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Laura Nicole: 0:02

Welcome to your Virtual Assistant Coach, the podcast for moms who want to make money from home on their own terms. I'm your host, Laura Nicole, a successful six-figure earning VA and coach, who replaced my college professor salary in just five months back in 2020, after my daughter was born, and I have never looked back. I'm here to help you build a profitable, flexible VA business that fits into your family's lives, so you no longer feel like you're living just to work. Let's dive in. Did you know that, in addition to being a virtual assistant and a virtual assistant coach, that I am actually also a mind reader? I bet you did not know that, but I feel like I can read your mind right now, because I can almost guarantee that, even though you're feeling really excited about the possibility of becoming a virtual assistant and feeling like it would be such a good fit for your personality and your lifestyle and your income goals, that you're also still thinking to yourself okay, but what services would I actually offer? Like, what would I actually offer to clients to start this and start bringing in income as a virtual assistant? Well, luckily, I also have the answer for you, which is that when you first start out as a VA, you truly can start out offering services based on skills that you already have and things that you already know how to do. Throughout this episode I'm going to break that down for you and give you a really easy entry point into the industry that hopefully, will make the idea of coming up with services to offer feel way less overwhelming.

Laura Nicole: 1:39

I want to make it really abundantly clear that to start as a virtual assistant, you do not need to go out and learn a bunch of new skills or programs or softwares before you can start. This is something that women ask me all the time when they're considering becoming a VA is like what services do I need to go learn or what programs do I need to get better at? And my answer honestly is you don't need to spend your time and energy doing that, because you absolutely already have skills and abilities from your past experiences, both at work and at home, to help you compile a starting service set with your existing skills. Because the truth is that your soft skills plus everyday admin skills that most of us women have equals incredible value to your potential clients. So the most common entry point into the VA industry is offering a combo of general admin and customer service, and this is the easiest entry point into the industry, for a couple of reasons. Number one like I just said, most of us women already have the general admin skills, either from work that we've done before or our current existing jobs, or simply managing a home and a family and all of the things that go with it, but also the fact that every single small business out there has admin work that they need help with. Right. Every small business owner has admin work that they have to keep up with in order for their business to run successfully and efficiently, but business owners do not want to spend their precious time answering emails and following up on invoices and running reports. Yes, it needs to be done, but it doesn't need to be done by them, and so admin and customer service is something that business owners are always looking to outsource and delegate to their brand new virtual assistant.

Laura Nicole: 3:23

You and I can say with confidence, after five years of being a VA myself and after coaching almost a thousand women to do this over the past two years, that even if you have never been in an administrative position before if you're like Laura, I've never been an admin assistant or an office manager or an executive assistant. That is fine, because the jobs that you have held in the past I can almost guarantee that there is still admin work as part of it. Right, I was never an admin of any sort. I was a restaurant manager and a college professor. But as part of those jobs and as part of my responsibilities, I still did admin-based tasks, right, like answering emails or running reports or dealing with my students or with customers in the restaurant, which was customer service. And because I've already let my secret out that I'm a mind reader, right, I know I can hear you in your brain trying to disqualify yourself and say I've never been an admin assistant, so it doesn't translate as easily for me. And I'm going to stop you right there, because it simply is not true and you need to hear me that any job experience you have had, also the experience you have of managing your home, at the root of what you do in both of those places, you have the skill set to transfer them into general admin services as a virtual assistant.

Laura Nicole: 4:41

And just to kind of help you see the bigger picture, I'm going to ask you a few questions, okay, and answer honestly. Are you someone who keeps track of your family's appointments, kids' school schedules, sports calendars yes. Okay, then you can be offering calendar management as a service. Do you send emails to teachers and coaches or volunteer groups to keep everybody in the loop and organize, fantastic. Then you have the skill set to offer email management and customer service, or otherwise known as client relations. Are you someone who keeps track of everything from grocery store lists to holiday budgets to meal plans for the upcoming week Fantastic. Then you have the bones to offer project management. Are you the person who helps to plan the party or the trip or the school event? The one who's coordinating all of the details among the volunteers and the vendors and sending out the invites and doing the follow ups Amazing. Then you could be offering event coordination to your future VA clients.

