Welcome to another episode of the podcast that teaches you how to be a ridiculously good virtual assistant.
Today I want to talk about how to become a virtual assistant.
Today’s Quote: It’s not about ideas. It’s about making ideas happen. – Scott Belskey
Click the play button above to tune in, or choose your favourite podcast player below:
Connect with Tracey D’Aviero, VA Coach and Trainer
Episode Notes:
Starting a VA business is pretty simple.
It’s a service business, so there isn’t a lot of startup cost involved – I always say if you have a contract and a way for your clients to pay you, you can start taking on clients.
Of course there is more to it than that, but essentially that’s all you need.
So many women get stuck on allllll the details and never get started.
But if you have admin experience, you can say yes to a client today. You are ready.
Today, though, I want to help you get set up the right way – with the right plan.
Here are the five pillars you need to get in place to start your VA business the right way.
Choose Your Services
The very first step you need to take to set up your business is to choose which services you will offer your clients.
It sounds limiting but it’s not. After all, if you are a general admin VA, you can do a lot of things.
Yes you can, but do you do everything well? Do you love everything you know how to do?
When you are starting a VA business, you are not buying yourself a job.
You are doing what you want – what you love – what you are GREAT at.
And that means you can take some things off the list.
I know how to do a lot of stuff. I don’t do it all for clients.
We did that in our corporate jobs – we did whatever was needed.
But business is different. We can do whatever we want, and leave the rest.
When I start talking with a VA about their services, it’s often a surprise to them that they get to say NO to some thing, and yes to others.
It’s a mindset thing, for sure, but we do get to make all of the decisions in our business.
When I ask VAs what they love to do, their voice changes and their eyes light up and their whole body language changes when they talk about something they love doing.
THAT is what you should be offering in your business.
Choosing your services is a step that so many VAs don’t even do, and then when someone asks them what they do, it comes out as a garbled mess .. and the person they are talking to has no idea how they can help them.
Clarity in your marketing and in your networking is going to be the fastest way for people to understand how you can help them in their business – which is exactly what your business is all about.
Support. Helping others with their business stuff.
Choosing your service offerings is the key to being able to have conversations (and creating content) about it.
Your service offerings are about your expertise. What you can do best. What you love to do.
It doesn’t matter what someone needs help with.
Let me repeat that, and I want you to write it down.
It doesn’t matter what someone needs help with.
If someone needs what you offer, and what you love to do, and what you are great at, that’s what matters.
You do not need to do whatever a client asks.
You do not need to learn anything to get clients.
You already have expertise. You already have experience.
So … what do you want to do for your services? Identify that and you’ll be on your way to getting great clients!
Set Your Rates
The next step is to set your rates.
You must know how much it costs to work with you, before you start talking to potential clients.
Every client will ask you this question.
And yet I would wager to say that the majority of new VAs I talk to do not know the answer.
If you don’t know how much it costs to work with you, you will stumble over the answer to this question (or worse, not answer it at all), and the client will not be inclined to say yes.
Your rates are the driver of your business.
You need to make money to stay in business.
Remember all those things we want, in our dream to work from home.
Here is where we simply turn it into an idea and then a plan.
You have to calculate how much money you need to earn in your business, in order to understand how you can make it work. In order to understand how to talk to your clients about money.
Money is a funny thing. So many people don’t like to talk about it.
In business, you have to talk about it.
Buying someone without knowing how much it will cost you never makes sense.
It’s scary and it makes everyone nervous.
Your clients are no different. They need to know how much they are going to invest to work with you, to make sure that it’s a good financial decision for their own business.
It’s your responsibility to calculate your own rates so that you know you are charging correctly, and then to relay that information to the client as clearly as possible.
Whether you are going to bill your clients hourly, or by the package, or the project, you need to understand how your rates are structured, and why.
The why part helps with the confidence you have in talking money, but it’s also important because if you know why you are charging a certain amount of money for xyz service, then you now have a plan, not just an idea.
I’m not going to get into how to calculate your rates in this episode, you can pick up my rate calculator package to do that – but I want you to know that when you do the math, you will set your rates much more accurately than by just picking a number out of thin air, or guessing from what others charge.
What I do want to say is as you start to network with potential clients, you are going to want to have a money conversation. Be confident. Don’t leave it out of a conversation, because it’s arguably one of the most important deciding factors for someone as to whether they will work with you or not.
Use the word budget – ask them what their is. Put the money squarely into their lap.
