I’m fortunate enough that my virtual assistant (VA) has been with me for almost three years. In those three years, I’ve delegated quite a few things to her, but it wasn’t until recently when I realized just how much you can delegate to a VA.
Here are a few of the things you can delegate to a VA but probably aren’t. Spoiler alert: it’s not your emails, your social media or your calendar.
Making travel arrangements.
There’s one client I have to travel for occasionally. Rather than spending my time looking at flights coming out of Miami International Airport and then sending the information to my client, I can delegate it to a VA.
Granted, I don’t always do this because a lot of my traveling is on my own dime and I use points. However, if a client is footing the bill I just delegate the research to a VA.
Calling customer service on your behalf.
I recently had an issue with my e-commerce site and a payment processor that wouldn’t connect. This was causing issues because customers wouldn’t be able to make payments and get their digital product. I could have called customer service for both companies myself, but I knew that was going to take hours.
Instead, I decided to delegate these calls to my VA. The end result was she got the answers a lot faster than I did. This allowed me to make a decision much faster than if I would have tried to do it myself. Additionally, in the time she was doing that, I was able to take meetings and secure two new paying clients. Win win.
This points to the fact as to why virtual assistants are worth every penny. Because she took something off my plate, I was able to secure revenue that would more than cover the cost of hiring a VA in the first place.
Have them buy stuff for the business.
If you’ve been working with your VA, you may be able to allow them to buy things for the business. Administrative assistants do this all the time for their bosses, so why not let your virtual assistant do it for you?
I admit I haven’t experimented with this yet, but my virtual assistant does find all the financial documents for my accountant, meaning she already has access to all the business financial information anyway. If that’s the case, then it may save me time to tell her what I need, where to buy it and just let her do it.
Chris Ducker talks about this specifically in his book, Virtual Freedom. He provides some strategies for how to go about delegating purchases to a virtual assistant while safeguarding your information.
Handle customer service inquiries for your business.
I receive a lot of the same questions in my inbox, so I’m working on letting my VA take the reigns when responding to blog readers and queries that come in through my website.
We’re still working on templates so we don’t have this down to a science yet, but this is definitely something I plan to delegate to a VA in the future.
Final Thoughts
If you haven’t gotten around to delegating these things to a VA yet, don’t worry about it. Delegating takes practice. Just know that there’s probably more you can delegate that perhaps you haven’t thought of yet.