Laura Nicole: 5:44

Are you someone who's been told that you're great at keeping people in the loop and explaining things really clearly? Then that means you're a great communicator, which is honestly probably the number one thing that potential clients are looking for when they bring a VA onto their team. And, last but not least, are you someone who is considered the quote unquote friendly face, right, who puts people at ease and just makes them feel welcome and seen and understood? Are you the person who stays calm even when things get hectic and you're able to figure out creative solutions when your original plan might have gone completely freaking sideways Also, yes, perfect, you're a problem solver, you're a critical thinker, you're a calm presence, right, and this is just a small handful of examples for you. Hopefully you're starting to see and get the gist here of how you truly already have the skills in you and how we can be transferring those into services to offer in this admin and customer service category.

Laura Nicole: 6:43

Okay, so I kind of want to pull back the bigger picture for a second here and give you a list of examples of general admin services that you could absolutely be offering to start out as a virtual assistant, with a brief explanation of what each of them could entail. So email and calendar management are definitely up at the top of the list. Small business owners are absolutely getting tons of emails in their inbox and they do not have the time to answer every single one and filter through them. So, as their VA, you can be screening their emails, answering questions for all of the ones that you can and then flagging the ones for your client that are really important, that they actually have to be the one to get their eyes on and respond to. Another component of email management if your client has you, handling forward-facing emails to their potential customers or clients is adding in that customer service aspect. And just a quick, important reminder for y'all that customer service in the virtual assistant industry does not equal being on the phone. It equals being in an email inbox. So pull your stomach back up out of your booty. I'm not saying that you have to be on the phone to be a successful virtual assistant so you can breathe easy again. To be on the phone to be a successful virtual assistant, so you can breathe easy again.

Laura Nicole: 8:02

Okay, you can also help clients to manage their calendar keeping their booking platforms organized and up-to-date and reflecting when they have meetings come on their schedule, making sure that nothing overlaps, making sure, if they have certain times that they don't ever want things scheduled, that those times stay clear, and helping to communicate to them what is on their calendar so that they're not missing anything. So many small business owners these days have communities that they offer along with their program or their product or their service, like a Facebook group or a Discord or a Telegram chat, and those communities actually need to be moderated and managed, which is a service that you can offer. It's as simple as approving requests in or sending the link to somebody when they make a purchase and they need to get into the community, approving posts within the community, maybe replying to comments in there, or even uploading files and documents and keeping them organized inside of the community so they're really easy for your clients customers to be able to find, sometimes in those communities too. It also looks like scheduling out content that your client wants to share with their community, so they'll create the content and you actually schedule it inside of the community. And in the same vein of scheduling, a couple other services you can offer is scheduling for their emails or their social media content. So again, your client is the one creating the content. Right, they're the one writing the actual email or creating the content for their social media. But then they'll tell you hey, I want this to go out. Let's say it's an email. They say, hey, I want this to go out to all of my members on this date, at this time, and they'll give you the copy for the email, but then you can be the one who actually goes in and puts it into their system and formats it and selects who it's going to send to and schedules it and actually make sure that it gets into people's inboxes.

Laura Nicole: 9:50

There's also a lot that happens on the back end right with a business in terms of their finances. So, helping with getting invoices processed, whether that's helping them to pay the invoices they owe, or following up to make sure the invoices that are owed to them are getting paid. Processing refunds. Following up on payments A lot of times, online business owners offer payment plans on their programs and so if someone defaults on their payment plan, right, there's typically a follow-up procedure that your client's going to want you to send out an email or send them a link to update their card. So those are all services that you can take off their plate, right. Those are super important for their business to run successfully and make sure that their finances are in order, but your client does not need to be the person actually tracking payment plan payments and sending emails with card update links to get those payments in the door.

Laura Nicole: 10:39

And then a couple last examples I have for y'all. This is definitely not like a fully inclusive list by any stretch of the imagination, but a lot of small online business owners are going to host, like webinars or live classes or challenges, and they will need you on those calls with them to help make sure that the event runs smoothly, even though it's online. So that can look like helping with troubleshooting on Zoom, maybe having to mute people who are on the call who accidentally unmute themselves and it becomes a distraction. Helping to keep up with the chat or answering questions in the chat, sharing links for the participants who are a part of the chat or answering questions in the chat, sharing links for the participants who are a part of the webinar or the challenge essentially handling all of like the forward-facing interactions with the people participating, so that your client doesn't have to worry about that. They can just focus on delivering the content that they're teaching.

