How Hiring A VA Can Bring Business Success With Jen Lenher

KEY TAKEAWAYS COVERED IN THE PODCASTWhen it comes to hiring your first virtual assistant the most common objection is that you don’t think you can afford it. If you don’t stop doing those tasks that allow you to hire a virtual assistant, you’ll never be able to afford it. You must hire a VA first to get there. Even if you’re not incredibly profitable, it’s still a great investment.When working out whether or not you need a virtual assistant, write down the tasks you do every single day and think whether or not you are the only person that can do them. If not, you may want to consider hiring a VA. Think about whether or not these tasks are worth your hours.If you want to teach your VA how to do the tasks that you’re doing daily, screen record yourself doing those tasks and talk yourself through it. It takes no extra time to what you’re already doing, but it means you have a training video for any assistants you bring on board.When you place your VA job advertisement you must detail everything from the start. Make sure you make it clear they’re going to grow with your business, and that you want them to prove they’re the right person for the job. The best way to do this is to include a list of tasks you want applicants to complete in your job advertisement. Not only does it test their ability to follow instructions, but it shows you what skills they have.Once they have completed their tasks, you can narrow it down to those that you want to use and interview them. After your interviews, you can bring one of two VA’s on board for a PAID trial. Make it very clear what you want them to do in your trial and link them to the training videos you have already created.You must be making your virtual assistant feel as though they’re a valued member of your team. Do whatever you can to make them feel valued.THE ONE THING YOU NEED TO REMEMBER ABOVE ALL ELSE…One of the best ways you can succeed with a virtual assistant is to consider them as someone you want to grow with you as a business. You need to show them that they are of value.HIGHLIGHTS YOU SIMPLY CAN'T MISSIntroducing Jen Lenher – 13:51Alexa Flash Briefings – 19:00Hiring Your First Virtual Assistant – 21:57When A Virtual Assistant Becomes Much More – 29:00Finding Those Tasks You’re Repeating Daily and Training Your VA – 30:42Writing Your Job Advertisement and Using A Trial Period To Find The Perfect VA - 35:06Valuing Your VA - 46:00LINKS TO RESOURCES MENTIONED IN TODAY'S EPISODEJen’s One Hour Workshop On Hiring A VAJen’s Podcast EpisodeJen’s Blog PostJen’s InstagramJen’s TwitterJen's communityTranscript below Hello and a super warm welcome to this week’s episode of the podcast. How are you? I have just come back from two weeks away in the states having attended two different conferences. The first one was the Kajabi Summit, Kajabi Impact Summit, sorry. And that was a three day event in Irvine in California and it was run by Kajabi and they used their customers as speakers but boy did they have the best customers. Like when if I was to write a dream list of people I would want to watch on a stage, they probably had the same list. It was amazing so much so I decided to write a blog post about the summit and how good it was. I reviewed briefly the speakers and also wrote kind of what was their key takeaway or their key point and their learnings. So if you do want to go and have a look at that, I’m going to hook that up in the show notes for today because I never write blog posts or I rarely write them because I don’t like writing as you well know.. Hence why I have a podcast. But I was so compelled because it was so good and I knew I wouldn’t be home for a few weeks and I knew I wouldn’t have an available episode for quite a few weeks so therefore decided to write this blog post. Got that out. There within about a week which I was really pleased about although it did take me ages to write I will admit but it was a great conference. Really really good and Kajabi basically won me over. They are a great program. They have some amazing facilities in their platform and I am slowly learning more about it so that I can potentially put my stuff on Kajabi. So that’s exciting. Just a bit more work to do. And then the second conference I attended was actually a private event which was because I am part of James Wedmore’s Business by Design Next Level Coaching Program and he puts on a couple of events a year for those people. So there’s literally about 80-90 people in the room, all his coaches, he’s on the stage in front. There was a speaker actually but there isn’t normally because the event is really to be honest the coaching program rather than a conference where you sit and listen speakers. So the idea is, he tailors the individual events to the people that are in the room. He gets to do or he asked people for hot seats. He goes through particular problems. It really is an opportunity for you to have almost a month of one work with James and his team. So that was a really good event. They’re all really full on and very long days. So the Kajabi conference, they started when we actually got there at about 7 am to get a good seat. I know such a geek but as I like to talk about and funnily enough I talk about in today’s podcast front and center is always where you’ll spot me in a conference because you want to be right there in front of those speakers and I like people that are front and center and so when I’m speaking and I see those faces so I’ve always used as a tool myself. But anyway said they were they started like 7am and they went on till some of the nights till about 8 or 9 pm. So those were really long days, short breaks and then the conference for James Wedmore. His event again that started us sort of eight thirty and went through to seven thirty. So long long days they know how to do it. It just is so packed full of amazing stuff. So I’ve come away from that head headful of cool stuff, now need to kind of climitize back into the UK. I’ve done a lot of travelling these first three months or these last three months I should say cause in the fourth month and I’m really now looking forward to settling down a bit and getting some actual work done. What was great is during my time in the States, I was able to really clarify on my offer in terms of what I want to offer people to work with me because I do the podcast every week, which I love. I say that every week but I do love it and I love getting your messages so thank you for that and I’ve had some ones recently which have been just super lovely but I love getting your messages and I love doing the podcast. However people want to work with me, which is amazing and I’d love to work more closely with people so I’m putting together a structure of how you can work with me and there’s gonna be different levels and different price points. So look out for this it’s gonna be coming and I don’t want to be sales-y about it now. I’ve decided that I’m rebelling a little bit against some of the marketing strategies that I teach which sounds completely ridiculous. It’s not, bear with me. So you know how I’ve just started doing my email and I emailings you all if you’re on my list every single week and it’s a very personal email from me to you guys and I’m writing it. I’m trying to add value but I was thinking about this when I was coming up with subject lines for these e-mails and previously, I would do subject lines that have your name in there. So it might say, “Hey Teresa, hello from California” or something like that in the actual subject line. And then I thought to myself, if I was writing an e-mail to a friend or to a client or to a colleague would I write their name in the email subject line? No, I don’t think I would. Would you? I didn’t. I don’t think I’ve ever done that. So why is it marketing, we think putting that name there is going to attract us to open the e-mail. Now I can argue why that would work. But in my quest to be as authentic as possible and because I get tired of trying to be sold to in a really sleazy sales and marketing way that I want to kind of do this in a much more positive and less sleazy manner that I was looking at some of these marketing tools thinking, actually that’s interesting that I would do that previously but I would never do that to a friend or a client. So that’s the way I’m trying to treat everybody. That’s the way I’m trying to put my message and my marketing across now so that I can do it as if I was talking to my friends because that’s what I see you as. All you lovely people that listen to the podcast, that interact with me, that get my emails and respond to me which is amazing. I see you as friends and people I want to work with and therefore I don’t want to treat you like I’m sending you some sleazy sales message. So I just wanted to get that out there and just let you know where we were and what I was thinking. So anyway like I saidm great few weeks done loads conferences, head’s about to burst but I am so glad I’ve got the next few months.. I think just about at home. I am speaking at a couple of UK events; one tomorrow, one next week in London. But most of them I mean they’re going to go up and down in the day or maybe just one overnight. But hopefully my case is going to be well stored at least for a few months which is kind of nice because I can get on with some work. So anyway on the today’s podcast episode and it’s gonna be a really good one. I am interviewing my very lovely friend Jen Lenher. Now I have a great story to tell you about how I met Jen which we do talk about on the interview as...