Today’s Quote: Don’t expect a business to give you their expertise when you only want to pay a fraction of their fees. Hire someone within your budget and accept the quality of what you’re willing to pay. – Donna Mee
Welcome to another episode of the podcast that teaches you how to be a ridiculously good virtual assistant.
Today I am going to go a little further into time management and talk about how to break down tasks, time and cost them, and work within your client’s budget.
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Connect with Tracey D’Aviero, VA Coach and Trainer
Episode Notes:
So the quote is for business owners but also for us VAs
Rates are a tricky thing, and trying to jam everything a client wants into our schedule often leaves us feeling like we need to charge them less because they need our help.
And they are willing to hire us if we can do what they need.
But today I’m going to talk about how to break down your tasks, time them and track them, and use that information to work within your client’s budgets.
Let’s start with breaking down your tasks.
Everything we do has a length of time it takes to complete.
I’m talking about picking up or managing emails, scheduling an appointment, creating a newsletter, creating a Powerpoint, making a travel arrangement, writing social media, running reports for KPIs … everything.
And it’s your job to figure out how long everything takes to do.
Does that sound exhausting? Ha ha it doesn’t have to!
There are two kinds of tasks: one with a clear start and finish (I call these ‘set’ tasks), and one that I call ‘open-ended’ – that could take 10 minutes, or could take an hour, depending on the volume of ‘stuff’ involved.
Set Tasks
For a clear start to finish task – like, say, a client newsletter, we can time it.
We know when we start and we know when we finish. Easy to time track, eh?
But time is money as a VA and we need to make sure we are working more efficiently.
With recurring set tasks, getting procedures in place is easy – but often something that VAs don’t bother doing.
I suggest you do!
One of the things that VAs tell me so often is that they don’t know how to charge for a task a client needs.
This is becuase they have no idea how long it takes them to do it.
How do you know how long something should take to do? You do it … and you time it!
Here’s how:
Do the task, start to finish.
Document every step and time it as you go.
Do it again, and this time follow your process document.
Check your work time against your original times. Any changes?
Why or why not?
Figure in what ifs – is your internet slow today? did you get distracted? did you program or software force you to update and restart your computer before you can keep going on your work?
Settle on an average time for that task. Done!
Oh … then multiply the time that task takes by your billable rate.
There is the cost you bill your client, every time you do that task.
I used to do this for newsletters. A client would pay me $50 for every newsletter they needed to send out. That was an hour of my time, based on me pulling it together from they sent me. But I didn’t bill them an hour, I billed them for a newsletter. Task time.
So once you have your rate per task figure out, that’s what your client gets charged every time.
Revisit your time often to ensure that the timing is still correct. If it is longer than your estimate, you need to make changes to reflect that. If it is shorter than your estimate, you just got a raise.
Set tasks are easy to time and cost. They are the same steps each time, so they are easy to document and set.
And that’s how you do it!
Open Ended Tasks
Now let’s get to the open-ended stuff.
But Tracey, what about things like checking email, or doing research, or creating a Powerpoint? I have no idea how long these might take me.
Well, it’s your responsibility to know!
I’ll share a story of open ended task going wrong in a bit, but here is basically how you should be handling these.
It’s start and stop times, gang. You know, those buckets of time that I always tell you to use to manage your time better?
They come right in here for your recurring open ended tasks.
Let’s take email management as our example.
If you are looking after email for your client, and you are checking it all day long, stop doing that. It’s not efficient or effective.
Instead, decide how many times a day you will check it.
Two is great – three is standard – four is probably acceptable for a very high volume client.
Set a start and stop time to check it. 15 minutes, 30 minutes max,
These time slots should be short because you are managing your time – not letting the email dictate the length of the task (which can often go off the rails).
So let’s say 15 minute time slots for a client that doesn’t have high volumes of email. 30 minutes at a time for clients who have lots.
You can process a LOT of email in 15 minutes. or 30 minutes.
How many times a day are you checking? 2? 3? Add up your total daily time – 15 mins? 30 mins? You are charging the client for the check in and processing. That’s why the frequency is so important. I often find only twice a day is lots – that is 30 minutes to 45 minutes of time which is plenty even for the busiest clients. But you aren’t going in every day and trying to account for two minutes here or there.
And this is about quoting the client a daily rate for that task.
So back that that. Multiply your daily time by 20 or 22 for the business days in the month. 15 mins a day works out to about 5 hours per month for email. 30 mins a day works out to about 10 hours per month.
Multiply that by your hourly rate – $40? That’s $200 per month for email or $400.
