Change Work Life

Managing life admin without the overwhelm: buying back your time with a virtual assistant - with Sarah Rugg of Vi-VA

• Jeremy Cline/Sarah Rugg • Episode 206

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#206: Sarah Rugg is an author, entrepreneur and an expert in outsourcing, virtual assistance and life admin.  She explains how to free up your time through delegating time consuming tasks, what your own personal assistant can do, and how much it costs to hire a virtual assistant. 

What you’ll learn

  • [01:47] What a virtual assistant is and what their work life looks like. 
  • [02:39] How a virtual assistant can help you. 
  • [04:46] How Sarah started her own virtual assistant business. 
  • [06:50] How to have a good relationship with your virtual assistant. 
  • [08:02] How common having an assistant for your personal life is. 
  • [09:17] Why more people have personal assistants. 
  • [10:15] The average age of people who have personal assistants. 
  • [11:22] The areas of your personal life a virtual assistant can help with. 
  • [13:42] The unexpected  tasks virtual assistants can help with. 
  • [15:16] The limits of using a virtual assistant. 
  • [17:30] How to overcome middle class guilt. 
  • [21:06] How people’s lives have been improved through having a virtual assistant. 
  • [22:17] How to know a specific virtual assistant is a good fit for you. 
  • [23:20] How specific you need to be with your requirements for a virtual assistant. 
  • [27:25] The amount of time it takes to get set up with a virtual assistant. 
  • [30:00] The importance of giving your virtual assistant feedback. 
  • [34:35] The pros and cons of using an overseas virtual assistant. 
  • [37:52] How much it costs to get a virtual assistant. 
  • [39:05] How to work out the ROI of a personal assistant. 
  • [40:50] How virtual assistants can leverage AI. 
  • [44:43] How to see if using a virtual assistant is right for you.

Resources mentioned in this episode
Please note that some of these are affiliate links and we may get a commission in the event that you make a purchase.  This helps us to cover our expenses and is at no additional cost to you.

For the show notes for this episode, including a full transcript and links to all the resources mentioned, visit:

https://changeworklife.com/managing-life-admin-without-the-overwhelm-buying-back-your-time-with-a-virtual-assistant


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Everyone seems to have less and less time, so how can you free up some of yours? Are there things which you do yourself, which you could delegate to someone else? If you had your own personal assistant, what difference could that make? That's what we're going to talk about in this week's episode. I'm Jeremy Cline, and this is Change Work Life. Hello and welcome to Change Work Life, the show that's all about beating the Sunday evening blues and enjoying Mondays again. I'm a career coach, and in each episode my guests and I bring you tips, strategies and stories to help you enjoy a more satisfying and fulfilling working life. A friend of mine recently explained why a two-day weekend isn't long enough. Ideally, he'd have one day for socialising, one for life admin, and one for just relaxing and chilling out. Whilst a few employers are starting to embrace four-day weeks, for most of us a two-day weekend remains our reality. But suppose you could give someone else your life admin. Suppose you could free up some of your leisure time by delegating those jobs that don't necessarily have to be done by you. That's what we're talking about this week, and I'm delighted to be joined by Sarah Rugg. Sarah started her virtual assistant business 20 years ago and now has a team of 30 who help busy people reclaim their time by taking on both business tasks and everyday admin. Sarah, welcome to the podcast. Hi Jeremy, great to be here, thanks for having me. For those who are unfamiliar with the term, what exactly is a virtual assistant? It's somebody who would normally work from home on a self-employed basis, possibly freelance, and they will take on the admin for a business owner or somebody perhaps in their personal life as well. And they work flexibly, and normally, they might be doing it, say, around children or looking after an elderly parent or around something else in their life. They like the flexibility of the role. Okay, so from the person who's doing it perspective, I can see that element, there's that flexibility, work from anywhere, work around other commitments. What does the person who's using a VA see, and maybe how it distinguishes from, I don't know, maybe a traditional assistant, if there is such a thing? Yeah, sure. The main difference is obviously the virtual element of it. And they might do things like inbox management, manage your diary, book appointments, that kind of thing. Anything that they can do by email, WhatsApp, phone, Internet, anything that can be done virtually. And there is pretty much everything that can be done virtually nowadays. Yes, that's something we learned about five years ago when suddenly we had to do pretty much everything virtually. Absolutely. And interestingly, during lockdown, there were a lot of businesses in particular who would never entertain the thought of using a virtual assistant prior to that. And I think they're more open to it now because they saw that the virtual working idea actually wasn't too bad after all. It reminds me of a conversation I had with my boss at the time where they said something along the lines of, 'Oh, no, we can't have our PAs working from home, we need them here, we need to be able to keep an eye on them, and they've got to be on hand.' And I said to him that in five years' time, I didn't reckon we'd be having that conversation, that it would just be the norm. And I think that conversation happened about a year before lockdown. So, I was off by four years, but I was still pretty right about that. Absolutely, yeah. It's the way things are