Busting common myths and concerns about working with a VA
Hiring a virtual assistant to support your business growth is a great way to get reliable, flexible, and specialist support. But as with all contract and freelance-style services, you’ll find there’s a huge range of people who can offer your business virtual assistance.
With the range of quality and lack of strict regulations come many common misconceptions about what it’s actually like to work with a virtual assistant. Understandably, you’re protective of who you let into your business and might feel cautious about hiring a VA.
As a team of virtual assistants within our agency, we hear many of these concerns from prospective clients and are here to bust those myths in this blog post. We want you to be able to make an informed decision about whether it’s the right choice for you now or in the future.
The truth about working with a virtual assistant (VA)
There are so many myths surrounding virtual assistants. It’s a largely unregulated field, meaning many people can offer virtual assistance, and with this comes some disparities in people’s experiences.
You have to bear in mind that the quality of work, skills, attitudes, experience, and costs vary with each VA. What happens too often is someone works with a virtual assistant who doesn’t have the skills and knowledge they need, has a bad experience, and writes off the process forever.
Finding the right VA (or team of VAs) can take some time, as you have to evaluate what your business needs and find a great match. But when you do, they can push your business to new heights, reduce your day-to-day stress, and become a valued part of your team. The key is to find the VA that suits your business.
Let’s bust the top 5 the top myths we hear most frequently about working with a VA:
You need to deal with time zones and language barriers
The first myth we hear regularly from prospective clients is that they need to work with VAs in different time zones, or someone who doesn’t speak English as their native language.
Yes, there are lots of amazing VAs working out of India, the Philippines, and elsewhere around the globe, but they fulfil a specific need and certainly aren’t the right choice for everyone.
It’s important to understand they aren’t the ONLY choice – there are many highly skilled, professional VAs in the UK and within Europe who work in the UK time zone. If you don’t want to deal with time zones and language barriers, you don’t have to!
But if you work with clients globally, you may want to have support in other locations, so having the option to work remotely with a range of VAs is potentially useful, not something that should be considered an issue. Remember, a VA is there to support you – not to add more stress.
Managing a VA takes too much time
Another common worry from busy, often overwhelmed, leaders is that managing a VA will take too much time out of their already packed schedule. When you hire the right VA – someone who has the skills and experience you need – this simply isn’t the case.
In fact, working with a VA can save you a HUGE amount of time in the long run as you’re no longer the CEO of everything. After the initial delegation stage is out of the way, many of our clients wonder how they ever managed to keep so many plates spinning before they had a VA by their side.
Yes, you need to invest a little time upfront to ensure you clearly communicate your priorities, ways of working, and other key information to your VA… but we’re talking a few hours to save potentially hundreds of hours in the long run.
A VA is there to give you more time, so any VA that does the opposite is not a good fit for your business and you might want to look elsewhere. Here’s our guide to finding and hiring a great VA for your business needs.
A virtual assistant won’t understand your business
Next up, we often hear prospective clients fretting that a VA won’t understand their business. But in our six years as a VA agency, although each company has its own unique qualities and approaches, we’ve never encountered this being an issue.
A good VA will flex their skills to best support your goals. In time, they will learn your specific business needs and become great at thinking ahead to what you need before you know you need it (we call a great VA your ‘second brain’). But you don’t need them to understand every technical detail of your products/services from day one…
What you do need is support behind the scenes to keep the wheels turning from someone who is super-organised, has great attention to detail, thinks on their feet, and knows how to prioritise.
And if you decide you need a VA with specific experience, there are plenty of specialised VAs in industries including construction, healthcare, technology, and so on… You just need to seek them out.
VAs are hard to trust with your business
Trust is an essential component of any relationship, so it’s no wonder that you worry about trusting a VA with sensitive information and your detailed business operations. Please don’t let any nervousness put you off getting support because there are many incredibly trustworthy VAs running highly professional operations.
You must establish that know, like, and trust connection before you start working together. There are a number of ways you can find people who can really deliver what they are promising, including:
- Ask your network for recommendations on platforms such as LinkedIn
- Research people you meet at networking or industry events
- Search on Google for the type of support you need
Once you find a potential VA, check their credentials and get a sense of the type of person they are, how they help clients, and their professionalism by doing any of the following:
- Check out reviews on their website or LinkedIn
- Read case studies of how they achieve client results
- Ask to speak to a current or past client they’ve worked with
- Interact with them on social media
- Sign up and read their newsletters
- Book a discovery call to get to know them
We encourage clients to start delegating low-level tasks and building up slowly when they have any worries about handing over the reins for their business. It’s a great way to build that all-important trust with your VA.
Your data won’t be safe with a VA
Concerns about having your technology and data in safe hands are valid. But it’s an easy issue to overcome – all you need to do is just ask any prospective VAs how they handle your data before you start working together. We would also advise that you ensure they have appropriate insurance in place (professional indemnity and cyber as a minimum).
In our agency, we have obtained the Cyber Essentials Accreditation. Plus, we work with an IT partner who carries out a health check on the laptop or PC of every team member before they commence working with us.
We also have a strict IT and cyber security policy which every VA attests to following. This policy includes guidance around equipment, email accounts, data handling, password management, multi-factor authentication (MFA), PC protection, and smartphone security. Virtually Priceless is also registered with the ICO, who handle data protection. All of our clients and team members have a data processing agreement in place.
So provided you check how a VA will handle these aspects, there’s no need to worry about your data or technology being compromised.
Work with a trusted VA to get more time to grow your business
Many of these common concerns really are just myths that often come from misunderstandings or opinions based on someone else’s bad experience. When you do your due diligence to find a trusted, reliable VA that suits your needs, you won’t have any issues.
Working with a VA is a viable, effective solution for so many businesses, especially those who are looking to scale efficiently. If you need support from a VA but you’re not sure what that could look like for your business, take our free quiz: What level of support do I need?
At Virtually Priceless, we work with a range of clients to grow their businesses by taking away their day-to-day stress and becoming a trusted partner, and our VAs are always matched to the client’s individual needs. To discuss how we can help you with virtual assistance, get in touch.