A Productivity Expert’s Guide to Working with a Virtual Assistant

Over the past five months I’ve worked closely with a virtual assistant (VA). This article summarizes what I’ve learned about the best ways to handle the working relationship, in the form of a guide for anyone who wants to do the same.

Hiring a VA can be an absolute game-changer for your productivity, effectiveness, and peace of mind. As important as it is to optimize your own time and effort, there is huge potential upside in bringing on a real human, with all their own abilities and knowledge.

But I say “can be” because it depends a lot on how you set goals, expectations, and policies. In this guide I’ll give you my recommendations for how to do so, along with numerous examples and templates you can use for yourself.

If you have any questions not answered here, register for the Forte Labs Slack at https://community.fortelabs.co/ and join the #virtualassistants channel.

Hiring a VA

The service I worked with is called Belay Solutions. They are a full-service matching and management service for virtual assistants based in the United States. All their VAs are U.S.-based and native English speaking.

If you decide to try them out, I’d appreciate if you used this affiliate link, which gives me a referral fee: https://mag.isrefer.com/go/BELAY_VA/TForte/

For your first VA, I highly recommend working with a service like Belay. They provide:

• Strict vetting of VAs that accepts only 1-2% of applications
• A thorough matching process including an interview and survey to determine your needs
• The option to request a man or woman as your VA, and your choice of timezone
• An onboarding and training process for their VAs which includes best practices on communication, time management, and common productivity tools
• Access to a dedicated Facebook group for fellow VAs, where they can share tips and ask questions of more experienced peers
• Periodic check-ins with a dedicated Relationship Manager (RM) to make sure the relationship is working for both parties

The bottom line is, they take care of much of the administration and logistics required to work effectively with a VA, so you can get the most value for your money. For your first time, it is well worth having all this support to make sure everything runs smoothly.

COST

My general recommendation is to pay at the high end of the scale. This means between $20-$30 USD per hour. You can easily find a VA in Asia or Eastern Europe for a few dollars an hour, but you’re always going to have to be double checking their writing, correcting their mistakes, and second-guessing whether you can trust them with a project.

By paying at the high end of the scale, you’ll get someone with significant administrative experience, who speaks English good, and who is somewhat familiar with U.S. and international business culture. You don’t realize how many unstated expectations and norms there are until you work with someone who doesn’t know them.

Belay charges a $595 activation fee to get started, and then $1,560 per month, which entitles you to 10 hours of service per week, or 40 hours per month. This comes out to $39 per hour, which is on the very high end of the scale. Again, I believe this is justified for your first VA, because there is so much to learn and so many ways for it to go wrong.

After 6-12 months, when you’ve learned the ins and outs of working with a VA, you can easily hire someone overseas for $20-30 per hour and manage them yourself. Fortunately, most of the systems and processes you create with one VA are easily transferrable to another.

This means you are looking at $19,315 for a full year of Belay, or $9,600-$14,400 if you opt to hire someone yourself at $20-$30, respectively. In either case, I think 10 hours per week is the minimum to have them be engaged and up to date with the pace of work. This also makes it feasible for you to be their only client, which I think is ideal.

In other words, this is a major expense. Don’t take it lightly, because you really are hiring a human to invest a huge amount of their time and energy into your work or business. You will also be investing an extraordinary amount of not only money, but more importantly, time, trust, and energy in someone you will likely never meet in person. It’s worth doing it well.

AUTOMATIC BILLING

My strongest recommendation, regardless of which route you choose, is to set up automatic, fixed-price billing. You should be automatically charged the same amount every 2-4 weeks, even if your VA doesn’t have enough work to fill those hours.

Automatic billing creates a pressure on you as the client to constantly be giving your VA things to do. This is essential, because for the first few months it will take you much longer to package up and explain a task than to just do it yourself. This creates a powerful disincentive to assigning tasks to your VA, especially when you can “save money” by giving them less to do in a given week.

The best way to balance this with an equally powerful incentive is to know that you’re paying them whether they have anything to do or not. As an entrepreneur or freelancer, the idea of paying someone to sit around is maddening. This will convince you to invest the time to assign tasks to your VA, which eventually will pay off as they learn your habits and projects.

Best practices for working with a VA

Here are my recommendations for how to work effectively with a VA over the long term, from most to least important.

MAINTAIN A STANDING WEEKLY VIDEO CALL

I strongly recommend maintaining a recurring weekly check-in. So much can happen in a week, it’s important to get on the same page even if you think all the needed tasks are totally clear. And I recommend doing this as a video call whenever possible, because a lot can be conveyed with body language.

I use the Zoom video-conference app, and turn on automatic recording for every call:

You can find this setting by logging into your Zoom account, clicking “My meeting settings” in the left sidebar, and clicking the “Recording” tab

I set the default recording location to a folder on my computer that automatically syncs to Google Drive (using the Backup and Sync tool). This folder is shared with my VA, which means that she has access to the video recording within 20-30 minutes of the end of a call, with no additional action required on my end.

These weekly calls generally take 20-30 minutes, but I schedule it for an hour in case something more complex comes up. I usually spend the 5-10 minutes before the call looking over the agenda and thinking of any questions or new tasks.

MAINTAIN A STANDING AGENDA

What do you do during this weekly standing call? You go over your standing agenda, which I keep in a Google doc, which is saved in my bookmarks bar.

Click here to see my actual standing agenda for the last 5 months, with only last names, passwords, and some links redacted.

This document serves many functions. Throughout the week, we both jot down questions, ideas, clarifications, requests, etc. to form an agenda for our next meeting. During our meetings, both of us have this document open and take notes on everything we discuss. Our agenda turns into meeting notes, which we can both refer to retrospectively if we need to.

The structure of this document is very simple. Each meeting has its own heading, which is the date. The bullet points below the heading contain the main points covered in the meeting. We try to summarize any next steps at the end of the outline, for quick reference during the following meetings. But since this doc is only used by two people, you can keep it pretty informal.

SET UP A SHARED PASSWORD MANAGER

The most useful tool when working with a VA is a shared password manager. I use and recommend 1Password, but I’ve also heard that LastPass works well.

These apps allow you to set long, difficult-to-guess passwords for your online accounts, which is a very good idea security-wise, but then have a centralized app that “remembers” them for you. You “unlock” this app using a single master password, and then the app fills in the password for a specific site for you.

The 1Password interface on Mac