8 Steps to Building a Strong Virtual Assistant Team

Outsourcing to a virtual assistant team can unlock your business’s growth potential. By delegating tasks to specialized team members, you can have faster speed and time to market, and increase revenue margins in just a few months.

Read along to discover the essential steps you need to take in building a strong virtual assistant team for the growth of your business.

1. Choose Where To Hire a Virtual Assistant

First off, you need to decide on how you’re going to hire a virtual assistant. You can hire directly from job sites and online communities, or you can hire from a virtual assistant agency.

Hiring directly means you can be as meticulous as you’d like in screening your applicants. It also means all the time and effort the hiring process needs will be coming from you.

Hiring through an agency can cut down the time and effort it takes to hire a virtual assistant as they typically already have a pre-screened talent pool. They’ll also help you navigate your business’s needs and find the right virtual assistant for you.

As with Virtudesk, clients are matched with the top five candidates according to their business’s needs, and the job descriptions they submit to our company. Talent is pre-screened with background checks and personality assessments to help speed up the process, too.

Once you’ve decided where to hire your virtual assistant, the next step is to decide on the services your company needs.

2. Identify the Virtual Assistant You Need

Whether you’re hiring directly or through a virtual assistant firm, you should know which tasks you’d like to outsource to virtual assistants.

It helps to have a job description and a checklist of daily and weekly tasks they would do once hired. Even before you do that, identify the area of your business that needs the most help. This can be anything from customer service and administrative assistance, to marketing and prospecting. 

Other ways to know what kind of virtual assistant you need include identifying what types of tasks or projects you don’t like doing, tasks you don’t have time for, or tasks you don’t have much skill in.

This helps you narrow down your search when looking through job sites and helps agency consultants discover faster what kind of virtual assistants your team needs.

More importantly, you should identify the characteristics you’re looking for in your next hire. Virtual assistants are highly flexible and receptive to additional training, so you should determine what kind of person you’d like to work with and rely on for support.

3. Complete the Prep Work

As with other hiring processes, looking for the right virtual assistant also entails some preparation on your part.

This includes making a list of the tasks you want to outsource, expectations, benefits package, and other parts of a job offer.

Another part is preparing the training you’ll provide your virtual assistant, and the tools and accounts they’ll need to accomplish their tasks.

You can check this virtual assistant onboarding checklist to compare the prep work needed between hiring directly and through a virtual assistant agency.

4. Designate an Executive Admin

Depending on your business’s growth phase, you may get the most benefit from an executive admin, a prospecting virtual assistant, or a marketing and creative services virtual assistant.

The executive virtual assistant, however, is usually highly-recommended for your first hire. They have high versatility and functionality. They can help optimize workflows, build on existing standard operating procedures, and even manage teams in the future. They usually have more skills than just a marketing or prospecting virtual assistant and can address multiple needs in your business at once. 

Executive virtual assistants can contribute to businesses at any growth stage. They can help in figuring out the direction your company should take to grow, or simply take over some of the overwhelming lists of tasks it takes to run and grow a business.

Here’s an example of the daily tasks you can delegate to an executive virtual assistant.

If you’d like someone who you can work closely with on the growth of your company, and help you implement ideas, an executive virtual assistant should be your first virtual assistant hire.

5. Hire Your Second and Third Virtual Assistant

To start building your virtual assistant team, your next step is to hire more virtual assistants, that will help fill in gaps in your company. Once you and your executive admin start getting overloaded with tasks again, it’s time to look at who to hire next.

Among the top three remote hires experts recommend are marketing virtual assistants and prospecting virtual assistants.

Marketing virtual assistants can help you position your brand faster as a top-of-mind option for your target market. Prospecting virtual assistants, on the other hand, can help you generate leads and move leads along your sales funnel faster.

Here’s what your team could look like when you start outsourcing more tasks.

You can also outsource video production tasks to establish a more powerful digital presence if your target market is on social media.

There are also data entry virtual assistants you can hire to make sure all your paperwork is moving along at all times, and properly managed in a scalable manner, while your business is receiving some administrative support.

6. Look for More Roles

Growing your virtual assistant team includes a collaboration between you and your employees to figure out skill and labor gaps in your growing organization.

First, you’ll need to take note of processes that need more people, and projects you’d like to get started on. From there, you’ll discover which of these gaps can benefit from outsourcing to virtual assistants.

Let’s say you hired a marketing and prospecting virtual assistant for your second and third hires. Now, you can look at other roles and specializations like customer support virtual assistant, or graphic designer.

There are businesses that outsource all their prospecting or digital marketing tasks to virtual assistant teams. Your customer service operation can also become more robust by leveraging the time difference and cost-effectiveness of offshore outsourcing.

Identifying which business process you can outsource is fundamental in hiring virtual assistant teams. While some businesses do this to create hybrid teams, there are also those who have teams of virtual assistants running entire departments.

7. Pick Your Team Managers

Once you’ve hired enough virtual assistants, you need to decide on how you’re going to manage them effectively. One way of doing this is delegating their supervision to a team manager.

This can be done by a local, on-site hire, or by your executive virtual assistant. Remote and hybrid teams both benefit from the advantages of digital and virtual collaboration, but proper management is still needed.

There are collaboration tools that help with this, as well as communication apps like Slack and Skype. Nevertheless, you’ll need someone as a point of contact for all your virtual assistants or remote hires.

As with other businesses and even in Virtudesk, there are virtual assistant teams managed by someone from the local area, while other team members are managed by tenured virtual assistants.

For example, you can outsource content creation and distribution to virtual assistants while a local manager makes sure everything is aligned and running smoothly.

Here’s what your growing virtual assistant team could look like.

8. Prepare for Growth

As you discover more about the benefits of outsourcing and effective delegation, you should prepare your team members for the growth of your business.

This step includes creating an organizational chart with space for additional team members, and a clear chain of command. You can delegate this process or collaborate with your executive virtual assistant.

Part of this is listing down tasks you want to have in your business, and delegations you forecast to be impactful in your teams, all laid out in clear job descriptions for future hires.

Creating scalable processes and clear workflows is also a great way to prepare for future growth. This can further be enhanced by preparing a digital business transformation strategy where automation is central to your processes.

Explore this interactive organization chart to discover other roles you can outsource to virtual assistants.

Building a Virtual Assistant Team

Growing a team of virtual assistants to outsource tasks to is a process. Like with digital business transformation, it’s best to consult with people who have experience in doing this.

That’s another benefit of working with a company like Virtudesk, which can help you identify the next best virtual assistant service your business needs.

You can also join a community like Leverage to talk to other entrepreneurs about their experiences with hiring and growing virtual assistant teams.

If you’d like to start outsourcing to a virtual assistant from Virtudesk, feel free to fill out this form and one of our Consultants will get in touch with you.

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