going. I know that some people, like some bigger companies, have brought people back into the office, haven't they? So, I know it doesn't work for everybody, but I think virtual assistants, they love working virtually, they don't really want to be in an office, and you get the best out of them working from home. So, it's a job that suits them, and they're most efficient doing. And I get that. There's no distractions at the office. So, what was your path to starting a virtual assistant business? I'm guessing it's not something that you proudly announced to your mum when you were eight years old that that's what you wanted to do. No, absolutely. No. So, I worked in a bank for many years, and I was very busy, I was working very long hours, and I just didn't have enough time to do anything in my evenings, on my weekends. Much like your friend that you were describing at the beginning. So, I thought, you know what, it would be great to have a PA in my home life. So, fast forward a few years on from then, and I decided to set that up as a business. So, there wasn't a huge amount of people interested in that back in 2005, but there were a few, and I did get some clients. And so, I've always had that passion for helping make people's lives easier and being able to allow them to buy some time back to spend with the families, friends or hobbies, or whatever they want to do. And I'm a bit of a geek with streamlining and organising and all of that as well. So, did you start out doing the work yourself, or did you go straight into being the business owner and outsourcing that bit? I did it all myself for many years, and now I run a team. I think we had a count yesterday of 38. And they do all the day-to-day work, and I just help manage the business and oversee now. But yeah, no, I've been there, and I've experienced what it's like working directly for the client, and I think that was really, really important. So, I know how to recruit the right people and how to train them up. Yeah, I'm a big believer in knowing how to do something yourself. So, I used to edit this podcast myself, I used to do pretty much everything myself. I delegate it now. But it's just helpful to understand that bit about how it works, so you know how it works. And also, you can do it yourself if things go wrong. Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you like things done a certain way or you have certain standards, I always encourage our clients to tell the VA that, tell them how you want it done, show them and talk to them about all your isms and everything that your pet hates and maybe even record them a Loom video on how to do something, and that way they can do it exactly how you like it. So, there's a lot of my clients who would call themselves a control freak. So, that's not me calling them it. They actually tell me that they are one. I'm not saying all the clients, but I would say quite a lot of our clients are. And I understand that. So, it's difficult to let go, and it's difficult to delegate. But if you can say, right, this is exactly how I do it, and this is how I want you to do it, it's a little bit easier to let go if you've shown somebody exactly your way of doing it. So, I can see how VAs could be very valuable for business owners, especially those who might not necessarily be ready to make a full-time hire themselves. But when it comes to life admin, personal admin, it sounds really luxurious, and it sounds like something that's frankly just for rich people. I mean, you hear about the rich and famous who have got their own personal secretary, that kind of thing. Is this really something that is accessible to, I don't know, normal, for want of a better word, people? Yeah, I mean, absolutely. So, obviously, it did used to be for the rich and famous, but with lives so busy as they are now, and with families, with children and jobs, and everyone has so little time, it is becoming more and more popular and more and more of a thing that, again, for want of a better word, normal people, the non-rich and famous, are accessing. Because I think the main reason is people just want time back. They want to spend time with their family, they want to do things they enjoy, and they think life's short, I don't want to spend it doing all my admin on my very little precious time off with my family. So, it's definitely becoming more and more popular and less of a luxury than it used to be. So, what do you think has changed in the 20 years that you've been doing it? What is it that's leading it to become more popular and more accessible? I think, yeah, life getting busier is probably the main thing. There's just more coming at us, isn't there, from different angles. I mean, social media is obviously an awful lot bigger now. People are more accessible. So, if your boss needs you on a weekend, they could WhatsApp you. I know they probably shouldn't, but I know some do. And so, I think there's just a lot more pressure which creates a lot or gives people a lot less time than maybe they had 20, 25 years ago. And have you seen a rise in the number of dual income households, for example, in that time? Or was that something that was just already there even when you were starting out? So, where you've got, say, both parents working. Yeah, I mean, I didn't have a huge amount of clients back in 2005, because it just wasn't a massively popular service for the life admin side. It was more the business side. But I think the few people that did use it then, yeah, probably both of them were working, both partners. So, we haven't seen a massive difference in the type of people who use us. I guess maybe the age has gone down slightly. So, the average age of people that use us, we're getting a lot of contact from people in their 30s now. And I would say it probably used to be 40-plus. So, yeah, possibly a slight difference in the age, and obviously the volume, we get a lot more inquiries now. But no, the type of people has always been typically husband, wife or partners with children, both