This is episode number 68 of The Growth Booth. I'm Aidan Booth. Welcome to the show. Today we are continuing from where we left off last week talking about Virtual Assistants. Last week, I spoke about how to find a virtual assistant, some of the expectations you might have of a virtual assistant, the kind of jobs that they can do for you, and a few things you might want to consider before hiring a virtual assistant. You can check that out at thegrowthbooth.com, episode number 67. As always, we also publish the video version of that on YouTube. If you want to see the video version, then you can head over to YouTube.

In this episode, episode number 68, we're talking about what happens after you've hired a virtual assistant. I'm talking about retention. I'm talking about managing your virtual assistant, and some best practices to make sure that you get the very best out of the relationship that you have with your new employee, who will hopefully go on to become an absolute superstar in your business.

It's important that you think a little bit about managing your virtual assistant and put some time into this because the output that you get is going to be directly correlated with the relationship that you have and the style of management that you have. Also, you're working on different time zones for the most part, and it's going to require a fair amount of trust going both ways, but you can get incredible results without needing to overcomplicate things too much. I 

I'll dive in here first by talking about managing some of the day-to-day tasks. I think at a fundamental level, what you should be using are project management tools and apps to streamline and centralize your approach to management. Now some of the tools that we use, and I touched on these in the last episode as well, but include things like Trello. That's one of my favorites right now. Skype, Loom, Notion is another one. These are good to communicate a series of tasks around a project and be able to sort of make sure that you've got an open line of communication and that any communication that you have is tied to a specific thing.

So in particular, I like Trello for this, and I also like Basecamp as another one. They are superior in my mind to the likes of Skype for project management because you can have conversations that are sort of organized by threads. You might be doing lots of different tasks with your virtual assistant, and one of them might be related to social media. Now, that social media conversation that you have can be in its own thread. Imagine, on the other hand, just trying to communicate everything and all of your ideas back and forth with your virtual assistant through something like Skype. It can get quite messy and cluttered. That's why I like the likes of Basecamp and Trello for that. G Suite is good for file sharing. We also use Dropbox a little bit and Toggl is a good tool for time tracking.

The project management tools can provide a centralized platform for communication. This just makes it so much easier to communicate and share information. Some of the tools that I've mentioned should help you with that. You can also use these tools to track tasks, to add deadlines, to make sure that the tasks are being done in the right order, and that's going to improve efficiency, and productivity, and also just make sure that you and your VA are on the same page. 

Project management tools can also help facilitate better collaboration between you and your VA. If you've got multiple people working together, then it's also going to help with that because the whole team is going to be able to see what's going on. With the production of this podcast, for example, I have a virtual assistant who manages a lot of the different moving parts, but I've also got a show manager who manages the higher-level ideas that we've got with the show. We've then got a video editor who handles the video editing, and we have someone else who handles the communication of the podcast episodes via email and social media channels out to our subscribers.  We manage all of this through a Trello board, and it's easy for me to see at a glance who's doing what we're up to and add in any bits and pieces that I want to add.

It also makes my life easy because all I need to do is sit down and record an episode like what I'm doing right now. I hand it off to the team, and when I say hand it off to the team, it takes me about 1 second to add a note into one of the Trello boards and say "Episode number 68 has just been filmed," and then everything else happens on autopilot. This is the power of leveraging a team, but it's so much easier when you're using something like Basecamp or Trello is what we use for this podcast.

Social media management is one of the easiest things that you can outsource to a virtual assistant. In this day and age, a lot of the different projects you're working on probably require some kind of social media management, or if they had social media happening, it'd be beneficial. This would be one of the things that I would recommend you consider. I have one of my VAs manage all the social channels for my business, so she creates different posts for the different channels. When I say the different channels, I'm really talking about focusing on Instagram and Facebook at this point.

She manages them through Hootsuite, which is a social media account management tool. And the beauty of this is that we can schedule dozens of different posts at any given point in time. So we're not going in and having to actually post every day. We can also manage comments and reply to comments and so forth so much easier. From my standpoint, this is less important, but what's important for some people is I don't have to give up my passwords to any of my social media accounts either. I can just give this person access to Hootsuite. There are others out there, I think there's another one is called Buffer, but there are a bunch of them out there and that's enough for them to go in and do the job. They create the content, they curate the content, they can write captions, design graphics, add videos, pretty much anything you can imagine.

This is something that's getting easier and easier or faster and faster, more and more dynamic with the advancement of AI tools, which we're going to be talking about in another of the upcoming episodes. I know my virtual assistant likes to use Canva for creating social media images. Photoshop is another good one if it's a blog. WordPress is something that you might want to use to sort of get involved in the social media posting as well. Hootsuite is great for scheduling your posts and managing them. You can also have your virtual assistant engage with your followers as well. They can engage using their own name. They could engage on your behalf. They can reply to comments, messages, mentions, and this helps build out a community. If that's one of your goals, then this is an area that a virtual assistant could be absolutely indispensable. I know that my own virtual assistants probably know a heck of a lot more about social media than I do because they are significantly younger than me and more switched on to those types of channels.

