How A Virtual Assistant Can Help Propel Your Freelance Career!
I am going to dive straight in with a couple of questions for you.
- How much time have you spent on non-income generating work in your business this week?
- Did you know you can hire someone to take care of it for you?
What do I mean by non-income generating?
On a basic level, time spent on non-income generating work is work that is not earning you a fee at that point in time, but which is necessary for the running of your business.
They are those ‘ten-minute’ jobs which take you down a rabbit hole and before you know it, your entire day has been stolen and you have a client deadline looming.
I am thinking along the lines of
- Sending invoices
- Competitor research
- Posting on social media or engaging with followers
- Responding to emails
- Updating your website
I bet when you started your freelance work, you didn’t bank on how much time would be spent on these sorts of tasks and not on client work.
Completing these ‘admin’ tasks often results in pushing your working day into the evenings and weekends, and although I am sure an element of you accepts that erratic hours are part and parcel of freelance life and the flexibility is fabulous, on the flip-side the overwhelm can be real and have a significant impact on the quality of your life.
So, did you know you can hire people to take care of your admin?
This is where people like me, Virtual Assistants, step in with the power to lighten the load and literally transform your business and as a by-product, your life!
What is a Virtual Assistant?
A Virtual Assistant is a self-employed freelance administration professional who tends to work from home and support one or several clients with admin tasks. Some Virtual Assistants will have a generalised skillset whereas others will focus on just one service such as social media and/or one industry such as fitness or real estate.
How can a Virtual Assistant help me?
First of all, think about the tasks that are not directly linked to your freelance work, such as those listed initially. You know what you are doing with them but they just take up too much time. How long does your invoicing take per month for example? Say it was two hours. How much could you earn in two hours? Compare that to what you would pay a Virtual Assistant to take the task off your hands. What is the difference?
That’s more income in your back pocket!
Virtual Assistants can also help with tasks where you aren’t sure what you should be doing, for example, social media. You know you need to have it so you can stay visible in your space, but you don’t know the difference between Facebook and Instagram and someone else said Linkedin is worth posting to. Or should you just focus on Twitter? What does engaging mean? Should I be making reels? How do I do that?
Stop. Hand it all over……
How should I work out what I could hand over?
Start with a list of absolutely everything you do, whether it’s daily, weekly, monthly or less frequently. Tally up the hours and work out what
- could be delegated to someone else if you showed them how
- other admin tasks you know you need to be doing, but haven’t had the time/knowledge
You know your freelance business inside out and having an initial list of tasks is a great starting point for having a chat with a potential Virtual Assistant.
Where can I find a Virtual Assistant?
Well luckily due to the boom in online work, Virtual Assistants are absolutely everywhere!
Taking your first step towards delegating tasks can feel like a huge leap of faith and you are going to want someone you can trust and build a rapport with first and foremost, so initially why not ask your network for a recommendation to see if they have suggestions.
Just put a post out on your social media platforms and in any professional groups you are in. Someone is bound to have used one previously!
The next step would be to check out their credibility as you would do with anyone you are hiring for work. References can feel too formal in the freelance world, but certainly check out their social media pages and reviews on Facebook and Google to get a sense of who they are.
If this yields nothing, then there are agencies you can approach and many other freelance work websites where they have profiles.
What if I only have one-off projects I need support with?
This is a conversation to have at the time of an initial enquiry and the response will vary depending on how the Virtual Assistant runs their business.
I run my own Virtual Assistant services as a pick-up, put-down operation, and have never set minimum hours with any of my clients but that’s a personal choice. I have several regular clients who all give me around about the same amount of work each month without the need to formalise it, and I also have some clients who use my services just now and again if they are particularly overloaded and I will accommodate this wherever possible too.
However, minimum hours with monthly retainer fees are fairly commonplace within the industry.
How can a Virtual Assistant help my freelance business grow?
When you started, what vision did you have of your freelance future? Did you become self-employed so you could pick your hours and work flexibly for yourself so you could have more time with your family? Maybe it was uncapped earning potential, so unlike the stifling employed roles you had had in the past.
Whatever your ‘why’ was when you set up your business, with your time-consuming tasks delegated to a Virtual Assistant and freeing you up, you can dare to go there again!
Jen Taylor is a freelance Virtual Assistant in the U.K. who is living her freelance dreams. She began her career with a background in events and worked as a trainer in the hospitality industry for 7 years before deciding during her second maternity leave in 2015 to give freelancing a try. As she gradually increased her hours and client base, she found herself working with a variety of clients from a dental marketing consultant to a haberdashery and sewing school to a private scanning clinic to child sleep consultants as well as a COVID-19 scientist. She is currently living her maternity leave pipedream of being able to work around her family and is now teaching others how to do it too with her Udemy course, How to set up as a Virtual Assistant. You can learn more about Jen at www.jetvirtualassistant.com