with quite busy jobs where they work silly hours, they like to live a little, they like nice things. So, yeah, I don't think that's changed massively in 20 years. We've talked briefly about the virtual element of this and how it's for jobs which can be done with an Internet connection. Can you talk a little bit more about the sorts of things that a VA can help with from a personal life admin perspective and maybe give some examples? Yeah, of course. Personal inbox management is something that we do for quite a lot of clients, particularly if they've got children who are school age. So, I mean, anyone with kids at school will know how many emails come in, and a lot of them are not relevant. Our role as VA, for example, might be to sift through all of those, get rid of any that are not relevant, and then for the ones that are relevant, make sure stuff is in the diary, reminders, if it's World Book Day and the child needs an outfit, we can help source that and have it delivered. So, that's one thing. We can manage personal calendars as well with all the personal appointments. We can book restaurant reservations, theatre tickets, that kind of thing. We do a lot of birthday reminders and gift purchasing for people ordering flowers, that kind of thing. I mean, with some clients, we actually send cards on their behalf. They tell us what to put, and we send them through the likes of Moonpig. And then, just lots of other appointments that need booking, like car MOTs, we'll just do reminders when insurances are due. Gosh, what else? So many things, like beauty appointments. Yeah, I mean, just going to one extreme, with one of our clients, we do actually liaise with his mother, so that she gets to see him on a regular basis. Now, she doesn't mind. We've obviously made sure that's okay. She said, 'I would rather deal with you so I see my son at least once every few weeks, than not see him at all.' So, that's a complete far extreme. And to be fair, there are reasons for that, which I won't go into. But yeah, so it can go from just anything like basic booking of appointments, right through to managing relationships or making sure people see each other on a regular basis. And leaving aside anything that needs to be done physically present, what are the limits? What are the things where, yeah, sorry, a VA can only go so far, but they can't go beyond that, and sorry, you'll have to do it yourself. Personally, in my own VA company, our motto is, as long as it's legal and ethical, we'll do it. So, we have done all sorts of weird and wonderful things from sourcing special socks for somebody's son who had huge feet, through to sourcing special size sheets for a certain size mattress and all sorts in between. And yeah, I think the most crazy thing at the time that we did back in the day, probably going back about 15, 20 years, was we arranged a flash mob. And at the time, that wasn't really a massive thing. It was quite new and up and coming. So, that was quite exciting, arranging a flash mob. So, I don't really think there is limits. I think maybe some virtual assistants who offer life admin may put their own limits in place. I think most people will do whatever needs doing, as long as it is legal and ethical. Okay, that's interesting. Because I know from personal experience, there's a time of the year that I really dread, and that's when car and home insurance is coming up for renewal. Because the insurance company almost inevitably will give a quote which is much higher than you could get elsewhere. And then, it involves trawling through comparison sites and that kind of thing. But that does also involve quite a lot of detailed personal information. So, yeah, when does that become something which you guys would be able to help with, rather than it just being something that I would do myself? Yeah, sure. I mean, with, let's say insurance, for example, particularly travel insurance, you have to know the full medical history. Even with house insurance, car insurance, you need to know the history of everything for that as well. So, it can be tricky. We can't, as a VA company, and I don't think any VA company can recommend insurance, because that's not what we're allowed to do. But we can certainly do the legwork. So, we can always contact an insurance broker, if you use one, and say, 'Here's the current policy. Can you give us quotes for similar policies?' And we know good insurance brokers, we have a lot of black book contacts that we can use. So, there's certain things that we can do. Ultimately, you have to say to the client, 'Look, you need to just check it over before you agree to it.' Just, it can't be our responsibility that something's been missed. But we can certainly do the majority of the legwork, and we can do the comparison site stuff, if we've, say, got a copy of your last insurance policy, and maybe nothing's changed, for example, that could work. I like the research element. As someone who, whenever they're making a big or, frankly, not even that big purchase, will research the heck out of it and spend vast amounts of time on it, and then usually just come back to the first one that I looked at, I can see that being really quite valuable. Yeah, I mean, it is quite a requested task that we get at Vi-VA, so I know it's a task I personally cannot stand. It's my worst task, so my VA does it for me as well. And yeah, I mean, if there's a way to make it work, then absolutely, it can be delegated, but you just need to make sure that your VA's got all the right information, because there are things that could, obviously, go wrong if key bits of information are missed. But it works well most of the time, as long as the client just checks the final version. We'll come on to talk about the financial aspect of it. But before we get there, I'm curious how you work with your clients to get through what I'm going to call middle-class guilt. So, this feeling that you should be doing something yourself rather than delegating it, and it might not just apply to