It doesn’t matter what your billable rate is – what matters is what the client is willing or able to spend, and then you can tell them what you can do with their budget.
You can’t go into McDonalds and get 5 Big Macs for $20. You can’t tell them what to sell their Big Macs for. They tell you. You know your budget is $20 – and then they tell you how many Big Macs you can get for that amount of money.
It is exactly the same for your clients. You offer services. They have a budget. When you have calculated your billable rate, you know precisely how much of the client’s tasks you can do for the amount they are able to spend.
It is not your responsibility to do everything they need for what they want to spend.
This is the most important information you need to understand about setting your rates for your VA business. You’re in charge. You set them. And then the client works with them.
Make sense? It should!
And it’s why I’m still shocked every time I talk to a VA who doesn’t do the math to set their rates properly. Do it!
Choose Your Target Market
Tracey you talk about target markets so often.
Yes I do.
Just like we talked about getting specific with your services, and calculating your rates, we are going to talk about who you can help with your services.
Being able to start your VA business and get great clients, is so much easier when you know who you are best suited to work with.
Sure, you can help everyone. Or almost everyone.
But if you don’t choose a target market, you could be walking up and down the main street of where you live knocking on every door, hoping someone will need your services.
You will probably do a whole lot of educating. This is what a VA is. This is why you need one.
And you can do that if you want, but I will tell you it’s a much slower process than going straight to people who need exactly what you offer.
And that’s really all a target market is.
It’s a group of people who need precisely the services you offer.
It’s like going into a meeting with a group of astronauts with packages of dehydrated food.
Sorry for the example, I watched The Martian again recently.
Isn’t that a great movie? We rewatch it all the time. Just great!
And speaking of making ideas happen – holy cow, he grew potatoes on Mars!
But really if you go into a meeting with a group of astronauts and you provide dehydrated food options, you are in your target market, aren’t you?
Everyone there needs what you offer. They might not need it right now, but they all basically need it at some point.
If you go to a local business networking event and you bring your dehydrated food, you might find one person who needs it.
That’s the difference between choosing a target audience and not choosing one.
Everything we do in our business should be a good use of our time.
After all, we are doing most of the things ourselves. So give yourself a leg up and go to where the people are who really value you and need you are.
if you offer general admin services, get specific on what kinds of things you do, like we talked about earlier, and then go to that local networking event and connect with people there.
An entrepreneur group can be a great target market – if they all need client care or social media or whatever, and that’s what you offer, that’s a target market. Your target market will be based on what your services are.
If you offer blog writing and SEO, maybe the locals aren’t going to be a good target market for you. Maybe you need to target people who are using blogging as part of their marketing strategy- people who work with their clients online and who need their blog to showcase their expertise.
There are many, many industries that use virtual assistants these days – and the more specific you can get with who you can help, the more you can tailor your content and activities toward them.
If you want to target real estate agents, then you will be able to speak very specifically about what you can do to help them. Not ‘general admin’, but ‘posting listings online, booking showings, gathering feedback, closing documents, property listing promotion’ and whatever else.
I don’t help real estate agents, so I don’t know what they need, but you get the idea.
When you know your target market, you will use language that they use and you will be able to talk very clearly about what you can do for them, and you’ll know why it’s important to them.
A target market makes your plan much clearer.
And as we know, clarity helps your clients say yes!
Create a Marketing Plan
Oh yes, you have to market your VA business in order to get clients.
It’s wonderful to think (dare I say dream) about clients banging our door down as soon as we launch our business.
That’s rarely the way it happens, sad to say.
It takes work. But I can tell you that if you do some real work making a good plan that works for you, that marketing in fact becomes very easy.
With your marketing plan, you will want to know who your target market is and where they spend their time getting support for their business.
This can take some effort in the beginning, but once you find where that places are, all you need to do is create content and start networking.
Sounds simple, but that’s because it is. If you are creating content for every social media platform about offering general admin services for everyone under the sun, you are wasting your time.
When you find an entrepreneur group filled with people where your target market is hanging out, showing up, and looking for help, and you become a part of that community, half the work is done for you.
Your marketing efforts are so much more targeted, and you will get much better results.
It’s taking your idea, and making it happen … starting to see the pattern here?
Network to Find Clients
The last of my five pillars is networking.
The best way to get great clients is to talk to people who are in business.
if you are nervous to have business conversations, it’s most likely because you don’t know what to say.
A lot of VAs are introverts – me included.
I love my alone time, but networking doesn’t make me nervous anymore because I know what to say.