That’s how you bill your client – again, not by the hours, but by the billable task rate.
Then it is your responsibility to process the client’s email in 10 hours per month, by checking on it twice every day. No one needs their email tended to every hour, unless they are in the middle of a huge launch and it’s customer service email. Trust me!
Set the client expectation, get the work done and everyone s happy.
It’s about working with averages for your open ended tasks – and it takes some practice, but once you set that process in place, you will free up so much of your time and you will be very happy!
Time is money – for you and for your client. Use it wisely.
Quick story: I once hired a VA for a 10 hours to help me do a project. It involved research, creating a spreadsheet to track the research, and then some initial follow up from the research contained in the spreadsheet. Simple enough right?
She got to work, and I was happy that I didn’t have to do all that work. I didn’t instruct her on how to do it since I hired her = she should know, right?
Well, she did not. Well … at least she didn’t know how to use my budget of 10 hours.
After the first week I hadn’t heard from her and I didn’t see any updates in the spreadsheet we shared. I reached out to ask her how it was going, and she told me that she had used 6 hours of research already but she hadn’t gotten too far. Um .. what? She wasn’t finding what she needed … or what I needed, I guess … but she still kept at it. Spending my money. Instead of reaching out. Of course I was not happy! We had used more than half the time already, and had very little to ‘work’ with, which was the point.
Because I was a VA myself, I knew how I would have handled this. And how I handled all research projects – If a client gives you a budget of 10 hours from start to finish, then you need to work within that budget. 20% in, check in!
She should have done 2 hours – and then reported back to me. Is this what we are looking for? Or, I am having trouble. I could have helped! But 6 hours without saying anything? No, not good.
So … research. An open-ended task LOL! And one that I want to describe for you.
How do you price it?
Simple. Start and stop times. Those buckets of time that I always tell you to use in your business.
Have a research project? Set an amount of time to get it done … and then get it done in that time.
Communicate super clearly with the client if you are struggling to get something done in a decent amount of time. You are the expert, never forget that!
For research or open ended projects it’s fine to give the client an estimate if you don’t know what you might be up against.
Like I said, work with averages – get an idea of how long something should take (we give our client’s estimates all the time) and then work within those.
Yes there will be extenuating circumstances sometimes, but for the most part averages work.
Next step is to write all of this down (as you are doing it, of course)
Procedure documents are important so that you can do that detailed time estimates – so what do I suggest, doing it 3x and writing it down. Then referring back to it every month or quarter or whatever, to ensure that your timing is still accurate.
But one step further is working with your client budgets – and that’s the final step today!
If your client has a budget of $750 in mind, but they want you to do all of the things they need, your instinct might be to give them a deal because you want the client, and you know they need your help.
Let’s get back to today’s quote – the concept of which I like even though it says you’ll get less if you pay less. I don’t want you to think of it in that way. I don’t believe if you pay less you get less quality – you can simply give them less WORK.
Working within a client’s budget is easy.
Okay you can pay this? Then we can only do this, this and this.
Clients don’t get everything they want unless they pay your rate.
But you can do things less frequently for them if their budget is lower than you expect.
Two newsletters a month instead of four.
Email – check it once a day instead of 3x a day.
A research project that they can have done in 2 hours instead of 10.
What does that take to do? Often they need to do more legwork on their end. Frequency of tasks done goes hand in hand with the client’s budget.
You know how long something takes – with a set task, you can do it less often to fit into the client’s budget. With an open ended task, you can adjust the time you spend doing it to fit.
The client still pays your full billable rate, but for less time or less work.
Mastering this time process and costing will pay you in dividends – it works!
I still do it. And the client just gets told $$ instead of hours, which is another great thing.
Your quote or estimate for them is super clear and based on deliverables, not on hours.
I hope you implement this in your business today! You’ll see a huge change in how you manage your time.
Need Some Help?
This is exactly what I help VAs do. As a VA coach and trainer, I help you set yourself up for success, helping you fix the specific things that are going wrong in your business. When we work together either privately or in a group we talk specifically about your business and you – there is no one stop solution for everyone when it comes to service businesses like VA businesses.
I’ll help you get clarity around your issues, and cheer you on as you walk through the steps to fix them.
I’ve helped hundreds of VAs through their challenges and got them on their way to growing their business and the lifestyle that they dream of.
I’d love to do the same for you.
You can work with me privately, or you can join 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 start running the VA business you dreamed of.
Reach out to me if you are interested.
That’s all I’ve got for you this week, see you next time!