The questions of “how do I?” versus “can you?” raises a really interesting problem. I’m Kristy Smith from Virtual Elves, and today I want to talk to you a little bit about when you’re considering bringing on a virtual assistant, the questions that you need to be asking yourself to make sure that the tasks that you’re giving that virtual assistant are within the realm of what they’re able to do for you.
Let’s look at the “how do I?” questions.
If you’re going to a virtual assistant, and I see this consistently when I’m doing my initial calls with clients to find out whether they’re right for our business, if someone’s coming to me and saying, “You know what? I need a virtual assistant to tell me how to do Facebook ads and show me how to do my MailChimp newsletter because I really don’t know what I want to do with it. I just want them to tell me.” The problem here is that, number one, you don’t really know what you want yet.
You need to understand the outcome that you’re trying to achieve first.
More often than not, you actually need to get your strategy sorted out first by going to somebody that can give you that strategic advice around what actually needs to happen in the implementation side of things because I want you to understand that a virtual assistant is more about process and implementation. It’s not necessarily about strategic advice and understanding best practise of doing things. That’s where they’re going to rely on you to give them that discipline and that direction so that they’re doing what you are trying to achieve in the business, not what they think so that it leaves room for a lot of interpretation that potentially might not work for either of you.
What I ask you to do is just have a think about the questions that you’re asking when you’re saying you’d like a virtual assistant to do something for you.
Is it “how do I?”, or is it “can you?” Now, the can you, as you can imagine, is, “I’ve developed a strategy around my Facebook ads. Can you please do this, this, this, and this to achieve that?” Yes, you’ve got to give them KPIs and milestones along the way, and yes, they should be experienced in actually using Facebook ads in the first place, but the process and the way that you want it done is really how you need to present that task to them, not, “I need Facebook ads. Can you just do it for me?”
This is a really interesting situation. I want you to start thinking about that before you bring on a virtual assistant. There will be some instances where you can find someone that can give you that strategic advice when you don’t know what it is yourself, but you need to present it in that way to say, “I really don’t it myself, so I need somebody with a little bit more experience in that area to be able to give me that strategy and that advice, not a general virtual assistant who I’m expecting to know that stuff.” I hope that’s been quite helpful for you, thinking again about “how do I?” versus “can you?”. Have a great day, guys, and I’ll see you at the next one.
