Building My VA Business: What to Delegate and Why it Matters for Success

For my 5th Dynamic Women Podcast Anniversary special episode, I invited incredible women from my community to join me in a Q&A session. 

One of the topics that came up was my virtual assistant business, sparking a conversation about how I built my team and how VAs can transform the way we work. 

Natasha asked, “I’m curious to know, how did you grow your virtual assistant (VA) business? What are some of the most common tasks that you find VAs are most helpful for?”

Here’s my answer: 

Awesome. Good question! For those who don’t know, I do have a team of 13 virtual assistants in the Philippines. They’re all working virtually. Eleven work with my business clients and two with me because there’s so much to do in a business or even your career that passing off work is so important. 

One of the most common questions I get from clients is, “What do you delegate? What do you pass off?” That’s why I created the Virtual Assistant Made Easy program because I realized people aren't sure about what to delegate.

There are two ways of looking at it. 

1. Specialist Virtual Assistant - They will do some specialized work for you like copywriting, cold calling, SEO, website design, these sorts of things that require a higher level of expertise, and you're going to pay a higher amount for that one specific task. ​

2. General Virtual Assistant - I think general Virtual Assistants are more helpful, because they can do a whole bunch of tasks. They can do social media content creation, social media management, like scheduling your posts, maybe interacting or commenting for you online. 

Then we get into things like newsletters and email management. It might be graphic design, video or audio editing, research, data entry, email campaigns like in a CRM, where you'd have all of your clients. I also have them do my PowerPoint presentations. They develop them in Canva. If you have seen the Dynamic Women Secrets books that I have, one of my main VAs has helped to format the book, design the cover, and upload it.

All the tech stuff as well is really helpful because I know sometimes I’m like, “I don't even know what's going on with this website. Can you figure this out? Can you update this on my website?” ​

These, I'd say, are the most common things because a lot of my clients are coaches, trainers, speakers, and small business owners who are selling a service or product. 

If you want something like cold calling, high-level copywriting, or Facebook ads development and management, I suggest you go to a specialist. 

But you know, with our clients, we help them to look at, “What are the goals you have? Therefore, what should you have your VA do to help you reach those goals or to take stuff off your plate so that you can do the tasks to reach those goals?” 

I do have a document of 229 tasks that you can pass off to a VA that I give to my clients, as well as a document that says what to give your VAs when you are on holiday, too busy, or sick. Because then those tasks don't need a bunch of setup and explanation. (Send me an email at [email protected] if you want to talk about having your own VA and have getting a copy of these documents.)

I hope that answers your question, Natasha. ​

Natasha: Yeah, thank you. Thank you. Congrats again on your five years. That's so exciting. You’ve come a long way.

Then Catherine asked, “This kind of segues from the whole VA thing because I don't have a VA, so I end up doing all this stuff myself. 

What I find lately is information flying at me from all angles. It's personal work, business emails, texts coming in Messenger group chats, WhatsApp, phone calls. You name it, it's all coming at me. 

Some days, I'm just like, “Have I missed something big?” That is one of my things. Sometimes I have, and I sometimes don't understand whether it's me who has too many things coming in from too many places, or it really is just, I won't say it's an age thing. But the world has changed so much again, since 2019, things have gone bananas crazy. We all feel this urgency to keep up with everything else. What I find is that on a daily basis, I tend to say that one, that one, that one, that one, I mark them and go ahead with them, and I never get to the rest of them, so then my inboxes are just chaos. 

That's my big thing because you know me, Diane, systems I can do, but chaos, I can't.” 

Here’s my answer: Yeah, well, actually, that's what I would say is your solution: have a process or a structure that you put in place to help you deal with it. When I start my day, I will look through all my platforms, look through everything and I deal with anything that needs me right away. There might be a potential keynote. Someone's asking, “Diane, can you keynote our conference?” I want to jump on that right away. 

It might be a quick question from a client. The other thing is I flag messages for follow up, but then I have to be diligent to actually put it in my calendar, or my schedule later in the day to go back and deal with those. Sometimes, at the end of the day, I have my cleanup time, where I go back through, I just filter my email for all the flagged ones. Then I go through and deal with them. 

