Need some advice on virtual assistants

Good day everyone,

I have a question and also some much needed advice.

My husband and I recently put up a carpentry business and don't have the capital at the moment to hire a full time assistant. We heard about virtual assistants but we don't even know where to begin to search now how it actually works.

If you all could give me some advice or personal experiences, I'd really appreciate it.

Thanks in advance!

 

You can try posting on this board or there are virtual assistant companies like Upwork or even dropping the job on Indeed and tagging it remote.

 

Virtual assistants as in A.I. like Siri and Cortana?

 

An assistant that works remotely, through the internet.

 

I seem to be missing something. Why would a carpentry business need a virtual assistant /assistance?

 

I've never seen a carpentry business with more than 5-6 people. In this competitive market they may get 1-2 jobs a week (sometimes none). I am wondering why the owner can't manage it on his/her own.

 

wonder how a VA going to be any assist for you as long as your business is not trad-able online unless you are doing it in a local website.wts in your mind exactly?

 

Va is the simple way to get the employee with cheap cost based on their experience..but just like @sarahk said before you need to identify what you need to outsource before and tou can find them on this forum or others company like freelancer,upwork,fiver and many more

 

One thing you'll need to do is use something like Lucidforms to map out what you want done and become extremely process based.

Without this you'll generally find mistakes are made and you end up spending more time than you'd like on your VAs

 

Thank you all for your answers!

 

I had this concern a few years back as well. Go post the job opening to Upwork and Craigslist. You indicate the job requirements and the rate you're willing to pay. The lowest and most decent offer you can give is $3-5/hour, still depending on the difficulty of the job. Then you can set how many hours a week the VA works for you and as an employer it's just fair to pay them on a weekly basis. I set up a work incentive to keep my VA from slacking around. The Upwork platform has the option for timer and screenshots which is nice but they charge fees both to the employer and the employee like an agency, but it's the safest place that to get decent employee. I usually go for the ones from the Philippines because they're really dedicated. Hope this helps!

 

I have used Fiverr for this and after a few trial and errors, found some great people.

 

Thank you so much for your response Greenpea, you have been wonderfully helpful

 

There are different types of VA's. And different levels of them. There's those that work for peanuts but take a long time and don't do a great job. And there's those that charge a bit more but work fast and do a great job. Now if you are looking for a VA to do something for you, some admin task, one of the best places to find them is through SEOClerks by posting a "Job" request. Once you have done that, those VA's can then "bid" on your job and you can check them out, message them etc. If you like someone and their bid is good, you can purchase them there and then and a new order is started. In that order, all you need to do is put the required details what you want them to do, then they can do it. When they are done, they can deliver the order to you which you can then review. If it's not done to your specification, you can "reject" the order. That way they will have to redo it again until it's done properly before being able to get their money. It's a great system and I've been using it for years to hire VA's for many micro tasks and even larger ones like yours. You can find more details about SEOClerks in the link in my sig. I'll shut up now because when it comes to SEOClerks I do tend to gush a bit! But hope this helps you and good luck!

Mike.

 

Here we go again with Fiverr gig but he doesn't even know how great it is? Its interesting just to include this service with no supporting documents.

 

Yes, those from the Philippines are really good. You can PM me about it since there is a site that is dedicated to hiring VA from the Philippines.