FREE GUIDEBOOK: The 10 Pitfalls of Growing a Creative Team
Description
Ever feel like there's just not enough hours in the day to get everything done? You're not alone! This episode is all about my personal journey of overcoming that feeling of overwhelm by hiring a virtual assistant (VA). I know the idea of hiring a VA can be daunting, but getting started is actually so much easier than you might think.
Let's face it - emails are the bane of our existence! But what if I told you there's an efficient way to manage them with the help of your VA? Yes, it's possible! We get into the nitty-gritty of creating an effective email management system for your VA, including how to train them to respond to your emails and keep your inbox organized. We even discuss the types of emails you can immediately delegate, so you can start reclaiming your time.
We also discuss how better time management and creating an ideal work week can significantly boost your productivity. Incorporating this system has been a game changer for my productivity and overall well-being. So, let's dive in and get you back in control of your time!
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
BELAY: my top recommendation for virtual assistants
Schedule a call with Anna and mention Hannah Bjorndal for $300 off the implementation fee
Episode 82: Exactly How I Organize My Inbox to Save Hours of Time Each Week
OTHER RESOURCES
Vision Casting Workbook: Download for Free
SIGN UP NOW: Dream Team Accelerator Waitlist
Join the Insiders Group: Team Building for Creative Entrepreneurs
FREE GUIDEBOOK: The 10 Pitfalls of Growing a Creative Team
Description
Ever feel like there's just not enough hours in the day to get everything done? You're not alone! This episode is all about my personal journey of overcoming that feeling of overwhelm by hiring a virtual assistant (VA). I know the idea of hiring a VA can be daunting, but getting started is actually so much easier than you might think.
Let's face it - emails are the bane of our existence! But what if I told you there's an efficient way to manage them with the help of your VA? Yes, it's possible! We get into the nitty-gritty of creating an effective email management system for your VA, including how to train them to respond to your emails and keep your inbox organized. We even discuss the types of emails you can immediately delegate, so you can start reclaiming your time.
We also discuss how better time management and creating an ideal work week can significantly boost your productivity. Incorporating this system has been a game changer for my productivity and overall well-being. So, let's dive in and get you back in control of your time!
RESOURCES MENTIONED IN THIS EPISODE:
BELAY: my top recommendation for virtual assistants
Schedule a call with Anna and mention Hannah Bjorndal for $300 off the implementation fee
Episode 82: Exactly How I Organize My Inbox to Save Hours of Time Each Week
OTHER RESOURCES
Vision Casting Workbook: Download for Free
SIGN UP NOW: Dream Team Accelerator Waitlist
Join the Insiders Group: Team Building for Creative Entrepreneurs
I am your stereotypical procrastinator. I always have been, probably always will be. When something is overwhelming to me, or when there are like big question marks that I still have about a task, I tend to put off doing that thing Somehow. Just by being an unknown, a task seems so much larger and more time-consuming and difficult, I just automatically assume it's going to take an infinite amount of time and I won't be able to do it. An example of that recently is that I have been redecorating our condo.
Speaker 1:It was just time for a refresh and so, little by little, we've been redecorating the rooms. The wall in our living room, specifically, was a spot I wanted to redo. I had this vision for a really big gallery wall. We have some original art from Evan's grandfather, who was a painter, and we have photos I've taken on our travels and some posters and vintage framed graphic art. So I've been really excited to make this thing happen, but also figuring out how to lay it out and get it perfect and also make sure it all looks good together.
Speaker 1:It was like ridiculously overwhelming to me. I got started with the task on multiple different occasions, like trying to figure it out, only to abandon it because I was frustrated or I'd get a headache. I actually am pretty sure I even started crying one day because I was so frustrated by not being able to make progress and being kind of stuck on what to do. However, this week we hosted a friend's birthday celebration at our place, so last weekend I suddenly had a lot of energy and excitement to really get this thing done and thankfully Evan had a strategy for getting the wall laid out on the floor and then hung properly so everything would be spaced out evenly. And you know what it came together, and not only that it's really beautiful and I love how it looks. Sometimes I just need someone to light a little fire under me to give me some motivation and reason to just get it done. And knowing that there was a path forward for this task, that Evan could help literally put the nails in the wall and get everything hung straight and evenly, that gave me the confidence that this thing could actually get done.
