How and When Do You Hire a Virtual Assistant?

Author or Speaker? How and When Do You Hire a Virtual Assistant?

You’ll want to think about spending your hard-earned dollars on an assistant (or a team) who knows your specific goals; and understands your purpose and mission as an author, speaker or podcaster.

By Lorianne Vaughan Speaks

O one of the biggest mistakes people make is hiring the kid down the street for cheap. Even though that kid knows some things about social media and technology they’ll never be able to help you run your business past those few minor tasks. And, they don’t have (normally) the experience to deal with changing business priorities.

You’ll want to think about spending your hard-earned dollars on an assistant (or a team) who knows your specific goals; and understands your purpose and mission as an author, speaker or podcaster.

Here’s a helpful list of what qualifies someone to be a VA:

They are current or past fulltime admins who want a few extra hours to supplement their income.

They are self-motivated

They stay on task and aren’t easily distracted

They have strong communication skills

They have experience with the kind of work for the project you need help completing.

When you hire someone, who has the time management mastery down, as well as the insider knowledge and resources specifically tailored to help your area of focus, the results can be magical.

In the January issue, I gave many sources to find virtual assistants for any small business. This month, I wanted to focus on the speaker/ author/podcasting space. This community is filled with amazing people with great stories and programs they offer to the world. That doesn’t mean they are great business owners!

As we all are learning to up our game in the Success Champions Facebook group, and other trainings from Donnie. He says you need to delegate so you are spending your time on your high-priority, revenuedriven capabilities. If you are a speaker/author/podcaster – then you should be focusing on your message, writing that book and taping your shows. Virtual assistants could take over tasks such as:

Guest scheduling and coordination Production Social media posting (you need to be consistent) Invoicing/QuickBooks Proofing/editing your books, blogs and articles Researching new stages to speak from Data Entry CRM updates Travel/Logistics Just plain organizing your life! I have a client who moved from an income of $1500 a month to six figures just by hiring her first VA to take over all the minutiae. Consider what you could do if you had an extra 10-20 hours a week!

How do you know if you need a virtual assistant?

If you’re spending forty percent or more of your time doing administrative duties, you need someone on your team. And when you let them help you with those kinds of tasks, get ready for the freedom to write, tape your message, and step onto stages more often - because you’ll actually free up your schedule enough to be able to do what YOU do best.

Virtual assistants can work on things like calendars, bookings, editing, social media, and so much more. You cannot scale yourself, but you can economically hire a VA for as little as 5 hours a week.

Everyone in business needs a support staff. Taking the leap to hire

your first helper is scary. But not as scary as burning out and failing in your business because you didn’t have the time, energy or knowledge to do what you needed to do to make it all work.

Lorianne Speaks is an expert in the area of Speaker/Author/Podcaster support. She amplifies the visibility of Authors/ Speakers/Messengers while they do what they love - SPEAK! Lorianne has helped spearhead multiple best-selling book campaigns - editing, proofing, through to launch and social media marketing to help authors create buzz and momentum throughout the social media platforms and increasing their message World-Wide. Lorianne and her team have made it their mission to empower these messengers to deliver their message by handling the rest of the details! https://www. LVSConsultingServices.com.