And you can do it too.
Let’s recap what we have talked about so far.
You need to choose your services. If you know, clearly, what services you offer, then you can talk about those in any networking situation.
You need to set your rates properly. If you know how to talk about budget with people who may need your help, you can talk about that in any networking situation.
You need to choose a target market. If you know who you can help, and specifically what you can help them with, you can talk about that in any networking situation.
You need to create a marketing plan. If you know where your people are, you can find people to have business conversations with.
So networking is just about having conversations. With people you know you can help. Who are in a place where they are networking with people they can help or get help from.
That’s the key right there. When you are staring to do some networking, don’t go to your family and friends and hope that they will hire you.
I hear this all the time. It’s deflating to your ego. But guess what? It’s not their fault – they simply don’t need your services!
It’s also not their responsibility to hire you just because you are a VA.
Find the people who you can actually help – we defined them earlier in this episode.
Don’t try to sell someone something they don’t want or need.
Instead, find the people who do need and value the services you provide, and talk to them.
Don’t try to sell them either actually.
Just have conversations. That’s all networking is.
Have you ever walked into a department store or specialty store and had a sales associate ‘greet’ you at the front door? I can’t stand that.
You know they work on commission, and you know that they want to make a sale.
Even if that’s their policy, that they have to greet you, there is a feeling there as the customer that you are just waiting for the opportunity to pounce.
My dad used to call the guys in the AV department at Sears the vultures. To get to the toy section in Sears (and I think the lawn and garden section too), you had to go up the escalator (our of the clothing and perfume sections) and the AV department was at the top of the escalator.
So as you got to the top of the escalator, these guys in suits were standing right there, I can see them so clearly, and they would greet you and ask you what you were looking for today.
It was so annoying, even to me as a little kid. My dad would always say it as we approached. Oh, here come the vultures.
And you would have to awkwardly answer them, knowing that they are just doing their jobs, but that you a) are headed to the toy section, b) headed to the garden section, or c) interested in sitting in front of one of the tvs in those couches, but you aren’t going to buy a tv today.
We would often leave my mom downstairs in the clothing section and hang out in toys, there was no sale being made.
Anyway! All that to say, don’t be a vulture.
Make conversations. Get to know people. Become a part of the community that you are networking in.
Ask people what they need help with and offer help if you can.
When you look at networking as a community and conversations, it becomes much easier – and more fun too.
Not everyone you will meet in your networking group will need your help right now. Don’t push them into it.
Maybe they are just hanging out in toys while their mom buys back to school clothes, you know?
But when you become a part of the community, you will be the person they think of when they do need help.
Having business conversations is the single most effective way to build your VA business to the dream you had. I can promise you that. Master it and you’ll have a great VA business.
So those are the five pillars to becoming a virtual assistant.
Yes, you need to set your business stuff up. Yes, you need an invoicing system or process. Yes, you need a laptop and a dedicated work space.
These five things are the most important things to work through to ensure that your business will be a success.
The good news is that none of them are rocket science, right?
Take your time and do it right. You want it to work. You dream about it working.
Put your ideas on paper, and then work the steps to make them happen.
Do You Need Help?
If you need help making your ideas happen – and getting your virtual assistant business started right now, get in touch with me. I’m here to help. It’s the only reason I’m here at all, as you know. To help you become a ridiculously good VA.
I have helped hundreds of VAs who are stuck get moving through private coaching, group coaching, and live and self study trainings. If you want to talk about how we can work together, let’s connect on a Cut to the Chase call. You can book yours at YourVAMentor.com/chase
Thanks for tuning in this week! I’ll see you next time!
What You Need to Do Next:
Let’s work together privately to get you to your really big goal. It’s the fastest way to get results and we can start right away. Learn more about private coaching here.
The Virtual Circle (TVC) is a monthly mastermind group for Virtual Assistants just like you. We get together 3 times a month for group Zoom sessions to talk about what you are struggling with, working on, or celebrating. It’s a close knit community of your VA colleagues that provides the best kind of support for your VA business. Learn more about TVC here.
My self study program Getting Started as a VA can help you get your VA business started easily and quickly too. You can sign up right away and be on your way to getting clients by the end of the program, with all the right foundations in place. Check out the program here.
Click here for more tips to help you with your productivity and time management in your Virtual Assistant business.
Reach out to me if you need to talk about where you are stuck and what the right option might be to get you moving. It’s literally all I’m here to do is help you get to where you want to go. Book a complimentary Cut to the Chase call with me here.