Speaker 1:My experience hiring a virtual assistant in some ways was similar. I waited way too long, was stuck on, just not knowing how it would work, and I was worried that I didn't have enough time. But then I took a little step forward and realized that the company I was interested in hiring actually was going to help me and had some tools for me to get started, and that helped me actually take the leap and hire the assistant. Since you're listening to this episode, I'm going to guess that you're at least intrigued by the idea of hiring a virtual assistant, or maybe you're on the fence about hiring one, or maybe you already even have hired one and are just a little stuck on what to do next. Fear not, that is what today's episode is all about helping you get a jumpstart on working with a virtual assistant so that you can gain back hours of time each week without the hassle of figuring out what to do first.
Speaker 1:You're listening to Team Building for Wedding Pros, a podcast dedicated to helping you scale your creative business through building a team. I'm your host, hannah Bjorndahl, owner of LaVian Rose, an expert in all things team building in the creative artistic world. Over the past several years, I've gone from being a one woman show to leading a team of amazing people to serve more clients, dramatically increase our business income and ultimately make a much bigger impact in the world, and I'm passionate about helping you do the same. So let's do it. I will be the first person to admit that it took me way too long to hire an executive assistant, also known as a virtual assistant or VA or EA, whatever you want to call it. I'm going to call them VAs throughout the rest of this episode because I think that's probably the term you've heard the most. It's definitely the one I hear the most.
Speaker 1:So hiring a VA was something that I was pretty sold on for like a few years before actually going for it. I had read a lot about it, listened to podcasts and I had friends who were successfully working with VA's themselves and I knew it saved them a lot of time. And yet I still hesitated and didn't move forward. The cost was probably the biggest or most obvious thing holding me back, but I also think that I felt like I needed to do a ton of prep work before moving forward. I didn't want to start paying someone until I felt ready myself, but then I would just not do the prep work, so that absolutely held me back. I also think that I lacked confidence that a VA would work for me.
Speaker 1:I had heard that VA's managed email inboxes. That was kind of like the number one thing I was hearing and honestly, I just like wasn't a believer that that would work for me. I felt like that would be impossible for me and just cause more work than it was worth. I don't feel like I'm a huge control freak around things in my business. It, honestly, is more just not knowing how to get started on that, like I couldn't visualize how it would work and no one had given me tools to know where to start. So it just felt impossible. So I've been thinking about that this week and I've also had a few questions recently in my DMs and in our private online Facebook community. By the way, if you're not already in that, go check it out. It's at hannahbjornedollcom slash Facebook or you can check out the link in the description for this episode. So these questions were a reminder of how overwhelming it was for me to bring on a VA, especially when I didn't have someone guiding me through the process. So in today's episode I want to offer you both encouragement to take that first step towards hiring a VA if you're on the fence, and also give you some concrete tasks that you can delegate to your VA, and also a little bit more about how I made that happen in my own business so you feel ready to take that first step and it's actually going to be effective and save you time.
Speaker 1:So first a little backstory. Like I said before, I spent a long time considering hiring a VA before I actually moved forward on it. I finally felt ready like I was going to go for it at the beginning of 2022, but I felt like I needed to have a lot of available time to train my VA, so I didn't want to move forward until I had an open enough calendar to have that regular training, which is so funny now because it was not that much extra time each week and the amount of time it saved me immediately would have been so worth a week or two of working an extra hour or so to get that up and running. So I went through this crazy six months of extreme busyness and a lot of travel and I just kept putting off pulling the trigger until I finally had a break in the busyness in July. So again, it was like six months of being ready but just doing nothing and I decided to go ahead and move forward and work with a company called Belay.
Speaker 1:As soon as I started working with Belay honestly, even before I had officially signed on the dotted line to work with him, I realized, oh my gosh, I should have taken this leap six months ago. Even with that crazy schedule, carving out just like an hour or two each week would have gotten my VA on boarded quickly and it would have saved me hours and hours of time. Those six months would have been way less crazy and better for me if I had just gone for it right away. Belay was really great because they actually provided me with some helpful resources to jumpstart my relationship with my new VA, alison. It set me up to hand things off right away and also gave me a template for how to train her moving forward, which took out some of the guesswork.