the tasks that your team helps with, but things like cleaning the house or doing the gardening or that kind of thing, which tends to be stuff that I'm very happy to pay someone else to do. But yeah, that idea that I should somehow, it makes me a bad person if I'm not doing these things myself. Yeah, I mean, we do see that. We do all sorts for clients, and I just try and reassure my clients that we don't judge. And I can only talk from Vi-VA's point of view. Other VAs hopefully are the same. I don't know that all are, but hopefully. But I'll say to people, 'Look, we book people's fake tans, we book GP appointments, and we have to know what the issue is in order to get past the receptionist.' And so, we do, we just tend, people who do life admin don't judge clients, or certainly we don't at Vi-VA. Because it is hard. You do feel bad, and I know myself because I'm in that situation as well, I outsource a lot, but you do feel guilty, don't you? And I think it doesn't help if you get remarks from certain people or jokes. I know that one of my family members is like, 'Oh, I wish I had a cleaner.' And I say to them, 'Well, you know, for me, it's not a luxury, that's just my lifestyle.' So, I think you can't stop people coming to us who are clients, you can't stop them feeling guilty. But we try and make them feel more comfortable by saying, 'Look, you know, we deal with all sorts, we don't judge you, just tell us whatever you want us to do. And we are here to make your life easier, whatever that might look like for you.' I mean, we're on a WhatsApp group with a two partners and their teenage son. It's our responsibility on the WhatsApp group to remind them of things that are coming up and give them a bit of notice. And the agreement we've got with them is that the teenage son or the husband or the wife, they can all contact us and ask us to do any task. And of course, with the teenage son, I have got a few guidelines from the dad, things that we are allowed to do for him and things to let the dad know if he asks for that, and no, you're not having it. So, literally, life admin can be whatever you want it to be, and it can look like whatever's going to make your life easier. It's very personal to each individual. What's going to make my life easier would be potentially very different to what will make your life easier. So, I think it's interesting that if you do use a VA for life admin, that you make sure that you're not being treated the same as everybody else, that you are being treated as an individual, and they're really asking a lot of questions about your life in particular, you personally. Okay, so someone who has these guilty feelings, one way of helping them through that could be showing them how their life could be easier. And you said that that tends to be different depending on the person. So, again, could you give some examples of what are the tangible ways that some of your clients have had their lives made easier by the work that you've been doing? Well, I think some of them don't have to go in their inbox anymore. So, that's a tangible measurement, and that's kind of been quite life changing for them. And others have, for example, kept in contact with their various different friends and family members. Because I'm just thinking of one particular client where his brief to us was, 'I want to see my rugby friends every three months; I want to take my wife out for date night fortnightly; I want to see my parents every three weeks.' And it was our responsibility to make sure that that happened and that a table was booked somewhere, that it was in the calendar. So, I think some people are just getting a bit of a life back and making connections that maybe they had lost with certain people. So, I think, again, that's kind of quite tangible for those people. And that's just a couple of examples. When someone comes to you, how do you match a VA to their needs? And I suppose what I'm really getting at is turning it the other way, how does someone know that they've got a VA matched to their needs? Yeah, so I've been doing it since 2007. I think that's when I took on my first team member. So, I think I've got quite a good gut feel for it now. But the things that we look for are personality, for a bit for personality match. If the client has asked for anything in particular, like we had one last week, she wanted her VA to have their finger on the pulse about the latest trends in London, bars to visit, beauty places to go. So, certainly, sometimes we have specific requirements like that. But obviously, skills. So, it depends what people are asking for. So, we'll always look at based on what they want, what skills do we match that to, what skills does the VA have. And availability, of course. So, skills, availability, personality and any specific requirements, really, they're the main four things. And so, if someone is looking for a VA, how clear do they need to be on what it is they're looking for? Or can they just come in with, I don't have enough time, I'm overwhelmed, I don't know how you're going to help me, but help? We do get plenty of those. I think either is fine. So, I think if you just get to that point where you know you need help, but you just don't know how it looks, you've never used a VA before, you're overwhelmed, and you literally are at that point you've described, I think it's fine to contact a VA at that point, because VAs are intuitive, they show initiative, they're organised, they're experienced, and they're going to be able to extract certain information out of you to then work out how they can best help you. So, they'll ask all the right questions, hopefully. Like, where is your time being spent, and what are your pain points and et cetera. And I think a good VA as well will really, really listen to everything that you're telling them and listen to where it's just not working for you currently, where those pain points are, and come up with the solutions to them. I think, if you are not in that situation, if you're in more