Now if you told me a year ago that I would be sitting down to share my story of how a person who I have never even met would become my virtual assistant and within a matter of months one of my good friends, I would have told you that you were losing it. But here I am.
It was late 2014, and I had only recently opened my new fitness centre in Melbourne, Australia. There were many long months of stressful sleepless nights and cramming in personal training sessions during the day in the beginning of my fledgling practice. At the time I had a receptionist who was scheduling the classes and keeping the books of the business and doing as little on Social Media as she thought she needed to in order to not get fired. But it wasn’t long before she left me for a position closer to her home. It meant she wouldn’t have to spend so much on commuting every day, it didn’t matter to her that she was leaving me in a massive ditch at a crucial point of building my business and getting my gym subscriptions up to profitability.
Thereafter I spent a few weeks shopping around, asking for word-of-mouth advice on who might be able to come in on short notice but it all came to nothing. When I started my business, I looked 10 years down the line and envisioned having the same receptionist sitting at the front desk from day 1, and here I was within my first year and I didn’t even have someone to answer my phones.
It was then that Clarke, a gym member who had started his own trucking company a few years back suggested I look into hiring a Virtual Assistant. Of course I thought he was mad at first, envisioning a Rosie from the Jetsons zooming around the workout zone refilling water dispensers. But Clarke explained that his company of over 15 employees relied 100% on virtual assistants.
I’ll admit, it wasn’t 100% because Clarke sold me on getting a virtual assistant, it was that I literally had no other choice. So I made the call to Virtual Assistants Australia.
Obviously my first concern with employing a virtual assistant was, could I trust her to do what I needed her to do. Could she keep the instructors informed of class time, manage my inbox and sign up new members, send out and follow up on outstanding invoices and help my build my social media presence? I mean, overnight I was going to be putting my work life in this woman’s hands, what if she dropped something?
The first and most important lesson that I learned about putting your trust into the hands of a virtual assistant is “be clear with what you want”. Set out very clear processes and make it practically impossible for your VA to misunderstand your needs. The type of work you’re going to rely on your VA to take care of for you is the administrative, time-consuming hour-wasting stuff, usually easy and hard to mess up if instructed correctly.
Within a month, and I’m not exaggerating, my business and my life in general was back on track. My new VA had swiftly slotted into my life, taken over my businesses’ organization and administration and done it with initiative and (for most things) without being asked. It was the attitude that she had that helped me believe and trust that I could leave things in her hands.
Our relationship blossomed so quickly that before long we were actually quite good friends. She became able to anticipate my needs and meet me at the virtual door and I learnt that being a virtual assistant meant that she didn’t waste money and resources on commuting into a packed city every day and that her job allowed her to spend time with her 2 kids whenever she wanted.
I’ve never been one to be called an “early adopter” of anything in life, but I am quite proud of the fact that I have a virtual assistant (and friend) helping me run my fitness centre. I’d bet I’m one of the only gym owners who do.
Related Tags: Virtual Receptionist