Speaker 1:And I know, for me personally, when I feel like I have to kind of figure things out myself and there's going to be a lot of guesswork I procrastinate or just don't do it. That kind of thing really overwhelms me and I just want to get all my ducks in a row and do things the right way and then I just don't do it at all. Can you relate to that at all? I think that's a common business owner thing. So if you're on the fence right now about hiring a VA, especially if it's because you don't feel like you have enough time to like prep all this stuff.
Speaker 1:I hope you'll learn from my mistake that you don't need to spend tons and tons of time preparing in advance and then training for hours and hours each week for it to actually be worth it. It is worth working maybe an extra hour or two for a couple of weeks to get your VA up and running. There are a million things a VA can do for you, but specifically there's a handful of really easy to offload tasks and that's going to start saving you time right away, like hours and hours of time each week. And then that's a snowball effect. Then you're able to prep even more that your VA can do and then you have more and more time. You can get more and more organized and delegate more work to your VA, which continually creates more and more space in your life to work on the things that are most important. So again, just to kind of reiterate, taking that first step and just doing it is going to get the ball rolling to saving you time. You don't have to be perfectly prepared to bring in a VA for it to really be effective for you.
Speaker 1:Okay, so I'm going to share my top five tasks to delegate to a VA as soon as you get started. These are tasks that are pretty easy and they don't require a crazy amount of prep work in advance, just like we've been talking about. In fact, a few of them really don't require any prep work at all in advance, depending on how you currently structure your business. Now, these tasks might look different for different types of businesses, but I think there are things that we all have to do in some way in our business that are all the same in one way, shape or form. So I think this is going to be an effective list for anyone in the creative entrepreneurial world that's listening. So let's dive into that list. Five tasks that a VA can start doing for you today.
Speaker 1:Number one is managing your main email inbox. I'm starting off with this one because for me, like I said before, this felt literally impossible, and I also think it's the most common thing that we hear about offloading, but it's kind of a mystery at least it was for me. So I thought to myself how in the world is my VA going to know how to respond to my emails? Like there's no way that's going to be such a long process. I can't ever imagine them understanding how to write in my voice, like, how does that even work? And I had so much to learn because this is possible. Not only possible, but it's actually pretty easy and there's some really simple strategies that you can implement right away to start making it happen. This is one of the items on the list that takes a little more prep work, but really it's kind of a develop it as you go task. Your VA is going to learn little by little over time, and if you already have an organized inbox, this is going to be super easy.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's talk strategy on this one. The first thing I'd recommend to make this task a time saver for you is to decide how you want this to work logistically, and what I mean by that is really how is your VA going to share certain emails with you and then also keep that boundary up so that you're not constantly in your email checking it? This was actually like a really big question mark for me, because I was thinking in like a zero sum game of either don't ever go in my inbox or I'm like always in there, but my virtual assistant is also always in there and we're just kind of answering as much as we can all the time, and the truth was, was that? A better way to do this is to create a new private email address that no one else has access to other than your VA and maybe a few other team members. If you have other team members on your team, that inbox that's going to be the only one that you check. Your main inbox is going to be managed by your VA, and then they're going to share the emails with you that they need help with and handle the rest on their own.
Speaker 1:So next we'll get into a little bit more about that in a second, but next I want you to decide on a simple organizational system for your emails. I actually have a whole episode on how I manage our inbox. It's episode 82. Exactly how I organize my inbox to save hours of time each week. I will link that in the episode description and show notes, but it's kind of funny because that episode was originally recorded before I had a VA, but it's something that made it even easier to start working with Allison when I hired her. I really do want to keep this very simple for you, so you don't necessarily have to go back and listen to that episode, especially if that feels overwhelming to you If you don't already have an inbox management system like a way of sorting the emails as they come in and making it easier for you to currently look through your inbox.
