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Chris: And we’re back. This segment of the Entrepreneur Magazine E-Biz Show is brought to you by MorePhotos.com, your internet sales photo solution. today we’re talking with TeamDoubleClick.com president and CEO, Gayle Buske, about using a virtual assistant to help you expand your small business or just to keep it running on a day-to-day basis.
Chris: Gayle, let’s continue where we left off before the break. How does a client know that the work is actually getting done and they’re not just paying for the virtual assistant to hang out and play computer games.
Gayle: That’s a very good question too and it’s a question we get asked a lot from our clients. One thing we do at Team Double-Click, because we operate similarly to a bricks-and-mortar staffing agency, only everything that we do is virtual, of course. One of the things that we do is we have all of our virtual assistants send their assigned clients a daily reporting of what they did. It may be, I accepted this many phone calls inbound, I made this many outbound calls, I set so many appointments, I worked on this Word document or this Excel documents. And then let the client know how many hours or how much time they put in for that day and then their cumulative time for the week. And it’s a good way because the client can’t actually see those tasks getting done as they’re happening, it’s a good way to let them know what’s going on in their business on a daily basis. And it also helps the client keep on budget too because they can go, oh my gosh, she’s got 10 hours in for the week already, I can’t afford any more for the week, let’s hold these tasks until the following week. That’s our company policy, is everyone does daily reports to clients. I guess if I were a client hiring a virtual assistant on my own I would require something similar to that just so you can keep abreast of what’s going on.
Chris: Sure. So I guess that leads to the question, does the client pay for a certain amount of time each week? Or are there situations where you can set up to pay weekly for your virtual assistant or programs where you can actually pay hourly, and do the virtual assistants usually warrant a 40-hour work week or look for a 40-hour work week?
Gayle: That’s a lot of questions (laughter).
Chris: (Laughter). Let’s back up to the first one.
Gayle: I know some individual virtual assistants require weekly or monthly retainer fees. Team Double-Click doesn’t. Everything is pay-as-you-go so there’s no length of time commitments or you have to stay with us for a year or six months. It’s as we’re needed basically. We do have a 2-hour per week minimum because we guarantee that much at least per week per client to each of our virtual assistants. But otherwise we time everything right down to the minute. We don’t do any rounding other than to the closest minute. And like I said, everything is just pay as you go on a weekly basis. Some people, again, do require monthly retainer fees, and it really varies from virtual assistant to virtual assistant what that retainer fee would be.
Chris: Well that’s great. I mean, for people who are just getting started in business they can actually afford to use someone as a virtual assistant. In my situation, Gayle, I may be calling you after the show (laughter).
Gayle: Wonderful, please do.
Chris: In my situation, you know, we have a lot of great people on staff at Worldwide Brands, but an administrative assistant I do not have currently and would be real interested in doing that. So I could do that on a 40-hour a week basis? I mean, I imagine that once you get established with a virtual assistant that’s working with you you really come to rely on that person too. It’s got to become a fairly close relationship after a while.
Gayle: You know, you really do. because that person gets to know you and your business just as an in-house person would get to know them. You get to know their little quirks and how they like to have things returned and what time of day is best to reach them and how they prefer to have appointments set and things like that.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: So really you can rely on a virtual assistant just the same way you would an in-office assistant. Again, the biggest difference is you won’t see her face every day.
Chris: And let me ask you this, when you’ve got a virtual assistant that you’re working with a few hours a week and that virtual assistant is also working for someone else or a couple of other people a few hours a week, is there a division of time, when, okay, I know that I can’t call my virtual assistant between 12 and 4 because they’re working for someone else at that time. Does that happen?
Gayle: We try to stay as flexible as we can. There’s really a lot of multitasking that goes on behind the scenes and what we try to train our virtual assistants to do is to do that multitasking. Prioritize, like you eluded to, they may be working for four or five or six different clients. Client Joe might come along with something very high priority that needs to be done right now. It would be up to the virtual assistant to ask Joe, when do you need it done and maybe ask Bob, Bob I’m working on this spread sheet that you said was low priority, can it wait for a while because I’ve got something else I need to attend to.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: So there really is a lot of multitasking and juggling involved.
Chris: Which really isn’t any different from someone working in your own office.
Gayle: No, not at all. You might work for six or seven sales reps in an office and Joanne comes over with something that she needed yesterday and Diane has something that needs to be done whenever.
Chris: Right. So that prioritizing is going to happen anyway.
Gayle: Exactly.
Chris: So you can pretty much, even if you’re using a virtual assistant just a few hours a week, you can pretty much call them any time and say, I need this or that to be done or could you set this appointment for me, and they’ll prioritize on their end when they can do it, but they’ll get it done in time.
Gayle: Right. And what we do with our virtual assistants too is when they’re going through that interviewing and screening process we try to find out how many hours a week they want to work. Some people want 40 hours, some people actually want 60 or 70. Some people can only work 10 or 12 hours a week. And we keep track of how much time they can work and then we assign clients accordingly, of course, according to their skills and the client’s needs, and then about how many hours the client needs a week and how many hours the assistant is available and kind of try to balance all that out.
Chris: Right, makes a lot of sense. Now, is a virtual assistant an employee of the client in any way?
Gayle: Typically, no, and part of the reason for that is they are so far away, it’s hard to make someone in a different state an actual employee.
