA, how it’s gone for you. Really love getting feedback from people and hearing how these podcasts are helping them. So let me know in the reviews. Don’t forget to subscribe to the podcast and leave us a review if you’re getting value from this. We’ll see you on the next one.

Greg Wilkes (25:50):

If you’d like to work with me to fast track your construction business growth, then reach out on www.developcoaching.co.uk.