Speaker 1:I'd suggest creating a very simple system Of sorting emails so that you can know which emails have been responded to and which can be cleared out, so that your VA, first of all it doesn't have to deal with old messages that have been in the inbox for a long time. It's much better to start them out with just responding to what comes in the inbox after their first day. So figure out what you want to do with those old messages, clear them out as much as you can, and then you also want to decide how to sort new emails moving forward. So the way we do this is that we leave messages in the inbox only if they still need to be responded to, and we also mark them as unread until they've been responded to. As soon as a message has been responded to, we sort it into a folder or delete it, and then it's out of the main inbox. The inbox stays clean and neat this way and actually a lot of experienced VAs might have their own ideas for you about how to manage an inbox in an easy to follow way.
Speaker 1:So it's definitely worth asking your new VA. Hey, do you have any suggestions or things? You've seen work for past clients when it comes to managing the inbox, but now you kind of know how I do it. So let's assume you've got that simple system set up and you have a new private email address created. There's nothing in that private email address inbox yet and there won't be for a little while. Then the process moving forward will be this and I've already kind of touched on it a little bit your VA will respond to what they know how to respond to in the main inbox and then they're going to forward you what they don't know how to respond to and they need help with to your private inbox. You'll be able to just check that private inbox, respond to your VA with how you'd like to respond. That could be writing up a full response that you just want your VA to copy and paste back over to the main email and respond to that person. That way, If your VA has become accustomed to a certain type of email but still needs a little bit of help from you, it might just mean that you respond to the email, speaking directly to your VA, instructing them what to do next. Or you could even do something like sending back a voice memo so that you don't have to type. If you're more of a talker and you don't like writing things out like I am, this can be really great because you can just record that message, email it back over and your VA will handle it from there.
Speaker 1:Little by little over time you're going to have less and less in that inbox to respond to, because your VA is going to learn more and more about how to respond. But how do you start showing your VA how to respond to those emails? First, simply have them watch you respond to emails as you would regularly do. So there's no extra time needed on your end. You can simply share your screen in that first week that they're working with you and explain a little bit, maybe as you go about, why you're responding in a certain way or not.
Speaker 1:You can also flag any emails that you respond to. That could be turned into templates, because I'm guessing you respond to a lot of certain types of messages regularly and even if they need a little customization, it's like generally the same type of email. So, rather than creating all those templates yourself, you can actually just flag them and let your VA know hey, this could be turned into a template. Why don't you turn it into a template? Send it to me for approval and then I'll give you the thumbs up. So I suggest letting your VA watch you respond in your inbox once or twice a week for a couple of weeks so they can see a variety of the different types of emails that come in and also ask questions as you go. And then, as time moves on, you can reverse that. You can watch your VA answer emails in the inbox by screen sharing and give them feedback if something's a little bit off, or they can ask you questions in real time about new emails that they've never seen before. So this is a little bit of a process, but the good news is that you can jump right in to training your VA very quickly on a bunch of emails that can be templated or are common emails that they can learn quickly because they're simple responses. The best part about this is that you never have to stress about double checking that the emails have been answered correctly, because you're able to give your VA the instruction of here's what you have approval to send out without me looking it over, and here's what I need you to send me for approval. Or here are the type of emails that you never should answer yourself and always forward to me. You still maintain the right amount of control to ensure quality of the emails going out without having to be in your inbox every day. Your VA gets to sort through all that stuff and pull out the things that aren't worth your time so that you can focus on the most important messages. Here are some examples of emails my VA learned to respond to over that time period that were really fast. I was able to offload this really really quickly.
Speaker 1:First, requests for certificates of insurance for wedding venues. If you're in the wedding industry or the events industry, you probably have had some requests like this before. We have to issue one of these COIs, probably about once a month for weddings. So the process is typically that a planner or even the client will email us and say, hey, my wedding venue requires a certificate of insurance. Can you provide that for me? And while that's not in and of itself like a huge time consuming task, it does set off a chain reaction of having to reach out to our insurance agent and then provide them the information that they ask for. Then sometimes we have to go back and get more information from the venue to prepare that document the right way. We have to send that COI document to the right person. So Allison can handle all of this for me without me having to be involved at all, because it's a very straightforward process reaching out to our insurance company and making sure we get that document ready.