Laura Nicole: 11:31

And then a lot of times, as a VA, when you offer admin services, you spend a good amount of time in good old Google Workspace creating Google Docs or Google Sheets for your client and then keeping them up to date, especially if you offer weekly and monthly reporting, which again is part of their financials. It's a service that business owners absolutely need so that they can be really in touch with their numbers in terms of their conversions and their opt-ins and how many people are looking at their pages and their products and then actually buying from them. In addition to which of their products are actually selling, which of their products are getting refunded right? How many refunds are they having come in? These are all reports that you can be running for them and, don't worry, they will train you and teach you and show you how to run the reports in their system, but then you can run the reports for them so that they can just see the data that they need, without spending the time running the reports.

Laura Nicole: 12:24

For example, when I first became a VA, when I was a little baby VA back in early 2020, the very first part-time client that I signed with she was an online course creator and she had a course that was geared toward the parents of high school juniors and seniors that helped them prepare their student to apply to colleges, and what I did for her was super simple, but it was so helpful for her. I went in and listened to all of her lessons in her courses and then came up with questions that would be really helpful to put into a worksheet, got them approved by her and then actually took those questions and went into Canva and created the worksheet and then we downloaded that worksheet as a PDF and we uploaded it in with her course and now when people went to her course, they were able to listen and then also do the worksheets to help them implement what they were learning. I had another client who had me following up on invoices that were owed to her and answering emails from people and even just cleaning up her client email list, weeding out people who hadn't opened an email in 90 days and didn't need to be there anymore. Really simple, straight to the point things y'all that I guarantee you are absolutely capable of doing, and I was making $25 an hour to do that.

Laura Nicole: 13:39

The magic combo when you're starting as a virtual assistant is to pick services that you know that you can do, but also that you will enjoy. Yes, you're becoming a virtual assistant to make money Absolutely Right but to also actually enjoy your work. So when you start out, start by controlling the controllables Right. You have control over the services you offer, so do not offer services that you will dread completing for your clients. That is a one-way ticket to burnout and we don't become virtual assistants to continue the burnout cycle. I want you to lean into your strengths and know that you are really going to discover and learn so much as you actually work as a VA. So your services are absolutely going to evolve over time. I offer services now five years in that, again, I didn't even know existed when I first started.

Laura Nicole: 14:33

So, number one, make sure you offer services that you will enjoy actually doing for your clients. But number two, do not put so much pressure on yourself to pick the perfect services, because you're not married to the services that you pick. You're deciding on a starting service set. It is a starting point, a jumping off point, so that you can get the ball rolling. But they're not going to be the same services that you're offering, probably even six months, definitely not a year, down the line. So don't put that insane pressure on yourself. I see this happen with so many women. They want to get it so perfect and so right, but, to be completely frank, that's kind of a waste of energy, because it's going to change pretty soon anyway, because your services are not going to stay the same as what they are when you first start.

Laura Nicole: 15:18

My last pointer for you when it comes to services that you can offer when you first start as a VA is to remember that you do not need to offer a whole freaking library of services. You don't need 10 or 15 services. You don't need to offer everything under the sun so that you feel like, oh, hopefully a client will see this and I'll have something that they want. It's not going to make it more likely that clients will pick you to work with If you have more services. It might actually just confuse them. So pick three to five services that you feel really strongly about, that you absolutely know you can do and you can execute well and that you'll enjoy doing with a max I would say max of seven and that is your perfect starting point.

Laura Nicole: 16:01

If your wheels are spinning right now and you're feeling like, okay, I definitely know that I have skills. I just would really like some help pinpointing which of my skills and which pieces of my past experience are really going to bring the most value as a virtual assistant, then I would love for you to join me for the next live round of Discover your Superstar VA Skills. This is a four-day workshop and, don't worry, I did not forget that you're a very, very busy human. You will be putting in a total of about five hours worth of your time over four days in this workshop that is designed specifically to help you identify your valuable hard and soft skills and then transfer those skills into services that you can be offering to clients. And we even take it one step further and put them both into a one sheet resume that you can start sharing with potential clients right away.

Laura Nicole: 16:53

It is an absolutely incredible event. It's one of my favorite things to do and, on average, women leave this event feeling doubly confident in becoming a virtual assistant. I will leave the link in the show notes for you to check out, and I would love to see you there. Thanks for hanging out with me today as your virtual assistant coach. If you love this episode, be sure to share it with your best friend, your sister or even your favorite coworker, who you know wants to start making a flexible income. I'll see you all next time.