of a fortunate situation and perhaps less overwhelmed and more organised with it, and you've got the luxury of having time to think about what you would like a VA to do, I think it's really good to write it down and be very aware for a minimum of a week, preferably a month really, or anywhere in between, just be very aware every day of what could I delegate to a VA, maybe at the end of each day, what could I have delegated today, what took up a lot of my time today that I could have spent doing things more enjoyable to me. And I think that's a really good mindset to get yourself into, to start off, start the ball rolling with thinking of what a VA could take off your hands. And it's quite exciting once you start thinking in that way, and you're like, 'Oh, they could source all these birthday gifts, and, oh, I forgot someone's birthday last month, that wouldn't happen if I had a VA. And, oh, my car MOT, and I haven't got time to book that in.' All of those things, you can just throw all of that at a VA, whether it's on WhatsApp, email, whatever, as thoughts come into your head, rather than them either being forgotten or clogging up your headspace, you can just whack them out on whatever it is, WhatsApp's quite popular amongst our clients, to the VA, and you just know that then you can forget about it. Yeah, that excitement piece, I definitely recognise that. I use a VA to help me in my podcast and business, but she said to me, 'Look, you can send personal stuff as well." And so, when we were planning a family holiday, usually, I would be researching it to the Nth degree, but I said to her, 'Okay, so we're going to be here for four nights, suggest an itinerary.' And I gave her some guidelines on the sorts of things that we like to do. We didn't follow the itinerary strictly to the letter, but it definitely gave us a much better starting point than if I'd been just starting with a blank sheet of paper myself. Yeah. No, I mean, researching holidays or itineraries is definitely quite a popular requested task for life admin. You are a dream client, Jeremy, because you're so organised, and you've thought it through, and you've given all those guidelines. So, in an ideal world, a VA would love their client to give all that information. It doesn't always happen in reality, but that's great. As a VA, if you get all the guidelines and very specific, here for four nights, here's the guidelines, I mean, that's great for a VA. It just gives them a really good start and some kind of boundaries and, yeah, it's great. I'm guessing there's going to be a bit of a time investment up front in order to set the relationship up. And it's one of those vicious circles where you don't have time to delegate, which means that you don't have time to delegate because you're not delegating until you don't get your time back. So, how do you make that as painless as possible, so that there's the right amount of time invested up front, but it doesn't become off putting? I think this is something that I am quite blunt about. If you are going to use a VA, you've got to invest time upfront. I mean, you just have to, really. The more time you invest up front, the more you'll get out of it on an ongoing basis, and the smoother it will be, and the more efficient it will be. I suppose, I know some people, I guess that they don't have much time. I would say, at a minimum, just show the VA how you like things done. So, for example, if they're managing your inbox, and they're managing all your school emails, tell them all about your kids. How old are they, what kind of things that are going to come through in this inbox are they interested in? For example, one of our clients said, 'If anything comes through about ballet classes, just delete.' And that kind of information is really useful to a VA, and I always say to people, never assume anything, just give as much information as possible. If you can jump on a Zoom and screen share and show them your inbox, show them your family calendar, or your birthday reminder system, whatever it is, the more you can invest upfront time wise, honestly, the more it will make your life easier going forward, definitely. But getting that balance, how do you do that? I think it's really hard. I think it depends how committed you are for the long term. I think if you're really serious about it, and you really want it to work, then I would really urge people to spend more time than they probably want to, only in the first few weeks. I'm not talking eight hours, I'm just talking maybe three hours in maybe different half an hour stints, that's all. And bedding down the relationship, I can envisage a situation where a client thinks they've given pretty clear instructions about what they want, and then something comes back, and it's completely not what they expected, and there's going to be a temptation at that point to go, 'Oh, this just isn't working. It would have been quicker to do it myself.' How do you deal with what I'm guessing are pretty inevitable bumps in the road, at least in those first few weeks and months? Yeah, no, absolutely. I think it's really important that you feed back to your VA and be a bit patient in terms of, they deal with lots of clients, and just because you're really surprised that they didn't book you a seat on a train with a table, because you always have a table, why wouldn't you have a table, if you didn't tell them that, then you can't assume that they would know that, because some clients don't care if they have a table or not. So, I think, just state the obvious, and it's just giving as much information as you can. And if it does go wrong, if they do book you a seat without a table in my example, then just tell them. Just say, 'Actually, I really want a table.' And just think, what else would they need to know? And a classic one is, some of our clients don't care how long it takes to get on a train somewhere. They just don't like changing, they just like to work all the way there, it's great, uninterrupted, and they really