administrative virtual assistant

Francis

Although this does sound a little bit arrogant, I like this metaphor; a virtual assistant is not magical like a “fairy that swings a wand” and leaves your site perfect. But, the virtual assistant is the closest you can get to cloning yourself. So, think of it: how do you say this stuff for pottery, the material for pottery?

Eric

Clay?

Francis

Clay, yeah. So, think of it, the assistant being clay. If it’s a good assistant who’s willing to learn and adapt to your business and is willing to please you (the employer) he/she is probably open to suggestions and improvement.

And, if you also have a trusting relationship and put lots of effort into training him or her, then the clay metaphor makes that “assistant” as close as you can to a second version of you.

So, when you want to clone yourself because you have to go to your day job and want to continue taking care of your business, you have to put in quite a bit of training into the assistant.

Eric

Right, yeah. And, that’s what I noticed. At first, I thought, okay, I could give my assistant any kind of task and they could sit down and be able do exactly what I wanted them to do without a whole lot of training.

And, that was just totally not the case. It took me, I’d say at least 4 or 5 days to kind of get them to understand exactly what I instructed and get the rapport between the two of us working together well.

And, then after that, it seemed like things started working a lot better as far as communication is concerned and, as far as they (The VA) understands what I wanted and a frequent communication between the two of us to kind of get a lot better.

Francis

Yeah. I think that’s the main reason why a beginner in outsourcing has this sort of assumption. – Actually, I probably have something similar – it’s from the marketing of 5 or 4-hour work week and other stuff like that.

Of course, they want to sell their products so they have to slightly exaggerate it or only tell you the good parts without openly telling you all the bad parts.

And, especially, on my part, I really believe in being super transparent with even the bad parts. So definitely, the good part is that you can hire someone at a very affordable price when you go overseas in some developing countries.

And that’s definitely good and a breakthrough in the mind of many people who are not aware of that.

But, the bad part (sort of), is the amount of training and patience you have to bring up and many people are not ready to bring that to the table.

Eric

Right. I think, for me too was that I didn’t have the necessary funds. I didn’t want to waste a whole lot of money trying to train them. Because, I thought, okay, I’m kind of limited on funds in the first place and if I’m going to take a week of my money to kind of train them, then that’s a week of money that I felt like it was going down the drain.

In reality, that’s investment money that you’re putting back into your business where you’re training that person.  Where in the future they will know exactly what they need and what you want a whole lot better and a lot quicker.

Rather than not train them at all or not putting the proper training in place.

Francis

Yeah, I agree. Also, if you put yourself into the shoes of your assistant – I think one of the main fears your assistant obviously has is that he/she will not get paid. That he will be scammed out of his money.

There are lots of scammer employers who do this just because there are masses of virtual assistants that you can try to scam and the other way around is also possible.

But, I think the investment at the beginning especially is really just to set up the communication channels such as:

• share the Dropbox accounts,
• email accounts,
• how to communicate,
• how often they should be reporting

And although this is paid time, this is also a test for the assistant to see if you are paying them.

I strongly believe that many assistants are sort of a little bit not so invested into the relationship from the beginning because they don’t have a written working contract that will guarantee those three months of payment.

Even if they had that—for them, for example, from the Philippines to legally pursue you in the US and vice versa. If they are scamming or damaging your business then just go in hiding, you have no chance.

Eric

I think that was one of the things that I was concerned about. At the beginning, I thought, “Am I going to hire this person and am I going to hire them and they’re not going to be getting any work done? I’m going to pay them and not get exactly what I wanted from them”?

And I noticed that usually 99% of the people that I worked with did an amazing job. They wanted to please me as much as they possibly could. Because, if you think about it that this is their livelihood, it’s their business. It’s the way that they make their money.

In the beginning, I thought, “They’re going to scam me. This is going to be a big rip off and they’re going to take my money and ran off. And I’m not getting any of the stuff that I was asking for.”

But, what I noticed was that every single person that I worked with has been very eager to please and wanted to give me exactly what I was wanting and would go over and above even to give me exactly what it was that I wanted.

Francis

Yeah. This is an experience that you have made especially with VA’s from the Philippines in comparison to other countries or in general?

Eric

Well, I think in general, because I’ve worked with virtual assistants from all over the globe. I worked with some from India, from Bulgaria, from Hungary and different places, and I’ve noticed, for the most part, mostly all of them are very eager to want to give me exactly what I want.

They’ll say, “I will give you as many revisions as you want,” for a particular thing or they’re just very eager and give me exactly what I’m looking for.