How to Work with a Virtual EA?
Admin Slayer has been a team of Canadian Virtual Executive Assistants (EAs) for over nine years now, before remote working was much of a thing. It’s what we chose to be: a source of high-level EAs providing service to entrepreneurs and business owners who would otherwise be spending too much of their time on admin work, but not enough hours to hire an employee.
Now that we have that little introduction out of the way, let’s talk about how a Virtual EA could work for you (and you with them).
What Exactly is a Virtual EA?
A Virtual EA is a real, living person, like any other assistant. However, instead of taking up room in your office and using your equipment, your virtual assistant is working from their home office and just an email, message, or phone call away.
A full-time employee is not only a member of your team, but also a responsibility for you as a business owner in terms of hiring/firing, payroll/benefits, and training. A Virtual EA is only there as much as you need them (subject to a minimum monthly hourly requirement based on Admin Slayer’s model) and is not around when you don’t need them. The learning curve is also much smaller: at Admin Slayer, we are all seasoned professionals, and each team member works with a handful of other business owners in a variety of industries doing a wide range of work. We aim to have a team of two Slayers work with each client so we’re able to cover for one another and so the client continues to have support when needed.
What Can a Virtual EA Do?
That’s a loooooonnnggg list. The short story - because small business owners rarely have time for the long one - is that a Virtual EA can take off your plate those administrative tasks that aren’t fun for you and that won’t make your business The Next Big Thing (that part is all you.)
It’s often stuff that doesn’t directly produce revenue which really bogs down a business owner. It could be scheduling/calendar management, client follow up, process creation, documentation and reports, systems management, research, data management, invoicing, communicating with suppliers, understanding and effectively utilizing cloud based services….you get the picture.
How to Work with a Virtual EA
Clear Communication
The key to everything else working: are you able to communicate - effectively - with someone working remotely?
Clear and concise communication is vital, because someone can’t just walk into your office and ask you what you meant by your request. No one is a mind reader. What you want is someone intuitive who is able to learn to anticipate what you need and mean - but that takes time and cooperation on both sides.
How? Decide how you will communicate instructions, requests, updates or feedback. Will it be through Microsoft Teams? Slack? Via a Task Manager / CRM?
A couple hints: an email may be fine for a one off “please save this attachment in xxx folder?”, but not for conversations. Using texts for instructions is also not something we recommend because they are difficult to organize and file away for future reference.
Using Teams, or Slack, for example, where you can create various channels based on subjects, clients or departments will keep related conversations together. As well, holding quick weekly meetings with your Virtual EA will help smooth communications, keep everyone on task, and develop a good working relationship.
Understanding Urgency
Are you the type that has urgent requests that need to get done now? You might be better off with a full-time person, someone who is available to you from 9 - 5 every day.
But what if you don’t have enough work to pay for a full-time person? You will need to consider if that urgency is valid or just a habit of how you are used to working, maybe because you only had yourself to coordinate with.
A Virtual EA will have a set number of hours put aside for you. If you have contracted them to work 10 hours a week, they will have two hours each day blocked off just for you. Outside those two hours, they are working for someone else so you can’t tap them on the shoulder and say “hey, can you stop what you’re doing for that other client of yours?”
Work, questions or tasks that you have this afternoon might not get looked at until tomorrow. Ask yourself if you’re okay with that.
What Do I Need in Place to Work with a Virtual EA?
Virtual Business Infrastructure
Your business needs to have the appropriate infrastructure in place to allow people to not be on-site. This is far more common now than when Admin Slayer started nine years ago. If you’re using Google Workspace or M365 as your platform, you’re already there. Both are cloud-based so that everything is accessed through your internet browser. Software doesn’t need to be installed on personal computers. Files don’t need to be downloaded to personal computers. Access to a physical server in an office isn’t needed.
A User Account
The first step to enabling a Virtual EA to work with you is to provide a user account in your company domain. This will be a new user in your Google Workspace or in M365. As the owner, you may have “Admin” privileges to add users, but if you don’t, it’s because you have IT support that looks after this for you.
File Access
Sharing appropriate folders in your file structure is next. It’s important to keep the theory of “least privilege” in mind. While it might be easy to share everything, it’s not appropriate, wise, or necessary. Start with only the necessary folders, and grant access to others as the need arises.
Email Delegation
It’s often desirable for a business owner to provide “delegate” access to their email account so their EA can read the inbox and send emails “on behalf of” the business owner. Delegate access does not provide access to the files/folders that you have access to - just your inbox. We can provide instructions on this if you don’t know how.
Calendar Sharing
Having access to a business owner’s calendar (or calendars) is critical to helping manage and schedule their work (and sometimes personal) lives.
Password Manager
One of the first things we ask a new client is how they store the various passwords for their business. We highly recommend that clients use a Password Manager where everything that has a password is securely stored and, from there, securely shared out with the people involved in running your business, including your EA. This gives you control over all your passwords as you can revoke who has access if that becomes necessary. We often create this for a new client if they don't have one already.
Business Tools Inventory
All the other tools you use in your business, if they are needed by your Virtual EA, need to be provided; some will need new accounts, whereas for others you might be able to share credentials of an existing account.
The following is an example of some common apps and tools used. Every business is different and some will have industry specific apps, so start by creating your own inventory:
Google/M365 (mentioned above)
A task manager (i.e., Asana, Pipedrive)
Calendly
Slack
CRM
Zoom
Website
QBO
DocuSign
Supplier sites (i.e., Amazon, Staples, etc.)
Corporate credit card info
You may be nervous about all this sharing, but
it’s one of the reasons why a Password Manager owned by you is important, and
you don’t need to provide access to everything at once; you can let the relationship and trust build up before, for example, sharing credit card info.
Task Managers
Even if a business owner doesn’t see direct value in the use of a task manager, for others (like your Virtual EA) to do their jobs effectively, there needs to be a way to track what’s been requested, what the instructions are, when it’s due, who’s doing it, and the status.
For most clients, we go in and set up a system for managing tasks. It may be for the entire business, or for just the administrative side of things.
For the Long Haul
Having an effective Virtual EA can truly make a difference to the busy business owner by giving you:
someone (or a team of two Slayers) that you can count on who are fully invested in your business for the long term,
someone proactive who wants to do more than just “tick off the task”,
someone who knows how you like things done, how you like to communicate with your clients, and how to organize your business.
After all, you deserve to have the time and energy to thrive in all parts of your life, don’t you!?