use the time effectively. Other clients are like, 'Get me there as soon as possible. I don't care how many changes. It's all about speed.' So, we never assume at Vi-VA which one it is. We always ask. And if your VA doesn't ask, tell them things like that. Because it's not obvious. Just because it's obvious to you doesn't mean that's the norm. I suppose the ideal metric of success will be that it seems like your VA is a mind reader, but you've actually got to give them quite a lot of help in order to get to that stage where they are a mind reader for you. Yeah, no, I mean, it's great when it gets to that stage, and I've achieved that with my own VA, and it's wonderful. And yeah, she's picking things up and doing what I would have done with them, and before I've even seen them. And that is just great when it gets to that point. But yeah, it does take a lot of relationship building, and you have to share a lot of information with them. I think it's really important that you involve your VA. Not everyone does this, not everyone wants to do this, and it's fair enough. But what does really work well is if you involve your VA in what you're trying to achieve, your bigger goals and your aspirations, and just really share any wins with them, and make them feel part of your life or your business if you're running a business. And they really like that. They really like to be involved like that. And you will get so much more out of a VA if they're really involved to that level. Does it ever get to the stage where the VA is comfortable questioning something? So, maybe someone has said this is their expressed goal, and then they give a VA a task, and then the VA might go, 'Yeah, sure, happy to do that, but you did tell me that this is your goal, so I'm just wondering how it actually fits in.' Yes, definitely. I think you build such a close relationship with your clients that you get to know what to say and what not to say, and you can make suggestions, but you know them well enough, if they say no, you know not to push it, you know if they're going to be open to suggestions of ways to do things better. So, you just gauge it client by client. In Vi-VA, we ask the clients upfront, do you want us to give suggestions on ways to do things better or question you if you've not done something, would you want us to hold you accountable? And we get a real mix. Some people are really offended at that. No, absolutely not. I can achieve myself. And other people are like, 'Oh, that'd be amazing. Yes, please. Absolutely.' So, yeah, I mean, just everyone's different. Their requirements are different. It can work for anybody. Just, again, tell your VA, do you want them to question you? Do you want them to tell you it's not in line with your goals? My VA does with me. I love it. And I'm like, gosh, yeah, you're right. Okay, cancel that meeting. I think we all need that in some shape or form. Some people are open to it more than others. But yeah, your VA can do that if you want them to. One of the benefits you mentioned earlier of a career as a VA is the fact that you can pretty much do it from anywhere and quite flexibly. So, what's your view, and I'm aware that you could be a little bit biased here, but on things like onshore versus offshore? You can get VA services pretty much anywhere in the world, some of which are places which have a much lower cost of living, and so lower prices. And time zones might not align. But my experience is that you do get VAs who are happy to work what might seem like odd hours, because it fits in with where they've got their clients. So, if someone is making a decision about whether to get something which I'll call onshore, so for our purposes, the UK, or if they're in the US, someone who's US based, versus someone who is in South America, Africa, the Philippines, what are the considerations? I think generally the main issue with using an overseas VA is language barrier, time differences, as you mentioned, and sometimes cultural differences as well. I mean, overseas VAs are really great for certain things. So, for example, a lot of our clients will use them for specialist functions, like SEO, for example, is quite popular, also maybe tech stuff, web design type thing or website updates. And often, we will actually coordinate overseas VAs, so we'll make sure that everyone's doing what they should be doing, and they're coming back at the right time and that the quality is good. So, I think, overseas VAs definitely have a place. I'm not anti them at all personally. Obviously, I get this question quite a lot, and I don't like to give an opinion on something if it's kind of unfounded or if I don't have experience of it, so I decided to have a go myself. So, I've tried using an overseas VA about three times now. It doesn't work for me personally for the reasons I've said. I think the main thing I hear when clients come to us, and they say, 'I've tried an overseas VA thing, I've tried that, and it doesn't work', is reading between the lines, going back to that control freak thing that I referred to earlier, I think sometimes if you've got really high standards, and it's very key to you that your emails are worded perfectly, and I don't know, it maybe is not the right thing for you to use an overseas VA as your kind of day-to-day VA for your admin needs maybe. I'm sure there are lots of brilliant ones out there. I think if they're good, they're not so cheap as they used to be. The last time I looked at the company who I had previously used, their rates were not much lower than ours, and they were based in India. So, yeah, it's a mixed bag, and it works for some people, it doesn't work for others, and a combination works actually really well in some situations. So, you mentioned rates there, at a risk of asking you how long is a piece of string, what can someone expect to pay to use a VA? In the UK? Yeah, or anywhere where you've got experience or have the knowledge. Sure. Well, the average rate per hour for a VA in the UK last year was £30. So, if the VA company is VAT registered, then you'd expect to pay VAT on top of that. You can get VAs for less. There are plenty of VAs charging more. It depends as well in the country where you are. So, around London, VAs are generally on the higher side, as you'd expect, and in certain other areas of the UK slightly lower. I mean, really, it doesn't matter where your VA is, because you probably will never meet them, so you could choose somebody in an area where the price is more palatable. But yeah, a real variation. I'm a bit out of touch with what overseas VAs charge now. It's obviously a lot more than it used to be, but yeah, I can't really comment on that, to be fair. I haven't used one recently or tried to use one recently. It was probably a few years back. And going back to one of the themes we were talking about earlier, so the mental barrier of paying someone to free up your own time. I guess where you've got a business, it can be a little bit easier to measure your ROI, your return on investment, but where you're talking about personal and life admin, that can be a little bit harder. So, how can you help clients figure out that this is money well spent? What's the metric that they can use, if there is one? Yeah, interesting question, and very hard to measure, unless the client says, 'Right, I'm putting aside the weekend or this day of the week to fill in the gap, whether spend time with my family, play golf', or whatever it is that they want to do to free their time up to do. So, that's one way of measuring it, to specifically put aside time when you do that, and you haven't been able to do that previously. But other than that, it's quite hard to measure specifically. But like the couple of examples I gave before, I think it's the feeling, it's the, 'Oh, I'm seeing my rugby friends. I haven't seen them for about two years, and now I'm seeing them every three months, or I'm seeing my parents more regularly, I feel less guilt.' And so, it's more of a feeling than a metric, I think, when it comes to life admin. I can't resist asking a question about AI, because, of course, everyone's talking about it, and I kind of see AI as another form of delegation. So, I'm curious to know how you see AI impacting the work which gets given to you, for example, research, but also how you can see you'll be leveraging AI within your business. Yeah, sure. I mean, I think AI is amazing, and I'm embracing it, both in my business and personally, it completely blows my mind. We're testing all sorts out at the moment. So far, what we've found is that you still need human intervention with a lot of it. So, it is making, obviously, massive inroads into efficiency and making businesses more efficient. But it's making a lot of mistakes. I mean, we're currently trialling various different software to manage your inbox, where AI replies to all of your emails for you. Which I got so excited when I heard about this, and I'm personally involved in testing it myself, because I just thought, the thought of having my inbox just done for me was amazing. And we always test everything first before we roll it out to our clients. So, we're still in kind of the testing phase, but it's very, very problematic, to be honest with you, at this stage. There's a lot going wrong. It's very, very frustrating. It's nowhere near, and this is just the inbox management piece, it's nowhere near a place where I would roll it out to our clients. But when it does get there, hopefully very soon, then we will be rolling out to our clients. And I think the sweet spot is a virtual assistant who embraces AI and uses it for your work or your life admin, but who also can check that work and make sure it's accurate and it sounds right. For example, if it's writing copy, a lot of it sounds like AI. You've got to know what prompts to put in. I mean, it's taken us probably six months of tweak, tweak, tweaking to get our prompts right, so that we can now write a blog post through AI that sounds like us, and it's the kind of thing we'd say in our voice. And it's not something you can do readily. So, I think it's kind of amazing and still very early stages in terms of the admin stuff it can do. But yeah, I mean, there's lots of things that it can do, which I think coupled with a VA is really, really powerful. And that's how we're embracing it anyway. We are always going to offer the VA to actually do it for you and then check it at the end. I mean, most people of our client base don't want, I mean, yes, they're embracing AI to an extent, but they don't want to have to learn the latest of everything and dive into detail of every single bit of software and ability and the latest prompts to put in. They just don't have the time to do that. So, we're trying to take that legwork off them and do all that research for them. So, we're kind of behind the scenes preparing for a really exciting future of where VA plus AI is going to make massive differences to individuals and businesses. It's really exciting. How can someone start in a relatively risk-free and small way? Because I'm guessing that some people might be prepared to go all in with a VA, but I'm guessing there's also quite a lot of people who might just want to test the water first, try with something small. So, what's a good way that minimises risk that you can see whether it's right for you? With using a VA? With using a VA, yeah. I'd just go in for a small number of hours per month. I'd ask to have a call with the VA first, if you can, if that's an option, and just check that you gel with them. That's really important. If you do have that luxury of being able to write down or make a note of the kind of tasks that you need help with, then that will help. If you can go to the first call with the VA with that list, it gives them something to work from. Yeah, just trust in the process. As you rightly said earlier, you need to be a bit patient at the beginning and just don't assume anything. Feedback, feedback, feedback, you know, all the time in the