71: What Does a Virtual Assistant Actually Do? (And Why You’re More Qualified Than You Think)

You don’t need to be a tech genius, have a stacked resume, or know the Instagram algorithm to be a successful virtual assistant. 📣

In today's episode, I’m breaking down exactly what virtual assistants do, what clients are really looking for, and why you're actually more qualified than you think! 👀

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Transcript

SPEAKER_00 1:30

You don't need to be a tech genius, have a fancy resume, or know all the ins and outs of the Instagram algorithm in order to be a successful virtual assistant. In fact, there are people out there right now with fewer skills and less experience than you making money from home as a VA. And in this episode, we're going to get into it. Let's go. Welcome to the Virtual Assistant School Podcast. I'm your host, Kate, a teacher turned entrepreneur, mom of two, and I teach women how to use the skills they already have to make money from home as a virtual assistant. Every Tuesday and Thursday, you'll get step-by-step strategies, behind-the-scenes insights, and hear honest, unfiltered conversations about making money and growing an online business so you can stop feeling stuck and start taking action toward your goals. Whether you're looking for a flexible system side hustle or want to take your business full time, this podcast is for you. Building a business or starting something new can be super overwhelming at times, but here you don't have to do it alone. So grab your coffee or make another cup and let's dive into this week's episode. Hello and welcome back to the podcast. If you notice, we actually have a We switched up the name of the podcast, which I'm in love with, and I hope you love it too. We are now calling the podcast the Virtual Assistant School Podcast, and I am so excited. We just decided, actually a little backstory, Your Behind the Scenes BFF has been our brand since 2022 when I first started my business as a virtual assistant, and it was like the perfect name. We loved it. I wanted everything branded with Your Behind the Scenes BFF, all that good stuff. It still is our brand name. But when it came to the podcast, we just never really found a name for the podcast that we loved. And I just really was like, you know what? We're just going to have it be Your Behind the Scenes BFF podcast. It's going to be great. And it wasn't until now that there was a name that we decided– was going to be perfect for the podcast. And so we just switched the name up. The brand is still Your Behind the Scenes of BFF. That is never going away. But the podcast has this new fresh name, which feels really good for kind of this new season that our business is really diving into, which... We'll probably go through more of what that's going to look like over the next few weeks when we're chatting with you in these episodes. But welcome to the Virtual Assistant School Podcast. Yay! It's so exciting. Okay, so today we are talking all about what a virtual assistant is. actually does. This is one of the biggest questions that I get, whether it's in my DMs, when it's in an email, if it's in the Monetize Your Skills Challenge, when people hear the podcast and they're interested in becoming a VA, but they're like, what the heck does a VA actually do? And can I do that? Do I actually have the skills? And the answer is yes, but I want to dive into that more so that you can see actual tangible examples. We have people that go through our program with all kinds of backgrounds, all kinds of skills, all kinds of experience, and I want you to know that it is so possible for you. So when it comes to being a virtual assistant, the first thing I want you to think about is when you're looking at your skills or right? And if you haven't listened to the episode that we released on Tuesday of this week, I'll link it in the show notes, but we talked about how you already have the skills that you need in order to be successful. And that's one of the greatest things about becoming a virtual assistant is that you can use those skills and actually get paid for them. Okay. But when it another little sidebar. If you haven't taken the Discover Your Money Making Skillset quiz that we talked about in the last episode, I'm going to link that again for you in this episode because you have to take it. I have to know what your results are. It's going to help you so much too in uncovering what we're talking about today. Okay. Back to the meat of the episode. Squirrel brain. So you have different skills, right? And there's a category of hard skills, right? And then you have soft skills. So Hard skills are things like teachable technical skills that can be measured, okay? That can look like how to manage an email inbox, using Canva or social media, data entry and spreadsheets, knowing how to utilize different customer service software, like tangible, teachable technical skills that can be measured, Those are hard skills, all right? Now, soft skills, these are things that it's not as easy to measure, okay? A lot of them are actually your natural strengths and what make you great at the things that you do, even if you don't realize it, okay? Examples of this might be like you're highly organized, right? All right. You're really great at communicating. You're able to solve problems quickly. You are someone who just figures it out. Maybe you pay really close attention to details. Right. So there's the hard skills that, like I said, are teachable. They're technical. They can be measured. And then there's things that. might be natural strengths of yours. They might be things that you've learned over time, but you do them really well. And it's not something that can really be measured. It's just a part of who you are. It might be like a strong personality trait of yours. And what people get wrong when