Chris: Oh yes, we know that (laughter).
Gayle: (Laughter)
Chris: From personal experience we know that (laughter).
Gayle: It’s difficult (laughter).
Chris: Yes.
Gayle: But it also helps with the flexibility. The contractor, the virtual assistant, isn’t tied into someone long term if they want to maintain that flexibility, and the same thing for the client. It keeps them nimble. I mean, they can ramp up when they get an influx of business or they can back off when that business dips down again for a different time of year. So it keeps everybody flexible. So typically, no, they’re not employees, they’re independent contractors and they’re responsible for their own taxes and health insurance and office supplies and things like that.
Chris: And we should say to our listeners who have not had the experience of hiring employees that it is a complicated process. And especially, like you just said, hiring an employee in another state, just getting the insurance paperwork done can take years and cost millions of lives, you know…
Gayle: Mm-Hmm.
Chris: It’s really, really difficult stuff to do.
Gayle: It really is.
Chris: So how does a client actually go about hiring a virtual assistant?
Gayle: Well of course they can call a virtual staffing agency like Team Double-Click (laughter).
Chris: Right, TeamDoubleClick.com.
Gayle: Right. And there are a lot of good individual virtual assistants out there. If you Google for virtual assistant you’ll find a whole host of people. What I would tell someone looking to hire a virtual assistant on your own, make sure you screen them, make sure they’ve got the skills that you want, just like you would if you were hiring someone to come into your office. You want to make sure that your personalities match and the skills match and availability and all those things jive with your own work ethic and your own needs.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: And that’s something that we try to do also when we talk to clients. That first couple of phone calls is usually trying to figure out their personality, are they very high strung, are they more laid back, what do they need in the way of personality, and then of course what they need as far as skills, whether they need a graphic designer or an administrative assistant or a higher level managerial type executive assistant, and try to determine all of those things so that we can hopefully make a good match.
Chris: And during the process of actually doing this interview today, when we were setting things up, we always look for the best people to put on this show, you know, the best companies that represent their different fields and, of course, you come very highly recommended. When I worked with the person to set up this interview today I was really impressed with the thoroughness of everything that went on, the documents I got, the speed of the replies going back and forth getting all lined up to do this today. And I imagine that is one of the people that works with your company possibly as a virtual assistant? She is. Her name is Shawn and she actually is our executive assistant and she recently just took over coaching all of our individual virtual assistants that work with clients and she is a dynamo. I don’t know what I would do without her. She’s very detailed. She also works with some of our clients and everybody loves her. And that’s the kind of person we look for, somebody that’s on the ball and detailed and knows how to follow through. And yep, she’s awesome. I’m glad you had a good experience with her, that’s great.
Chris: Well I’ll tell you, you know, it’s rare. Unfortunately, it’s fairly rare in booking radio shows and doing those kinds of things. But the performance that she put forth in this effort was just a real testimony for your company. She did a fantastic job and we were really impressed. So we were even more certain that we had the right person on the show today (laughter).
Gayle: (Laughter) And you know, it really is rare. To be honest, we turn away about 70% of the people that we interview to work with us because we just don’t find that foundation that we need to work with and people that have the right attitudes and the right ethics that we want being the front line working with our clients.
Chris: Right.
Gayle: So it really is rare for only 30% of the people that we interview to actually come on through and work with us.
Chris: That’s very true. Now, how can someone become a virtual assistant?
Gayle: Well, of course, you can set up on your own to be a virtual assistant. It takes a lot of persistence. You’ve got to be able to sell yourself, at least, to potential clients. You can sign up with a virtual staffing agency like Team Double-Click and we do all the backend work and all the client finding and matching.
Chris: You know, I get the idea that pretty much anyone with skills in many different areas can contact Team Double-Click and ask about being a virtual assistant.
Gayle: Absolutely.
Chris: You don’t have to be a top line, you know, you don’t have to have a Ph.D., there are all kinds of different staffing needs that your clients have.
Gayle: Oh absolutely. We get every range. We’ve got clients that have their virtual assistant hand-write or type envelopes or do mailings for real estate businesses and things as simple as that to we’ve got a gal that’s actually working 40 hours a week for one of our clients helping really with everything. She manages almost every aspect of his business. He leaves for two or three weeks at a time to go to Europe or Arizona or wherever and she runs everything while he’s gone from signing up new students to sending out materials and house closings and everything in between. So there really is a very wide range that we see from clients as far as skills needs.
Chris: That’s fantastic. I mean, running a whole business for a couple of weeks including house closings is really impressive.
Gayle: It is. She does an awful lot for him. And it’s nice for him too. He’s really grown his business since we started working with him and part of that he attributes to having a virtual assistant, because he was doing all those things on his own prior to hiring Team Double-Click and us sending him a virtual assistant. So he was bogged down in all of that administrative stuff and it kept him actually from going out and selling, which is what he was good at.
Chris: That’s really the point, is offloading some of that work.
Gayle: Absolutely.
Chris: We are out of time for this segment, but we will be back with more from Gayle Buske. You can find a virtual assistant for your small business at her company’s website, www.teamdoubleclick.com. Don’t forget to check out ebizshow.com for free show transcripts, podcasting of this show, e-commerce education tools and more. Join us when we continue.
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