early days. Your VA won't mind. They want to do a good job for you, so there shouldn't be any problem with any feedback. See how it goes. It's not for everyone. So, the odd person does say to us, 'Actually, it's made me realise I need someone physically in the office next to me.' So, there still are people who prefer that. But the vast majority get started, dip their toe in. With Vi-VA, we start with five hours a month as a package, and it's quite popular as a dip-your-toe-in kind of package, and then quite quickly, clients increase to the next package up or the one after that. But yeah, just start small, and then you'll see what difference it makes, and you'll get quite excited, and you'll start to realise, you'll start to think, 'Oh, I could give my VA this as well, and oh, could you do that?' And they might say to you, 'Would you like me to take that off your hands?' And our clients say to us all the time, 'Oh, I didn't even know you could do that.' So, it builds over time. It's worth just dipping your toe in and just having a go and see where it takes you. It's very exciting, and it can free up so much time and just give you headspace back. That's what I find about using my VA is, it just allows me to have that headspace back that I just didn't seem to get at one point, because anything that I think, 'Oh, I've got to do that', I just WhatsApp her or email her, and then if it's the middle of the night, which often it is, it's out of your head then, and you can focus on the stuff you should be doing. So, what's been your favourite result for a client for whom you've started doing their life admin for? What's a real highlight where you go, yeah, this is a success story, this is where we've got something really good for our client? That's a question, a tricky one to answer, because a lot of the stuff we do is day-to-day, we do the same things maybe one month to the next. But I think when we did that flash mob, that was really an achievement, because, obviously, it was top secret, it was a massive thing at that point, and we managed to, from the client just saying, 'Can you sort out this flash mob?', we arranged this amazing dance thingy that was pulled off in a public place, and the results were amazing. So, I think probably that one stands out, even though it was quite some time ago. Yeah, it's got to be that. Fabulous. So, what tools or resources can you recommend to someone who is maybe starting to think, 'I'm getting a bit overwhelmed here, and I just need a blog or a book or something to start thinking about how I could perhaps progress to using a VA'? So many. And I think one that I would like to recommend is Todoist. It's software to manage tasks. It can be used in your personal life, it's brilliant for recurring tasks. So, you can put birthdays in there that pop up every year, MOTs that are due, same, insurances, all of those, and you can set them up as recurring reminders and plus your day-to-day stuff, and it's something that your VA can manage for you as well. But that, to me, it's been around for a while, we try all the new software coming out, me in particular, I like trying them all out, and I keep going back to Todoist. So, yeah, I think that's my recommendation. And where can people find you? Yeah, so my website is vi-va.co.uk. Yeah, that's probably the best place to find me. Or LinkedIn. Sarah Rugg on LinkedIn. Either of those two places. Links, as always, in the show notes. Sarah, thank you so much for coming on, and yes, giving us an introduction to this world. It's a pleasure. Great to be on, Jeremy, thank you. Okay, hope you enjoyed that interview with Sarah Rugg. Now, clearly, not everyone can engage a virtual assistant. If you're going to pay someone to do jobs for you, then, yes, it's going to have a cost element to it. But I don't think that's the only hurdle. Mindset plays just as important a part. And one of the things I think is at the root of that is that we value money more than we value our time. You can put a figure on money, you can understand it in terms of what it can do for you, its purchasing power. It's much harder to do that with time. And it's kind of strange when you think about it, how things have evolved that way, given that earnings can be incredibly variable, and yet everyone, everyone has the same amount of time, the same 24 hours in the day. I'm slowly coming around to the way of thinking that money enables you effectively to buy some more time. No, it's not going to add an extra hour to the day. It's not going to make it 25 hours. But if you pay someone to do a job which would otherwise take you that hour, then that's an hour back to do, well, whatever you want. I started to use VAs in my podcast, even though I wasn't making any money at all on it, but because I knew the things that were taking me time were not the best use of my time. I can do the editing, I can do the show notes, but other people can do them better and more quickly than me. And so, by paying them, I'm freeing up my time to do things which I'm better suited to, which are a better use of my time. You'll find the show notes for this episode at changeworklife.com/206. That's changeworklife.com/206. And if you'd like to help me grow my audience, if you'd like to help me get my content into the ears of more people, then one of the things you can do to help me is leave a review. Apple Podcasts is still the best place you can do that. But also, I think you can leave reviews on other platforms. And it would be really helpful if you'd do that for me. On the subject of time, if someone sees a review that this podcast is worth the time, then someone else will hopefully take their own time to listen to it. In the next episode, we're taking the temperature of work in the 2020s. My guest has interviewed 100 people from all sorts of different jobs, and we're going to be finding out just what he's learnt. It's a really thought-provoking interview, so subscribe to the show if you haven't already, and I can't wait to see you then. Cheers. Bye.