Today’s Quote: You don’t get paid for the hour. You get paid for the value you bring to the hour. – Jim Rohn
Welcome to another episode of the podcast that teaches you how to be a ridiculously good virtual assistant.
As a Virtual Assistant, time is always money, and yet a lot of us don’t manage our own time well.
Click the play button above to tune in, or choose your favourite podcast player below:
Connect with Tracey D’Aviero, VA Coach and Trainer
Episode Notes:
I’ll say it again. Time is money when you operate a service business like we VAs do.
So that means a few things:
First, it means that you need to be meticulous in measuring your time so that you know you are profitable.
Second, it means that you also have to work as efficiently as possible – and waste less time each day – in order to be profitable.
And last, it means that at some point you will max out your own time, and that’s when you need to expand your day – and as a result, your VA business.
The most important thing you need to realize in business is that client only wants to know two things: what you can do for them and how much it will cost them.
Many VAs quote their clients time – and then that’s all anyone thinks about.
But Jim Rohn is 100% correct when he talks about value.
The client wants to know what you can do for them – they are paying for the value that you can bring to them. They aren’t asking you how much of your time they can have. They just need stuff done. When you start talking to them about time, you drag your value way down – and it becomes a race, instead of your expertise.
Let’s instead tell them what we can do for them – and how much it will cost them. Trust me when I tell you this is all they want to know.
Let’s break all this down.
Tracking Your Time
How do you feel when I even say those words?
I don’t like tracking my time. I expect that you don’t either. But you know you have to do it when you are charging your clients for work that is completed in a certain amount of time.
Hourly billing is not a bad thing, but there are some things that come up from it that don’t make sense as a business owner.
The most obvious is missed time. You want to ensure that you are not forgetting to bill your clients. Would you believe that this is one of the most common issues VAs come to me with for help? They work all day long, never stop, and then at the end of the day they can only find 4 or 5 hours of time to actually bill their clients.
This is the same for hourly billing or ticking time off of a retainer. If you can’t account for the time you have spent working on a client’s stuff, then you can’t bill them for it (or subtract it from their retainer).
Usually the main problem is that we are jumping from task to task without ever thinking about recording anything properly. We think we are being efficient but we are not. We are actually acting like a bad business owner because we are not taking the time to look after our business in between tasks.
So what can you do to do this better? Easy. Slow down. Be meticulous in recording what you do for each client. This is truly the main reason I still use pen and paper as a means of recording time. It’s always available.
Each day I have a page in a spiral notebook that stays on my desk and I write down every task I have done and for which client. That’s all. I don’t have to record time start and time stop or anything – just that task.
Why does that suffice? Because I have created processes that tell me how much each task costs the client. Checking email, 15 minutes. Creating a newsletter, 90 minutes. Making 5 graphics for social media, 25 minutes. You get the idea. It is the billable time to the client for each of the tasks that have been completed for that particular day.
So when I have to figure out how much time I spent working on a client’s work on any given day, I add up the task times. Done.
I get a lot of pushback from VAs on this process when I ask them to figure out those estimated times. But once they do, they realize how simple it makes everything in their business.
And when you have these processes in place, and the estimate times that go with them, you can easily quote package pricing to your clients – and tell them what you can do for them and how much it will cost them (yep, circled back on that!)
Working Efficiently
The second part of this slow down process is to batch a client’s work – so that you know you spent 1 hour on this client, or 30 minutes on that client. When you stop billing your clients by the minute, you can make a plan to stick with their work for a specified period of time, and then you will be sure not to miss tracking it or billing it.
Looking for efficiency in the way you work is the other thing that is going to help you manage your time better.
Not only is this important for your own task list – which you manage, probably pretty well I’d guess.
But you have to think about the others you are working with as well.
How organized is your client? Do they have other team members that you have to work with?
If anyone else is providing you with pieces of the tasks you are doing, then you must ensure that you have some processes in place to account for how things get done.
For instance, as we talked about in last week’s episode, if you run a client meeting, you should be the one creating the agenda and holding everyone to the agenda, as well as keeping it on time. If you do a client’s newsletter every week, be sure that you have a process in place for the client or team members to send you their pieces, as well as deadlines to do so. If your client needs to approve social media posts before they go live, ensure that you provide them with enough time to get that done so you aren’t going back to the same task 10 times. As a matter of fact, if a client has to approve the final version of anything you do, make sure that you have a policy for how many revisions are allowed – and you hold them to it. If they need more than the number you offer, tweak your process leading up the final version.