Speaker 1:The next thing that she responds to for us and was able to do really quickly was requests from other wedding vendors or clients from the past to resend a link to their wedding gallery. We get these from clients every once in a while and we actually get them from wedding vendors pretty often, especially wedding vendors who maybe we didn't know they were a part of the wedding day. We were never given their information, but then they see us on Instagram posting about the wedding or whatever, and will send us a DM on social media or directly an email. It's time consuming and I certainly don't need to be the one to be resending those links. So if I get a DM, I can just screenshot that message in social media and send it directly to Allison and she'll take it from there, or if it's an email, I never even see it, she takes care of the whole thing. This has saved me more time than I would have expected. That going back and forth, getting the right email address, making sure I input it into the gallery and send that information. It took up enough time that I don't have to think about at all anymore and it's been really great.
Speaker 1:Another email is sorting automated emails and then only updating me on the most important things. So, to be specific here, we receive a ton of automated emails and announcements from our CRM system, honey Book. Maybe use Honey Book too and these are emails that we don't necessarily not want to receive. So there are notifications of things like a new contract is signed or a new booking or payments have come in, or maybe there's an overdue payment that a client hasn't paid yet. But Allison can look into these things and then summarize and just send me a really quick update, or she can handle sending a reminder to the clients without my help. Again, these emails aren't in and of themselves incredibly time consuming, but when taken all together, they are. It's a lot of stuff, and when you open up your inbox and see 25 unread messages or more after you just worked through it the day before. That's overwhelming and discouraging. So all these little things really add up and it took barely any time to get Allison trained to do them. Here are a few other things that she helps out with that we were able to train her in pretty quickly Client emails.
Speaker 1:While there are plenty of messages from our clients that either my team members are handling directly themselves, if it's their client, or it's an email for my own personal client that I need to be involved with or respond to, we do have a pretty set system for working with clients and there are a lot of situations that have pretty standard answers. So having these FAQs documented all in one place that allows Allison to respond on my behalf. She may send the message to me for approval first, but I don't have to be the one that's actually prepping it and writing it out. It's just a simple yep, that looks good, or can you add one more sentence about this year and that FAQ document? That's something that you can add to little by little over time, or you can even have your VA add to it as you respond directly to your client emails. You can have them document those FAQs so they know the answer for future messages.
Speaker 1:There's a lot of other emails that Allison handles for us, and creating those templates over time has meant less and less emails for me, to the point where I spend probably less than an hour every week on my inbox and emails. Honestly, most of the emails I get now are personal, to my personal inbox that have nothing to do with work. Before I started working with Allison, I was spending at least an hour a day in my inbox, if not much longer. It was also just a major source of stress. I hated being in my inbox and yet I would get sucked in and I often had some messages that would slip through the cracks because I was in the cracks because I'd be overwhelmed. Allison has allowed me to be more consistent and professional and has also saved me so many hours of time each week. This has been such a major change in my business for the positive.
Speaker 1:Okay, so let's go to number two. The second task that you can immediately offload to your VA is implementing social media posts. So we need to dig into this a little bit further, because hiring a VA does not necessarily mean that they can instantly take over your social media for you. In fact, that's pretty unlikely, and if you really want someone to do all of your social media from scratch, you probably need to work with a professional social media manager. But to tell you how, we have offloaded a lot of our social media posting to Allison.
Speaker 1:The main platform that we use is Instagram and I also use planally to plan out our content. Maybe you've used planally before yourself or tested it out. It's basically just like a grid planning app that allows you to see what your feed is going to look like in advance and also plan some other content. I still like to be the one to plan out our feeds, broadly speaking, but Allison is the one that implements the plan and make sure that this content gets posted and that we're on track, posting every day. So I prepped the feed, I choose the images and then she does the rest. She writes out the captions, based on a bank of captions and content that we have written in the past things like old blog posts, and we have like a wedding guidebook that we send to all of our couples and there's a digital form of that, so she's able to pull content from that. She also always makes sure to tag and credit the full vendor list and also put that in the caption, which that's something that she actually prepares about a month before each wedding, based off of lists that planners send us of our vendors and also referencing the wedding questionnaire that we send out to couples that has some questions about which vendors they're working with. Usually it's actually a combination of both of those lists and she handles finding out that the info is correct and puts it together right within our Google calendar event for each wedding, so it's accessible to everyone on our team at any time. She also creates reels for us after every wedding. We upload all the BTS footage behind the scenes footage to Dropbox for her and we favorite the images to use in the reel via our online gallery system so she's able to just pull up that online gallery and see which images we would want as the portfolio images from that wedding.