Now, the next thing I wanted to talk about with regards to managing your VA on a day-to-day basis are payment methods. This is something that you would have fleshed out when you were testing out and getting to know the virtual assistant. But just to recap on that here, and to give you some more insights into the different ways that you can do it, sometimes you can pay direct into a VA's bank account. PayPal is an option; however, PayPal often have fees associated. Just be sure to factor these into your costs and to make sure that you're paying the fees and that your VA is not left with them.

You can also use remittance centers the likes of Western Union to send money to the Philippines. And again, I'm assuming that your virtual assistant is in the Philippines here. These services charge fees as well, but you can talk to your virtual assistant about how often you want to make the payments. It may be beneficial for them that you make it once a month versus once every single week or something like that. There are other online payment platforms as well, the likes of Payoneer and Wise that allow you to transfer funds into your VA's bank account or e-wallet in some cases.

The next thing that comes to mind when thinking about managing your VA is motivating them. There are multiple different things that you can do here. I mean, ultimately, I think what you're trying to do is set up a good working environment for them. One way you can do this is by paying competitively. You can hire a VA for $2 an hour, but it's not going to be very attractive to someone in the Philippines, especially when you consider the foreign exchange costs and just the cost of living in the Philippines. You're not going to get much motivation by paying $2 an hour. I think that the sweet spot is between $3 to $10 an hour. As your VA gets more experience and as your business grows, then hopefully boosting them up closer to $10 an hour, that's going to be quite motivational.

The thing to remember though is that one of the beauties of hiring someone in the Philippines is that you can pay significantly less than what you may pay in developed countries like the United States or other Western countries. Paying $5 an hour could be pretty attractive to someone in the Philippines because the cost of living is so much less. I know that Argentina, for example, this is another example close to home given that I live in Argentina, people are also attracted to earning in dollars that they don't really want to earn in the local peso currency because there's so much inflation. This can also be a side benefit that you might not have thought about, but can definitely be a benefit for someone in a developing nation, certainly like Argentina and potentially like the Philippines as well.

Another way that you can motivate your virtual assistant is by sharing in work benefits, so worker benefits. If you think about your virtual assistant, if they were working in a corporate job in the Philippines, they may be offered health insurance, they may be offered retirement plans, they may be offered paid time off, they may be offered maternity leave, and other things as well.

As someone hiring a contractor, you can choose to offer these or not. I basically come in on the end of I want my virtual assistants to be happy. For the most part, this is something that I would prefer to package up as part of their compensation plan. You can talk to your virtual assistant and find out about this, and it may just mean a marginal bump in the hourly rate, and you say, "Look, I'm going to be paying you a little bit more so that we can participate in the health plans," and so on and so forth that exist in the Philippines.

Another thing that exists, not just in the Philippines but also in Argentina, for employees, are a 13th month pay. The 13th month pay is something that's legally mandated for all employees in the Philippines, including Filipino VAs, and it's kind of like a year-end bonus, and it's equivalent to 1/12 of the annual salary, so it's equivalent to an extra month. This is something that also exists in Argentina. I still haven't really got my head around this because I would have thought that the compensation would be covered in whatever the annual salary is, but for whatever reason or no reason at all, there is a 13th month pay. It's not only a legal requirement, but it also shows that you value and appreciate their hard work and contributions to your business, so I think it's just something that's good to do.

Saying that's a legal requirement, I'm not sure that as a contractor there's any legal requirement for you to pay that. It's not really my area of expertise, although I would find that pretty hard to believe given that you're hiring someone on an hourly basis as a contractor. If they were a full-time member of your team, then that might be different. But what I'm doing is always hiring my VAs on an hour-to-hour contractor-style basis and saying that, and regardless of that, I still think it's a good idea if you've got someone on your team full-time to pay them the 13th month. It's a small bump. I guess it's like a 10% bonus. It sort of works out to be over the course of a year, but it can mean a huge amount to them, especially at a time of year when things can be more expensive with different festivities happening.

I think it's also important to give a raise when it's been deserved. The most important factor to consider here is the performance of your virtual assistant. How long they've been with the company is probably something to consider as well as the loyalty that they've given. I think you can decide this based on the financial health of your business. Obviously, if your business is really struggling, you might not be in a position to do this, but if your business is thriving and your virtual assistant is a key part of that, then consider giving pay rises from time to time when it's deserved.

You can also provide other incentives as well, so you can offer opportunities to your VA to learn new skills, attend conferences, and training programs. You can send them to industry conferences. You can give them the opportunity to travel, either to travel to meet you in a fun place, to work from different locations, and you can provide them with equipment as well, or you can cover different costs, like Internet costs if you wanted to do that.