These are really simple ways that you can look for efficiencies. Depending on the services you offer, there are many others.
Working efficiently is about looking for the best way to get things done. You can use others on a team (maybe that have more skill in something than you do), or you can use automation (ie scheduling software), or you can implement checklists (my #1 tip!).
I am a big fan of checklists because they work. When you are following a checklist to get something done, even if you’ve done it 100,000 times before, you are allowing yourself to trust your process. You don’t have to use any brainpower to remember where you were if you leave a project part way through. You simply go back to the checklist and begin and the next step. Checklists help you make sure that you never miss a step because it’s right there in front of you and you have to check it off once done. And if you have anyone else who helps you with things, checklists are a great way for you to know that they are doing things the way you need them done.
Look for efficiencies everywhere. Implement the tools you need to improve your work, and you’ll get more done.
Working efficiently also helps increase the value you bring to the client – they pay for deliverables, and the expertise that you and your team bring to their business. It’s a great way to grow with your clients.
Expanding Your Day
There will come a time when you are maxed out. The most successful VAs find this to be the case right away when they have a full roster of clients.
So what do we do when we are running all day long, and we know we are tracking our time properly, and we know we are working at maximum efficiency?
That’s when it’s time to expand – something.
When your day is tapped out, you can’t make any more money.
One solution is to raise your rates. This episode is not a rates episode, but you can do that. At some point, you must do that do grow your business.
The faster way to expand is to hire people to help you with your work. Of course your rates have to be in place where you are able to pay someone else and yet still remain profitable. So if they aren’t there right now, that’s where you need to begin.
If your rates can handle paying out someone else to do the work, then that’s your next step.
But because you have already gone through the other steps above, you should be fully prepared to bring someone in to help.
This is what I teach my private clients and my group coaching clients.
Standard operating procedures are important to have in your business – but they are even more important to have when you are bringing in subcontractors.
When someone is doing your client work, you get to dictate how they do it. They follow your processes, and they do the work in the estimated time that you tell them to do it. The only way to know this time is to write up the process and to assign that time to it.
Your subs are spending your money – and your client’s money – so this is very important for you to have a very good handle on.
And yet so many VAs brush this whole area off thinking that they are just getting things done so everything is fine.
Not to mention you are charging your clients a premium rate so that you can offer them a team of people to do their work.
And in many cases you aren’t seeing every little thing the subs are doing anymore because you are overseeing instead of doing.
It’s important, folks, and you can’t skip it.
Write up the processes. Create the checklists. Assign the estimated task times. Insist that your subs follow the processes and use the checklists, and bill you accordingly.
If your estimated times are not jiving with how long it’s taking your sub to do the work, then you can identify why that is and fix it.
But don’t leave it up to them to eat up your profits simply because you haven’t given them all the tools they need to do things as efficiently as possible.
Expanding your day is essential to growing your business – and when you do it well, you will reap the rewards, your subs will reap the rewards, and so will your clients – who ultimately, are the ones that you are working for.
Remember that value. The client is hiring you. Your subs are working for you, representing you. It’s so important that they do things your way. Don’t ever forget that.
Ridiculously good time management isn’t rocket science. But it does take tracking to a new level, and it’s much easier than counting minutes or using a clock timer all day long.
I used this method to support my 6 and 7 figure business coaches for many years. And we did lots of tasks that many VAs tell me can’t be tracked in this way – yes they can, and I can show you how.
You may need to change the way you think or the way you work (slightly) but once you make the change you’ll see the difference immediately.
It’s only a secret until you learn to do it!
Need Some Help?
Growing your VA business is something we can work on together in The Virtual Circle, my mastermind group for Virtual Assistants. Check it out at www.YourVAMentor.com/TVC (the virtual circle) – I bet it’s exactly what you need to work better with fabulous clients for your VA business.
If you need some help with creating processes and estimating your work time, reach out to me at tracey@yourvamentor.com
I’ve helped hundreds of VAs through their challenges and got them on their way to growing their business through my private and group coaching. I’d love to do the same for you.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week, thanks for tuning in to learn to become a ridiculously good Virtual Assistant.