Speaker 1:I created a few example reels to show her early on so that she could see what I had in mind for the reels, because I actually started doing this right around when she started, so I was figuring out how I wanted to be posting reels at the same time that I was training her how to do it, so I made a few examples so that she could see kind of what was in my head when I thought would be cool. And then I gave her the creative freedom to create each individual reel with her choice of music and timing, using those examples that I gave her as the general format. The first few times I had her do this, I actually had her send me the reel she had created before approval, before officially posting. But she quickly got the hang of it and now we're able to post these reels every single week for all of our weddings. And this used to take me like, as I was figuring it out, hours of time per reel. Even when I started to get a little bit better and more regular at it, it still took about two to three hours per reel to prep it, and that was on a good day, assuming nothing would glitch. And then I also had to gather all the information for the post and the vendor lists and all of that. So it has saved an enormous amount of time.
Speaker 1:Allison also posts regularly to our Pinterest, so she chooses images from our blog more on that in a few minutes and that's something that was super fast and simple to train in. So I created a handful of categories for of Pinterest boards and then I explained which photos would go in which categories. That was pretty straightforward, to be honest, and I also gave a really broad, simple template for our blog Simple template for how to label them and caption them to make them go the furthest and be the most effective. And also, as a side note, you can have your VA do some research on what type of posting or strategies on social media are currently the most effective. If you don't have time to do that kind of thing and stay current, that's definitely something you can have them do and then report back to you on what they find. So there's so much more I could say about this. It's social media category in general, because we have expanded our social media delegation so much since Allison started with us. But those are my fast and easy ways to offload the heavy lifting and save you time weekly, right away when it comes to social media.
Speaker 1:Okay, let's move on to the next tip, which I kind of hinted at before, which is writing blog posts. I used to blog every single wedding really quickly after a wedding, along with sending out a sneak peek to our couples, but then, when my team started growing and we had more and more weddings. It became overwhelming and we stopped blogging so much. Not only that, but I was measuring some of our metrics and I saw that the inquiries we were getting directly from Google searches actually were not that strong. So blogs would take me at least an hour per post and sometimes we'd have up to three weddings per weekend once my team started to grow. So it was a lot. So we delegated those blog posts to Allison.
Speaker 1:Now all we have to do is select the images for the blog for her by favoriting them in that online gallery and I already mentioned that before. We're actually already doing that task to also be able to create a reel on Instagram. So it's nice that we're able to do something that kind of double dips and allows Allison to do two different tasks for us, so she can download those images directly and then prep them, get them sized correctly, reorder them to look pretty, based on a really simple format that I've given her, and then she's able to post, and I also have given Allison a general idea, when it comes to the copy of the blog post, what that should look like, but what was really helpful in her being able to write that all on her own is that we've created a wedding intake form that each photographer on the team fills out after they shoot a wedding with questions about the wedding day. It's really fast and easy to fill out. It's not a complex form. There's no need to write full sentences or even fully form thoughts. We're really just filling in details about the day so that Allison can pull that content together and write something about the wedding day. This has not only saved me a crazy amount of time, like I said before, it's also ensured that we're adding content to our blog regularly and can share those posts with clients, because it just wasn't really a top priority for me in that year or two leading up to starting to work with Allison. However, I know it's something that does contribute to our business staying relevant and moving forward, even if it's not the best way that we're getting new leads, and it's also a way that we can honor our clients by writing about them and posting about them. So it's been an incredible help and time saver to delegate this to Allison so that it's still happening, even though it wasn't something that I was able to prioritize before I was working with her.
