Simple Tips to Help You Manage Multiple VA Clients

This week I received an email from a VA who said that with all the training that people offer for Virtual Assistants, she hasn’t found anyone who teaches how to work with multiple clients.

She had some specific questions about how to manage her client work. I understood that she was asking how to collaborate with clients and make sure that you had boundaries and procedures in place to ease the flow of work back and forth. She replied that it wasn’t what she was looking for.

So we dug a bit deeper, and that’s when we got to her real question: how do you put systems in place to manage your workload during the day?

Her specific example was how to manage the email of multiple clients during any given day.

That’s an easy one!

Ask the client how often the email needs to be checked and answered. Then log in once, twice, or however many times during the day and check it then. I advise against leaving it open all day. It makes it impossible to track the time you have spent on that particular task, and it can be distracting to other work you need to get done. It’s important that with all client work you have a clear start and stop time.

Here are a few tips about how to set up a work plan that will help you maximize your efficiency, while still giving the client the attention that they deserve:

The first thing to consider is how you work. What kind of systems have you used in the past that have worked for you? For instance, I am a pen and paper person. I like to write things down. So I use a spiral notebook to track all of my to do’s for the day. I find it easier than logging into the computer to check what needs doing. Then when I finish something I record the task time in my spiral notebook so I know how long something took me to complete. You can use any number of systems to track the work you need to do, but be sure that you keep everything in one place, and that you have the means to check off things that are done, and that you can coordinate your list with your billing (some systems even integrate task & time & invoicing in one).

The second thing I do is to batch my work for each client where possible. So if a client needs two or three things done today, I will try to do all of that client’s work at the same time, to cut down on the ‘stop and start’. I find it helps me to be more productive when I do it all at the same time. Another option for batching work is do ‘like’ work at the same time – ie do all client newsletters at the same time, or post all of their social media. I prefer to keep each client’s work separate, but again whatever works for you is right for you. Batching your work into packages of time is not only efficient but it’s also better for your billing purposes. Making sure that your client is getting what they pay for is half of it, but also making sure that you are not wasting your time (and hard earned money) is important.

Finally, I use a simple project management system to track my calendar and larger list of projects. It’s called GQueues and it’s the simplest task list I have found (that I actually use!). You can set up many different clients and tasks and set deadlines to ensure that you don’t miss anything. I put every client task in there, each under their own task list, and then my deadlines are synced with my Google calendar, so it’s available to me to keep tabs on anytime. I build my daily task list using the master list in GQueues. I find it very effective. There are many different systems out there that can do the same, and more. Find one that works for you that is easy and supports your work style.

Managing the work of more than one client does take a bit of practice – it’s important to plan your time so that you are maximizing your productivity, and asking simple questions like this to other VAs about how they do things can really help you to make the decisions that help you run a better business

Keep in mind that your productivity is the most important piece, and look at how you can efficiently do things.

For more tips and information that you can implement in your VA business, visit my blog at www.yourvamentor.com/blog.