My Decision to Hire a Full Time VA

In my business life there has been one thing that’s always been 100% certain to me:  I will want and need a stellar team around me to get the job done.  This is not that I can’t do the job myself, but the simple fact is that I neither want to do all of the work myself nor do I think I’m the best person for the job.

Countless books have been written on the subject of outsourcing and the leverage that team can contribute to your team, and I’m here to tell you that this is 100% true.  The growth we’ve seen with PodcastMotor in just a few short months is amazing, and I certainly could not have done it without the team I’ve assembled.  Now I won’t go off and say that it was all luck and I have no idea how this happened, because it was all very intentional, took a lot of time and effort, and in the end of the day was the result of just good ole hard work.

Now that our core specialist team at PodcastMotor is pretty firmly in place I’m excited to say that I’ve brought on a full time VA to the business.  I went through Virtual Staff Finder for this process, and overall couldn’t be happier with the way things went.  VSF took about 2 weeks, just like they estimated, to filter through the “application” I submitted and give me 3 final candidates for me to conduct Skype interviews with.  From this the choice was pretty clear.  One candidate stood out above the rest and I hired her the next day.

Onboarding and training are now the next steps, which is a bit of new territory for me.  I’m very accustomed to training the specialists that we’ve brought onto the team, but not in training someone on the backend of the business and how all of our processes are done.  I’ve gotten help from a few really key people in helping me to streamline this approach, but the fact is that I just have to spend time with her relaying my “tribal knowledge” and helping her to be successful.

I think that term is the real key of managing a team:  How to help them be successful.  This isn’t some backhanded, passive aggressive way of talking about managing people, but what I think it means is a way to set people up for success so that they can flourish in their work environment in every respect.  Like a lot of things this is easier said than done, but also like a lot of things that are worth doing, I know it’s going to pay for itself in the long run.

Looking forward I have no doubt that bringing on a VA will be the moment I look back at and say “yep, that’s when I was finally able to start working on the business instead of working in the business”.  To do this I have to position myself appropriately too.  I have to do training, onboarding, communicate, manage expectations of both customers and team members.  This is what a founder is supposed to do though, right?

OK, well let’s get cracking!