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Episode 677

VA 101 for Your Cleaning Company: Episode 677

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Episode 677 – VA 101 for Your Cleaning Company

Welcome Cleaning Nation! This is Lindsay Bjorklund, I am the Client Happiness Manager at Grow My Cleaning Company. Today, we are going to deep dive into something that I get asked so much about how to do which is: VA 101 for your Cleaning Company. You think, “What does the Client Happiness Manager have to do with our VA’s?” While I specialize on the client end of stuff and serving our clients with what they need, I still perform the day to day operations of GMCC, and I manage our current three VA’s. Also, as a side note, VA simply stands for Virtual Assistants.

What is a Virtual Assistant? A Virtual Assistant is an independent contractor who provides administrative services to clients while working outside of the client’s office virtually (not on location).

What Tasks Should Your VA Perform?

Usually, when one of our clients comes to me for help, I say make a list of three categories, and I want you to put at least one task in each category.

First, you’re going to list a thing that you hate doing. This should be something that you cannot do for one day longer and you need to get this task off your plate.

Second, I want you to make a list of things that you’re okay at doing, but you as an owner really shouldn’t be doing.

Here’s a good example: a lot of people are okay at doing payroll. Some people are good at it but there will be a time that you feel like you need to offload it. Another example is scheduling. If you have a cleaner doing your scheduling, there can be some conflicts of interest there, so this is a good task to offload to a VA.

Third category, think of one thing that you love doing in your company, and you enjoy it, but it’s probably not the best use of your time.

For example, in terms of admin tasks. I actually love doing podcasts- the editing, the behind the scenes making this whole podcast “pretty”, and even doing video editing, I love doing that and I could do that all day. But I realized that I don’t have time to do this and could be serving our clients in a bigger way, so we outsourced it.

Now you should have a list of plenty of things to offload to a VA. I want you to pick 1 to 3 things off your list. You should have at least three things in each category. Pick one of them and focus on that to start.

And we’re going to use that as your job description for your VA.

Where to Hire a VA?

There are people looking for jobs all over the world, and you can definitely find someone to work virtually online for you. Also, you can find a virtual assistant in your own town. For example, you could check your local college or university in your town, see if they have a website or even a job board. See if someone’s looking for easy admin work and that might work out great with their schedule.

There’s a lot of hiring companies on the internet like Upwork, and if you want to hire a Filipino Virtual Assistant, you can reach out to me at support@growmycleaningcompany.com and I will guide you. On that too.

Training Your VA

The next step is training your Virtual Assistant. As soon as you know that you need to hire a VA, record anything that you need to offload. You can use loom.com or any screen recording tool. The training video should be under five minutes, and if it’s too long, separate your videos into sections. You can also just make a video on Zoom if you’re training your virtual assistant on live on Zoom, just hit the screen record and record the video of you training and having the conversation. You can reuse this video again and again in the future!

More Tips

Once you’re scaling your company, and have more than one VA, like Grow My Cleaning Company does, empower the VA’s to teach and train each other. This takes you out of the training equation. Also, that way, you can have the up to date and latest operations procedure for the task. If you have to replace someone or fill in form someone ever, you’ll have their most up to date training! This approach also allows you to easily cross train your team for when people take vacations or are sick.

Here’s a tip that Mike taught me and that I hope will help you when you have a brand new VA: ask your VA to do one task, for example: “I need you to edit this podcast just to make it ready for release”. Give the VA no more instructions and just see where they goes with that instruction to test their abilities. The world’s not going to end if the VA comes back to me with something completely different than you expected. It just gives you an idea of how they operate and where their skills are currently at.

Takeaway

Whatever system you come up with for your VA’s:

  1. Make it work for you.
  2. Make it scalable,
  3. Make it something that you can teach someone this system one or two times and take you out of the training equation.
  4. Make a video of it so it’s on record forever.

If you loved this podcast and want more FREE information on how to run your cleaning business, head to www.growmycleaningcompany.com for the FREE webinar or www.growmycleaningcompany.com/talk to speak with one of our coaches. 

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