#2 How a VA can help you grow your business with Louisa van Vessem

Podcast

How can a VA help your business? In this episode of Starting to Scale with Emmie Faust, I talk to Louisa van Vessem who says she performs virtual magic to make awesome businesses flow seamlessly. We all want more of that, don’t we?

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The differences between a PA, EA, and VA.

  • The Virtual Assistant (VA) title is a bit generic as it doesn’t actually describe their skillset. There are many different types of VAs but they don’t always highlight their key specialisms and experiences.
  • The top tip here is if you are looking for a Virtual Assistant, make sure that you are very clear as to what exactly you want/need help with.

 

How can a VA help your business?

  • VAs can help you with a huge range of tasks.  These include diary management, social media, organising meetings, competitor research, content creation, proofreading, organising events and much more. I wrote a post a while ago with more info on this: why hiring a VA is great for business.
  • Louisa suggests setting aside some time to log everything that you do in your home and business life and make a note as to how long it takes you to complete the task. Then review what you are doing and how long it takes and whether you can outsource that to someone else (or whether you even need to be doing it in the first place!).
  • There are always going to be some tasks that you are better placed to do, rather than outsourcing to a VA – where that person might never quite get it. For me, I wouldn’t outsource LinkedIn as I want it to be in my voice. However, what works for me is getting someone to proofread my content and my blog posts.

How do you find a good VA and the right one for what you need?

  • There is no set way to finding a good VA (other than checking out Louisa’s business below). Generally, it’s worth asking around, researching on LinkedIn – it might take a while to find the right one for exactly what you need.
  • You need to have confidence in your VA. When trying to find the right VA, have a conversation with a few and see who you connect well with and their approach and how they would tackle the tasks that you will give them.

What should you pay a VA?

  • The standard rate is about £25-£30 an hour, though there are people that charge more, especially those with more experience.
  • You get what you pay for to a point but for me, it’s not about the hourly rate it’s the value that they bring. In some cases, it’s definitely worth paying more as you save time in the long run.
  • Find a VA that doesn’t need spoonfeeding – someone that can grasp what you are trying to do and that can hit the ground running.

Louisa’s offering as a VA

  • Louisa has a VA business which is a one-stop-shop with a team of associates that help her and her clients with creative, technical, and strategic consulting – reviewing processes and inefficiencies.
  • She is also a LinkedIn Mentor. She really understands how to use it properly and effectively and she now shares that insight with others through 1:1 training. Louisa loves LinkedIn and gets loads of traction – one of her recent posts got over 350 comments. Wow, that is a lot of liking and responding to comments!
  • Louisa loves helping and supporting people and using her experiences to help clients be successful in what they are doing.   She is always up for having fun and bringing the human element to work.  We all love human connection, don’t we?

 

Related LinkedIn post

 Find out more about Louisa here:

P.S. I know Louisa is really good because when I sent her this blog post (which I had read through and checked before sending it to her), and she came back to me with about 10 corrections to make it read better and where I had messed up the grammar. So if that was a little test, then she passed with 100%!

Thanks to Matt Duggan from Click Start Digital for the little testimonial at the end. I interviewed Matt in episode #4 – Digital Trends 2020 with Matt Duggan. 

You can also connect with me – come and say hi – Emmie Faust on LinkedIn.

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