It's finding what works for you. I also benefit from having my VA Karissa, who is on all my social platforms. She'll say, “Diane, you have a message on Instagram that you need to reply to.” 

But if you don't have someone, then set for yourself a little reminder to go and check in to see if you have messages or comments. 

I remember the time I dropped the ball. I had someone reach out and said, “Hey, could we have a consult about this thing.” I didn't see it, so I didn’t respond. Thankfully I was still able to salvage it and she is now my client, but this isn’t always the case.

The key thing is, you've got all of these places where information comes in. First off, can you teach people not to reach out to you on certain platforms? Sometimes clients want to reach me on Facebook. I suggest, “Let's move this to email.” 

I actually have one coach of mine who doesn't do email at all. Not at all. His assistant does email, he does not have an email. It just stops you from reaching out if you need him. But you can I can call him to leave a message and then he'll call me back when he can. Figure out, What are the channels you prefer communicating on? Then, when you go to do it, how long have you given yourself to actually reply? 

“Touch it once” I think this is one of those cleanup methods for in your house, you should only touch something once and put it away where it belongs. So if we bring it over to our inboxes, how many times are you “touching” or interacting/reading each email? 

Then what is the way that you're not going to forget to reply to ones that don't have an urgency, but they need to be replied to. Then give yourself some grace. Maybe there is a little thing that's near the bottom of your email that says, “Hey, my emails might be shorter than normal, just to make sure that I have the time to reply to everyone.” 

One of my clients writes me a book every time she writes me an email, and I read it, but that's the way she communicates. I know other coaches that say if it's more than three sentences, I'm not reading it. Maybe setting some parameters there. 

There's also a wise woman I know, and I love how in her footer of her email, she says, “My hours might not be your hours.” This is good because she often replies in the evenings around 10 or 11 o'clock at night. 

But if you're working for someone else, like contract based as you are, you might not want them to see you working at night because it gives the idea that, “Oh, I can reply, and I can message her and she's going to reply at those hours.”

If I'm doing a final go through all my social and my emails that late, I will schedule those emails for 7am the next day, so it looks like I'm really on the ball in the morning. But I'm actually replying at night.

Catherine followed up with:  “The challenge isn't with the actual work. It's with trying to get everything else up and running and going and then I just get caught up in what I call “the administrivia”. I'm like, I don't have enough income coming in on the side stuff yet to actually have someone do it. I'm probably going to lose the bit of help I get from my daughter because she graduates from law school and is going to be a lawyer. It's a big transition for her and I'm like, “Now what am I going to do??””

Diane: There are so many different ways to be organized: simplify things and create structure would be my two main ones.

Tanya added her thoughts: “Can I add to that a little bit, Diane? Even for me, when I started using the VA, for the first time, it was stuff that I could do. In my brain as a person who's been in business for a long time. Number one is I can do it, so why would I pay somebody to do it? Then I thought, well, do I have enough income coming in to pay somebody else to do it? When I got into the VA services, yours specifically, they took on these tasks, the ones that you've mentioned earlier, and I was shocked how that left me available to actually sell bigger ticket items, as opposed to the smaller stuff for that person to deal with. I had to work through myself that it was okay, that somebody else could do it for me, because it really increased my business significantly. I just wanted to encourage anybody who's listening out there, those things that we worry about, sometimes they work out to the best if we just kind of step into it and give it a shot.”

Diane: There you go. Wise words. 

Wrapping Up

Building a successful business—especially with the help of a virtual assistant team—has allowed me to scale, focus on the tasks that matter most, and deliver greater value to my clients. 
Delegating may feel daunting at first, but as my own journey and the insights from my clients show, it opens up time and energy for you to focus on the high-level work that drives growth. Whether you're new to VAs or looking to refine your delegation skills, consider taking the leap. 
Remember, building a reliable support system not only enhances productivity but can lead to incredible results. 
If you want to know more about my Virtual Assistant Made Easy program, email me at [email protected].

Read my other blogs:
1. Steal My Strategy for Delegating
2. Craving the Best of it All
3. “What Tasks Can a Virtual Assistant Handle for Me?”