it comes to becoming a virtual assistant is that your soft skills are actually more important and make you more desirable than your hard skills do. And one piece of advice that I give people who come to me and they say, you know what, I'm looking to hire a VA. What does that look like? How can I do that? We actually have a network for the gals who go through beginner to book VA and they're in our VA network. They are able to get connected with people who are looking for virtual assistants. And one of the things people ask me when they go to hire a VA is like, what should I be looking for? How do I do this? I've never done this before. And one of my biggest tips is to, I heard this quote one time, this is not my original quote, but I heard this a few years ago and it stuck with me. Hire for the heart, train the hands. You want to be the virtual assistant that you're just the person that people... know that they want in their business and they know like they can teach you whatever they need to teach you. And that is what most people when they are hiring a VA are looking for. That's what it's all about. If you go back to this last episode, we talked about how your role as a you're supporting the business owner. You're not running the show. And part of that is being able to learn different things. And as a business owner, when I'm hiring VAs or I'm hiring people to support my business and the recommendation that I give other people who are looking to hire a VA is don't get so focused on what their hard skills are and if they have experience in X platform or whatever, because you can show them how to do the thing that you want them to do. I actually tell people that if you can show a VA or you can show someone how to do a task in a one to 10 minute video, then you can delegate that to a VA, all right? This kind of goes into SOPs or standard operating procedures and how as a virtual assistant, your clients are going to give you those or they should. And if you're a client or someone looking to hire a VA listening to this, this is a tip for you. you should have a process that you are going to hand off to your VA for them to take over. That's the role of a VA. Okay. So as a virtual assistant, it doesn't really matter if you have experience in all these different platforms and all these different things, because your client is going to tell you exactly how they want you to execute that. I'm going to give you some examples. So first I want you to think of like, this is such a really, this is a metaphor, an analogy, whatever it is. When you think of like your favorite recipe, okay? Might be a chili recipe, might be a salad kind of recipe. It might be a lasagna, whatever it might be. You had a recipe that you started out with that you followed to a T, most likely, okay? And then over time, You got better and better at doing that recipe. And now you can pretty much do it from heart. You don't have to look at the recipe anymore. That's how I am with a 15-minute chili recipe that I make at least once a week. When I first started making it, I had to follow it to a T. And now I know exactly what ingredients. I can rattle them off to you. I know exactly how long it's going to take to cook. I know what I need to get from the store. I know the process and the order in which everything needs to get added in. And we're good. So that is basically like a life SOP. Like recipes to a dish that we're making for our families is the same thing as an SOP that your client is going to give you. So at first, they're going to give you this essentially a recipe to create or do a task for them. And then over time, you're going to catch up and catch on really quickly. All right. So your role as a VA is to take over those processes. And here's the thing. I've been working with business owners for over three years in some support capacity, whether it's been a VA or an online business manager or a social media strategist and manager. Right now, I am the ops and marketing assistant for one of my clients. And no matter if I was to take on a client right now as a VA, I would have a lot of experience in lots of different systems. I've been in a lot of different systems, not only for my business, but for other people's businesses. I would still ask for their process and their recorded SOP on how they want me to execute. Because here's the deal. You can have two clients that use the same system and they want you to do the same task, but how they want you to execute it is going to be different. So they are going to have to tell you and show you how they want that done. All right. This is why the hard skills aren't as important as the soft skills. The soft skills, like being able to learn quickly, being able to problem solve, being able to kind of figure things out if they don't go how you expect them to, being able to communicate effectively, all of these things are way more important than if you have experience in X system. Because to be honest, there are a million systems out there and you will not find a virtual assistant that has experience on all of them. And if people are too hyper-focused on, oh, I'm going to hire an assistant that has experience in these things, they are going to do themselves a disservice because they might hire someone who might have experience in those things, but they're not a good fit for their team. And this is what I see people shifting away from is people are like, you know what? I know I can teach them how to do the thing I want them to do, but I want to make sure it's a good fit for our team. Make sure it's a good fit for my business. Make sure our personalities mesh really well. Make sure that maybe if I'm someone who's not very detail-oriented or not as organized, I want to hire someone that has those strengths so that they can help me be that way. And that's actually something I did when I hired my VA. And I think