Recently, one of my virtual assistants had an issue with her laptop and she wanted to upgrade her laptop, but it was quite a financial outlay to buy a brand-new laptop, so I bought the laptop for her, and we just deducted the payments for that laptop from her salary over a course of ten months. Basically, providing financing for things like that, and this is just one thing that you could do. You could just offer to buy the laptop for the VA as another option.

Another thing to think about is to agree on the paid days off. There are a lot of public holidays in the Philippines, but then you've also got to take into consideration sick days and vacation days. You just want to be clear about your stance on these from the get-go. Do you expect your virtual assistant to work every single day, five days a week, 52 weeks a year? Is it fine if they take their own local public holidays off? Do you expect them to take the days off that are public holidays in your country?  The way that I do it is to recognize the public holidays that they have.

Obviously, if they're sick, then I want them to recover, and I don't want them working at the computer. Because they're, for the most part, on an hourly basis, if they want to take a couple of weeks of vacation, then that is also sort of self-correcting because they can take vacation days, but they're on an hourly rate, so they're not specifically paid for those necessarily. If they're on a full-time contract though, then you might want to work that in and say, "Look, with your contract, you've got two weeks of vacation time per year," so it's really just about managing expectations, and there's no right or wrong to what you offer. The key is that you communicate whatever it is.

With regards to communication, I think maintaining an open-door policy is the absolute key here. You want your virtual assistant to know that they can reach out to you anytime to discuss concerns, feedback, or questions that they may have. You want to be open and transparent about your decisions, your actions, and your plans, and you want that communication to be a two-way street, though. One of the most frustrating things when you hire someone else is if you can't get through to them when you need to get through to them. This is important, and one of the most important things for me in my business is communication. I say to any team members, not just VAs from the outset, that I need an easy way to be able to get in touch. I expect that my virtual assistant or my team are going to be paying attention to their emails and Skype multiple times throughout the day in case I need to get a hold of them.

You want to be clear on tasks and you want to keep yourself open for questions about them. The best thing that you can do is to give a clearly defined task. I like to give an objective approach to doing it. So I'll say, "Look, this is what I want to end up with and this is how I do it. You might find a better way of doing it, but this is how I do it. This is what I want to end up with and these are the most important things." I use Loom a lot for this. Loom is great because it gives a screen recording of your desktop, of what you're seeing on your screen. It provides sort of an over-the-shoulder demonstration if you like. It's a great way to teach. I always come back to, whenever I'm teaching anything to any of my team, is first I do it, then we do it together, and then I hand it off, and they do it. One of the best approaches to this is to think about what kind of training could you give someone so that you never, ever have to do a certain task again. That's creating a standard operating procedure, essentially, which could just be a simple video.

One of the things that I mentioned in the last episode was expressing appreciation, so saying thank you, making sure you recognize achievements, and participation in achievements of different things that your company may go on to achieve. It doesn't cost you anything, it doesn't cost you money, and it doesn't cost you time to say thank you. It can be a really important part of maintaining good rapport and morale with your team. That's definitely something that I think you should add into what you're doing.

Finally, here, I think sharing company goals and sharing what the bigger picture is can make sure that your virtual assistant feels part of your company, because oftentimes these are people that are working from their own homes. They could be 5000 miles or 10,000 miles from where you are, and it's easy for them to feel disconnected. But if you have a meeting once in a while and they're included in that, or even if it's not a meeting, if it's just an email that you send them, talking about the bigger picture, making sure they understand why you're asking for certain tasks to be done on a day-to-day basis, then I think this can help you get on the same page.

Now, if you don't feel like you're ready to delegate tasks, I would just ask why that is. Because task delegation has a very low risk, for the most part. You can choose what you want to delegate and you can start just by dipping your toes in the water. You don't have to get too crazy with delegating mission-critical elements of your business. When I got started, the very first job that I outsourced was writing. It was writing blog posts. And this was something that had very low risk. I was paying on a content-by-content basis piece for that part. But even with VAs, where you're not paying on a delivery specifically, you're still only paying what is, for most people, a pretty low amount on an hourly rate, you've got the ability to be able to test people out before you hire them. What's the worst that could happen? You go through the process of trying to find someone, it doesn't work out well, that's fine. You wouldn't have lost any money, and you would have probably picked up some good experience.

I'm absolutely a fan of hiring virtual assistants. And anytime I get an opportunity to snap up a virtual assistant, I do it. In fact, just recently, I was able to hire a new virtual assistant who used to work for a friend of mine, no longer works for him. He said to me, look, this person is a superstar. You're going to love working with them. I snagged them up because I will always find work for them to do. I'll find new ways that I can be more efficient in my business, and I'll tap into some valuable experience that they might have as well. I'm a big fan of virtual assistants, and I think you will be as well if you start using them.

Check out episode number 67 of The Growth Booth if you haven't seen that already. That will give you some more insights into some of the things that you can do as you're getting ready to hire a virtual assistant. I will see you here on the next episode of The Growth Booth. Talk to you soon. Bye for now.