If you’ve been reading our case studies over the last several months, you know we’ve been sharing how our virtual assistants are helping business owners all across the country. Several entrepreneurs now have well-oiled administrative, marketing and bookkeeping machines running behind the scenes. They have teams of expert staff far beyond what they could afford on their own if it were not for the crowdsourced approach we use at Admin Slayer. This month, we’re excited to walk you through how we helped our client Melanie with her online coaching business.
Our Online Coach
As an online coach, Melanie helps executives grow their businesses while improving the quality of their lives. She helps her clients to create effective digital communication tools via a custom eLearning platform and through in-person workshops. She also teaches them how to create their own training and communication videos. Like most of our clients, Melanie loves her work and her passion shines through in everything she does.
The Challenges
When Melanie had her discovery call with us, she went through the major pain points in her business. She felt she had fallen behind and was struggling to engage with her clients as much as she wanted. We always ask new clients to tell us everything they want and how they envision their business running after they receive our help. We want to know your dream list, even if it seems far reaching. This allows you to focus on the what, while we worry about the how.
On our online coach’s dream list? It looked like this:
Email triage, client follow-up
Calendar management with Acuity Scheduling
Create a sales pipeline and automated workflow
Management of the administrative part of her online courses (help to ensure students/business owners were on track and up-to-date on assignments)
Daily tasks, including:
Morning and afternoon email checks
Asana task check
Management of GDrive for document storage
Newsletter creation through ConvertKit
Courtesy reminder emails to clients for appointments
Invoice creation and follow-up using Freshbooks
Travel booking (flights and hotels)
Setting up client appointments using Zoom
Managing multiple in-person appointments and travel
Reminding Melanie at the end of each week which appointments are happening the following week
From this list, it’s easy to understand how trying to do all of those tasks, while working to provide quality online coaching, checking assignments, meeting with clients and travelling for business would be a lot for one person to handle. But this is where our virtual assistants excel. Nothing on this list sounded hard or daunting to our team, and we very quickly provided Melanie with two Slayers who were eager to give the support she was looking for.
Creating Time for Business Growth
After collecting Melanie’s dream list, we went to work! Every day, we check Melanie’s emails in the morning and in the afternoon. This ensures we keep her at a zero inbox so she isn’t stuck in an email trap while important client work falls behind. We took on all of the invoicing, client follow-up, and created a client tracker for Melanie to access any time. The tracker tells her exactly where a client stands with assignments, eLearning progress and within her pipeline overall. Melanie feels deeply connected with her clients and the work she’s doing with them, without actually having to do all of the work herself.
We set up a weekly procedures document to make sure that all clients who need to have meetings actually get them, and by sending courtesy reminders, we eliminated client no-shows, which were a drain on Melanie’s precious time. By adding her slayers to Asana, Melanie now has help when it comes to completing her task list. She knows that she can simply add new tasks and our team will take care of them (think “set it and forget it!”). We also built out templates in Asana within a pipeline. Each time a new client signs up for online coaching, they go through the appropriate tasks in the right order. This allows us to communicate directly in Asana so that everyone on the team knows who is where and what needs to happen next.
We looked at Melanie’s calendar to see if we could simplify her days with time blocking, and suggested specific days for out-of-the office meetings and for focused, in-the-office work. This allows Melanie greater blocks of focus time, eliminates travel time and prevents her work from getting interrupted by several meetings each day. She’s found the system is a simple, yet effective way to improve her productivity - and her energy.
On the personal side, we help Melanie’s family by ordering her groceries online and scheduling pickup at times that don’t interfere with her focused work. We have access to her family calendar and manage her children’s busy extracurricular activities in a way that gives Melanie the opportunity to participate and be present, while staying on top of her online coaching tasks.
A Winning Formula
Having a team to ensure that the day-to-day tasks are getting done allows Melanie the brain space she needs to continue creating quality eLearning tools for her clients. By freeing up much of Melanie’s time and changing her schedule around, she gets to exercise her creative muscles that lend to the growth of her online coaching business. We are so happy Melanie is able to continue to scale her business to the next level - because she isn’t spending hours managing her inbox or travelling to meetings where clients don’t show up.
How are our Virtual Assistants Helping Other Businesses?
If you want to know more about how our team is helping several businesses each day (picture multiple inboxes reaching zero, CRM systems running smoothly and being updated in real time, social media schedulers being created and content being posted right now, as you’re reading this!), take a look at our other case studies:
Samantha, our financial advisor
Adam, our realtor
Nathan, our wealth coach and insurance advisor
Avalon who owns a marketing agency
Camilla, our online store owner who creates scarves and jewelry
No matter what your business, we can free up your time and help you take your company to the next level. Reach out to us - we’d love to hear your dream list.