Speaker 1:Let's move on to the fourth task I have on my list today. The fourth thing that you can delegate to a VA right away is calendar scheduling and management. This was one that I really thought would never happen for me, kind of like the inbox management. I just couldn't imagine handing over the responsibility of scheduling things on my calendar because I falsely believed that it would mean I'd have to always be available from like nine to five. Something I love about being a small business owner is the flexibility, and I sometimes will just randomly take days off. So I was like no way this scheduling thing could never work for me because it's going to limit my flexibility. But here's what I learned If I keep strict boundaries around when I schedule meetings, this becomes really easy for a VA to manage and it also helps me have more free time and protected time so that I'm not constantly scheduling random things during the times that I would actually prefer to have focus or productive time uninterrupted. This is actually something that Belay really helped me with as I was hiring Allison.
Speaker 1:Allison, they suggested that I come up with an ideal work week. I'd never done that before, so like time block when I did want uninterrupted time and when I'm cool with having meetings, and what I've learned about myself since then is that I do not like having morning meetings. Anything before noon is really disruptive to my workflow. I'm hyperproductive in the mornings and I prefer to reserve that time for like deep work. I also avoid meetings on Wednesdays and Fridays altogether. These are days that I block off entirely for me, whether that typically be for a work day of just uninterrupted time to work or sometimes for time off.
Speaker 1:I didn't have that clear boundary around my work before starting to work with Allison. This actually forced me to be a little bit more disciplined with my time, which in turn has allowed me to be more flexible with my time. I didn't realize how much I was putting random stuff on my schedule at random times without really thinking about it. So now Allison knows what times each week are blocked for just me and that I don't like to schedule meetings in that time. But I also have a window of time throughout the week that is open a couple different windows. To be honest, that window is pretty small, but that's OK. When I get requests for meetings, she just sends me a quick confirmation that I want to in fact take that meeting with that person, and then she'll handle the coordinating and scheduling of it with that person separately and will create a Zoom link if needed, or a calendar invite, whatever. If the person absolutely cannot do the time that is my free window of time, then we'll have a further discussion, just she and I. But honestly, I can't even remember the last time that that happened. When you give people a limited number of hours of your free time, they usually figure out how to make it work and this allows me to protect my time a little bit better than I used to.
Speaker 1:Logistically speaking, we use Google Calendar for scheduling. I look at it every morning and I usually give it a quick glance in the evening before bed just to preview what I have the next day. And honestly, when it comes down to it, I know the time blocks in my week that potentially might have a meeting, and there are plenty of weeks that go by that Allison hasn't scheduled anything for me, which is really great. I also have some regular meetings that always happen each week, so I'm always kind of prepared for those upcoming meetings. But using Google Calendar as our scheduling system makes things so easy. My whole team uses it and having that specific time blocked really has helped keep my brain clear and free to be creative when I need to be creative, focused when I need to be focused.
Speaker 1:It's really changed a lot for me. I had no idea how much time I was wasting in my week not only trying to piece together my schedule and plan for meetings, but also that time that was wasted because I was haphazardly putting things in the middle of my most productive time. I had no rhythm or scheduled to my weeks and I hadn't really paid attention to what parts of my day were most productive that I should protect, and I definitely didn't have blocked time to do uninterrupted work regularly. So I was a lot less productive before working with a VA Time, blocking my weeks and leaving my mornings free. That's probably been the number one thing that has made me more productive and saved me time on tasks. It's also contributed to a huge improvement in my overall well-being. My mental health is so much better knowing that I can always do my morning routine before work. I can even start work a little bit late sometimes if I want to, and I'm able to utilize my best creative energy right away. All right.
Speaker 1:Finally, the last time-saving delegation that I would recommend if you're just getting started with a VA is having your VA manage your receipts. I'm willing to bet that you do not enjoy keeping track of your business receipts. This is pretty freaking boring. It's also super tedious and it's something you have to do as a business owner. So we use QuickBooks. We used to use the self-employed version and now we have the QuickBooks online version, but both of them have great upload receipts features so you can manage all of your receipts in one place and make sure that you're not missing anything. In general, I think using a system like QuickBooks is a really good idea for your business. It's relatively cheap and it's so useful. It makes life super simple for just sending everything off to your accountant at the end of the year.
