Should you hire a brand new VA, or one with expert status, or someone who is somewhere in between?

When you first start looking for a Virtual Assistant, you are probably doing so mainly with your budget in mind.

And the question becomes how to spend that budget – on someone who costs less per hour but might just be starting out, or someone who cost more per hour but has more experience.

As an entrepreneur, you are likely seeking help with one of these two things:

• work you have been doing yourself (which is either not a good use of your time, or work that you dislike doing, or work that you don’t do well)
• work that you are not doing yet, but need someone to help you with

Work You Are Doing Yourself

If you are doing your own bookkeeping or marketing tasks, or data entry, or travel arrangements, or administrative work like client contracts and processing payments, you have a sense of how long each of these things takes you to do.

But typically I see business owners overestimate how long these things can take an expert to do – much less time than it takes you to do it. Let’s consider your newsletter, which takes you 4 hours a week to put together and send out. When you talk to a VA about their hourly/billable rate, you may be thinking it takes $X times 4 hours to do your newsletter. But your VA will probably only take half as long a you (or less) because it is their area of expertise.

VAs who have expertise in newsletters, or client care or marketing or other tasks, typically have processes and systems in place that help them get things done efficiently. And it will often cost you a lot less to get help with these things than you think.

Work You Aren’t Doing Yet

When you look for a VA to help you with things that you are not doing yet, you may have no idea how long something takes to do.

The first thing you should do in that case is ASK. Communication is essential with your VA and asking for an estimate of how long something will take to do is an excellent question.

If you hire a VA who is brand new, they may not be able to tell you how long something will take. That means that you are at the mercy of their work speed and learning curve.

If you hire an experienced VA, they should be able to give you a rough estimate – barring unforeseen circumstances.

You should look for someone who communicates the time it takes to complete work exceptionally well to you. Ask for regular status updates so you aren’t left wondering if your work is being done properly, and on schedule.

So what’s the right answer?

Hiring experience over no experience is a good idea – most of the time. Of course you really don’t have to hire an expert if it’s not in your budget. But you can probably find someone midway between the two.

Once you have experience working with a VA, you can then bring in people with less experience if you want to lower your support costs. But at the beginning, working with someone who can do your job quickly and easily because they are experienced is the better choice.

For more tips for about how to work well with a Virtual Assistant, be sure to LIKE my Facebook page, where I do a weekly Facebook Live training every Thursday. Let me know what you want me to talk about and I’d be happy to cover that topic for you!