How to Invoice in a Multi-VA Business...

Regardless of which business model you choose, your goal is going to be to be able to work less and earn more. To do so, you need to charge your clients one rate and pay your virtual assistants another, lower rate.

Now, this isn’t about finding the cheapest VAs you can or about demanding a specific rate out of your team members but you do want to make sure that at the end of the day, your marketing efforts, your sales call time, your time spent managing the projects and managing all of the other pieces of your business is paid for.

My rule of thumb is to always try and locate assistants who are at ½ of what I charge my clients. Now, my rate is a lot higher than most virtual assistants so I can do that and still afford to pay my team the rate that they specify. That’s the beauty of everyone being virtual and of everyone being business owners. We get the opportunity to ask what their rates are, honor their rates and treat the relationship like a business-to-business relationship as opposed to employer/employee relationship.

Some multi-VA owners will specify the rates they pay to the assistants or start them at a rate and move them up over time. This is also perfectly acceptable if your own rates are a little lower right now. This gives you the chance to increase your rates over time and pay your assistants more over time.

The best thing to do though is to have this conversation about rates and rate expectations in your discovery / interview call with the team member. You want to be sure that both of you are perfectly clear about what the relationship will look like and how, moving forward, you will handle things such as rates.

Like this post? We have an event happening on the subject of building a multi-VA team! Learn more here.

Updating Your Website for Your Multi-VA Team...

Your website is people’s first glimpse into who you are, what your business is about and how you will help service them in their business. It needs to outline the way you work and what the benefits of your company are before someone ever picks up the phone and calls you or sends you an e-mail.

Focus on the Benefits of the Team

You want to make sure that you focus on the benefits. Your role is to convince people that they shouldn’t work with any company who doesn’t do this and here’s why… Your role is also to appease any worries or fears that your potential clients might have.

A few blog posts ago we talked about those fears and we did some flip work to change how you felt about each of the potential client fears or questions. What I would recommend is to take those particular fears or objections and look for ways to turn those into articles or blog posts on your website. If you know some people might be worried about your expertise not being present with a team member, write an article about training and hiring the right team for your VA business, etc.

About Us Page – Add Your Team Members

Your about us page is the place on your site where you can feature and showcase your team members. This does two things. One – it lets your clients see the team members you’ve got ahead of time and gives them a chance to get to know them before coming on board your company. The second thing it does is it empowers your team and makes them appreciate being a part of your company.

The best thing is to feature a short bio of each team member, a photo and if you feel comfortable with it, give them individual titles. For example, we have a lead project manager and we’ve got different account managers but I like to give them titles based on their expertise. For example, “aMember expert”, etc.

Do an Audio or Video Walking Your Potential Clients Through the Way You Work

I told you all before I’m sure about www.howavaworks.com. This is an ideal way to get your message across to your potential clients before they ever sit down to work with you. It’s important to really explain the process beforehand to eliminate that element of surprise that we talked about earlier.

If video is not something that you feel you could implement, an audio works well too. The reason that this can be more powerful than plain website copy is because it is more interactive and available. It also humanizes you so that you aren’t just a person hiding behind a webpage but now, you are stepping out and really becoming a part of your site and a part of the customer experience.

Create a Few Articles or Blog Posts on the Subject of Multi-VA Businesses and Benefits of Working With One

You can create articles or blog posts on the subject of multi-va businesses and the benefits of working with one. Do up these articles, submit them to Ezine Articles, post them onto your blog, put links from your website, etc.

Letting Go in Your Multi-VA Practice...

Delegate, delegate, delegate

Even though we encourage people to do this and we sell a service that forces people to delegate out work, we can often be the worst at this ourselves. Once you have a team, delegate work out to them and don’t hold back.

What I do often is each morning, when I go through my inbox using my layered approach, one of the layers of e-mail checking is to delegate it and forget about it. So, I go through the e-mails and anything I know I can send to a team member, I do and then I archive it.

Start preparing yourself to give up some of that control we all like to hold on to so well. We need to know and trust the process that we’ve setup. Look to other people doing this for inspiration. Know that if their billable hours increase without their own workload increasing, yours can too and that’s what will get you to the level you need to be at.

Walk away and trust it’ll all work out

This falls back into the control aspect. Don’t micromanage. I think sometimes we can put things in place such as a project manager but use it in the wrong way. Don’t hound your team about doing tasks unless of course you have to.

Send them tasks and know that they will do it. Trust that you’ve put the right people into place and that they will do what you’ve asked them to do. Without trust, you don’t have a solid business base and you’ll end up doing more harm than good.

Empower your team members to handle full projects

The other thing I want to encourage you all to do is to hand off full projects instead of just pieces of a project. While that works in some cases, you will still be heavily involved and thus will not decrease your time spent doing work. Ideally, you should pass off an entire project to a team member and let them work through it. It will cause less frustration and less annoyance for you, the team member and your client.

Take on new clients only when you know you have someone to immediately transition them to

Make sure that if you are bringing on new business, you can handle it. Grow at a pace that feels healthy instead of growing at a pace that feels chaotic.