that's something really important and it should be really encouraging for you because that is what I mean when I say you can get started using the skills you already have. You already have so many skills that people want to pay you for. Time and time again, I see this. I see multiple leads come through our network a week looking for VAs and every time I see them, I'm like, wow, so many gals in this program, so many gals that have graduated, so many gals in this group could do this because they have the soft skills that are required. Now, the next point that I wanna make is talking about how those skills you have actually can translate into specific services and tasks for clients. So on Instagram, a couple of months ago, I posted a question box and I said, what is your profession or what's your background in? And I'm gonna give you specific examples on how you can use the skills that you use in your profession to help clients and what people are actually hiring people for. So I pulled three of those. There's so many more. I actually have a post on my Instagram with these different, even some more examples if you want to go check that out. But a couple of examples. We're going to start with a teacher because I'm a former teacher. I know we have a lot of teachers that become VAs that go through our program, probably a lot of teachers that are listening to this episode right now. You communicating with parents, staff, students, et cetera, translates so well. And you being able to do email management, do customer and client communication, help with follow-ups, help with answering questions and doing like the customer support side of things. Your ability to do grading and tracking progress and managing learning plans and all that good stuff, perfect for data collection and entry. for business owners, proofreading, updating websites or other documents for your client. These things are so needed. People are hiring for them every single day. I'm telling you. Okay. Also, if you're a teacher that creates resources for lessons or anchor charts, or maybe you have experience creating worksheets or TPT or whatever that might be, you can be very valuable in in creating visuals for clients' graphics for social media, helping them create workbooks for their clients, helping them create any kind of graphics or visuals that they need for their business. Those are just a couple examples. But you see how the skills translate. Just because you're a teacher and you have these skills, teachers have so many skills. And I think a lot of times, at least when I was a teacher or when I was looking to make money from home and I was trying to figure out something I wanted to do with my career, I was like, okay, but I've only ever been a teacher. And how do I translate these skills into something else? And sometimes we get, I think, tunnel vision, especially I have my master's in education, so I'm like, I can only do something in education where because that's what my degree is in. And it's not true. And this goes for a lot of different professions, but this is my experience that there are so many skills that you learn that can be translated and you can really hone in on your strengths, which is what is so cool. Okay. The next one is a registered nurse. Okay. So if you're an RN or you're in healthcare, you know, hopefully you can relate to this, but this was someone that put that they were a nurse and this is what I came up with. So You are managing multiple patients. You have shift handoffs. You're juggling tasks simultaneously. That makes you such a great VA for supporting multiple clients, juggling projects without missing deadlines, like project management. Nurses are doing project management every single day. So are teachers. So are people in corporate. You just might not call it that. It might not look like how project management looks like for a client, But it's something that you very much are doing every single day, okay? Nurses also make decisions really quickly in urgent situations, right? So translating that into being a VA, it's not nearly as dire as But troubleshooting tech issues, managing time sensitive tasks, being able to perform under pressure, you know, maybe your client's in a launch and you got to, you know, do some things to help troubleshoot the launch, you know, whatever that might be. Okay. Oh my gosh, this is a good one. So nurses are, nurses and teachers, this is really the case for a lot of people, constantly adjusting to new information while staying organized, right? New things come up, You're constantly having to adjust and pivot while staying organized and keeping your head on straight. This is so valuable for VAs because let's be honest, us business owners can change our mind a lot. We might do something one way and then we want to do it another way and we need our team to keep up and be able to stay organized while also shifting. All right. So this is super, super helpful because you can pivot and adjust as needed. Right. Okay. One more example. We have an insurance account manager. Okay. So I had to look up the roles of an insurance account manager because I don't know of anyone except this one person who is an insurance account manager. And this is what I came up with. So One of the roles of an account manager for insurance is updating records, processing forms, and managing compliance, okay? That is so valuable as a VA because you can help with data entry, you can help with file management, inbox organization, general behind-the-scenes support, right? Managing compliance, I think of when we have clients who are course creators or have memberships, if people's payments fail, making sure that you're following up and letting them know that they need to change their card information or whatever that might be, right? Another thing that insurance account managers do is they manage renewals and policy