Speaker 1:But gathering all those receipts, finding them, sorting them, uploading them it's really time consuming. This is something that you absolutely can hand off to a VA. For us, many online purchases are made using our main email account as the email address for the purchase, so we have a Gmail folder in our main account specifically for those receipts. Allison will collect them and put them in that folder throughout the year and then she turns them into PDFs and uploads them directly to QuickBooks for me. She also will store them in a folder in Dropbox which we organize by year, so that there's a second copy of all those receipts somewhere. And I also will add receipts to that Dropbox folder as the year goes on, if I get a receipt that didn't go to the inbox, or maybe even it's a paper receipt that I can take a photo of and upload it. That way I don't have to worry about trying to find a million different receipts when getting stuff ready for my accountant. And if there are receipts that are still missing, allison also will make a Google spreadsheet of all of those different transactions so that I can go on a search for them. But it's great having Allison be the manager of that task, because now I've gotten into the habit of just sending over any receipts, photos of receipts, even text receipts directly to her as soon as I get it, and then she can handle it from there.
Speaker 1:It has felt so good to get this off my plate. I'm pretty organized with my finances, as is around my business, so I actually was pretty diligently uploading receipts, like once a month, but it still took so many hours every month and then I'd have to go back through and figure out which ones were still missing at the end of the year, because inevitably there were a few that I couldn't find each month. It was just this whole long process and huge time waster. So, all in all these five tasks that a VA can do for you right away that I've shared with you today, which are again, managing your email inbox, implementing social media, posting, calendar scheduling and management, writing blog posts and managing your receipts those, for me, save between 15 to 30 hours per week. I'm not kidding. This has been an absolute game changer.
Speaker 1:Looking back on July 2022 and on when I first started working with Allison, I see this as one of the major turning points in my business. There've certainly been times since then when I've had a difficult or overwhelming week, but it's never, because I have a lot of little tasks adding up like never, and before working with Allison, I got overwhelmed by a bunch of little tasks adding up like all the time. But now I have so much more time and it's only increased more and more as Allison has learned to do things better and better and taken on more tasks. It's definitely been a snowball effect. I just keep gaining back more and more time in my schedule, one of the things I've tasked Allison with, now that we've been working together for a while, is that she's actually been documenting all the things that I've trained her in and creating how-to YouTube videos, so that we have a library of standard operating procedures in video form of specifically the tasks that she does, and so even if, for some reason, allison stops working with us, we're going to be able to easily onboard someone new. Allison can also now further delegate her tasks and train other people, like our interns, because we have an intern program. Without needing me to spearhead those trainings, she can actually do them herself, and I don't even necessarily need to be a part of them. It's pretty amazing. I genuinely have no idea what I would do without the help of a virtual assistant. It's a major regret in my business that I waited so long to do this, and so I hope this can be an encouragement to you, especially if you've been thinking about it and you're on the fence. It is 100% worth it to work with a virtual assistant.
Speaker 1:There are so many great companies out there. I mentioned Belay earlier. I would highly recommend them. They're fantastic to work with and you don't have to do quite as much work up front to get started. They also have some social media managers and bookkeepers, so if you have multiple needs, you can kind of bundle that together. I'll drop some info in this podcast episodes description and the show notes for you. If you're interested in learning more, you can get 300 off your starting implementation fee when you reach out to them and mention me. But even if it's not Belay there are so many great VAs and VA companies out there I would highly recommend hiring someone who is a professional at being a virtual assistant so that they can give you some guidance and tools to make it even easier to get started. It's only going to further boost the impact and make it easier to start saving time in your calendar if you work with someone who really knows what they're doing and they can give you some advice. It's also going to ensure that your VA is actually doing the work that makes the most impact.
Speaker 1:I would love to keep talking to you about this subject, so if you have questions, reach out to me anytime. I'd love to talk to you. You can join our private Facebook community, hannahbjornedollcom, or you can send me a DM on Instagram. I'm at hannahbjornedoll and that's a wrap. Thanks so much for listening to Team Building for Creative Business Owners. I hope you learned something new that you can use to grow and thrive. If you're interested in getting in touch, send me a message at info at hannahbjornedollcom, or you can always shoot me a DM on Instagram. I'm at hannahbjornedoll. I'll see you back here next week.