5 Things Your Virtual Assistant Wishes You Knew

Hiring a virtual assistant can be a time saver and a life saver for busy entrepreneurs and businesses. An on-demand employee without the overhead costs. While there are definite perks to using a virtual assistant - there can also be inconveniences along the way for both the company and the assistant.

These are the five things your virtual assistant wishes you knew. 1) Communication is king. We aren't mind readers. Working virtually means that everything must be clearly communicated and instructions need to be detailed. Especially in the beginning phases of working with you. Most of us are pretty motivated and intuitive but there's a learning curve involved with every new client. We hate to waste time as much as you hate to waste money so it's always better to over communicate rather than under communicate. 2) We're not always on. We have families, personal lives and other obligations. If we aren't working we probably want to disconnect. Being a VA means that many of us work non-traditional hours and we are connected way more often than we want to be already. If we have friended you on Facebook, Twitter or another platform in order to manage your accounts for you, please don't tag us in work related posts and such. If you need to share something with us send an email or create a document that we both have access to. 3) We love recognition If we were working in an office with you, you'd probably occasionally treat us to lunch or grab us some Starbucks to show your appreciation for our work. That isn't feasible with a VA but we still love to hear that we're doing a great job and we're valued. 4) Take our advice Often when you hire a VA it's for a specialty focus like - social media management or ghost writing. You chose us because of our experience and qualifications, just like any other employee you'd hire. The added bonus is that we have knowledge of what is producing results right now in the ever changing world of algorithms, posting schedules and target markets. If we're offering you advice on something it's because we've done our research and we are trying to save you time, money and headaches. Especially since we will probably be the ones repeating the project again to fix the issues. 5) You're probably not our only client It's rare to have a client who needs us enough to be exclusive. There's many times we're juggling 10+ clients and as many as 20 projects simultaneously. If you're going to have projects coming up that are labor intensive or have a tight timeline it's a great idea to give us a warning. We will usually adjust our workload with other clients to accommodate it. We want your business and for you to be happy with our work. Honestly, most VA's love what they are doing. We get the flexibility to work from home, set our own schedules and work on a variety of projects. The ability to flex our creative muscle and expand our qualifications is great too. Everything just runs a little smoother when everyone is on the same page about how to work well together. If you're looking for an assistant that specializes in social media marketing and ghost writing please feel free to give me a shout and see if we'd be a good fit for each other.