Virtual Assistant Business

A virtual assistant is a person that works remotely to help a company or person with day-to-day tasks. The awesome thing about virtual assistants is that you can hire them for very cheap from places like India and Singapore and get businesses to pay you more than what they cost allowing to make profits just by outsourcing the work. In this section we will go over how you can hire virtual assistants for your virtual assistant company and how you can find businesses that will pay you for these services.

The first thing you will want to do is choose an industry you will focus on providing your services to and choose what services you want to offer. You can focus on providing assistants that have site building experience, cold calling experience, marketing experience, social media management or any other specialized skill you can focus on advertising for. They should also be capable of simple tasks like email management, appointment scheduling, and using basic computer software. You can choose to focus on service businesses for example and offering them appointment schedulers and social media managers. Regardless of what you choose, make sure that you start out with a niche in mind and specific services you will pitch to them in person and with your website that you will build later on.

Next you will want to set up an LLC and business bank account for your business. You can check out how to do this in our how to start a business section. You will use this business bank account to receive all payments for your business and pay expenses from so that you are organized come tax season. You can also get a business credit card once you start showing income with your company and you can set it up to auto withdrawal the full balance from your account so that you avoid interest and benefit from points and cash back on your purchases.

Once you have your LLC and bank account you will want to set up a TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook for your company as well as a personal account on LinkedIn if you don’t already have one. We will use these accounts to market with later. You can check out profiles of other virtual assistant brands to get ideas for posts and how to set up your bios. You will also want to check out some virtual assistant sites in your niche to get an idea of how to set up your site. You should clearly list the virtual assistant services that you are offering, and list the prices for these services with a payment processor allowing them to purchase your services on the spot or set up a zoom call so you can go over your services and close the deal. For your set pricing they can pay for right away, you can offer full time service for a monthly rate that renews automatically, or part time service billed the same way. Once they pay, they should be prompted to enter their email and phone number so that you can reach out to introduce their assistant and the services they can help you with in detail. You can learn how to set up payment services and make a site in our section on how to make a professional website.

Now that you have your online presence taken care of, you will want to set up an account management software that will allow you to track tasks from your clients and assign them to the assistants that you have helping them. Trello.com is an amazing service that you can use for this and it is very affordable for what it allows you to do and the amount of assistants you can add to the platform. A software like this will keep your assistants’ tasks organized and make sure nothing slips through the cracks.

Now that you are all set up to run a successful virtual assistant company, you will want to hire some virtual assistants that you can outsource work to. The best way to find virtual assistants to work for you is to go on fiverr.com and upwrk.com and message all the virtual assistants you can find. Don’t order their services on the platform but rather get the WhatsApp numbers of these people and talk to them on there about using there services outside of the platform you contacted them on. Keep in mind that anything you do off of a platform will not be insured by the platform you found them on. However, this is the best way to find cheaper work and make deals with people that run offices in other countries that can provide you with plenty of work out of the offices they run. Come up with a monthly rate for each client for part time and full time work you outsource to them, and you can haggle with these people on WhatsApp to get a great deal that you can make good money up charging to your clients. You can set up a payment structure with them that allows you to pay only once you receive payment from your clients or you can pay them each week as they provide their services. Either way try to protect yourself from allowing someone to run off with your money but understand that most people on these platforms would rather have long term work than run off with a little bit of money.

Now that you have your assistants, it is time to find some customers for your virtual assistant business. One of the best ways to do this is by using the LinkedIn profile you have set up and paying for a premium account for $100 per month that will allow you to direct message people outside of your network. You can search companies in your niche and message owners and managers about your services. You can say something like, Hey ___, I run an online assistant service for companies in the ____ industry and I know that I could save you a fortune on administrative work (or whatever service you specialize in). I would love to hop on a call with you when you have the time. If I can’t save you a substantial amount of money, then I will reimburse you for your time. My cell phone number is _____ I look forward to talking soon! You can be confident of this fact because almost every company has employees that they pay high wages to that do basic tasks that could be completed by cheaper labor remotely. You must put yourself in a business owners’ shoes who is trying to save money and increase profits. If you could replace an employee that is costing a company $5,000 per month with one of your virtual assistants that costs $1,000 per month, you would be saving that business owner $48,000 per year! Now that is something that a business owner would love to hear about.

Another way you can make use of this same tactic is by searching for business owners on Facebook. You can simply type business owner or sales manager on the search bar and start messaging the people that have those titles in their bios. You should also join groups with business owners and managers on Facebook and start by just interacting with posts and adding value to conversations. Once you make a name for yourself in these groups you can begin introducing yourself and the services you offer.

You can also simply search for businesses in your Niche around your area and go to their physical locations or cold call and try to get in touch with managers and owners. Use the same proposition that we mentioned in our message example and promise them that you can save their business a lot of money. You can also go to networking events for business owners in your area and introduce yourself and the services you offer there. Make business cards for yourself on Vistaprint.com and exchange them with business decision makers at these events so you can follow up with them later. The goal at these events should be to make as many introductions and gather as many cards as possible.

Search up public records for businesses around the world that could use your services as well. You can find who owns any business by using a states’ business records service website. Once you get the name of a business owner, you can go on a skip tracing service like beenverified.com and search them up to find out their phone numbers. Then you can get to work calling these owners and pitching them in a similar way that we did with our message pitch. Make it clear that you can really save them a lot of money by allowing you to take over the work you specialize in for much cheaper. Again, you will be amazed at the positive responses you will get if you are able to get this point across quickly in your pitches.

Once you land clients, you will always want to hop on a call to introduce them to the assistant you are assigning them to. You will also want to go over the process that you create to train them on the exact tasks they will need to perform for that particular client and set your client up with a way to message your assistants. You can use a simple app like slack to keep your assistants connected with your clients and have them exchange usernames and start a chat together. Typically, you will want to dedicate the first week of service to learning the tasks your clients need done yourself so that you understand what your assistants will need to do. Then you will train your client’s assistant that you assigned to them on how to complete these tasks. From there it should be smooth sailing between your client and their assistant, and you can continue to check in on your clients to make sure their assigned assistant is completing their tasks to their standards. You should also make it clear to your clients that they can always reach out to you if there is an issue or if they would like to try another assistant if theirs does not turn out to be a good fit.

If you follow these steps consistently, you will have a mostly autonomous business that you can continue to focus on scaling as your assistants do work for your clients. You can even start hiring virtual assistant managers to fill the role you have been providing so you no longer have to train them personally or even handle most concerns from clients. At this point you will be able to focus solely on obtaining new clients around the world and hiring more assistants to service them. You can also reach out to happy clients and offer free periods of service if they are able to bring you new customers for your virtual assistant business. However, in this industry I recommend waiting to ask for referrals until you have had a client for about a month or so since they will be helping out competition to do this but may still be willing once you have built good rapport with them.