updates, client questions, and client retention. So that is another huge bonus that you can offer your clients is helping them with client onboarding, right? Helping them update their client or customer relationship manager, I'm doing followups, doing customer support. And again, your client is going to show you and tell you exactly how they want this done. But this is stuff that people are looking for. Like, Hey, I have all these leads coming in and I can't manage them all. You know, here's how I want them to be managed. Here's the process. Here's even some email templates and they are delegating to their virtual assistant. And that's how you can step in and support them. So freaking cool. I hope you see that you have so many of these skills and I wish I could just go on and on about, you know, those of you who are in different careers, but we would be here all day. Okay. The third point that I want to make for you in this episode, and I really want to drive this home is you truly can start with what you have right now. Start with where you're at and develop your skills over time. Okay. You are going to learn so much by doing. I honestly think that the best learning comes from doing, okay? I learned so much like when I first started as a VA and I had no experience. I think I had like a little bit of experience in one system that a client was using and it's because I had used it for my own business in the past. But every other system, I didn't even know what it was. I had never even heard of it, okay? But because your clients are giving you the SOPs, they're giving you the recipe, right, for how they want the task executed, right? You can pick it up pretty quickly and you are going to be able to do that while also learning maybe how to do the process even faster. Maybe learning how to like make the systems a little bit more seamless. You're going to learn and kind of navigate your way around different systems and you're going to learn so quickly. There's multiple people that have gone through our Beginner to Book VA program. that were teachers and corporate, et cetera, and didn't have a background in these systems that most online business owners use. And now they actually specialize in those systems. They're actually doing like build-outs for these different systems for clients because they learned so much by actually helping clients and just getting in the weeds with it that they now are a specialist in that area. And that is so possible for you, but only if you start. Only if you start, you have to push fear aside and push this, you know, I don't know enough or, um, you know, starting something new and becoming a beginner again. And like all these resistances and hesitations that you might be feeling and just start or else you're never going to continue to grow and be able to see the fruits of what would happen if you started. right? So step number one, I want you to make sure you take that quiz. It's our free discover your money making skillset quiz that is going to kind of help you get a little bit of an idea of kind of where you are and what kind of skills you have and how that translates to other business owners and supporting them. And then number two is that if you are ready to get started, if you are like, you know what, I'm done, you know, Just thinking about it, I want a way to make money from home to be able to either add an additional income to my family and to our budget every single month or be able to quit my full-time job and what that could look like. You can check out Beginner to Book to BA. which is our signature program. And what's really awesome is that we have added a new enrollment option. So typically we run this program four times a year. It's live four times a year, okay? Our next live cohort, doors open for that at the end of August and the live cohort will start in September. But we added an option for self-study. And what that means for you is that you can get started today. You can literally sign up today. You can learn exactly how to start your business from the ground zero. No idea how to even get started. Beginner level, right? That's why it's called beginner to book VA. And you can get started today and learn how to start booking clients. You don't have to wait until the live cohort. And what's really cool is that if you do the self-study and then you decide in the future when we are running a live cohort, we are doing a live round, you can upgrade. If you're like, you know what? I want to get started today. I don't want to waste any more time. I want to just dive in. You can do that. And Then if you decide down the road, you know what, I want a refresher or I want to have more accountability to go through this or whatever it might be. I want the coaching. I want the live aspect of the program. Then you can upgrade and really just pay the difference between the two and jump into a live cohort. So it's really a win-win situation. Right? So if you are ready to get started, all you have to do is go to yourbtsbff.com slash beginner-to-booked. And I will also link that for you in the description and the show notes. And check it out and get signed up. You can sign up for self-study today. You don't have to wait for the live cohort. Or you could jump on the wait list for our live cohort. Doors are going to open on August 21st. Oh my gosh, let me get my calendar out. I believe it's August 25th. Let me confirm. Yep, August 25th is when doors are going to open and then they are going to close and we are going to get started with our fall cohort on Tuesday, September 9th. So whether you're jumping into the self-study or you're going to jump in on the wait list for the live cohort that starts in September, I cannot wait to see you inside. Okay, I will see you back here next week on Tuesday with a new episode and I just want you to know that I'm rooting for you. Have a great week. Bye.